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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77826 ***
+
+
+
+
+                               BELCHAMBER
+
+
+
+
+                               BELCHAMBER
+
+                                   BY
+                         HOWARD OVERING STURGIS
+
+                               AUTHOR OF
+                     ‘TIM,’ ‘ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE’
+
+
+                              Westminster
+                          ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
+                           AND COMPANY, LTD.
+
+                                  1904
+
+
+
+
+        Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
+
+
+
+
+                                   TO
+                          WILLIAM HAYNES SMITH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Belchamber is one of the most beautiful places in England. The name, if
+not the house, dates from days when Norman-French was the polite
+language of our kings; the reigning monarch, some early Henry or Edward,
+alighting for the night, as was the habit of reigning monarchs, at the
+house of his vassal, and having been especially pleased with something
+about the apartment prepared for his use, is said to have remarked in
+high good humour, ‘_Pardie! tu as là une belle chambre_.’ Something of
+old-world scandal hung about the legend (which in its authorised form is
+just a little bare and dull for the nucleus round which gathered the
+fortunes of a noble family), tales of frail beauty not insensible to a
+royal lover, of feudal complaisance, not to be more overtly acknowledged
+than by this gracious allusion to the _belle chambre_, from which the
+domain was to take its name.
+
+The house, as the humblest tourist may see for himself on certain days
+of the week, is an exquisite Jacobean structure borrowing largely from
+the Renaissance palaces of Italy, yet with a certain solid British
+homeliness about it, that specially fits it for its surroundings, the
+green undulations of an English park. The view from the front is
+sufficiently extended, and behind it, the various Dutch and Italian
+gardens are interspersed with water-works and statues like a miniature
+Versailles. Great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts stand in the
+park, and four large avenues of elms draw their straight lines across it
+to the four points of the compass. The little river, which in the woods
+and meadows is a natural shallow trout-stream with loosestrife and
+ragged robin fringing its banks, is pressed in the gardens into many
+curious uses--fountains and cascades, and oblong rectangular fish-ponds,
+where old carp and goldfish circle in and out among the stalks of
+foreign water-lilies sunk in hampers. The huge lawn behind the house is
+shaded by cedars of Lebanon, that are such a characteristic feature of
+Restoration places, and there is one that disputes with the famous tree
+at Addington, and I dare say with half a dozen others, the doubtful
+glory of being the oldest cedar in England.
+
+Of the thousands of acres of which the property consists, the farms and
+manorial rights, the livings in the gift of the owner, it is not
+necessary that I should give a catalogue; it is not the business of the
+novelist to value for probate, but if possible to convey a vague but
+imposing impression of wealth and position. Suffice it that the Lord of
+Belchamber is ground-landlord of the greater part of three large
+parishes, and that in the county of his residence alone no less than
+three beneficed clergymen sit in their comfortable rectories by the
+grace of a sickly young man of no very definite religious beliefs,
+without counting his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who ministers to the
+spiritual needs of a small army of in-and out-door servants and their
+families in the little tame church that is, so to speak, tethered on the
+lawn.
+
+Belchamber has suffered but little at the hands of restorers; the family
+have always taken a sort of lazy pride in the beautiful house, which
+luckily seldom rose to the point of desiring to improve it. The third
+marquis, to be sure, had some formidable projects for remodelling the
+building, of which the plans remain in a great Italian cabinet in the
+hall; but his two favourite pursuits combined to save his home, for he
+lost so much money at cards that even he drew back before the large
+expense involved, and while he still hesitated, a bad fall out hunting
+cut short his building projects with his life. That was more than a
+hundred years ago, when gambling and unpaid debts were indispensable
+parts of the ideal of a gentleman.
+
+If Charles James, third Marquis and eighth Earl of Belchamber, lost
+large sums at the club gaming-tables when he came up to the House of
+Lords, and died as he had lived, in the hunting-field, his successor,
+George Frederick Augustus, the fourth marquis, in no way fell short of
+his respected parent’s example. He played as high, drank as deep, and
+rode as hard as his father, while he imported into his excesses just
+that flavour of vulgarity which the bucks of the Regency copied so
+successfully from their master and pattern. He kept two packs of hounds,
+and several establishments in addition to his acknowledged and
+legitimate residence; and if he did not break his own neck, he at least
+broke his wife’s heart, not to mention such unconsidered trifles as his
+word, and a large quantity of beautiful old china, when in liquor.
+Belchamber saw him but little; he preferred London and Brighton, and one
+of his smaller places which was in a better hunting-country; and here
+once more the very vices of its owners seemed to conduce to the
+preservation of the beautiful house and its treasures. The books, the
+celebrated Vandykes, and the painted ceilings suffered somewhat from
+want of fires; but neglect has never been so fatal to works of art as
+attention, and if the pictures cracked and faded a little, at least they
+were not burnt, or repainted, or buried under a deposit of
+coachbuilder’s varnish.
+
+To the poor lady, who was occasionally brought from the seclusion of her
+lord’s hunting-quarters to be exhibited at a drawing-room in the family
+emeralds and diamonds, a son and heir was born, who received in common
+with so many of the children of that date the names of Arthur Wellesley.
+This was the fifth marquis and tenth earl, and the grandfather of the
+hero of this book. Marquis Arthur differed from his father and
+grandfather only in his mode of getting rid of money. If he played less,
+he made up for it by losing large sums on the turf, and by a generally
+luxurious and extravagant style of living. He was a notorious beauty,
+and had a straight nose, and an immense bushy pair of whiskers, which
+were fatal to the peace of mind of great numbers of the fair sex; he was
+inordinately vain, and a woman had only to tell him she was in love with
+him, and that she had never seen a man with such small feet, to get
+anything she wanted out of him. He frittered away more money over
+bouquets and scent and ugly jewellery than his father and grandfather
+had lost in their longest nights at Crockford’s. His triumphs over
+female virtue were so numerous and notorious that many thought he would
+never give a hostage to fortune in the shape of a wife of his own. But
+when the nets of the fowler had been spread for many years in the sight
+of this volatile bird of gay plumage, he surprised every one by bringing
+home a bride from across the Channel.
+
+If report said true, this beautiful young woman revenged the wrongs of
+her sex, and of many husbands, most thoroughly on her whiskered lord,
+who was not her master. At first it was impossible to Lord Charmington
+(as he then was) to believe that any woman he honoured with his
+affection could fail to be madly in love with him; then as the
+conviction grew upon him (and ideas came to him slowly), there were
+furious scenes of recrimination, anger, and jealousy on his side, and
+cold contempt and indifference on hers. More than once they were within
+a short distance of the divorce court; but his vanity never could be
+reconciled to the thought of appearing _coram populo_ in the character
+which to him seemed always the most ludicrous and humiliating possible.
+His wife soon discovered this weakness, and traded on it freely. If she
+was not a very clever woman, he was a more than ordinarily stupid man,
+so that he learned to dread her tongue almost as much as the ridicule
+that must attach to him in case of a scandal. He also began to take a
+certain pride in her position both in London and Paris. She was
+certainly for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the
+society of both capitals; and if the more particular and old-fashioned
+ladies held up their hands in horror at the stories told of her, she had
+a large share in introducing a different standard of morals for the
+younger set, in which she was always a leader. When no longer in her
+first youth, she was one of the galaxy of beautiful women who adorned
+the Second Empire, and though at the severer Court of St. James she was
+less smiled upon, there were not wanting circles in the land of her
+adoption hardly less august, and infinitely more congenial, where she
+was not only received, but highly popular.
+
+Through long years which converted her contemporaries into invalids or
+grandmothers, in which her husband grew fat and coarse, and took to
+drink and low company, in which children were born to her, two of whom
+died in infancy, in which her eldest son and one daughter grew up and
+married, in which her grandsons were born, and her son died, she
+remained always ‘the beautiful Lady Belchamber,’ always in the world,
+and of the world, immutably ‘gay,’ and fast, and frivolous, following
+the same dreary round of fashionable existence year in and year out,
+bedizened in jewels not always virtuously come by, dressed and
+head-dressed in the latest mode, and absorbed in the newest craze or
+pastime with women who might have been her daughters, and men who were
+sometimes the sons of her early lovers. As her natural charms faded,
+they were of course replaced by art; the raven locks that had been
+admired by Louis Philippe at first only took on an inkier black, then
+grew a little brown, and passed through dull burnished copper to a rich
+golden red, while the cream-white skin grew more and more rosy in
+sympathy. Gradually, as fashion artfully disarranged the hair of its
+votaries, and the wig-makers’ art developed and improved, so much of her
+ladyship’s elaborate coiffure came to be false, that it could be almost
+any colour she chose without inconvenience, and was even known to vary
+with her gowns.
+
+As for her husband, the flattery of women being as the breath of his
+nostrils, it was only natural that the older and less attractive he
+became, the lower he went in the social scale in search of it. The poor
+little feet that had stepped so nimbly on the hearts of many frail ones,
+began to spread in the vain attempt to support the Silenus-like body,
+and, cramped in tight boots, carried their tottering owner into very
+queer byways indeed. The beautiful nose swelled and grew purple, the
+Hyperean curls, much thinned at the temples, were still carefully oiled
+and arranged, and with the famous whiskers became more hyacinthine in
+hue with each advancing year. When I was a young man, this poor,
+foolish, wicked old marquis was still strutting about Pall Mall, and
+ogling the women, with a few other bucks of his own generation, padded,
+laced, and dyed. I dare say there are bad old men still, but they are
+bald, and have grey beards, and are somehow not so ridiculous as Lord
+Belchamber and his peers were. He and his wife met but seldom, and
+though he sometimes grew quite eloquent over the way she treated him, he
+was not really unhappy; after all, he was leading just the same life he
+always had, and if his companions were coarser and commoner, his taste
+had coarsened too, and the dull, bloodshot eyes had lost their keenness
+of vision and grown less critical. He outlived his son, and did not die
+till after the Franco-Prussian war. Almost the only remark of a purely
+sentimental nature he was ever known to make was on the subject of the
+siege of Paris and the fall of the Empire. ‘Poor old Paris!’ he said.
+‘I’ve had many a good time in Paris, though I did meet my wife there,
+damn her! but I shouldn’t care to go there again, hanged if I should,
+with everything so changed, and all that----’
+
+We shall have nothing more to do with him in this work, except to bury
+him, which, by and by, we will do with befitting pomp. Of direct
+influence he never had the smallest on any living creature, but who
+shall say what mysterious legacy of evil tendencies he may have
+bequeathed to his descendants? The question of heredity is very
+fashionable just now, but remains not a little obscure; and perhaps it
+is safer in the interests of morality that we should not know too
+exactly how little responsibility we have for our bad actions, and how
+much we can shuffle off on to our grandfathers and grandmothers. Whether
+it was the result of heredity or education, or a mixture of the two, the
+children of such a couple did not start in life with the best chance of
+being quiet, reputable people, and the two who survived the disorders of
+infancy were left to bring themselves up very much as fortune willed.
+Lady Eva was a very pretty girl who seldom saw her mother, left
+entirely to French maids and governesses, and mainly educated on the
+novels of that country, which she abstracted from her mother’s boudoir
+and read on the sly, generally with the connivance of her instructress,
+on condition that she passed them on to her. Lady Belchamber used
+sometimes to see this official, when she thought of it, for five minutes
+while her hair was being done.
+
+‘Lady Eva se comporte bien?’
+
+‘Parfaitement, ma’m la marquise.’
+
+‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle apprend? voyons.’
+
+‘Lady Eva étudie, en ce moment, comme géographie, l’Asie orientale, la
+Chine, le Japon; comme histoire, le dix-septième siècle, les guerres de
+Louis XIV., la guerre civile en Angleterre, la restauration de Charles
+II.; comme langues, Italien, _I Promessi Sposi_, Allemand, la _Maria
+Stuart_ de Schiller, Français, _Le Cid_ de Corneille; comme
+mathématique----’
+
+‘Assez, assez! ne faites pas trop étudier cette p’tite, vous en ferez un
+bas bleu. Elle va bien?’
+
+‘Parfaitement, milady. Désirez-vous voir Lady Eva?’
+
+‘Pas ce soir; je n’ai pas le temps.’
+
+Once, some one asked the little girl to give her mother a message. ‘I
+will write to her,’ the child said, ‘it will be quicker.’ They were
+living in the same house.
+
+When in due course she was presented and made her appearance in the
+world, she was very much admired. At nineteen she was engaged to two men
+simultaneously, and got out of the difficulty by running away with a
+third, a rather shady hanger-on of her father, called Captain Morland,
+who not long afterwards had to disappear from society, owing to an
+unfortunate difficulty that he experienced in confining himself to the
+strict laws of the game, at cards. Thenceforth they lived mostly abroad,
+and little was heard of them. Lady Belchamber, who was not an unkind
+woman, used to write to her daughter sometimes, and send her old dresses
+and hats; and the old lord, when on the continent, would have the
+couple to live with him, and give them money. He had a sneaking kindness
+for Morland, which he never quite got over, finding him a congenial
+companion; and his son-in-law was very patient in listening to his
+tender confidences. Lord Charmington, who was two years older than his
+sister, had the better chance that comes to boys of being sent away to
+school. Unfortunately for him, the one thing he did not inherit from his
+parents was the naturally strong constitution that was common to them
+both. Lady Belchamber, though herself a marvel of strength and vitality,
+came of an extremely old family, of which the blood, enfeebled by much
+marrying of cousins, had had time to run very thin indeed; and though
+the Chambers stock was originally strong and healthy, the excesses of
+the last three bearers of the title had not tended to the transmission
+of a fine physique to their descendants.
+
+From his childhood poor Charmington was a rickety, feeble lad, and more
+than once came within a tittle of sharing the fate of his younger
+brothers, instead of surviving to be the father of our hero, in which
+case this book would never have been written. If he could have stayed
+out his time at Eton, it might have done much for him, for he was not
+without some naturally kindly qualities, though he was as stupid as an
+owl, and never could learn to spell the simplest words. In those days
+there existed no ruthless law of superannuation, and he might have
+remained contentedly in fourth form till he was nineteen, had it not
+been for his unfortunate health: he was always ill, and always having to
+be taken away and sent to the seaside, or abroad, in the care of any one
+who could be got to go and look after him. This employment fell as often
+as not to his future brother-in-law, Captain Morland, than whom a worse
+companion for a growing lad could hardly be found, and where he could
+be, Morland found him, and introduced him to his charge. By the time he
+was twenty, the lad was an accomplished little rip, gambler, and
+spendthrift, and had materially impaired his already feeble
+constitution. He was bought a commission in the household cavalry, but
+at the end of a few years, having come to the end of everything--health,
+money, credit, and the limits of his father’s patience--he was
+thenceforward lost to the service of his country.
+
+After a severe hæmorrhage of the lungs, he was ordered to winter abroad,
+and by way of retrenching and building up his strength, he selected Nice
+as a quiet inexpensive winter resort, with the chance of a little
+congenial amusement, in the nearness of the tables at Monte Carlo. Here
+he found his sister and her husband (whose little trouble at the club
+had befallen the year before) hanging on to the fringe of society. But
+here, too, he encountered that veteran statesman, the Earl of Firth, who
+with his wife and two daughters was recruiting his strength after his
+retirement from public life at a villa in the neighbourhood. The
+Morlands were established at Monaco, where the Firth party never set
+foot, so Charmington had no difficulty in keeping his disreputable
+brother-in-law out of sight of his new acquaintances. He began to
+frequent the villa of the old Scottish peer with quite surprising
+assiduity. Just what there was in either Lady Sarah Pagley or her
+surroundings to attract a man like Charmington will always remain a
+mystery. Perhaps the jaded, invalid young man found something of the
+home atmosphere he had never known among these prosy folk; perhaps the
+blameless dulness of their lives was rather restful to him; or it may be
+that he took refuge with them from Morland’s incessant appeals for the
+money of which he himself was so sorely in need. It has been suggested
+that he paid court to Lady Sarah from mercenary motives, but to a man of
+his tastes and traditions her modest £15,000 would have seemed a very
+trifling price to receive for the surrender of his liberty; and if a
+rich marriage had been his object, there were wealthier maidens
+scattered along the Mediterranean shore, who would not have despised the
+suit of a marquis’s only son. He himself explained his choice to a
+wondering friend by saying that she was the woman most unlike his mother
+that he had ever met.
+
+With mere carnal charms the Ladies Pagley were somewhat scantily
+equipped. They were both fairly well-grown young women, healthy and
+vigorous; Lady Sarah, as she was the elder, was also slightly the taller
+of the two. Both wore their smooth brown hair divided in the centre and
+brushed plainly down behind their ears, a fashion from which Sarah has
+never departed to this day. Both were badly dressed, and either, in
+whatever part of the world she was met, would unhesitatingly be
+pronounced to hail from the British Isles, by people who had never seen
+an Englishwoman before. Sarah was religious, Susan political, each
+following the bent of one parent, for Lord Firth had been a member of
+several Cabinets, and divided his time between nursing his gout and
+studying blue-books, whereas Lady Firth dosed her body with quack
+medicines and her soul with evangelical theology. But the old lord had
+the ingratitude to prefer the daughter who reflected her mother’s
+tastes. ‘They are both dour women to tackle, my daughters,’ he would
+say; ‘but Sally’s not unkindly in matters where religion is not in
+question, whereas Susie has no bowels, none at all.’ Lady Susan was a
+great talker, and loved argument for its own sake; but Lady Sarah was
+reserved, silent, and really very shy for all the grimness of her
+aspect. If it did not seem profane to think of beauty in connection with
+either of them, who considered it so little, I should say that Susan was
+the prettier of the two, having a better complexion than her sister, and
+hair of a brighter, redder shade of brown.
+
+There never were two girls more predestined by nature for old maids, or
+better fitted to meet the cold world single-handed; and yet they both
+married, and married what is called ‘well,’ while many of their fairer
+and more eager sisters were left ungathered on the stem. Susan was led
+to the altar by a West Country baronet and M.P., Sir Charles Trafford,
+while Sarah, to every one’s surprise, became in due time Lady
+Charmington. If it will remain a puzzle what drew her husband to her, it
+is still more insoluble what attraction she found in him. Old Lady
+Firth, for all her piety and her sermons, was not above a little
+worldly gratification that her plain elder daughter at seven-and-twenty
+should marry the heir to a marquisate and a historic house; but I
+honestly think Lady Sarah was little swayed by these considerations. She
+may have felt a thrill at the thought of the power her position would
+one day put into her hands, but for its own sake she valued that
+position very lightly. Perhaps poor Char’s weakness appealed to her
+strength, and his wretched state of health stirred that pity that was so
+carefully concealed in her proud heart. Perhaps her missionary zeal
+awoke at the thought of plucking from the fire a brand that was already
+little more than an ember. No doubt both these feelings worked for him,
+but I am inclined to think that his most potent advocate was the fact
+that he was the first man who had ever made love to her. No woman hears
+those magic accents for the first time unmoved, and if she has reached
+Lady Sarah’s age without the faintest breath from the wing of Romance,
+the effect of them is not thereby lessened. Be that as it may, this sick
+dissipated boy, who was three years her junior, and whose past life had
+been made up of everything of which she most disapproved, succeeded
+where a better man might have been very likely to fail, and they were
+married with great splendour during the ensuing season in London, the
+occasion being one of the few on which her husband’s parents were ever
+seen together in public. Lord Firth and his son, Lord Corstorphine,
+looked very sulky at the wedding, but Lady Firth was all tears and
+benedictions, and old Belchamber, after much champagne at the breakfast,
+became quite maudlin over the consideration of his son’s respectable
+connections. ‘It’ll be the making of Char,’ he hiccoughed into the ear
+of the sympathetic Lady Firth. ‘Ah, if I’d had such a chance, now! if
+I’d married a different kind of woman, she might have done anything with
+me----’ The lady with whom he had just been celebrating his silver
+wedding was radiant in sky-blue silk and white lace flounces and a Paris
+bonnet all Marabout feathers and humming-birds. ‘I don’t envy Char,’ she
+wrote to her daughter, who did not come over for the wedding. ‘_Dieu!_
+what people those Firths! _Heureusement_, they won’t want to see much of
+_me_.’
+
+Very likely Lord Belchamber was right, and Sarah might have made
+something out of the unlikely material she had taken-in hand. Her
+influence over Charmington was enormous, and he both loved and feared
+her. She nursed him, ruled him, and generally watched over him,
+protecting him alike from the scorn of her kinsfolk and the bad
+influence of his own; she rigorously kept both wine and money from him,
+doling them out in infinitesimal doses. If she allowed no questioning of
+her authority, she accomplished the miracle of awakening some
+glimmerings of self-respect in him, and she bolstered up his shattered
+constitution so that he lived four years with her, during which she bore
+him two sons; but his lungs were too seriously affected for the
+imperfect science of the sixties to heal, and in spite of all her care
+he did not live to be thirty, dying, as has already been said, while
+that elderly Adonis, his father, was still figuratively wearing the
+family coronet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The world is like a huge theatrical company in which half the actors and
+actresses have been cast for the wrong parts. There are heavy fathers
+who ought to be playing the lover, and young men on whose downy chins
+one seems to see the spectre of the grey beard that would be suitable to
+their natures. Perhaps the hardest case is theirs who by their sex are
+called upon to ‘have a swaggering and martial outside,’ ‘a gallant
+curtle-axe upon their thigh,’ and yet, like Rosalind in her boy’s dress,
+start and turn faint at the sight of blood. The right to be a coward is
+one of the dearest prerogatives of woman. No man may be one with
+impunity, and it is precisely the women who are the first to despise him
+if he be. Those who are born with the gift of personal courage (and they
+are happily the greater number) have no adequate idea of their blessing.
+To be in harmony with one’s environment, to like the things one ought to
+like--that surely is the supreme good. If that be so, then few people
+have come into the arena of life less suitably equipped for the part
+they had to play than the subject of this history.
+
+Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber,
+Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, for all his
+imposing list of names and titles started in life without that crowning
+gift--wanting which all effort is paralysed--a good conceit of himself.
+And in fact, except for the gewgaw of his rank, which sat on him as
+uneasily as a suit of his ancestral armour, he had not much that would
+win him consideration from the people among whom his lot was cast. From
+his father he inherited his feeble constitution, his irresolution and
+want of moral courage, from his mother her sallow complexion and lack
+of charm, her reserve and shyness, and the rigid conscience which a long
+line of Covenanting ancestors had passed down to her, and which in him,
+who had none of their counterbalancing force of character, tended always
+to become morbid. In his babyhood he had been called Lord St. Edmunds,
+as was the custom in the family for the eldest son’s eldest son; his
+father in half derisive affection had abbreviated the title into
+‘Sainty,’ and Sainty he always continued to be to all who were intimate
+enough and to many who were not. He was only three when his father died,
+and his baby brother, Arthur, was not yet two. Even in those early days
+the contrast was strongly marked between the brothers. Sainty was a pale
+nervous child who cried if spoken to suddenly, while Arthur was as fine
+a pink and white fat baby as you could see in a picture-book, who crowed
+and gurgled and clapped his hands and liked his bath and took kindly to
+his food, so that the nurses adored him. When he had a stomach-ache or
+was thwarted in his wishes he roared lustily for a minute or two and
+then returned to his usual placidity, whereas poor Sainty if anything
+‘put him out,’ as his nurse would say, whined and fretted, and kept up a
+little sad bleating cry for hours.
+
+He could not remember his father, but with the help of the large
+coloured portrait in uniform that stood on a gilt easel in the corner of
+his mother’s room he had built up for himself a shadowy heroic figure,
+strangely unlike poor Charmington, which in his imagination did duty for
+this departed parent. He never spoke of him to any one but Arthur, but
+to him he talked with such conviction of ‘Papa,’ that the child, not
+very attentive and perhaps not greatly interested, gathered an
+impression that the elder boy was drawing on his memory for his facts,
+and indeed he almost thought so himself, until one day Lady Charmington,
+hearing some such talk between the two, sharply rebuked poor Sainty for
+telling falsehoods to his little brother. His earliest impression of his
+mother was in her black dress with the gleaming white on head and throat
+and wrists, a dress that lent a dignity to Lady Charmington’s somewhat
+commonplace figure. When she left off her cap, it was of the nature of a
+blow to him. Though he could not have described his sensations, she
+seemed somehow discrowned with her sleek, bare head.
+
+Grandpapa’s funeral was a different matter from these early fleeting
+impressions. That he remembered clearly, for he was seven when it
+happened, and had a little black suit of knickerbockers and black
+stockings and gloves, and led Arthur by the hand similarly attired.
+Every incident of that frightening, gloomy, yet strangely fascinating
+and exciting day, remained engraved in his recollection. He remembered
+the crowd in the churchyard, the murmur that greeted his own appearance,
+the staggering of the bearers under that long heavy burthen, the gloom
+of the church full of people in black, and the great yawning hole in the
+chancel pavement. What he did not grasp until very long afterwards, and
+then only most imperfectly and by degrees, was the difference the event
+of that day made in his own position; but his mother realised it fully,
+and indeed it made much more difference to her than to the meek little
+boy accustomed from earliest infancy to swallow distasteful puddings and
+nauseous drugs at her command, and anxiously to examine his conscience,
+if some remnant of the old Adam ever led him to question her decrees.
+Henceforth Lady Charmington entered into her kingdom, and it must be
+confessed that on the whole she ruled it well and wisely, and entirely
+in the interests of her children. Almost the only sensible thing the old
+lord had ever done was to appoint her and her brother the guardians of
+his grandchildren, and under the careful management of his
+daughter-in-law, aided by the wise advice of Lord Corstorphine, the
+property was nursed through his grandson’s long minority back to a
+tolerably healthy condition.
+
+As to Lady Belchamber, nothing would have bored her more than being
+cumbered in any way with the guardianship of her grandchildren. She
+carried off what her daughter-in-law declared to be a most ridiculously
+disproportionate jointure, and the furniture of her private apartments,
+in which some valuable china and cabinets, that she had certainly not
+brought into the family, somehow found themselves included at the time
+of the move. She even showed a decided inclination to keep the famous
+emeralds which, as Lady Charmington said, everybody knew were heirlooms;
+but these she was made to send back, by her second husband, the Duke of
+Sunborough, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, whom
+she married just a year after her lord’s death. On the other hand, she
+generously abandoned all claim to a damp and mouldy dower-house in which
+she had a right to reside for life, which, considering that the duke had
+a palace in London and five country seats, was very handsome of her.
+Three generations of gambling and extravagance leave their mark on the
+most imposing fortunes, and if the Belchamber estates did not come to
+the hammer, it was due to the action of the last person who might have
+been expected to save them, in marrying a hardheaded Scotswoman and
+dying before his father. To get the estate into order was Lady
+Charmington’s prime object in life. To this end she inaugurated a rigid
+system of economy, and made a clean sweep of the heads of almost every
+department under the old _régime_, toiling early and late to make
+herself mistress of many details of which she was ignorant; for this,
+she endured the dislike of the poor, whom she benefited in her own
+autocratic manner, and much hostile comment from her equals. She was
+rigidly just, and generous too in her own way; only prodigality and
+waste she would not tolerate, nor look with a lenient eye on the small
+peculations which those who serve the great come to regard as quite
+within the pale of honesty.
+
+If the mother spared neither time nor labour that she might be able to
+hand over his property to her son free of encumbrances when he came of
+age, she was not less eager and indefatigable in her efforts to fit him
+for the position she was making for him; and this task she found
+incomparably the harder of the two. It was not that he was naughty or
+insubordinate. A meeker, more obedient child did not live. The
+difficulty was far more intangible; it is easier to drive a slightly
+pulling horse in crowded thoroughfares than one with so light a mouth
+that he never will go properly up to his bit; and Lady Charmington had
+not the blessed gift of light hands in conducting the education of a
+child, whatever she might have on horseback. As a girl she had ridden a
+good deal, and even hunted; and though she gave that up after her
+marriage, she still found it possible to keep a more effectual eye on
+all corners of the huge estate from her square seat on the back of a
+substantial cob than from any other coign of vantage. No farmer ever
+rode more diligently and thoroughly about his fields; and on these
+excursions it was her pleasure that the boys, and especially Sainty,
+should accompany her. Arthur had a natural seat, took to horses from the
+first, and wanted to gallop his pony and make him jump before the family
+coachman had thought fit to abandon the leading-rein. With poor Sainty
+it was far otherwise. He rode, as he ate rice pudding, because he was
+told to; but he was cold for an hour beforehand, and he sat his pony, as
+his mother remarked, like a sack of potatoes. The smallest thing
+unseated him; he was always rolling ignominiously off.
+
+On this and similar shortcomings, he received many admonitions from his
+mother and uncle, from which the chief impression he derived was a
+rooted belief in the immense superiority of his younger brother. ‘At the
+worst there will always be Arthur.’ When and under what circumstances
+had he overheard that remark? He never was quite sure that he had not
+formulated it for himself. Be that as it might, it early became the
+burthen to which his life set itself. Far from resenting the point of
+view, he drew from it a certain consolation under his abiding sense of
+his many imperfections. He was still quite a small boy when he decided
+that his _rôle_ in life would be to die young, and make way for the
+younger brother who was so eminently fitted for the position that suited
+himself so ill; and he found a certain gloomy satisfaction in settling
+the details of pathetic deathbed scenes. I fear an element in these
+imaginings which was not without attraction for him, was the thought of
+exhorting Arthur with his latest breath on matters in which his
+brother’s conduct did not always square with his own more evangelical
+standard, such as a certain looseness of statement, and somewhat lax
+ideas of property. If Arthur could not find his own cap, or bat, or
+riding-whip (and his things were generally tossed about the great house,
+wherever he happened to be when he last used them), it was always less
+trouble to take Sainty’s, which were sure to be in the right place, than
+to go and look for his own. He also on occasion carried the juvenile
+habit of untruth rather further than mere thoughtlessness warranted; but
+he told his stories with so open a countenance, and such a fearless
+gaze, that he was invariably believed, as against poor Sainty, whose
+knitted brow and downcast eyes, while he sought in his mind for the
+exact truth, had all the appearance of an effort after invention.
+‘Arthur is very thoughtless and tiresome,’ Lady Charmington would say,
+‘but there’s one comfort about him, I can always depend on his telling
+me the truth if I ask him. I wish I could say the same for Sainty; I am
+sometimes afraid he is rather sly. I try not to be hard on him, for he
+is timid, and I don’t want to frighten him into telling untruths; but I
+do wish he was a little more straightforward, and would look one in the
+face when he talks.’
+
+Many such hints, all showing a like perspicacious insight into the
+characters of her sons, were given by this conscientious lady to the
+governess she had engaged to assist her in moulding their dispositions.
+Alice Meakins was the daughter of the rector of Great Charmington, and
+had the prime recommendation in her employer’s eyes of being her humble
+slave and completely under her orders. Had she been a little less in awe
+of Lady Charmington, and less impressed with the enormity of differing
+from her, she might perhaps have enlightened her on many matters
+concerning the little boys. Her mild rule, while it galled his more
+spirited brother, sat very lightly on Sainty, who worshipped the
+governess as the most talented and accomplished of mortals. ‘But I like
+her, I’m fond of her; I don’t _want_ to do what she tells me not,’ he
+pleaded to the indignant Arthur, as usual incensed by his brother’s want
+of pluck, in refusing to join in some plot against the authority of
+their instructress. ‘Ho, ho, Miss Moddlecoddle, you can’t ride, you’ve
+got no seat and no hands; Bell said so. You’re jolly bad at games, and
+you like to sit and suck up to an old governess, and do needlework with
+her, like a beastly girl. I’m a man, and I shan’t do what she tells me.
+What business has she to order me about? she is only a servant like the
+others.’
+
+Sainty was shocked. ‘O Arthur! you do say _horrid_ things,’ he said. It
+was true that he did like sitting with the gentle Meakins, and acquiring
+the modest arts of which she was the mistress. She had many little
+manual dexterities such as governesses impart to children, whereby the
+world is filled with innocent horrors, kettleholders in cross-stitch,
+penwipers faintly resembling old women with cloth cloaks and petticoats,
+and little black seeds for faces, and book-markers in the shape of
+crosses with many steps, plaited of strips of gilt and coloured paper.
+In all these manufactures Sainty soon became proficient. He also
+illuminated texts, ‘Be thou faithful unto death,’ and ‘The greatest of
+these is Charity,’ which were presented to Lady Charmington on her
+birthday. On the subject of the texts and the little plaited crosses
+Lady Charmington had a word to say to Miss Meakins in private, as being
+rather too papistical in tendency; but she was not displeased with the
+simple presents, on the whole, until her anxious maternal eye was led to
+detect the danger that might lurk in cross-stitch by some petulant
+remarks of Arthur’s, who wanted Sainty to come out and play Red Indians
+in the long shrubbery. ‘Muvver,’ he cried, bursting into the boudoir,
+where his mother was busy with some farm accounts, ‘isn’t Sainty howid?
+He won’t come out, though he’s done his lessons, ‘cos he will stick in
+and do beastly woolwork.’ One of Arthur’s many charms was a babyish
+imperfection of speech. He never could pronounce ‘th’ or ‘r,’ even when
+quite grown up.
+
+‘What is it he’s doing?’ asked Lady Charmington.
+
+‘Oh, beastly woolwork; he’s got two-fwee fings he’s makin’, and he likes
+to sit like a girl, instead of coming out and playing.’
+
+A shade of annoyance crossed the mother’s face. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use
+such words as “beastly,” Arthur,’ she said severely, but the severity
+was really addressed to the absent first-born and the effeminacy of his
+tastes; and the schoolroom was presently visited by the mistress of the
+house, and Sainty duly turned out to distasteful recreation. When he had
+gone forth to be scalped by the fraternal savage, his mother turned to
+the instructress. ‘I think, Alice,’ she said, holding up the offending
+kettleholder, ‘that it is a pity, on the whole, to teach Sainty to work;
+he’s quite sufficiently effeminate by nature, without having that side
+of him encouraged. I will speak to him about it. I shall tell him I
+don’t approve of his working; it’s not manly.’ She was surprised, when
+she carried out this intention, by meeting with passionate tears and
+protestations.
+
+‘O mother, I love my work; it’s the only thing I do enjoy, except
+botany, and reading, and some lessons (not ‘rithmetic or spelling); and
+I have to do so many things I _don’t_ like, cricket and riding,
+and--and--all the dreadful things that men and gentlemen have to do,’
+the little boy concluded, quoting a formula frequently used for his
+encouragement.
+
+Though not habitually distrustful of her own judgment, nothing so
+confirmed Lady Charmington in a view she adopted as any opposition to
+it; and the kettleholders became taboo from that day forward. Poor
+Sainty’s confession of dislike for the manlier sports that, as he said,
+were considered a necessary part of the education of a gentleman, was
+perhaps the most unfortunate argument he could have chosen, for it
+naturally convinced his mother that the mischief lay deeper than she
+supposed, and suggested to her the advisability of transferring the
+boys from petticoat government altogether; that is, of course, as far as
+the subordinate powers were concerned. The particular petticoat that
+typified her own sway remained in undisturbed possession of the throne
+in all her plans for the future.
+
+‘I think the boys are getting too much for poor Miss Meakins,’ she said
+to her brother, on his next visit. ‘She is an excellent girl, though a
+little inclined to be high church; but they ought to be under a man, I
+feel sure.’
+
+‘Don’t tell me that Sainty is becoming insubordinate?’ said Lord
+Corstorphine.
+
+‘No; but Arthur hasn’t the smallest respect for her. With Sainty the
+danger is of a different kind; he is perhaps _too_ fond of women’s
+society.’
+
+‘Not a precocious passion for the governess! I can’t believe that.’
+
+Lady Charmington looked resigned. ‘I don’t deny, Corstorphine,’ she
+said, ‘that you have been a great help to me in the management of my
+fatherless boys; that is why I am consulting you on the present
+occasion. But it is no help to be flippant and funny. What I mean is
+that Sainty is quite sufficiently inclined by nature to be a milksop,
+without living perpetually with women, and adopting their ways. He likes
+better than any game to sit indoors with Miss Meakins on fine days, and
+do woolwork.’
+
+‘Have him out, Sarah, by all means,’ returned her brother. ‘I can’t help
+being a little pleased at his liking reading. A Chambers who
+occasionally opens a book, and is tolerably well behaved, will be an
+agreeable variation of the type. But it’s bad his not wanting to be out,
+and playing games; it isn’t natural.’
+
+Lord Corstorphine felt that he was as near normal as it was possible to
+be, without becoming commonplace, and that those whose tastes differed
+widely from his own must always be more or less blamably eccentric.
+Still his greater commerce with the world had given him a wider
+toleration than either of his sisters, who had been known to call him a
+Laodicean, and Sarah once went so far as to draw a parallel between her
+brother and Gallio. But though she affected to be shocked at the
+looseness of his views, his known moderation made her lean the more
+confidently on his judgment. The knowledge that her opinion was backed
+by one whom the world praised for common-sense, gave a pleasing security
+that her own noble zeal was not hurrying her into extremes. It was
+invariably she who initiated every change in the education of her sons.
+But, though it may be doubted how she would have borne opposition from
+her fellow-guardian, his agreement was always a comfort to her.
+
+So Alice Meakins, with her little crosses and penwipers, returned to the
+paternal rectory, with the highest testimonials from her dear Lady
+Charmington, to look out for another situation.
+
+Poor Sainty could not be comforted. To be sure, no one tried much to
+comfort him. For the first time he felt a rebellious bitterness towards
+his mother. Though he could imagine nothing so dashing as active
+disobedience, he cherished a dark determination to be very cold and
+reserved towards the new tutor, with the natural result that Miss
+Meakins’s successor, a youth fresh from Oxford, and also of the children
+of the clergy, conceived a great liking for Arthur, and favoured him
+prodigiously.
+
+This young man, who had been selected mainly for his reputation as a
+cricketer, left Lady Charmington nothing to desire in the matter of
+sport, and was quite ready to ride any horse in her limited stable; nor
+need she feel anxiety as to his holding extreme views in religious
+matters. It is true he attended family prayers with exemplary
+punctuality, and accompanied his charges to service twice on Sundays;
+but she could detect no sign of the interest in matters ecclesiastical
+which she looked for in a son of the Church, and his waistcoats and
+riding-boots had a decidedly worldly air.
+
+Under Mr. Kirkpatrick, Sainty early proved the cynical dictum that life
+were endurable but for its pleasures, the hated pastimes, in which his
+sex and position in life inexorably demanded that he should find
+enjoyment. He stood like a martyr at the stake, to be bowled at with the
+Englishman’s fetish, that terrible disc of solid leather which he knew
+he should not hit, but which not infrequently hit him; and he would
+unhesitatingly have indorsed Mr. Pinchbold’s remark that ‘the horse was
+a fearful animal.’ He was so painstaking, however, and anxious to do
+what was expected of him, that he might possibly have attained in time
+to some sort of proficiency in these alien arts, had his efforts been
+greeted with a little more encouragement, and a little less ridicule;
+but the race is not yet extinct of those who hold that the best way to
+teach a child to swim is to throw him into the water.
+
+Meanwhile a new terror arose on Sainty’s horizon. When Mr. Kirkpatrick
+had been at Belchamber eighteen months, he one day intimated to Lady
+Charmington that he had been offered a mastership in a public school,
+and could not afford to remain much longer with his pupils. It was
+therefore suggested that, as they were both presently to go to Eton, a
+few years at a private school would not be undesirable as a preparation.
+Even Arthur was a little daunted at the prospect, while rather
+fascinated by it; but to Sainty it loomed black as the final end of all
+brightness, closing in the vista of his life and blotting out the sun.
+It seemed to him that each step in the _via dolorosa_ of his existence
+was fated to be more awful than the last. When his beloved Miss Meakins
+had been replaced by the hated Kirkpatrick, he thought to have tasted
+the dregs of bitterness; but now a new prospect had come to make life in
+the familiar places that he loved with a catlike fidelity appear the one
+thing desirable, even shadowed by the tutor and his cricket-ball. I
+suppose it seemed a hard thing to our first parents when the Serpent was
+introduced into Eden; but life in Paradise, even with a snake in the
+garden, was a very different thing from the flaming sword that drove
+them out into an unknown world of work and briars. Sainty said little to
+earthly ears, but he prayed nightly with intense fervour that he might
+die before the day came to go to school, which seemed the only escape
+to his poor little hunted mind.
+
+But there was another way, which, if he could have foreseen it, would
+have taxed his courage with a far more genuine fright than that vague
+abstraction, death, for which we all cry aloud so readily in our youth
+when things do not go as we wish. Arthur went to school alone when the
+time arrived, and this was how it came about.
+
+It was a beautiful day at the end of March. Mr. Kirkpatrick was to leave
+at Easter, and the dreaded exodus was only a month away. It was a late
+spring, and the snow still lay on the north side of the hedgerows. But
+it had rained in the night, and there was that indefinable sense of
+spring in the air that sometimes comes quite suddenly. The primroses
+were beginning to gem the coppices, the birds to sing late in the long
+twilights. Daffodils waved in the fields where the young lambs were
+bleating.
+
+‘What are you and the boys going to do this afternoon, Mr. Kirkpatrick?’
+asked Lady Charmington at lunch.
+
+The tutor looked inquiringly at the boys. ‘I’ll do whatever they wish,
+Lady Charmington. What should you like?’ he asked of Sainty.
+
+‘I should like to go to One-tree Wood, and get primroses,’ Sainty
+answered, after the usual slight struggle that it always cost him to
+express a wish or an opinion.
+
+‘Get Gwanmuvvers!’ burst in Arthur. ‘Bovver pwimwoses; you don’t care
+about ’em, do you, Mr. Kirkpatrick? I want to wide; Bell says the
+gwound’s in quite good order to-day, after the wain. We’ve hardly widden
+at all lately, ‘cos it’s been so hard.’
+
+As usual, Arthur had his way, and poor Sainty was condemned to ride.
+Generally he gained confidence when he had been out a little while, but
+to-day somehow everything went wrong. He began by rolling off at the
+hall door, because his stirrups were too long, and the pony moved on
+unexpectedly while they were being taken up. He was much chaffed for
+this misadventure by his companions, and he did not like chaff. Then the
+pony was fresh and inclined to shy, after the inaction of the long
+frost, so that he had a bad time of it altogether; but he managed to
+stick on somehow until they were on their way home.
+
+They had been round by Little Charmington, and their way lay through one
+of the high woods. When they came to the gate that led into the park,
+they found it locked.
+
+‘I never knew this gate locked before,’ said Kirkpatrick, pulling feebly
+at it with his whip. ‘I don’t suppose either of you have got the key by
+any chance?’
+
+‘Jaggins must have locked it. He’s got some young pheasants further up
+the wood,’ said Arthur; ‘he told me so.’
+
+‘I suppose we must go back,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘but it’s an awful long
+way round. We shall be late for tea, which your mother doesn’t like, and
+you’ve got some more work to do afterwards. There’s a gap in the hedge a
+little way along here,’ he added more hopefully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t
+jump the ditch? It would save us a good two miles, and it’s really
+nothing of a jump.’
+
+‘Of course we can jump the ditch. Hurray! what fun!’ cried Arthur, and
+without more words he wheeled his pony, put him at the gap, and the next
+moment was careering about on the turf beyond, in a great state of
+excitement and jubilation.
+
+‘You see, it’s quite easy,’ the tutor said, turning to Sainty, whose
+pony was already beginning to fidget, excited by the trampling about on
+snapping twigs and the rush past of the other. Sainty was very white.
+
+‘You know I can’t jump, Mr. Kirkpatrick,’ he said, gulping tears. ‘I’m
+sure to fall off if I try; I always do.’
+
+‘Not you,’ the young man replied encouragingly. ‘You see your little
+brother has done it. I should be ashamed to have him ride so much better
+than me, if I were you.’ The poor man was rather in a fix, with one
+pupil already across the obstacle and the other resolutely declining to
+follow.
+
+‘See,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lead. It’s as easy as easy; you’ve
+only to sit well back, and give him his head,’ And so saying, he put his
+horse at the gap, and followed Arthur into the park. ‘Come on,’ he
+called.
+
+‘Jump, Sainty, jump,’ piped Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be such a funk.’
+
+Whether Sainty would ever have found the courage to attempt the jump is
+doubtful, if the pony at this stage of the proceedings had not decided
+matters by bolting at the gap. But bothered and bewildered by the
+tugging of his rider’s despairing hands, he swerved just at the jump,
+and, slipping on the trodden earth where Kirkpatrick’s horse had taken
+off, he came to the ground; then struggling to his feet, galloped off
+through the wood by the road they had come.
+
+The young man was horror-stricken when he saw the accident; he was off
+his horse, and by the side of the fallen boy in a second. Sainty was
+unconscious, that was all he could tell.
+
+‘Now, Arthur,’ he cried to the younger boy, who was beginning to tremble
+and cry, ‘this is the moment to show the stuff you’re made of. I must
+stay here with Sainty, but you must get home across the park as hard as
+you can go, so as to tell your mother what’s happened, and save her the
+shock of seeing Donald come home without his rider. And then send people
+here to carry Sainty in; he may be more hurt than we think.’
+
+Arthur waited for no more, but galloped off in the direction of the
+house, glad to have something definite to do, instead of staring at poor
+Sainty.
+
+Lady Charmington had come home sooner than she expected, and was taking
+off her hat, when she saw Arthur come galloping across the park alone.
+She looked with pride at the boy, thinking how well he sat his pony; and
+she gave a little sigh at the half-formed thought that just crossed her
+mind, ‘What a pity he wasn’t the elder!’ The next minute her heart stood
+still; she had caught sight in the far distance of a speck, which as it
+drew nearer she recognised with sickening terror as Sainty’s pony,
+riderless, and with his saddle turned under his belly. ‘Not _that_ way,
+my God! I did not mean _that_.’ Was it possible that God was punishing
+her for her rebellious thought? could He have thought that she desired
+the death of her first-born? And she prayed with all the intensity of
+her soul that whatever had happened her boy might not die. ‘Maimed,
+crippled, or an idiot, if so it must be; only let him live.’ This was
+the cry of her heart, again and again repeated, as guided by the child,
+she stumbled across the park with the men who were to bring him home.
+Arthur could tell her little, except that Sainty had had a fall and was
+hurt. Perhaps even then her child was lying dead, while she was wishing
+in her sinful heart that his brother had his heritage.
+
+But Sainty was not dead, and did not die. The pony had kicked him in its
+struggles to rise, and he had fainted. There were long nights and days
+of pain to be borne, and he bore it as nervous people often do, who can
+stand anything but anticipation.
+
+At first he made sure that the death he had asked for had come to him,
+and even, one day, when he was a little better, attempted to bring off
+one of the beautiful scenes with Arthur, which he had so often
+rehearsed. But somehow it was not a great success. Arthur did not do his
+part at all nicely. He only said, ‘Oh! bower, dear old Sainty. You ain’t
+going to die; what’s ve good of jawing?’ and went off to more congenial
+pursuits.
+
+Though his life was not in danger, Sainty’s injury was a grave one; the
+hip was broken, and the great London surgeon who was called down, did
+not conceal from Lady Charmington that the boy would probably always be
+more or less lame.
+
+On one of his visits, Sainty astonished the great man not a little.
+
+‘Sir John,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell me something. Shall I ever be
+able to walk and run again?’
+
+The famous surgeon had boys of his own, and his heart smote him at the
+pathetic question. ‘Yes, my boy, yes,’ he said; ‘certainly to walk. As
+to running, oh! well, you won’t be very good at running, not for some
+time; we mustn’t go too fast, not too fast, you know. Walking comes
+first; we must get you on your legs first.’
+
+‘But I shan’t ever be able to play games, shall I? not like other boys,
+I mean.’
+
+‘Oh! well, never’s a long word. I can’t say, I’m sure. Not for a long
+while, I fear. But we never know, we never know----’
+
+‘Well, at any rate, I shan’t be able to ride, shall I?’ persisted the
+patient.
+
+Poor Sir John hated to extinguish hope; but thus pushed into a corner,
+he admitted, ‘Oh! well, ride, you know--I don’t know. I doubt if
+_riding_ would be advisable. My poor little man, if you must know, I’m
+afraid you mustn’t count on riding again.’
+
+To his surprise, the boy heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. ‘Ah!
+well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,’ he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Probably nothing is less calculated to make a man feel at home in
+another’s society than the knowledge that he owes him a debt which he
+cannot pay. Custom enables a number of people to support this
+awkwardness with tolerable equanimity, but I suspect that even the
+habitual debtor feels a certain nameless uneasiness under his equable
+shirt-front; while to a person whose boast has always been that
+directness of gaze celebrated in the Village Blacksmith, to have to look
+shiftily before the eye of a creditor must be peculiarly galling.
+
+Something of this consciousness had become the daily burthen of poor
+Lady Charmington with regard to her first-born son. Certainly nothing
+was further from claiming damages than Sainty’s attitude, for it never
+entered his head to hold his mother in any way responsible for his
+accident. But in the long weeks in which he lay so uncomplainingly
+bearing pain, and the inaction which to young creatures is worse than
+pain, she could not look at him without a very distinct twinge of
+remorse. She was even glad to see the once forbidden needlework cheating
+the weary hours of some of their dulness. Once when he thanked her for
+the withdrawal of the interdict on this pastime, her breath caught in
+her throat like a sob.
+
+‘You must find the time very heavy,’ she said, smoothing back the boy’s
+hair with an unusually tender touch.
+
+‘Oh no!’ Sainty said, ‘I don’t. I can’t help thinking what a good thing
+it was it happened to me and not to Arthur. Think how _he_ would have
+hated it. I’ve never minded keeping quiet. And then it’ll always be such
+a good excuse for not doing things. Before, when people said “Why can’t
+he be like other boys?” there wasn’t anything to say. Now you can say
+“Well, you see, poor boy, he’s lame; he met with an accident.”’
+
+He delivered this piece of consolation quite seriously, and with no
+ironic intention, but it may be doubted if it cheered his mother as much
+as he intended.
+
+Poor Kirkpatrick, overwhelmed with remorse, had wished to give up his
+public school mastership and devote himself to Sainty’s education, but
+the sacrifice had not been accepted. Lady Charmington, who, in spite of
+her hard head, was not without some very feminine weaknesses, could not
+bear the sight of the young man who was incurably associated with the
+most awful hour of her life.
+
+In her compunction, she made an attempt at regaining the services of
+Miss Meakins, but the governess had without difficulty obtained a
+situation in the household of one of those gorgeously dressed little
+dark women who drive about the north side of Hyde Park in such
+well-appointed carriages. They are of Lancaster Gate to-day, but who
+knows if to-morrow they may not be giving laws to fashion from a palace
+in Park Lane? Miss Meakins, with the stamp of the aristocracy upon her,
+was quite an important person in this opulent Tyburnian mansion and the
+beautiful villa at Roehampton, with its velvet lawns and blazing
+parterres.
+
+‘Tell us about the little marquis and his brother, and the big park at
+Belchamber, and the deer,’ her little charges would ask of her, as they
+walked on Wimbledon Common. They had large eyes, and beautiful gentle
+manners, and that look of ineffable world-weariness that is common to
+the children of their race. Sainty would have been astonished to know
+what an object of interest he was to these other children.
+
+It must have been her uneasy desire for compensation that made Lady
+Charmington give to a suggestion of her sister-in-law that she and her
+‘fatherless boy’ should pay Belchamber a visit, a very different
+reception from that which she would otherwise have accorded to it. Lady
+Eva had lost the embarrassing Morland, and was inclined to return to her
+native land and see what she could get out of her kinsfolk. She went
+first to her mother, who received her very graciously, and was really
+pleased to see her. Her daughter brought the duchess a whiff of her
+beloved Paris, and entertained her immensely with anecdotes of a world
+quite unlike that in which she herself had formerly figured. The younger
+lady, finding her noble relatives in the Faubourg rather inclined to
+cold-shoulder her, had gone in for being a sort of Muse, and surrounded
+herself with all the youngest and most modern of the new school of poets
+and painters. She wore indecent clothes, with a rope of turquoises round
+her waist, and lay on a white bearskin, smoking a narghilé, while they
+recited their verses to her. They spoke of her as ‘la petite Morland’
+and ‘la belle Eve.’ Her portrait by a young American of genius had been
+the great _clou_ of the salon, she told her astonished step-father. ‘It
+really was _épatant_; he painted me at full length on the sofa in
+straight perspective, my feet away from you, and my head hanging over
+the end, so that my face looks out at you upside down. I have my
+turquoises in my teeth, and the whole is lit by Chinese lanterns. It is
+amazing _de vérité_, and will make his reputation.’
+
+‘And what about yours?’ asked the duke, who thought he was rather a wit.
+
+The duchess was much amused with this talk, and all went well, until she
+and her daughter happened unfortunately to fix their affections on the
+same young man, who was a good deal the junior of either, when a violent
+quarrel ensued, and Sunborough House having become much too hot to hold
+her, Lady Eva was seized with a sentimental desire to ‘show the home of
+her childhood to her boy,’ and wrote intimating this wish to her
+sister-in-law. Lady Charmington knew very little of the lady, beyond the
+fact that she had made an unfortunate marriage and was now a widow with
+an only son. The early surroundings of this boy must have been
+deplorable; but while she trembled for the effect he might have upon
+her sons, she licked her lips at the thought of the influence she might
+be privileged to acquire over him. Lady Eva’s cleverly insinuated hint
+that she did not find the atmosphere of her mother’s house congenial,
+did much to open the doors of Belchamber to her; but perhaps her best
+ally was the thought that his cousin might be a companion to Sainty
+during Arthur’s absence. Sainty at least was not likely to get any harm
+from unfortunate lads who had been brought up in an atmosphere of
+papistry or atheism--the two words meant much the same to Lady
+Charmington--and then who could tell what they might be able to do for
+_him_!
+
+Claude Morland was between two and three years older than Sainty and
+extraordinarily grown up for his age. He was a handsome boy, but of
+quite a different type of beauty from Arthur, who had the fair curls and
+florid complexion of the Chambers family, whereas Claude had inherited
+his colourless white skin, thick, straight black hair, and large dreamy
+eyes from his French ancestors. He was not unlike what his grandmother
+had been as a girl, but with a certain heaviness of make and feature
+that came from his lamented father, and might easily become coarseness
+as he grew older. He seemed to Sainty like some strongly scented
+hothouse flower, white with a whiteness in which there was no purity,
+and sweet with a strong sweetness that already suggested some subtle
+hint of decay. As the flowers which his cousin recalled to him were
+among the things he did not like, his first feeling towards him had been
+one of vague repulsion; but to a naturally shy and silent person, any
+one with Claude’s ready flow of talk and perfect self-possession must
+prove attractive in the long-run. Then Claude had charming manners when
+he chose. To Sainty, accustomed to Arthur’s scornful affection and
+undisguised contempt, the little attentions and deferential politeness
+of this older boy were bewildering, but strangely pleasant. Claude’s
+smile was a caress, the grasp of his hand an embrace; in later years a
+lady once said of him that she always felt as if he had said something
+she ought to resent when he asked her how she did. But at thirteen this
+latent sensuality only made him like some charming feline creature that
+liked to be stroked and well fed, to lie in the sun and purr. A boy who
+spoke French as easily as English, and German and Italian a little, and
+read mysterious foreign books for pleasure, could not fail to be
+impressive to a small home-grown cousin; while the discovery that this
+gifted creature had never played cricket in his life, and, though an
+excellent rider, had not the smallest wish to hunt, made him at once
+sympathetic and puzzling.
+
+‘Uncle Cor hunts,’ Sainty said, ‘and Arthur is dying to, as soon as ever
+he is allowed. _I_ can’t, of course; but then I shall never ride any
+more. But all the men I know hunt--our neighbours Mr. Hawley at Hawley
+Park and Sir Watkin Potkin at the Grange, and everybody, even the
+farmers, when they can afford to. I thought all men who rode wanted to
+hunt as a matter of course.’
+
+‘Well, _I_ don’t want to,’ Claude answered. ‘I like riding, and the
+_manége_, and all that; a gentleman should of course be a good horseman.
+But to get up early, and gallop all day across country after a wretched
+little vermin, _merci cela ne me dit rien_.’
+
+‘Ah! you’re sorry for the poor fox; I’m glad of that,’ said Sainty. ‘I
+can’t help feeling it’s cruel. I think of all it must feel when it hears
+the dogs getting nearer, and knows it is out of breath and can’t run
+much farther. And yet very good men hunt, even clergymen. None of our
+own clergy, because mother doesn’t approve of it; but some of those from
+the other side of the county, who, I believe, are quite good men. I
+asked Uncle Cor, who is very kind to animals, about it, but he said if
+it were not for hunting, the foxes would all have been exterminated long
+ago, and he didn’t suppose they’d have liked that any better.’
+
+‘There is certainly something in that,’ replied his cousin gravely; ‘but
+I’m afraid I wasn’t considering the matter from the fox’s point of view.
+I hate getting tired, and wet, and muddy, and to kill a wretched little
+yellow animal doesn’t seem worth so much fuss and trouble. _Voilà tout._
+In France, if the foxes eat the poultry, they shoot them; it is much
+more simple.’
+
+‘Then what do you like to do in the way of exercise and games and that?’
+asked Sainty.
+
+‘I like the lawn tennis fairly well,’ said Claude. ‘It is not such a
+good game as the real tennis, the _jeu de paume_. I have played that a
+little, but not much; it was too expensive; but lawn tennis is very
+well. That, and riding, and fencing have been my principal amusements.
+But we have moved about so much; my mother is very restless. We have
+never stayed anywhere long enough for me to settle down and really take
+to anything seriously.’
+
+‘And cricket?’ asked Sainty, almost under his breath; ‘have you never
+played cricket?’
+
+‘_Mon Dieu!_ no. A game that takes three days to play! Those stupid
+stepsons of grandmamma took me to see a match at--what do you call
+it?--“Lord’s,” when I was in London. It went on all day, and nothing
+happened. I yawned myself hoarse. I can never do anything for more than
+two hours at a time.’
+
+Here was some one who was not apologetic or ashamed that he could not
+play cricket, who spoke of it even with contempt, as of a pastime for
+fools. Sainty was dumbfoundered. He wondered what Arthur would say to
+such heresy. What Arthur did say when presently he came home, was that
+his cousin was a ‘bounder,’ and ‘like a beastly foreigner.’ It was a
+curious fact that though Claude acquired a considerable influence for
+harm over Arthur, the latter always continued to speak slightingly of
+him, and never really liked him; whereas Sainty, who was not influenced
+by him in the least, and after the first discoveries of superficial
+agreement, found that they differed essentially in their views on almost
+every subject, cherished a sneaking regard for his cousin, which died
+hard even when Claude had done his best to kill it. Arthur’s mind could
+accept nothing that was not traditional; and this surprising outcome of
+shady foreign watering-places and Parisian _ateliers_ lay altogether
+outside of his traditions.
+
+Their aunt was as much of a surprise to the boys as their cousin. Lady
+Eva modified herself considerably, with a view to conciliating her pious
+sister-in-law; but in spite of extra tuckers, the first sight of her
+when dressed for dinner was a severe shock to Sainty, accustomed to the
+modest _décolletages_ of the neighbouring clergywomen who dined from
+time to time with Lady Charmington, and the little square of his
+mother’s neck, which barely accommodated the large oblong locket of
+black enamel, like a baby’s coffin, with which she decorated herself for
+these festive occasions.
+
+Luckily for Lady Eva, Lady Charmington was not of the intimate order of
+women, and never invaded a guest’s bedroom, or she might have been a
+little scandalised by the tone of some of the literature she found
+there; but she would probably have been still more bewildered, as she
+had kept up scarcely a bowing acquaintance with even ordinary French. ‘I
+have read Madame Craven’s _Récit d’une Sœur_,’ she said, ‘but I read few
+novels in any language; it does not seem to me very profitable. I was
+once recommended Feuillet’s _Histoire de Sibylle_ as quite
+unobjectionable, but I found it very papistical. It did _me_ no harm,
+but I shouldn’t have given it to any young person to read in whom I was
+interested.’
+
+‘I don’t remember to have read either of the _romans_ you mention,’ said
+her sister-in-law wearily.
+
+The two women found it increasingly difficult to talk to each other;
+neither of them seemed to take the faintest interest in anything which
+occupied the other. Lady Eva dwelt much on the disadvantages of her
+bringing-up, finding that a subject on which her hostess was much
+inclined to be sympathetic, and also on her maternal anxieties about her
+boy’s future. She and Claude laughed a great deal at the good lady
+behind her back, and smoked a great many cigarettes together in the long
+shrubbery, when Sainty was having his daily drive, and Lady Charmington
+was busy about her farms. Arthur caught them at it one day, but was
+bribed to silence by being lured into participation in the crime.
+
+‘Tell me, Eva,’ said Lady Charmington, when the ladies were sitting
+alone together, ‘you are not, I trust, a Catholic, are you?’
+
+‘No; oh no!’ answered her sister-in-law, with perfect truth; though she
+might have added that she had at one time been a very devout one, and
+had since tried several other _cultes_, of which the last had been some
+queer Parisian form of esoteric Buddhism. ‘Oh no! I have seen too much
+of Romanism; I have lived abroad too much.’
+
+Lady Charmington was delighted. ‘I have no doubt they tried to pervert
+you,’ she said, fairly beaming on this martyr to the faith.
+
+‘Tried!’ repeated Lady Eva with an eloquent gesture.
+
+‘And your boy?’ continued Lady Charmington. ‘He must have been much
+exposed in those countries. I trust you have managed to keep his faith
+untouched?’
+
+‘I have done my best,’ said Lady Eva meekly. ‘Poor boy! he has had to
+knock about the world very young, and to see and hear much that he
+should not. I have felt that he had only his poor weak mother to stand
+between him and--and--well--all sorts of things. He has not had the
+advantages of your dear boys, Sarah--a good home, and peaceful, virtuous
+surroundings, nor such a good mother, I’m afraid.’ And Lady Eva cast
+down her fine eyes, on the lids of which she had not been able to deny
+herself a faint tinge of blue, on learning that Lord Corstorphine was
+expected, though she had been trying not to paint at Belchamber. ‘You
+know how my own youth was neglected,’ she added presently. ‘But I had
+rather not talk of that. After all, the duchess is my mother, and in her
+own way has meant to be kind to me, I think. Only, I have dreamt of
+something very different for my Claude. Such influences as he finds here
+are exactly what I have wished for him, and what I have all too seldom
+been able to give him.’
+
+‘Well, now we have got him here, we must try and keep him, and see what
+we can do for him,’ said Lady Charmington, much gratified. ‘Have you
+thought at all what you are going to do with him? You are not going back
+to France?’
+
+‘Oh no! I want to stay in England--_at home_’; and Lady Eva gazed
+tenderly at her surroundings in a manner which hinted plainly that an
+invitation to consider Belchamber in that light might not be unwelcome.
+Lady Charmington, however, was in no hurry to give it, but she debated
+in her own mind many plans for the benefit of her nephew. She got but
+little encouragement from her brother, who by no means seemed inclined
+to take a friendly view of these interlopers.
+
+‘That’s a horrible woman,’ he remarked, with brutal frankness of the
+‘belle Morland’; ‘and just the sort I should have thought you would have
+hated, Sarah.’
+
+‘I can’t honestly say I exactly like her, Cor,’ his sister answered;
+‘but I’m sorry for her and for the boy. Think of her deplorable
+bringing-up; think what a mother she has had, and what a husband! The
+poor body seems to have some glimmerings of a desire for better things,
+if she had any one to take her by the hand; and I must say it’s to her
+credit to have kept by her faith, exposed as she has been to the darts
+of the enemy. But what touches me most about her is that she evidently
+wants to do well by her boy. She’s not a bad mother, whatever else she
+may be; and, after all, she’s poor Char’s sister, you know.’
+
+Lady Charmington very seldom delivered herself of so long a speech, and
+still more rarely made any allusion to her dead husband. Corstorphine
+was surprised and touched. Perhaps some likeness to her brother in Lady
+Eva, some trick of speech, or expression that recalled him, had gone to
+the not very accessible heart of her sister-in-law, and reinforced the
+adroit flattery which had been offered to her pet prejudices. Perhaps
+mother’s heart really spoke to mother’s heart in some language he did
+not understand; the woman, with all her faults, might have a genuine
+wish to do the best for her brat. He could have checked his sister’s
+nascent inclination to befriend her husband’s kinsfolk with a word, but
+it seemed an ungracious task. After all, Sarah was not too often in a
+melting mood, and if she could do something for this wretched lad, whose
+best chance was that he was fatherless, why should he seek to restrain
+her?
+
+‘I don’t like the boy either,’ he couldn’t help saying; ‘he’s a deal too
+smooth and civil spoken. He’s no business to have such finished manners
+at thirteen, and be such an accomplished little man of the world. But if
+you think you can do anything to prevent his turning out such a
+blackguard as his deceased parent, pray do; it’s a Christian act. All I
+say is, consider whether he is likely to harm your own boys in any way.’
+
+‘I’ve thought very much of that. Do you suppose it wasn’t my first
+thought?’ his sister answered. ‘But one mustn’t let anxiety for one’s
+own stand in the way of snatching a brand from the burning. Something
+tells me this boy has not been sent here for nothing.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Corstorphine, ‘and what particular form of charity do you
+think he was sent for?’
+
+Lady Charmington ignored the scoff. ‘I was thinking whether I mightn’t
+offer to send him to Eton, if he could be got in,’ she said; ‘he won’t
+be fourteen till November. I know his mother can’t afford it. Then he is
+very gentle with Sainty, and the child seems to like him; and I thought
+if later on Sir John thought Sainty could go to Eton, it might be a help
+to him to have a cousin who had been there a year or two, and could look
+after him a little. He can never be quite like other boys, you know.’
+
+Corstorphine smiled grimly. It tickled his not unkindly cynicism to find
+his pious sister had so human a thought for her own offspring nestled
+under her zeal for her nephew’s soul.
+
+‘Well, I agree,’ he said, ‘that the best chance the youth can have is to
+see as little as possible of his mother and grandmother. Perhaps if he
+gets well kicked at Eton, and you have him here mostly for his
+holidays, he may not turn out so ill. It would take an 18-horse power
+profligate to corrupt Sainty, it is true; but how about Arthur?’
+
+‘Arthur doesn’t like Claude; he makes no secret of it; so I don’t think
+he can do _him_ any harm. Besides, when the boys are at home I have them
+so constantly under my own eye, I should know in a minute; and by the
+time Arthur goes to Eton, Claude will be almost leaving.’
+
+‘Or if he turns out badly, he may even have left,’ said Lord
+Corstorphine.
+
+So the matter was broached to Lady Eva, who, you may be sure, was
+profuse in a mother’s blessings and tears. She was fond of her son in a
+way, and honestly wanted the best that was to be had for him in life.
+She had been ruefully reflecting that she would never be able to send
+him to a good school, except at the cost of decided privations to
+herself; and there was no doubt he would be dreadfully in her way in
+London.
+
+Lord Corstorphine proposed himself for a Sunday to a great friend among
+the Eton masters, and found that his host, having an unexpected vacancy
+for the next half, was delighted to do a good turn to any one in whom he
+was interested. The duchess, when she heard what was on foot, suddenly
+insisted on helping, and promised to pay half of her grandson’s
+expenses; and though her contribution was frequently several terms in
+arrear, she generally paid up in the end, unless she had been unusually
+unlucky at cards.
+
+So, though Lady Eva had failed to extract from her sister-in-law that
+general invitation to regard Belchamber as her country-home, which she
+had hoped for, she left for town with a comfortable feeling that her
+visit had not been wasted. Claude was practically off her hands; he
+would go to Eton at no expense to her, and spend most of his holidays at
+Belchamber. ‘Dear Belchamber, where poor Char and I spent our happy
+childhood, and of which I have always carried the picture in my heart,
+through all my wanderings,’ she said to Lady Charmington the day before
+her departure.
+
+‘Indeed,’ said Sarah, with a little dry cough, ‘I always understood
+from poor Char that he had hardly ever been here as a child. He said,
+when we first came here in the old lord’s time, that he hoped his son
+wouldn’t feel such a stranger here as he did, when he grew up.’
+
+‘Ah well,’ said Lady Eva hurriedly, ‘my happiest times, almost the
+_only_ happy ones of my neglected childhood were here, so I suppose they
+bulk large in my memory. I have so little reason to remember most of my
+youth with pleasure.’
+
+‘You said, Aunt Eva,’ Arthur burst in, ‘vat you wemembered every corner
+of ve place, blindfold, but you soon lost your way even in ve shrubbery,
+and you thought One-tree Wood was the other side of the village.’
+
+‘Ah, traitor!’ cried his aunt, playfully embracing him, ‘have you so
+little gallantry as to try to convict a lady of making mistakes?’
+
+‘You were a little rash, dear mamma,’ Claude said to her afterwards, ‘in
+remembering your happy childhood at Belchamber so well, unless you took
+a little more trouble to get up the subject.’ Claude for his part was
+quite willing to go to Eton and try how he liked it. Almost the only
+principle that had been early instilled into him was that it was always
+worth while to accept anything expensive that could be enjoyed at
+another person’s expense. It was rather absurd, no doubt, for so
+finished a gentleman to go to school; but experience had taught him that
+it was always quite easy to get sent away from educational
+establishments, if one did not happen to like them; and what was the use
+of his precocious knowledge of the world if it did not insure him an
+easy victory over such simple people as schoolmasters and schoolboys? As
+a matter of fact his astuteness did save him from paying the extreme
+penalty for many peccadilloes that would have cut short the career of
+less sophisticated youths under ‘Henry’s holy shade.’ His tutor’s
+attitude towards him was a curious alternation of attraction and
+distrust. But though never cordially liked by either boys or masters, he
+was still there, as an overgrown youth in ‘lower division,’ when Sainty
+hobbled into the school, a pale, gloomy little boy with an iron boot
+and a stick, and was even keeping a precarious footing when Arthur
+appeared a year later, and of course took the place by storm with his
+frank and friendly manners, hatred of books, love of games, and
+perfectly obvious and understandable type of beauty.
+
+Whether Claude really did much for his cousins on their arrival at Eton
+may be doubted, but he certainly managed to impress Sainty with the
+belief that he had been of incalculable service to him. To Claude,
+Sainty meant Belchamber with all its comforts, horses to ride, pheasants
+to shoot, good food, luxurious quarters, and presents at Christmas;
+things his shelterless childhood had taught him to consider in a way
+that boys to whom they had always been matters of course could not
+understand. It never occurred to Sainty that his cousin’s attentions
+proceeded from anything but a naturally kind heart compassionating the
+limitations of a cripple and an invalid. He soon learned to disapprove
+of Claude, and to dread his influence over Arthur, and on several
+occasions screwed himself up almost with torture to the point of
+speaking very plainly to his senior, a thing especially difficult among
+boys; and the indulgent good nature with which his strictures were
+received, where they might easily have been resented, gave him an
+uncomfortable sense of obligation towards one to whom his conscience
+forced him to say such disagreeable things in return for uniform
+kindness and affection.
+
+‘Dear Sainty,’ Claude would say, ‘you do look so sweet when you’re angry
+and solemn, for all the world like an old hen with all her feathers up
+in defence of her chick. Of course I’m a wicked unprincipled hawk, but I
+promise not to devour your bantling.’ He generally managed to refer
+again to these conversations when Arthur was present, knowing that
+nothing enraged the younger brother so much as the idea that Sainty, for
+whom he always entertained the sublimest contempt, had dared to give
+himself the airs of looking after him.
+
+It early dawned on Sainty that a loving heart was not an unmixed
+blessing, unless one had the gift of imposing one’s views on the object
+of one’s affection. Had he not been fond of Claude, it would be nothing
+to him that he disapproved of him; if he did not love Arthur, it would
+not have been a daily grief to him to see so clearly what his brother
+ought and ought not to do, while he was destitute of the smallest shred
+of influence over his actions.
+
+‘You know, dear,’ Claude said to him once, ‘there is nothing so easy as
+to get rid of me. I am horribly _mal vu_ by the authorities. If tutor
+hadn’t stuck up for me like a brick, I should have been sacked long ago;
+he has told me pretty plainly that if there are any more rows he shall
+say he thinks they had better take me away. A hint to him that I am
+corrupting his pet lamb, and a word to your mother, and neither Eton nor
+Belchamber will be troubled with me much longer.’
+
+Such a speech hurt Sainty like a lash. ‘Don’t you see,’ he cried, ‘that
+it is just the knowledge of what you say that makes it impossible for me
+to do anything? I am helpless.’
+
+See? Of course Claude saw; no one better. ‘Dear generous old boy!’ he
+said, with one of his sudden pretty changes of manner, throwing an arm
+lightly round his cousin’s shoulder; ‘who should know what an angel you
+are, so well as your poor scamp of a cousin, who owes everything to
+you?’
+
+‘Don’t,’ Sainty said, wincing; ‘you do things you know I hate, and teach
+Arthur to do them, and then you manage to make me feel a brute, and put
+me in the wrong.’
+
+Claude shrugged his shoulders, almost the last of his little foreign
+tricks of manner that he had not lost at Eton. ‘You are impossible, dear
+Saint,’ he said, and went his way, quite secure that what he had let
+fall of the ease with which his cousin could get rid of him would
+effectually tie his hands.
+
+The day came, however, when without any intervention of a schoolfellow,
+the measure of Claude Morland’s ill-fame overflowed, and the College of
+the Blessed Mary numbered him no longer among her children.
+
+That summer half was ‘long remembered’ at Eton (almost eighteen months)
+for what Claude called a ‘great massacre of the innocents.’ We are not
+concerned at this distance of time to inquire into the nature of this
+old story. As usual, it was not the most guilty who were sent away;
+there were angry mothers in many counties of England who declared their
+darlings had been most unjustly used, and that ‘there was a boy called
+Morland who was much worse than poor Tom, Dick, or Harry, who had only
+had to leave at the end of the half, and with no blame attached to him.’
+‘Claude was more or less mixed up in rather a painful affair,’ his tutor
+wrote to Lord Corstorphine. ‘He did not know how much he was to blame,
+but it would be best for the boy himself if his friends were to remove
+him. Personally he liked him, but ...’; and Sainty tried hard not to
+feel a certain relief at his cousin’s departure. He atoned for this
+unchristian want of sympathy by making the best of the matter to his
+mother and guardian, and begging that it should make no difference in
+the culprit’s footing at Belchamber. What he never mentioned at home was
+that Arthur had come very near being implicated, and that he, Sainty,
+had strained his conscience to the utmost, in solemnly pledging his word
+to his tutor for his brother’s innocence. Arthur accepted this as he did
+everything else from Sainty. ‘What is vere to make a fuss about?’ he
+said. ‘I’d have done as much for you, or for vat matter, for any over
+chap who wasn’t my bwover. You jaw about your conscience, and not being
+sure, and tell me to see what I’ve made you do. I don’t call that lying.
+Of course, if a fellow’s asked point-blank if anover fellow’s done a
+fing, he’s _got_ to say he hasn’t. Don’t be such a pwig.’
+
+Sainty did not stay very long at Eton himself. In spite of constant
+staying out, and much sick-leave, he really was not strong enough for
+the life there; nor was it a great grief to him to go. He did not make
+friends easily; his shy reserved manner, his studious habits, and
+inability for athletics, not less than his austerely high standard of
+ethics which his minor found so unnecessary, were not calculated to make
+him popular with his schoolfellows; and he resented their familiar
+abbreviation of his title into ‘Belcher.’ He stayed long enough to see
+Arthur launched on a course of prosperity, and in a fair way to become a
+‘swell,’ and then sang his _Nunc dimittis_. Arthur remained, alone of
+the three, and flourished like a green bay-tree. He did just enough work
+to get through his various examinations with a little cribbing, and
+found plenty of people ready to do all the rest for him. He was quite
+selfish, self-indulgent, easy-going, good-natured, and happy, and was as
+popular with the masters as with the boys. The elastic code of schoolboy
+honour fitted him like a glove, and he had the makings in him of a
+first-rate cricketer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Lord Corstorphine had been an Oxford man, but some curious lingering
+dread of Puseyism made Lady Charmington send Sainty to Cambridge. She
+gave a moment’s anxious thought to the vicinity of Newmarket, but, as
+she truly said, that hardly seemed a danger to Sainty; and as Arthur was
+to read for the army when he left Eton, there was no question of the
+University for him.
+
+Sainty went to college, as he did most things, from the habit of
+obedience, but with no great hope of personal enjoyment. Anticipation to
+him was rarely pleasurable; he had not the sanguine temperament. He
+looked on Cambridge as a larger Eton, a new field for unpopularity and
+isolation in the midst of a crowd, but he soon began to be aware of an
+atmosphere of wider toleration than he had known at school.
+
+It is true he was a dreary failure among his peers, the gilded youth who
+went to Newmarket, kept hunters, and spent their evenings at the
+card-table; and he was ignominiously blackballed for a certain
+fashionable dining-club for which some one was so ill-advised as to put
+him up. His college, however, was large enough to contain men of all
+sorts, and among some of the more thoughtful he found congenial society
+and kindly appreciation, especially in the little knot of undergraduates
+who gathered round a young don called Gerald Newby.
+
+Sainty was just ripe for some one to worship, and Newby supplied the
+object beautifully. In all his reserved, unhappy boyhood, he had never
+known the joy of that falling in friendship, so to speak, which is one
+of youth’s happiest prerogatives. The only two companions for whom he
+had felt much affection, his cousin and his brother, had certainly given
+him more pain than pleasure. The generous delights of an enthusiastic
+admiration had hitherto been withheld from him. This young man,
+sufficiently his senior to speak to his troubled soul with a certain
+authority, yet near enough to his own age for discussion on equal terms,
+excited such a feeling in the highest degree.
+
+It is difficult for older people not to smile at very young men’s
+estimates of themselves or of one another. Newby had opinions, splendid
+opinions, on all sorts of subjects, which his disciple imbibed with
+rapture. Sainty took his young mentor quite seriously, and Gerald, it
+need hardly be said, took himself quite seriously; and between them they
+were sublimely earnest and high-toned, and perhaps, if the truth must be
+told, just a trifle priggish.
+
+For one thing, of course, Sainty had ‘doubts.’ It is not to be supposed
+that a youth with a morbid conscience, a tender heart, a keen mind and
+delicate health, reared in Lady Charmington’s school of extreme
+Calvinistic theology, should have reached the age of eighteen without
+many searchings of heart.
+
+Little as this profane page may seem the place for the discussion of
+such subjects, it would be impossible to give an adequate notion of
+Sainty’s life at Cambridge or his relations with Gerald Newby, without a
+passing reference to the topics that kept them from their beds far into
+the small hours of many a chilly morning.
+
+Young men of Gerald Newby’s stamp can conceive of nothing that is not
+the better for being ‘threshed out,’ as he would have called it. He held
+that if the old creeds were ‘outworn,’ it was no reason for abandoning
+faith--that there was to be evolution in belief as in other things; and
+he had dreams of an universal Church freed from strangling dogmas, in
+which all sincere seekers after truth should meet in a common
+brotherhood. Perhaps he was a little vague as to what was to be left as
+the object of belief, when everything had been eliminated in which the
+controversially inclined could find matter for discussion, but that did
+not trouble him in the least.
+
+‘What we want,’ he said to Sainty, ‘is more light. All churches in all
+ages have been alike in the mistake of endeavouring to stifle discussion
+of their doctrines. Discussion is the breath of life; unquestioning
+acceptance is death.’
+
+‘But once one begins questioning things, one is so apt to find one
+doesn’t believe them----’
+
+‘Then let them go. Depend upon it, what won’t bear the investigation of
+reason cannot be worth keeping. The truth, and the truth only, must
+emerge clearer and purer from every test to which it is submitted; and
+it is the truth we want. Why, when in all other departments of knowledge
+our understanding becomes truer and stronger every year, should we seek
+to stultify ourselves and shrink from all growth in the highest science
+of all, that which deals with the fount of all knowledge, and the spring
+of all conduct?’
+
+‘But suppose,’ Sainty asked, ‘one should find in the end that one
+believes nothing?’
+
+‘Then believe nothing,’ said Newby grandly. ‘But I won’t, I can’t,
+suppose any such thing; it is belief that comes of inquiry, not the
+negation of belief.’
+
+Sainty was very much impressed. He had never before had any one to whom
+he could unburthen himself on these subjects. His mother, he knew well,
+would have revolted in horror from any questioning of the doctrines she
+herself accepted, and his uncle would not have approached the discussion
+in that serious spirit which alone he thought befitting. But the lads
+who assembled evening after evening in Newby’s rooms had no angelic fear
+of treading on anything, and talked everlastingly on all subjects,
+religious doubt or belief among the rest. If they found the world out of
+joint they by no means shared Hamlet’s distress at being ‘born to set it
+right,’ or doubted for a moment their perfect ability to do so. These
+boys who so confidently settled the affairs of the nation, the world,
+the universe, are getting middle-aged men now, hard-working public
+officials, clergymen, schoolmasters, and would probably smile at their
+own youthful enthusiasms. Many of them are married and fathers of
+families. Newby himself is senior dean of the college, and a very
+different person from the ardent apostle of universal belief and
+brotherhood to whom Sainty brought so many of his perplexities.
+
+Belchamber spent an immense amount of time in the young don’s
+comfortable rooms. A kind of sensual austerity marked the place,
+something cloistral and monastic, yet with a touch of art and luxury.
+Pale autumnal sunlight, or the soft glow of shaded lamps, lingered
+lovingly on the backs of well-bound books, some large framed photographs
+of early Italian Madonnas, and a reproduction of a Neapolitan bronze. A
+great many teacups reflected the fire, while a permanent faint smell of
+tobacco just gave a masculine character to the mellow warmth of the
+atmosphere. Several armchairs and a huge sofa seemed always trying, by
+the sad colour and severe pattern of their coverings, to conceal the
+fact of their depth and softness, just as their owner, who had a
+handsome refined face and a well-knit frame, affected a slouch and wore
+shabby clothes to show he was not vain.
+
+If Sainty poured himself out to Gerald when they were alone, he took but
+little share in the general discussions, when other people were present.
+To express himself was always a difficulty to him; he lay, as it were,
+on the margin of the pool of talk, into which one eager speaker after
+another dashed past him while he was still trying to summon courage for
+the plunge. It would sometimes happen that at the end of a long evening
+he had not opened his mouth, and he was taken to task more than once on
+the subject by his friend. ‘You really should try and talk more; men
+take your silence for ungraciousness. It looks as if you didn’t think
+them even worth disagreeing with, you know. Locke asked me to-day if you
+weren’t very proud; he said you sat all the time he was talking about
+the essential Christianity of Shelley’s point of view, the other night,
+with a little supercilious expression which said plainer than words that
+you thought him a fool.’
+
+‘Oh dear! and I was so much interested,’ Sainty cried. ‘I had nothing
+particular to say about it; to tell the truth, I had never thought of
+Shelley exactly from that point of view, but I liked it all so much.’
+
+‘Well, you should have told him so; you see, you didn’t convey that
+impression to Locke.’
+
+Gerald was by no means always tender with his proselyte. He had great
+belief in his own powers of sympathy--(‘I understand,’ he used to say in
+a meaning way to those who laid bare their difficulties to him)--but he
+was quite capable of ‘smiting friendly and reproving’ when the occasion
+seemed to demand it. ‘I shouldn’t be your friend, if I didn’t say ...’
+was a favourite formula with him, and he constantly invited an equal
+frankness in others, though it is doubtful how he would have liked the
+invitation to be accepted.
+
+‘I have been thinking a good deal,’ he said, pausing in the act of
+making tea, and turning to Sainty with the kettle in one hand, ‘about
+what you said the other day of shunning uncongenial society. Of course
+there is a great deal of truth in it, and nothing obliges one to live
+habitually with people with whom one has nothing in common, but one has
+a duty to the outside world as well as to oneself.’
+
+‘I can no more be myself with certain people,’ Sainty objected, ‘than I
+can write my own handwriting on paper I don’t like.’
+
+‘Of course we all feel that,’ responded Gerald rather brutally, ‘but
+there are two things to consider: in the first place, there’s the danger
+to one’s own character of getting narrow and cliquey; and in the second,
+unless you have something to do with men who are your inferiors in aim
+or culture, how are you to influence them for better things?’
+
+‘I don’t say they are my inferiors,’ said Sainty humbly; ‘I only say
+they are so unlike me in their habits and point of view that I can’t
+talk to them. They may be quite as good fellows as I am; probably they
+think themselves much better----’
+
+‘Yes, but _you_ don’t think so; you know you don’t,’ insisted his mentor
+sternly. ‘Ah! you are looking at that Giotto; it’s from the Arena Chapel
+at Padua; it’s a jolly thing, isn’t it? The meekness of the Virgin’s
+expression is so wonderful. Those fellows lost so much of the religious
+feeling when they ceased to be archaic. Probably you don’t cordially
+like or approve even of all the fellows you meet here. I don’t
+altogether myself. But it is one of my principles to welcome all sorts
+of men. It is not only that I think they may get good from us, but they
+teach us too. We must try to be broad, to keep our sympathies open on
+all sides, to be in touch with every kind of person, if we hope to do
+any good.’
+
+‘You are like St. Paul,’ said Sainty quite seriously; ‘it is very
+wonderful of you. I wish I was more adaptable, but people shut me up
+so.’
+
+Newby smilingly deprecated the likeness to St. Paul, but in his heart he
+thought it quite true. ‘Take Parsons, for instance,’ he said; ‘do you
+suppose I am not often shocked by things he says? Yet I think he keeps
+us fresh, as it were; he is bracing, stimulating, useful, if only as
+keeping alive in us the wholesome reprobation of some of the views he
+thinks it necessary to advocate. And look at the matter from his point
+of view. It is far better he should come here, and find his own level,
+and meet with wholesome disagreement, than be driven into thinking
+himself a social pariah persecuted for his opinions, or surround himself
+with a little set of duller men, who would take what he says for gospel,
+and on whom his influence would be wholly bad.’
+
+‘I don’t like Ned Parsons,’ said Sainty simply. ‘I know he’s clever and
+amusing and all that, but I think he’s rather a beast.’
+
+They were interrupted by the arrival of several undergraduates,
+including the subject of their discussion, the pursuit of which had
+therefore to be postponed to a more fitting opportunity.
+
+‘Yes, Newby,’ said Parsons, settling himself luxuriously in the deepest
+armchair, ‘I will take a cup of tea, though I should prefer a whisky and
+soda. And what might we be going to improve ourselves with to-night? the
+religious opinions of Swinburne, or the relation of the Ego to the
+non-Ego?’
+
+‘You are incurably flippant, Ned,’ said Gerald, with an indulgent smile.
+
+‘Here we all are, burning to be enlightened,’ continued Parsons. ‘Pray
+don’t deny us the tonic of stimulating conversation.’
+
+‘I’ve been wondering,’ innocently struck in a large rowing man, whom Ned
+described as having ‘aspirations after higher things,’ ‘what it is that
+keeps us all together, when we’ve so little in common, and I’ve come to
+the conclusion it must be our sense of humour.’
+
+‘Quite right, Og; no doubt it is,’ said Parsons approvingly. ‘And you
+and Newby are specially rich in it; and so is Sainty over there in the
+corner, though he is funny by stealth and blushes to find it fame.’
+
+The room was growing full of smoke and of the buzz of voices; Newby was
+holding forth to a small knot of admirers. ‘The Radicalism of Mill,’ he
+was saying, ‘is as dead as the dodo; all the things that were vital to
+his generation have been attained----’
+
+‘How about female suffrage?’ Parsons asked.
+
+‘But there is a newer Radicalism,’ Gerald went on, without paying any
+attention, ‘which is not incompatible with Imperialism in its best
+forms----’
+
+‘All Radicalism,’ said the rowing man sententiously, with the air of
+making a valuable contribution to contemporary thought, ‘tends to
+Socialism----’
+
+‘Well, yes, in a way you may say it does,’ assented Newby politely; ‘but
+that in my mind is not altogether an objection. The word Socialism used
+to be a bugbear to frighten children with; but there is a new Socialism
+as there is a new Radicalism. If you come to think of it, all
+interference by the State is a form of Socialism; it is the community
+at work for the good of the community, instead of the individual making
+weak and isolated effort for his own good----’
+
+‘Poor dear Mill!’ interjected Ringwood, a young man who in those days
+would have been called ‘æsthetic,’ ‘it is a pity he is so _vieux jeu_;
+he had such a nice refined face, and learned Greek as a baby, and it was
+so nice and unconventional of him to want women in parliament. Perhaps
+in time parliament may come to be all women, and men be free to look
+after things that really matter.’
+
+‘Such as old china,’ said Parsons.
+
+‘Women,’ said the rowing man, ‘should stick to woman’s province; her
+home and children should be enough for any woman.’
+
+‘And suppose she hasn’t got any?’ asked Ned.
+
+‘But I see what Ringwood means,’ said the rowing man. ‘Of course
+politics are very important and all that; far be it from me to deny it.
+For my part I’m a Conservative, and I don’t care who knows it. But the
+thing that really matters is no doubt the intellectual life.’
+
+Even Newby smiled discreetly.
+
+‘No doubt, no doubt,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal in what you say;
+but it is essential that politics should not be left to inferior men, or
+what becomes of the nation? Look at America with her venal professional
+politicians, and see what it has brought her to. Depend upon it, it is
+the intellectual element in parliament that leavens the lump. Our
+thinkers must not shut themselves up from public life; we must go down
+into the arena and put the result of our thought into action, if we hope
+to do any good in our generation.’
+
+This magnificent sentiment was applauded as it deserved to be, but Newby
+had not nearly had his innings. He had much more to say about the new
+Radicalism and the new Socialism, and he talked so beautifully of the
+wickedness of being a hermit that Sainty resolved to widen his horizon
+by asking Ned Parsons to lunch next day, and proceeded at once to ‘put
+the result of his thought into action.’
+
+It was not often that he indulged in the luxury of entertaining. He had
+none of that genial desire for presiding which to many a man makes the
+top of his own table such an exciting position; moreover, he had been
+trained in the practice of the most careful economy, and had been
+accustomed to hear his mother condemn unnecessary profusion as hardly
+less sinful than irreligion.
+
+The question of his allowance had been carefully discussed between his
+guardians, and the sum eventually decided on, although it would have
+been treated as quite inadequate by most young men of his position,
+seemed to him so ridiculously large that he was always endeavouring to
+conceal the amount of it from his poorer companions. He did so entirely
+from a feeling of delicacy; but it need hardly be said that his motives
+were frequently misconstrued, and he was firmly believed by many to be
+of a penurious and miserly disposition. As a matter of fact, if little
+of it went in ostentatious hospitality, he spent still less upon
+himself. Arthur early discovered that his brother was ‘a safer draw for
+cash than the mater,’ and Claude, if he asked for help less often and
+with more circumlocution, also found Sainty a convenient banker. Lady
+Eva’s son was studying with a well-known coach for diplomacy, and though
+he lived with his mamma, ‘found life in London,’ as he wrote to his
+cousin, ‘horribly expensive.’ ‘I wear my gloves till people look
+sympathetic when they shake hands with me, thinking I am in mourning,
+and should as soon think of taking a hansom as a coach and four. But
+cigarettes I must have; they are literally the breath of my nostrils,
+and no matter how skilfully I hide them, mamma will find them and smoke
+them when I’m out. If it were not for Sunborough House, I believe I
+should starve. How, when, and where my revered parent feeds I am wholly
+unable to discover; but there is never anything to eat at home. Luckily,
+I am in high favour with grandmamma. I tell her she is the most
+beautiful woman in London, and that if I wasn’t her grandson I should be
+frantically in love with her, and she swallows it all. We are the best
+of friends, but I don’t get much out of her, except food and an
+occasional back seat in her opera-box; and of course I have to make her
+little presents _de temps en temps_. I ask myself, my dear Saint, how on
+earth all the young men I see about, smiling and spruce, contrive to
+live in this wicked costly place. They can’t _all_ be millionaires.’
+This was the burthen of many letters. Belchamber smiled indulgently; he
+couldn’t help being amused by them; they were certainly better reading
+than the ill-spelt scrawls in which Arthur announced he was ‘infernal
+hard-up.’ ‘What with subscriptions, and one thing and another, a fellow
+had such lots of expenses at Eton, it was perfectly beastly, and the
+mater kept him so precious tight, and always seemed to think because you
+were at school you were a kid, and had no need of money.’ Unlike as were
+their styles, the upshot of all the letters was the same: the youthful
+writer was in pressing need of funds, and would ‘dear old Sainty’ kindly
+supply the deficiency? And ‘dear old Sainty’ usually did.
+
+It is no doubt a very bad thing to be in want of money, but it is almost
+worse to be the quarry at which the impecunious let fly all their
+shafts; to know when you see a beloved handwriting on an envelope, that
+it is hunger and not love that has set the pen travelling, and dictated
+the letter that lies within. It is an experience that only comes to most
+of us later in life; boys of Sainty’s age are not often called upon to
+taste that half humorous bitterness. This was one of the few troubles
+about which Sainty did not consult Gerald Newby. He knew instinctively
+that his virtuous friend would have little sympathy with his supplying
+the funds of luxury and extravagance. The double drain, of which neither
+the amount nor the recurrence could ever be accurately foretold, kept
+the boy perpetually anxious about money matters. Perhaps it really did
+tend to make him, as people thought, unduly careful in his daily
+expenditure; and, though he took infinite pains to conceal the fact, he
+liked to be able to help humbler unfortunates than his brother or
+cousin.
+
+Another eccentricity which showed his unfitness for the state of life
+to which he had the misfortune to be born, was his exaggerated
+propensity for work; he had a real aptitude for scholarship, a love of
+erudition for its own sake. No pains seemed too great to him, no
+research too profound, for the illustration of a curious expression or
+the elucidation of an obscure passage. There was a danger that his
+health, never robust, might suffer from such close application. ‘If you
+were a poor student,’ Newby said to him, ‘with your way to make in the
+world, having come up from Glasgow with a bag of oatmeal, I should think
+it most meritorious of you to peg away as you do, but for _you_ to go
+injuring your health by overwork is worse than unnecessary--it’s wrong.’
+
+‘My health does not seem to me such an unusually fine specimen that all
+risk of injury to it must be avoided at any cost,’ Sainty answered.
+‘Besides, what am I to do, if I don’t work? I know few people, and the
+men I do know are all busy. I can’t play games or ride; when I am not
+working I loaf, and you are always inveighing against loafing as the
+root of all evil.’
+
+‘You should come out more, have more air,’ persisted Gerald.
+
+‘In the summer I am out a good deal, as you know,’ Sainty answered, ‘but
+at this time of year I can’t sit out, and I can only do a very moderate
+amount of walking without getting tired.’
+
+‘Why don’t you start a cart and pony?’ his friend asked.
+
+Sainty looked scared. ‘It costs such a lot to keep a cart and pony,’ he
+said. ‘I do hire one sometimes,’
+
+‘What nonsense!’ Newby protested. ‘In your position it’s absurd to talk
+as if you couldn’t afford a trifling thing like that. That’s the sort of
+thing that makes fellows say you are screwy----’ He stopped rather
+abruptly, having said more than he intended.
+
+Sainty froze instantly. ‘Oh! they say that, do they?’ he said, with an
+expression which would have recalled Lady Charmington to Newby, had he
+enjoyed the privilege of her acquaintance. ‘Perhaps I am the best judge
+of what I can afford.’
+
+Like many people who are theoretically in favour of independence, Gerald
+resented it in his disciples. ‘For all your false air of humility,’ he
+said, ‘one has only to scratch you to find the aristocrat.’
+
+It seemed to Sainty one more proof of the irony of fate that even such
+qualities as his application to study and careful ordering of life’s
+economy, which would have been held as highest virtues in many of his
+fellow-students, by a curious process of inversion became almost faults
+in him, faults too for which he must be rebuked by the mouth of Gerald
+Newby, the great apostle of industry and frugality, and the one person
+in the University whose praise would have been sweet and valuable to
+him.
+
+‘The things you reproach me with are hardly aristocratic vices,’ he
+said, with a sad little smile; ‘but are you quite consistent? You
+lecture Parsons on his laziness, and Ringwood on his extravagance, and
+then you come and try to drive me into being an idler and a spendthrift,
+who have no gifts in those directions.’
+
+‘Of course, if you resent advice,’ Newby said, ‘I’m sorry; I have no
+business to _lecture_ you at all.’
+
+‘Ah Gerald!’ said Sainty, stretching a protesting hand; but Mentor was
+nettled and would not immediately be mollified. It was on the tip of
+Sainty’s tongue to explain his need of economy, but the story of his
+mother’s long struggle to restore its solvency to their house seemed too
+sacred and intimate to be told even to his dearest friend. The unveiling
+of his own soul was only a personal immodesty, but his mother’s thrift
+and Arthur’s premature dissipation could not be touched upon without a
+sense of disloyalty to them from which he shrank.
+
+‘Let us go and get a trap and have a drive,’ he said.
+
+‘Thanks; I’m busy; I’m afraid I haven’t time,’ Newby said stiffly. ‘Did
+you think I was hinting that I wanted to be taken out driving?’ and the
+offended sage strode across the court to his own rooms. Sainty heard
+the man in the rooms below him, to whom a scholarship was a dire
+necessity, being dragged forth to football by clamorous companions who
+would take no denial. ‘Well, I won’t go and drive in an east wind and
+get neuralgia all alone,’ he concluded, as he turned again to his table
+piled up with learned commentaries.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+In spite of his untoward mania for study, or rather because of it, the
+years spent at Cambridge were the happiest of Sainty’s life. He allowed
+himself to be dissuaded from going in for a scholarship, which he had
+much wished to do, on the ground that, as he would certainly have got
+it, it was grossly unfair to men to whom it was of real importance.
+Balked in this ambition, he concentrated his efforts on his degree, but
+here he encountered a new difficulty.
+
+It happened that his second year at the University was also the
+twenty-first of his life, a coincidence which to most of his
+fellow-students would have been productive of no derangement; but it
+became apparent that in the very middle of the long vacation, just when
+he hoped to go up to Cambridge and do his most valuable and undisturbed
+work for the tripos, he had got to be present at a horrible function
+known as ‘coming of age.’
+
+Nothing like serious hospitality on a large scale had been attempted at
+Belchamber during the two-thirds of his life in which he had been the
+nominal head of his family, but Lady Charmington was conscientiously
+anxious that this event should lack no befitting pomp and ceremony.
+Unfortunately, fourteen years of ceaseless watchfulness and economy are
+not a good training for lavish display when the time demands it; so the
+poor lady found herself much exercised in mind over many details, and
+not a little perturbed at the thought of what it was all going to cost.
+By no means a diffuse or prolific correspondent at ordinary times, she
+began early in the May term to rain letters upon her son about the
+selection of the house party for the great occasion. ‘Your Uncle Cor,’
+she would write one week, ‘says that we must ask your grandmother and
+the duke. Of course I am only anxious to do what is right, and I suppose
+we must have them, though the duchess has never shown any particular
+interest in you or Arthur. Tell me what _you_ think about it.’ The next
+it would be, ‘I am told there must be a ball, that there has always been
+a coming-of-age ball; the county will expect it. Such things are not
+much in my line, as you know, but I shouldn’t like anything to be
+wanting that ought to be done, or that people expect.’
+
+To Sainty the whole thing loomed an unmitigated horror. What pleasing
+anticipations, for instance, could the prospect of a ball awaken in a
+young man, one of whose legs was shorter than the other, and to whom a
+highly polished floor was nothing but a danger? He came to dread these
+letters of his mother, each one of which contained some new detail of
+the approaching martyrdom; such alarming obligations as the necessity of
+a speech at the tenants’ dinner sprang suddenly on him at the turn of a
+page, and left him gasping.
+
+‘You have rather a cold nature,’ his mother wrote, ‘not very
+imaginative, so I don’t feel I need fear your being carried off your
+balance by all this fuss. If you were excitable and emotional like
+Arthur, I should feel more anxious. In your case the danger is more that
+you will take the whole thing as a matter of course, and not realise
+fully the importance of this epoch in your life, and all the new
+responsibilities it entails on you.’ Characteristic passages like the
+above, scattered up and down the letters, seemed to give Sainty the
+measure of his exact knowledge of his mother, and cast a flickering
+light into the depths of her abysmal ignorance of him. The sense of a
+somewhat unfair advantage bred in him by these revelations of his
+superior insight brought into his love for her an element of almost
+pitying tenderness which alone was wanting to rivet the chains of his
+early acquired habit of obedience to her will.
+
+‘Are you afraid of your mother?’ Gerald Newby asked him once, with some
+scorn, in reply to his repeated assertion of the impossibility of going
+counter to her wishes.
+
+‘I am very fond of her,’ Sainty answered, with gentle dignity. He had an
+almost painful intuition of her sacrifices, her hopes, her frustrate
+ambitions for him, and of the disappointment he must inevitably be to
+her; he probably read into her not very complex emotions, fine shades of
+sensibility from his own consciousness, after the manner of
+tender-hearted ladies with their dogs, which made his sympathy for her a
+little exaggerated. It was this habit of deference to her lightest wish
+that sent him forth sorely against his will to make a solemn call on a
+youth whom Lady Charmington had indicated for this attention. ‘My friend
+Lady Eccleston has been staying here,’ she wrote, ‘with her daughter,
+and I have asked them to come in August for your coming of age. She
+tells me her son Thomas is at Cambridge. I didn’t know he had left
+Harrow, but it seems he has been at the University two terms. She said
+it would be very kind of you to call on him, and I hope you will, as his
+mother is a friend of mine. If you find the young man agreeable, you
+might ask him to come with his mother and sister in the vacation. _A
+propos_, of course you will ask any of your own friends you would like;
+we shall want some young men; there will be Cissy Eccleston and the two
+de Lissac girls--only let me know in good time how many you ask.’
+
+On his way to show a grudging civility to Tommy Eccleston, Belchamber
+revolved in his mind his mother’s parting injunction to provide a band
+of youths for the feast. Luckily, here lay one ready indicated to his
+hand, but as he ran over the restricted roll-call of his intimates, they
+did not strike him as ornamental. Young Lord Springald and Sir Vaux
+Hunter and their friends would have been the very people for the
+occasion. They would have been voted ‘nice, gentlemanly young fellows,’
+or ‘fine, high-spirited lads,’ according as they were shy and dull, or
+noisy and rowdy; but then, unfortunately, he did not know them. He could
+not ask men whom he had spent two years in avoiding, and who had
+blackballed him for their club, but his terrible habit of appreciating
+other people’s points of view showed him how unsuitable his own friends
+would seem in the eyes of the duke and duchess. Gerald of course he
+wanted, and Gerald would be at home and imposing anywhere. His uncle
+Corstorphine at least, who had many friends among the intelligent
+obscure, could be trusted to appreciate Gerald; but he inwardly hoped
+that his friend might not select Lady Charmington as the recipient of
+his views on revealed religion. Apart from Newby, his progress towards
+the compilation of a list had been purely one of elimination up to the
+time of his arrival at Mr. Eccleston’s lodgings. In response to his
+knock, the voice of some one who evidently spoke with a jersey over his
+head made muffled answer from an inner apartment.
+
+‘All right, damn you, wait a sec., there’s no hurry. I’m changing,’ and
+a moment after the owner of the rooms appeared, a pleasant commonplace
+pink youth struggling into a college blazer, with one shoe on and the
+other dangling by its strings from his teeth.
+
+‘Hulloa! beg pardon,’ he remarked; ‘I thought you were Johnson, who was
+coming to go down to the river with me. I thought as he was so quiet he
+was probably smashing something,’ and he held out a blistered palm of
+welcome.
+
+‘Oh! er--how d’ye do,’ said Sainty, laying his own in it with no
+unnecessary cordiality. ‘My name’s Belchamber. My mother asked me to
+call on you; she knows your mother, don’t you know. I should have come
+sooner, but I didn’t know you were up.’
+
+‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; awfully good of you,’ answered Tommy. ‘Sit down,
+won’t you; have some lunch?’ A piece of cold pressed beef and a boxed
+tongue, with a pot of marmalade, showed that the host had himself
+recently partaken of that meal.
+
+‘No thanks, I’ve had lunch,’ said Sainty. ‘But I oughtn’t to keep you;
+you are just going out.’
+
+‘Oh no, not at all; there’s no hurry; I haven’t got to be at the river
+for half an hour. Besides, I’m waiting for Johnson; he said he’d come
+and go down with me.’
+
+Then there was a moment of uneasy silence, broken with an effort by
+Sainty.
+
+‘Your mother and sister have been staying with my mother,’ he remarked.
+
+‘No, really?’ said Tommy, with the faintest possible show of interest.
+‘My mother stays about a lot; she’s awfully popular.’
+
+There was another pause, during which he finished putting on his shoes.
+
+‘I say, are you _sure_ you won’t have some lunch?’ he cried suddenly,
+with quite a show of eagerness. ‘Do. I’m afraid I haven’t got any cake
+or anything, ‘cos I’m in training. Have a whisky and soda, won’t you?’
+
+‘No thanks, really not; I’ve just lunched. But I’m sure I’m keeping you
+in.’
+
+‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tommy responded genially, and added, not very
+consistently, ‘I can’t think where that ass can be?’
+
+The conversation seemed in danger of collapsing altogether, when the
+long-looked-for appearance of Johnson came as a welcome relief to both.
+
+‘Tommy, you brute, why ain’t you ready?’
+
+‘Well, I like that, when I’ve been waiting half an hour for you.’
+
+Sainty got up.
+
+‘Well, I mustn’t keep you,’ he said.
+
+‘Beg pardon; didn’t know you’d got any one here,’ said Johnson.
+
+‘Oh! Lord Belchamber--Mr. Johnson,’ said Eccleston, getting very red
+over the fearful embarrassment of an introduction. Then to Sainty, who
+remained standing, ‘Must you go? Awfully good of you to come; wish you’d
+have had some lunch.’
+
+‘Good-bye,’ Sainty said. ‘I hope you’ll come and see me--D, Old Court.
+Come to lunch or tea or something; or look me up in the evening if it
+suits you better.’
+
+Sainty reported this conversation verbatim to Newby.
+
+‘You see,’ he said, ‘how hopeless it is for me to try and be gracious to
+people with whom I have nothing in common. If you could have seen how
+hard that poor boy struggled to look pleased to see me, and the grimness
+with which I sat and scowled upon him, you would have felt sorry for us
+both; you couldn’t have helped it.’
+
+‘Of course, if your idea of being gracious is to sit and scowl at
+people----’ Newby said.
+
+‘I didn’t mean to; I wanted to wreathe my unfortunate features in
+smiles, but it was not a success. I am sure I feel as kindly towards my
+fellow-creatures as most people do; but I approach them with invincible
+terror; and there is no such sure way of making a dog bite you, as to
+think he is going to.’
+
+‘Then don’t think so,’ Newby said. ‘Have you _no_ control over your
+apprehensions? Strengthen yourself in any way you like. If you can do it
+in no other way, say to yourself that you are a great personage and that
+most men will be only too glad of your attentions.’
+
+‘Oh! but _that_ is a way that I should _not_ like,’ Sainty cried in
+horror; ‘the one thing that finishes me completely is any idea that
+people may think _I_ think they could want to know me for such a
+reason.’
+
+‘“The idea that people may think that you think,”’ Gerald repeated. ‘My
+dear Belchamber, this is very morbid. Do try and be simple.’ Like all
+elaborately synthetical people, Newby was always preaching simplicity
+and a return to nature.
+
+‘And the sad part of this individual failure,’ Sainty continued, ‘is
+that I particularly wanted it to be a success. I had a purpose in
+calling.’
+
+‘And what dark designs had you on this innocent fresher?’
+
+‘My mother told me to ask him to the horrible business in August; his
+people are coming. By the way, she suggests that I should provide other
+victims, and I can’t think of any one who would not be hopelessly
+inappropriate and bored to death. None of our friends _could_ take the
+thing seriously, except, perhaps, Og.’
+
+‘Well, he’s no use to you, as Providence having unkindly made him nearly
+your twin, he has got, in a small way, the same business on, at home,
+and _he_ takes it seriously enough, I promise you. I happen to know,
+because he has done me the honour to ask me to stay for it.’
+
+Sainty gave the cry of a thing in pain. ‘You haven’t accepted?’
+
+‘Well, I didn’t commit myself; I’m really not quite sure yet where I
+shall be this Long. I rather want to go abroad, and perhaps do some
+climbing. Holmes and Collinson want me to coach them part of the time,
+and I thought we might combine the reading and the exercise, and drop
+down to the Italian lakes in the autumn.’
+
+‘And I had so counted on your being there, Gerald,’ Sainty said. ‘You
+are just the one person I did want. I felt there would be something
+human about it all if I had you with me.’
+
+‘You never said so, you know,’ Newby interjected.
+
+Sainty felt the hot pricking sensation at the back of his eyes which was
+the nearest he ever got to tears. He had so intensely desired that
+Gerald should be at Belchamber in August, that it had not occurred to
+him to put his desire into words; they had talked the subject over so
+often that he took it for granted his friend would know that he looked
+for his help on the occasion.
+
+‘I thought--’ he began, ‘I hoped--I suppose you would feel----’ He
+couldn’t express just what he meant at the moment.
+
+‘You see, you didn’t ask me,’ Newby persisted, ‘whereas Og did.’
+
+‘Oh! go to Og, or Switzerland, or Hell, as far as I’m concerned,’ Sainty
+broke out.
+
+Gerald laid a kind restraining hand upon his shoulder. ‘My dear boy, you
+needn’t lose your temper and swear at me,’ he said; ‘I haven’t said I
+wouldn’t come. I only said you hadn’t asked me, and I couldn’t be
+expected to assume that I was invited to your coming of age, unless you
+said something about it.’
+
+Sainty was trembling all over; his little gust of passion had passed and
+left him humbled and ashamed. How could he have spoken so to his friend?
+
+‘Oh! forgive me,’ he cried. ‘I suppose I felt in my heart such a need of
+you, that I couldn’t but fancy you would know it.’
+
+Newby coughed uneasily. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t let us be
+sentimental,’ he said, in his little, prim, dry manner.
+
+‘My mother says I am cold and unimaginative,’ Sainty answered sadly,
+‘and you accuse me of hysteria. You can’t both be right; but anyway, I
+suppose _I’m_ wrong. After all, why should I assume that just because I
+wanted you I was certain to get you? I haven’t so often got what I
+wanted in life. I should have remembered that though you are nearly
+everything to me, I am to you only one of a hundred men your kindness
+has helped.’
+
+Gerald smiled. Like all Englishmen he had been frightened by the
+indecency of a glimpse of naked emotion, but he was always prepared to
+accept any amount of solid adulation soberly offered.
+
+‘You make too much of anything I may have been able to do for you,’ he
+said graciously. ‘And affection is a great gift; I’m sure I’m very proud
+that you like me and feel I have been of some use to you. I have no
+doubt I can manage to make it fit in.’
+
+Sainty was profusely grateful; he really felt that Gerald had conferred
+a tremendous favour on him, which is probably what Newby meant he should
+feel.
+
+His other invitations were less successful. Even Ringwood, whom at last
+he decided to ask, though he knew his mother and Arthur would say he was
+an affected ass, had pledged himself to the rival celebration.
+
+Tommy Eccleston, to be sure, accepted. ‘Oh, thanks!’ he said, ‘very good
+of you; I shall like it awfully.’
+
+So Sainty wrote and announced this meagre harvest to Lady Charmington,
+who forthwith responded: ‘Do you mean to say that out of all the young
+men you must know at Cambridge, you can only get two? Try and find two
+more, or we shall be more women than men. Johnny Trafford is coming, and
+I have asked Algy Montgomery, and of course there will be Claude, but
+none of the other Trafford boys can come, and I know so few young men.
+You see, we are such a lot of women. There is grandmamma (my mother, I
+mean), and your Aunt Susie, and Lady Eccleston and her daughter, and
+Alice de Lissac writes that her husband, she is sure, won’t come, so
+there are three more women. And now the duchess insists on my asking
+Lady Deans, whom I don’t know, and your Aunt Eva wants to bring a friend
+of hers. I counted on your having lots of friends you would want asked,
+or I should not have agreed.’
+
+At last, in despair, Sainty had recourse to Tommy Eccleston again, who
+seemed sociable and friendly, and was the only person who had accepted
+with anything like cordiality. ‘You haven’t got any friend you’d like to
+bring, have you?’ Sainty asked.
+
+‘I think Johnson would come, if he was asked,’ said Tommy thoughtfully.
+‘You see, between you and me, he’s rather sweet on my sister.’
+
+It only wanted two days to the end of the term, when the list was
+finally completed in the most unexpected manner.
+
+Sainty was hobbling disconsolately across the court one evening, when he
+almost ran into Parsons. Since he had invited this gentleman to lunch as
+an attempt at greater catholicity, they had frequently met, and
+something like friendship might by a little stretch of imagination be
+said to exist between them. Sainty, feeling how very little strain their
+intercourse would bear, was always careful not to tighten it unduly.
+
+‘I hear you are coming of age,’ Ned remarked, ‘and have got a regular
+corroboree in honour of the event at the family fried-fish shop. I can’t
+think why you haven’t asked me.’
+
+The intention was evidently humorous, but Sainty was a little taken
+aback. The fact was that Parsons was the only man of whom he saw
+anything like as much, whom he had not tried as the possible fourth
+demanded by the necessity for sexual symmetry.
+
+‘Should you care about it?’ he asked, a little doubtfully.
+
+‘My dear fellow,’ Ned answered candidly, ‘don’t ask a poor devil like me
+to a place like Belchamber; I should be ludicrously out of place.
+Besides, you know, you don’t really like me. Of course I was only
+joking.’
+
+Sainty was touched. Perhaps he had done Ned injustice. He certainly had
+never been very civil to him, and Parsons had borne no malice.
+
+‘Will you come?’ he said.
+
+‘Do you mean it?’ said Ned. ‘Of course I will.’
+
+As Sainty wrote to announce this last recruit to Lady Charmington, he
+could not help smiling at the thought of three out of the four who were
+to represent his chosen intimates and cronies on the great occasion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+During the long years of Sainty’s minority there had been but a moderate
+establishment kept at Belchamber. Lady Charmington had been anxious the
+boys should be brought up there, and have the early associations which
+alone make a place a home, though it would have been simpler and much
+more comfortable to have lived in the dower-house, and some of her
+relations had blamed her for not doing so.
+
+Sainty had hardly ever been into the great central body of the house,
+where what were called the State Apartments seemed only to exist to be
+shown to tourists by the housekeeper. A whole wing of guests’ and
+servants’ rooms had been permanently closed, and was only occasionally
+aired and inspected. Sometimes, when the boys were little, they had
+played at hide-and-seek in the long vista of empty chambers; but for the
+most part the family lived entirely in the west wing, much like royal
+pensioners to whom a set of apartments had been granted in some unused
+palace. Sainty had exactly the intense love for the place, not unmixed
+with awe, which might have been felt by the child of a custodian. His
+mother’s long habit of unquestioned and unquestioning authority, not
+less than her constant inculcation of a sense of stewardship and
+responsibility to a certain abstraction known as ‘the estate,’ had
+combined with his natural modesty and self-effacement to eliminate all
+sensation of personal ownership.
+
+In the stable one pair of carriage horses, Lady Charmington’s cobs and
+favourite hack, the boys’ old ponies, and a riding horse or two, had
+sufficed for all their needs; and old Bell the coachman had never wanted
+more than the groom and a couple of stable-lads under him, cheerfully
+doing much of the work himself. The butler, who had been with them
+fourteen years, was perhaps rather practical than ornamental, but could
+turn his hand to anything, and the two footmen were lads from Lady
+Charmington’s own bible-class in the village, released by their
+proficiency in the scriptures from the necessity of following the
+plough, to wear the badge of servitude upon their shining buttons. The
+housekeeper and her ladyship’s maid held sound evangelical views, and
+the morals and health of the under-servants were looked after with equal
+care and sternness. Lady Charmington was thoroughly versed in the
+spiritual state of the odd man, and could have told without a moment’s
+hesitation the date of the third housemaid’s confirmation, or when the
+scullery-maid last had a quinsy.
+
+Now, however, all was to be changed. Sainty came home to an atmosphere
+of expansion and innovation. He found his uncle, Lord Corstorphine--whom
+in future we must remember to call Lord Firth, the old earl having been
+dead some years at the date of his grandson’s majority--in constant
+consultation with his mother, consultations in which, to his extreme
+embarrassment, he was expected to take part. He discovered that he had
+absolutely no views as to the proper functions of a groom of the
+chambers, or the relative undesirability of keeping a lot of young men
+unemployed when you were alone, or having extra liveries into which, on
+the occasion of a large party, temporary hirelings could be hastily
+inducted; about whom, as Lady Charmington truly remarked, you could know
+nothing, and who might steal the spoons and flirt with the maids. Old
+carriages that had not seen the light of day for years were dragged from
+their retirement and unveiled before him, while all the horse-dealers in
+the county brought animals for his inspection of every shade of
+unfitness for the duty of drawing them. Lord Firth’s political
+engagements made his presence necessarily intermittent; he could but
+seldom be there; and in his absence Lady Charmington would look
+anxiously at her son, hoping for some expression of opinion from him,
+but Sainty’s ignorance was only equalled by his indifference. He tried
+in vain to care whether, supposing the carriages were worth doing up at
+all, they should be sent to London or confided to a provincial
+renovator.
+
+As to the horses, as Bell scornfully told him, he ‘had never knowed one
+end of a ‘oss from the other.’ On general principles he was on the side
+of the least expenditure. If he had said what he really felt, it would
+have been ‘Why need we live any differently because I shall be
+twenty-one next month than we did when I was twenty? We have always had
+all we wanted; why spend all this money on things that are not going to
+give me the smallest pleasure--rather the reverse?’ But these are the
+things one must not say. He looked at his mother’s wistful face and
+strove manfully to show the interest in all these questions which was
+expected of him.
+
+Arthur, when presently he came home, having just left Eton for good,
+flung himself into the whole business with very different gusto. The
+spending of money, either his own or other people’s, was always a
+genuine pleasure to this young man, and the horse-coping afforded
+opportunities for displaying to an admiring audience a knowingness quite
+amazing in one so young, and a pair of irreproachable riding-breeches.
+Once when Sainty was walking in the shrubbery that masked the
+stable-yard he overheard the dealer from Great Charmington expressing
+himself to Bell with a freedom in which he would not have indulged had
+he known who was behind the wall.
+
+‘I’d a deal rather have to do with Lord Arthur,’ he was saying, ‘than
+with either my lord or my lady. His lordship, he don’t want no horse at
+all; Lady Charmington, she knows a good horse when she sees ‘im, but she
+don’t want to pay for ‘im; but Lord Arthur, he wants a good article, and
+he’s willing to pay a good price. He’s a gentleman, he is.’
+
+‘Ah!’ answered Bell, ‘it’s a pity ’e wasn’t the eldest; ’e’d ’ave made
+something like a markis, ’e would.’
+
+It was the old old story; the one thing poor Sainty seemed able to do
+was to stand between his younger brother and the position for which the
+very stablemen saw his superior fitness.
+
+Arthur had been allowed to stay at Eton over his nineteenth birthday
+that he might once more represent his school at Lord’s. A finer-looking
+young fellow it would have been hard to find at this time, tall and fair
+and ruddy, of athletic proportions and agreeable manners, a most
+attractive personality, and as Sainty felt sadly, admiringly, but
+without a touch of envy, a most complete contrast to his elder brother.
+No one but Sainty, and he only imperfectly, knew the selfishness, the
+carnal appetites, the imperious need of enjoyment, the lack of moral
+sense, that lay beneath that smiling surface, or suspected the rock of
+primitive obstinacy above which the floating growth of apparent
+pliability waved so prettily in the tides of circumstance. Arthur had
+not been at home a week before the usual demand for money made its
+appearance. There is no doubt the younger brother had been extremely
+useful to the elder just then; his happy presence had eased the strain
+between Lady Charmington’s strenuous eagerness and Sainty’s
+incompetence, and lent quite a spice of amusement to the fearful
+upheaval in house and stable. The boys were together in what had been
+their common sitting-room ever since it had been their schoolroom.
+Sainty had had thoughts of asking for a study of his own, having much
+need of somewhere to work undisturbed; but it seemed ungracious to ask
+for the one thing that would have added to his comfort, when so much was
+being done for him that gave him no pleasure whatever.
+
+Arthur, arrayed in a new pair of yellow boots, spotless white
+‘flannels,’ and a lovely pink shirt, was whistling the airs from the
+latest musical farce while oiling his favourite bat and sadly shaking
+the table at which Sainty was trying to write a treatise on Epictetus.
+
+‘I don’t suppose, dear old boy,’ he said suavely, ‘that you could oblige
+your little bwuvver with a small sum of money?’
+
+Sainty looked up quickly. ‘Why, Arthur,’ he said, rather sternly, ‘I
+heard you tell mother you didn’t owe a penny now. You know she offered
+to pay any debts you had at Eton when you left, and you said you had
+given her a complete list.’
+
+‘So I did, poor dear, and it made her hair curl. I even took my bill and
+sat down quickly and wrote fifty,’ which was a hint I had got from the
+passage of scripture she had read to us at prayers, so as to have a
+little to go on with; but the fact is, dear boy, I’ve been cursedly
+unlucky----’
+
+‘Arthur! you haven’t been betting?’
+
+‘Yes; you see that’s just what I have been doing. Damn it all, Sainty,
+don’t look as if I’d been robbing a church. Every fellow has a little
+something on his favourite horse: it’s not a crime.’
+
+Sainty stared aghast. He had often wondered how Arthur managed to get
+rid of so much money at Eton, where, as he knew, though the boys were
+absurdly extravagant, the opportunities for spending were not unlimited.
+Now he understood, and a bottomless gulf seemed to open at his feet.
+
+‘Of course it’s only a temporary thing,’ Arthur went on. ‘I made a good
+thing over Ascot, but I’ve been unlucky with the Eclipse; one can’t
+always win, you know. Unfortunately these things have to be paid up,
+don’t yer know. My bookie’s a very good sort of chap, but he’s got to
+pay his losses, and he naturally wants his money. You can call it a
+loan, if you like. I’ve got a splendid tip for the Leger----’
+
+Sainty looked down at his paper. Epictetus seemed to have gone a long
+way off and become suddenly very unimportant since he had looked up from
+it. He knew how useless it would be to expostulate; but he wanted time
+to adjust his mind to this new terror.
+
+‘How did you come to know _how_ to bet?’ he asked; ‘I mean the machinery
+of the thing. Who introduced you to a bookmaker?’
+
+Arthur laughed aloud. ‘Upon my word I don’t remember,’ he said; ‘but I
+assure you it’s not difficult. Half the fellows I know have a book on
+all the meetings. I rather think it was Claude told me of this chap;
+he’s a very good sort. The man I went to before when I won a pony over
+the Derby wrote and said my telegram had come too late. I wasn’t going
+to stand that kind of thing, so I cut him, naturally----’
+
+Of course Arthur got what he wanted; it wasn’t, as it happened, a very
+large sum. But Sainty was left with an abiding dread. He wondered
+sometimes how it was that he saw so clearly the dangers that menaced his
+brother, while Arthur himself remained so sublimely unconscious and
+untroubled. The mention of Claude’s name in the matter, too, had
+reawakened an old anxiety. He had supposed that after his cousin left
+Eton Arthur would not be likely to have much to do with him except at
+Belchamber, and under his own eye. Claude’s was an influence he
+particularly dreaded for his brother, and it was evident that they had
+at least been corresponding. He wondered if he ought to say anything to
+his cousin about it, but he remembered the small effect such
+interference on his part had always produced.
+
+The Morlands were among the first to arrive for the coming-of-age
+festivities. Lady Eva had said, when she proposed it, that there must be
+heaps of things to attend to, and she should love to be of use. It need
+hardly be said that she was not. Her notion of offering assistance was
+to look in when Lady Charmington was busy, and say, ‘Dear Sarah, I see I
+should be dreadfully in the way just now; you will do much better
+without poor silly me. I will take a book out under the trees.’
+
+Claude, on the other hand, was extraordinarily helpful. He was capable,
+when it suited him, of taking immense pains, and he had a genius for
+order and detail which was of incalculable service to his aunt and
+cousin. He helped Lady Charmington and the housekeeper to arrange the
+long disused rooms, he settled who should occupy each, and wrote out
+lists of every kind of thing and person, in a beautiful, neat, clear
+little handwriting. He was gay, tactful, amusing, good-humoured. Sainty
+was overcome with gratitude, and felt it more than ever impossible to
+take this smiling, affectionate person to task for such a little thing
+as introducing Arthur to a bookmaker. After all, it was not his _first_
+introduction to a gentleman of that profession, and apparently all his
+cousin had done was to substitute an honest for a dishonest member of
+the ring.
+
+Claude’s attentions to his grandmother had not proved fruitless, for
+when he failed, no one quite knew why, to pass his examinations for
+diplomacy, she had persuaded the duke to take him as his private
+secretary; and his experiences in that capacity made him now of
+incalculable use in coping with the new groom of the chambers, a young
+man of Olympian beauty, with a sepulchral voice and manner, who had been
+the duchess’s footman, and in keeping the peace between him and the
+butler, who regarded this recent acquisition with unconcealed distrust
+and aversion. The establishment was now more or less on its new footing,
+the unwieldy machine beginning to act, with much creaking and groaning
+and a need of all the oil that Claude and Sainty could supply between
+them.
+
+Old Lady Firth had been for some time installed in the warmest spare
+bedroom in the family wing, with her maid next door to her, and her son
+came down as soon as the session was over, giving up the ‘Twelfth’ with
+a sad heart, but promising himself to fly to the golf-links and moors of
+his native land as soon as he had done this last duty for his ward.
+Sainty appreciated the sacrifice his uncle was making for him, and much
+wanted to thank him for it, but only succeeded in feeling and looking
+embarrassed.
+
+‘I’m sure it’s very good-natured of you coming here for this boring
+business, Uncle Cor,’ he said suddenly one evening. ‘I feel sure you’d
+rather be in the north.’
+
+‘I don’t know, my dear boy,’ answered his uncle patronisingly, ‘why you
+should not give me credit for a natural interest in being present on
+what is really rather a big occasion in your life.’
+
+‘It is so ungracious of Sainty,’ said Lady Charmington, ‘to persist on
+looking on the whole thing merely as a bore, when we are all doing our
+utmost to mark our sense of the event.’
+
+My dear mother,’ Sainty cried, ‘don’t think I don’t appreciate----’
+
+‘Oh, I don’t want to be thanked,’ his mother made haste to interrupt;
+‘nor, I’m sure, does your uncle. We are only doing what we feel is our
+duty; but it would be pleasant to know you took a little interest. I
+believe no one takes so little interest in your coming of age as you do
+yourself.’
+
+‘It does sometimes seem about the worst thing I could have done,’ Sainty
+said bitterly, a remark not calculated to soothe his mother’s
+susceptibilities. He wondered why, whenever he tried to express any
+kindly feeling, it always appeared that he had said something
+disagreeable, with the result that by the end of the conversation he
+generally had actually done so.
+
+‘Who comes to-morrow, Aunt Sarah?’ inquired Claude tactfully. ‘I declare
+I’ve forgotten, though we went through them only this morning.’
+
+‘Let me see,’ said Lady Charmington, swiftly reabsorbed in her duties as
+mistress of the house; ‘Ecclestons, three; de Lissacs, three; my sister
+Susan and Johnny, two; and a young man Firth has asked, Mr. Pryor. Algy
+Montgomery has written that he can’t come till Monday; he will come with
+his father and the duchess and the Rugbies. When do your Cambridge
+friends come, Sainty?’
+
+‘Johnson comes to-morrow with the Ecclestons, mother: he’s Tommy
+Eccleston’s friend more than mine; Parsons on Monday; Gerald Newby, I’m
+afraid not till Tuesday.’
+
+It will be seen that a tolerably large party was being gathered
+together. The actual festivities were to occupy two days--Wednesday,
+which was Sainty’s birthday, and the following day; and not only was
+Belchamber being once more filled with guests, but Hawley and the
+Grange, and even some bigger houses further afield were preparing to
+bring over large contingents for the garden party and ball.
+
+‘Do you think we had better dine in the big dining-room to-morrow
+night?’ Lady Charmington asked.
+
+‘Oh, not till Monday,’ Sainty pleaded; ‘surely that’ll be time enough,
+mother. This room is quite big enough for to-morrow’s dinner.’
+
+Lady Firth, who was dreading the draughts in the great banqueting-hall,
+and secretly wondering if she would not dine upstairs the first night it
+was used, and let the rest of the party air it for her, was strongly of
+Sainty’s opinion.
+
+‘Do let’s stay a family party as long as we can,’ said Lady Eva. ‘With
+mamma’s advent on Monday we shall inevitably become very _mondain_. Who
+are all these smart people she has insisted on adding to the party?’
+
+‘The Nonsuches are cousins and old friends,’ Lady Charmington answered
+grimly; ‘but your mother wished Lord and Lady Dalsany asked, and Lady
+Deans; I confess I don’t quite see why. I suppose she thought she would
+be bored here unless she provided her own company.’
+
+Lady Eva laughed as if her sister-in-law had said something witty.
+
+‘Oh! is Vere Deans coming? That will be nice!’ exclaimed a young lady
+who had come with Lady Eva. Amy Winston dabbled in literature, and spelt
+her name Aimée. She always wore black, white, or yellow, and still
+looked remarkably handsome in the evening. ‘She is a dear, and so
+clever,’ Lady Eva had said of her; ‘writes, you know, and dresses so
+well on simply nothing. You would love her.’
+
+If Lady Charmington did love Miss Winston, she disguised the feeling
+with perfect success. ‘Is Lady Deans a friend of yours?’ she asked
+coldly.
+
+‘Oh no!’ said Miss Winston; but I’m simply dying to know her. She’s so
+handsome, and has such splendid jewels, and they say she’s so wicked.’
+
+‘I hope not,’ Lady Charmington returned, with an increase of severity;
+‘but if she were, it seems a strange reason for wishing to know her.’
+
+Every day now some of the renovated carriages rolled up from the
+station, bringing recruits to the house party, in one of whom the reader
+will be pleased to recognise an old friend. The Mrs. de Lissac, of whom
+mention has several times been made, was no other than Sainty’s former
+governess, Miss Meakins. Outwardly in rustle of silks and flash of
+diamonds, and the deference with which the world treated her, Alice de
+Lissac was a very different person from Alice Meakins, but inwardly she
+was just the same kindly, tender, sentimental creature as ever. Riches,
+which have such a corroding effect on some people, had left that shy
+gentle heart quite untouched; they represented to her only delightful
+means of doing good to her less fortunate brethren, and she was still
+wondering why all the great ones of the earth were so kind to a poor
+humble little creature like herself. It has been related in a former
+chapter how this kind lady had entered the service of a Jewish family,
+when she left Belchamber, as governess to two little girls.
+
+Mrs. Isaacs, her new employer, was a little, fiery, black-eyed woman of
+immense social ambition, which grew with the steady growth of her
+husband’s carefully accumulated wealth. She would have been the Napoleon
+of London society, had she only lived, so instinctively did she grasp
+the market value of her possessions in the exchange to which she brought
+them. She had already effected the removal of the family from Lancaster
+Gate to Grosvenor Square, and the metamorphosis of Isaacs into de
+Lissac, when Death, who, alas! is no respecter of even the largest
+fortunes, put a term to all her hopes. It seemed as though the very
+energy that spurred her to ever fresh exertions was a fever burning in
+her blood, and sapping while it stimulated her vital forces. Poor Madame
+de Lissac!--as she insisted on being called--she died within sight of
+the goal. To the end she fought her illness, and would stand with
+trembling limbs and head aching under the weight of a huge tiara, while
+the names of half the peerage shouted in her staircase gave her strength
+to bear the pain that was killing her. Her widower remarked truly,
+between his sobs, that it ‘would have been a comfort to Rachel’ to have
+seen the cards that snowed on the hall table for days after the funeral.
+
+He, poor man, cared little for all this. He had been glad Rachel should
+have it, just as he liked to give her superb presents on her birthday,
+and anything else his money could buy for her. Personally, his interest
+was in his work; he did not like the great people who had eaten his food
+and been rude to him. After a hard day in the city, he wanted his carpet
+slippers, a big strong cigar, and a volume of Schiller by the fire, or
+perhaps a sonata by Mozart or Beethoven.
+
+Alice Meakins was an angel in the bereaved household; the little girls
+adored her, and gradually Mr. de Lissac found that he could not do
+without her. The girls were just coming to an age when most of all they
+needed the care of a mother; if she, of whom they were all so fond,
+abandoned them, what would become of them? Poor Alice had a terrible
+struggle. She was sincerely attached to the good man who had been the
+most generous and considerate of employers, and she loved her charges
+with all her heart. The great luxurious easy house had been the kindest
+home to her. How could she turn away from all this warmth and affection?
+‘You know--you know how I respect, how I love you, if I may say so,’
+cried the poor girl, with tears in her eyes; ‘and I’d lay down my life
+for the children. But oh! Mr. de Lissac, feeling as I do about things, I
+couldn’t marry any one who wasn’t a Christian.’
+
+And now the most wonderful thing came to pass. Her principles inspired
+this shyest and humblest of human beings, who blushed if she had to
+correct a pupil’s mistake, and to whom a difference of opinion was
+almost a physical pain, with something of the spirit of the early
+martyrs. She herself always considered that she had been miraculously
+aided; perhaps a certain pagan divinity, whose assistance she would have
+made haste to repudiate, counted for something in the matter. But
+certain it is, that she was the means of leading a whole family after
+her into the fold, and it may be imagined the excitement she was to Lady
+Charmington under the circumstances. Mr. de Lissac had not been a very
+fervent Jew, and he made a most unenthusiastic Christian; but he was
+nominally converted. Instead of not attending the synagogue, he now
+stayed away from church, and that satisfied his not very exacting
+helpmate, to whom the permission to bring up her stepdaughters in her
+own faith gave the last brimming happiness in her cup of blessing. They
+at least supplied all the warmth and devotion she demanded. An eminent
+co-religionist of her husband’s, in the city, remarked to a friend:
+‘Isaacs can shanshe his name, and shanshe his religion, but he cannot
+shanshe his nose.’ Neither could he change his habits. He accompanied
+his wife once to the rectory, and once to Belchamber, where the
+rejoicing of the angels embarrassed him to the point of regretting that
+he had not stayed in the wilderness; but his wife mostly made her
+excursions to the scenes of her youth without him, and the present
+occasion was no exception to the rule.
+
+Mrs. de Lissac was always fluttered and excited when she came to
+Belchamber, and Sainty’s coming of age was just the sort of occasion to
+appeal to her imagination. The young ladies were fine-looking girls: the
+eldest, Gemma, whose biblical name Jemima had been thus abbreviated
+about the time of the removal to Mayfair, was tall and slight, with a
+clear olive paleness and almond eyes. Nora was more like her father,
+shorter, and with more pronounced features, but with her mother’s
+brilliant colour and black burning orbs. They were both a marked
+contrast to Cissy Eccleston, who was the fairest, pinkest, and whitest
+creature imaginable, with a little button of a nose, a more refined
+etherealised edition of her brother Thomas. Lady Eccleston, too, had
+been fair, but had grown a little red and wrinkled with time. She had an
+astonishingly slight and youthful figure, with rather an elderly face.
+Her hair, having a choice in the matter, had very naturally elected to
+stay young with her waist rather than grow old with her countenance;
+indeed, its adherence to the party of youth seemed to become more marked
+with each succeeding year.
+
+This lady was slightly known to Sainty as a rather unlikely friend of
+his mother; she was, in point of fact, of the nature of a favourite sin
+to Lady Charmington. Her late husband, Sir Thomas Eccleston, K.C.B., had
+been a permanent official in one of the Government offices, and had left
+her with a moderate competence, and a colossal visiting-list. She was
+essentially in and of London, a Belgravian to the marrow of her bones.
+Nothing but insufficiency of income could have prevented her living in
+Eaton Square. As it was, she worshipped at its temple, the church of St.
+Peter, and lived as immediately round the corner as her means permitted.
+She shopped in Sloane Street, she had her books from Westerton’s, she
+visited a ward in St. George’s Hospital; she also took a fashionable
+interest in a poor East-end parish. In short, she mingled religion and
+philanthropy with the punctual performance of her immense social duties
+in exactly the proportion demanded by the society of which she was a
+living, breathing, integral part. Much in so mundane a personage was at
+first rather alarming to Lady Charmington; but they met in the committee
+rooms of charity, who, among the multitude of sins she covers, could
+surely spare a corner of her mantle for the few venial transgressions of
+such a respectable devotee as Lady Eccleston. The very worldliness of
+her relations made her a powerful factor for good works. She might
+always be confidently relied upon for a duchess or minor royalty to head
+a list of patronesses, or a rich friend ready to lend a big house for
+drawing-room meetings; and even her deplorable habit of asking
+theatrical people to dinner on Sundays had been proved to have its good
+side, the professional gentlemen and ladies being very useful in giving
+their services in aid of many deserving funds. No one was a more
+practical hand at organising bazaars, concerts, tableaux, the various
+conduits which brought to the objects of her own interest the
+fertilising stream of other people’s money. She and Mrs. de Lissac and
+their families had travelled from town together. Alice was made for Lady
+Eccleston, who feasted at her expense, used her carriage, copied her
+bonnets, directed her charities, and revised her visiting-list. They
+were allies in many good works. The girls adored Cissy as only dark
+girls can adore a creature composed of rose-leaves and sunlight, though
+they were a little shocked at the triviality of her ideals, and the way
+she occasionally spoke of her mother.
+
+The visitors arrived about tea-time. Five o’clock tea had never been the
+institution at Belchamber that it is in most country-houses, the
+domestic altar where the high priestess makes her little daily sacrifice
+of blue spirit flame and fragrant herb. Lady Charmington did not drink
+tea as an everyday thing; being a rigid abstainer, she kept it for a
+stimulant when she was tired, which was not often. When there was
+company, a tray of half-cold cups ready poured out used to be handed
+round by one of the footmen, the other following with cream and sugar,
+and the butler bringing up the rear with a plate of bread and butter and
+some spongecakes in a silver basket.
+
+For the present party, the wonderful Claude had brought about a charming
+revolution. A pleasant table with its white cloth and gleaming silver
+was spread under the cedars, at which he and Arthur and Aimée Winston
+dispensed good things to the tired and dusty travellers.
+
+‘How good tea is after a journey,’ Lady Eccleston remarked, beaming on
+the company.
+
+‘I never touch it,’ said Lady Firth, with a shudder; ‘it is destruction
+to the nerves. This habit of five o’clock tea is having the most
+deplorable effect on the younger generation. My maid, who has been with
+me five-and-twenty years, always brings me a glass of taraxacum and hops
+at half-past four; it is wonderfully strengthening.’
+
+‘Oh dear! it is very dreadful of me to like tea so much,’ cried poor
+Lady Eccleston. ‘And I so agree with you, dear Lady Firth; we do all
+live on our nerves so much, too much, nowadays. I declare now you put it
+like that, I shall be quite afraid to drink it; but taraxacum----’
+
+‘Let me send for some for you,’ said Lady Firth earnestly; ‘you can’t
+think the good it does you. I gave some to the dear bishop of
+Griqualand, after that drawing-room meeting at my house, when he spoke
+for two hours and a half, and was quite exhausted.’
+
+Hardly was Lady Eccleston able to escape the proffered refreshment by
+tender and well-timed inquiries after the dear bishop and his mission.
+
+Sainty, by reason of his lameness, was not expected to hand about
+eatables. He sat, as he usually did, a little drawn back from the circle
+about the table, talking little, noticing everything--Lady Eccleston’s
+striving after cheap popularity, Mrs. de Lissac’s parted lips as she
+listened to his mother, for whom she had retained all her old
+reverential admiration, his uncle Firth’s bored expression as his Aunt
+Susan Trafford held forth on some small bill that had been too hastily
+passed at the end of the session, and the easy grace with which Claude
+moved about among the groups, dispensing sugar or fruit, and saying
+little laughing nothings to every one. ‘Really, he is marvellous,’
+Sainty thought; ‘it is impossible not to love him.’ Claude was solemn,
+brief, and official with Sir John Trafford, the young M.P., knowing and
+mysterious with Austin Pryor of the Stock Exchange, playful with Arthur,
+_empressé_ with the young ladies, and kindly civil to Tommy Eccleston
+and Johnson, who were very shy, while always ready to fill the teapot
+for Miss Winston, or hand a third cup to Lady Susan, who, like all great
+talkers, was a thirsty soul.
+
+But something else seemed vaguely perceptible to Sainty, watching from
+his low chair under the cedars, a sense of some secret bond or
+understanding between his cousin and the tea-maker. What gives these
+sudden intuitions? What silent, mysterious voice speaks to what inner
+sense, when with all our outward senses we are receiving quite different
+impressions? Claude failed in no shade of pretty deferential politeness
+to Miss Winston; his manner had just that touch of insolence which it
+had to all women, and which many of them take as a compliment. They were
+the centre of a large party, and bathed in the clear golden light of a
+summer afternoon. Sainty intercepted no meaning glance between them, no
+contact of monitory fingers, yet he felt as if a curtain had been
+momentarily withdrawn from some secret thing that he should not have
+seen.
+
+He roused himself with a start that was almost guilty, to find that Miss
+Eccleston, who was sitting near him, had addressed a remark to him which
+he had not heard.
+
+‘I beg your pardon,’ he said; ‘I didn’t know you were speaking to me.’
+Cissy laughed a little, clear, bubbling laugh.
+
+‘You were a thousand miles away,’ she said. ‘I wonder what you were
+thinking of; but I am not so indiscreet as to ask; it was evidently none
+of the present company. I hope I haven’t broken into some important
+thing you were thinking out. I’m told you’re awfully clever and deep,
+and read a lot.’
+
+‘You mustn’t believe all the harm you hear of people,’ Sainty said, with
+a weak attempt at persiflage. He was thinking how pretty this fresh
+young creature was, the childish face shaded by a great hat, the small
+head rising flower-like from among the laces at her throat. No young
+monk in his cloister had had less to do with girls than Sainty; it was a
+curious fact that in his generation there were none in the family. Lady
+Susan Trafford, like her sister and Lady Macbeth, had ‘brought forth men
+children only.’ No early intimacy with sisters or girl cousins had
+taught him any of their ways.
+
+‘You must have had a hot journey down,’ he remarked politely.
+
+‘Oh! it was unbearable,’ cried Cissy; ‘the carriage was like a furnace.
+You can’t think how fresh and sweet it all seems here, after London.’
+
+‘We were on the Montagues’ yacht for Cowes, and did Goodwood from it;
+you can’t think how delightful it was,’ said Lady Eccleston in a
+slightly raised voice to Lady Eva. ‘They wanted us to go on a cruise
+with them afterwards, but there were so many things I had to see to, I
+was obliged to go back to town for a day or two before coming here, and
+I wouldn’t have missed _this_ visit for anything.’
+
+Cissy drew her chair a little nearer to Sainty, and dropped her voice
+to a confidential whisper. ‘Isn’t that like mamma? She heard me say we
+had come from London, and all that was put in for fear you should think
+we had stayed in town after the season was over.’
+
+‘For fear _I_ should think?’ Sainty repeated, slightly bewildered.
+
+‘Oh! you or any one else,’ said Cissy. ‘Mamma would die if any one
+thought she hadn’t more invitations than she could accept. I do wish she
+wouldn’t listen to me when I’m talking to men; it makes me furious.’
+
+‘I’m sure you never say anything you would mind her hearing,’ said
+Sainty rather priggishly.
+
+‘I wouldn’t answer for that, you know,’ rejoined Cissy, with an arch
+expression of something not unlike contempt.
+
+If Sainty had been old Lady Firth, he could not have felt himself more
+outside the sphere of the ordinary attraction of man to maid. When his
+eye rested with admiration on Cissy Eccleston, his first thought had
+been what a charming couple she and Arthur would make. He thought it
+very kind of this pretty young lady to take pity on his disabilities,
+but he felt that it was hard on her to be left to talk to him; he didn’t
+want to monopolise her, and he looked round to see if some more suitable
+companion were not within reach. As if in answer to his thought, Claude
+came towards them at the moment.
+
+‘It is cooler now, Miss Eccleston,’ he said. ‘Some of us are going to
+the kitchen-garden in search of gooseberries; do you care to come, or do
+you despise gooseberries?’
+
+Cissy rose with alacrity. ‘I love ’em,’ she said simply.
+
+Sainty was quite inconsistently annoyed at the sight of the two standing
+there before him. Had Arthur or one of the other boys come for her, he
+would have been glad, but he felt on a sudden that in the light of what
+he had half surprised between his cousin and Miss Winston, Claude had no
+right to come making eyes at this fair young creature. An impulse
+stirred in him to snatch her away, to save her from he did not quite
+know what. He rose too. ‘I am sure Miss Eccleston is tired,’ he said;
+‘it’s a long way to the kitchen-garden; she had much better come in and
+rest.’
+
+‘Oh, I’m never tired, except when I’m bored,’ said Cissy.
+
+‘I know who _is_ tired,’ said Claude, with affectionate solicitude. ‘You
+look quite done up, old chap; you ought to lie down before dinner.
+Remember you’ve a lot before you.’ Sainty saw in a second how silly and
+unreasonable he was being.
+
+‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said; ‘I am tired. I’ll go in.’
+
+Claude and Cissy moved off in the rear of the little procession of young
+people that was beginning to stream across the lawn, and Sainty stood a
+moment watching them. As he turned towards the house, he saw Miss
+Winston, who had not gone with the others, also looking after the
+retreating couple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The Duchess of Sunborough had not revisited her former home since she
+left it after the death of her first husband. Sainty had paid one or two
+duty visits to his grandmother on the rare occasions of his being in
+London, sometimes with his mother, sometimes alone. He had always found
+the duchess smiling and debonair, very civil and entirely indifferent, a
+most mysterious personality, both in her strange spurious youthfulness
+and her entire detachment from family ties. She returned on the present
+occasion as cheerful, as amiable, and as unembarrassed as though she
+were paying a first visit to some distant acquaintances, in a place that
+was entirely new to her. She was accompanied by her husband, his eldest
+son and daughter-in-law, Lord and Lady Rugby, and one of his younger
+sons, Algernon Montgomery, a young officer in the Life Guards. The duke
+was a well-preserved, clean-shaven, spick-and-span old gentleman, whom
+people were fond of citing as a typical nobleman, and indeed among the
+dukes he made a very creditable appearance. Had he been the senior
+partner of some large commercial house he would have passed unobserved
+in a crowd of equally respectable-looking contemporaries on any suburban
+railway. In his youth he had been a gambler and a rake, and had made his
+first wife (the mother of his children) thoroughly unhappy by his
+devotion to many ladies, chief among whom had been his present duchess;
+but having at seventy outgrown his taste for youthful pleasures, he was
+spoken of as a pillar of the State and a model of all the virtues. In
+the year of Belchamber’s majority, a Tory government, of which his grace
+was an inconspicuous ornament, was busy making Great Britain what she
+is among the nations. The Chamberses, as far as they had a political
+creed, belonged, it is needless to say, to the same party. Lord Firth’s
+family, on the other hand, had always been Whigs, and the old lord, as
+well as the present one, had been a member of more than one Liberal
+cabinet. It was Lady Susan in her younger days who had given vent to the
+sentiment that she would as soon have married the footman as a
+Conservative; but a recent cataclysm among the Liberals had driven this
+ardent lady as well as her cooler brother into antagonism to their own
+party, though they had not as yet been absorbed into the other. There
+was a political flirtation going on between the duke and Lord Firth, who
+found themselves in novel agreement as to the line their young relative
+ought to take in politics. ‘When the Union is threatened, all minor
+differences must be sunk,’ the duke said graciously; ‘when the ship has
+sprung a leak, no matter what are our views of the way she should be
+sailed, we must all take a hand at the pumps’; which made Claude call
+his revered chief the ‘Pompier.’
+
+The guests were assembled before dinner in the great saloon, which even
+in August had a chilly suggestion of not being habitually used.
+
+‘I hope,’ Lord Firth said, with an inviting side glance at his nephew,
+‘that Belchamber will be able to help Hawley’s election. I don’t know
+exactly what his views are----’ and here he paused long enough to give
+Sainty an opportunity of making a profession of faith if he were so
+minded. Nothing, however, was further from Sainty’s intention.
+
+‘I think Mr. Hawley’s election quite safe,’ he said; ‘it is fifty years
+since the county returned anything but a Conservative,’ and he moved
+away to take Ned Parsons, who had arrived since the other guests had
+gone to dress, and present him to Lady Charmington.
+
+Sainty had been a little apprehensive how Ned would fit into the
+picture. Parsons had grafted on to the slovenliness that was either
+natural or affected at Cambridge a rather aggressive splendour; though
+a rebel tuft waved defiance on his crown, and his shirt-front was a
+little crumpled, his collar and tie were of the moment, his pumps were
+new and glossy, and he wore a gardenia in his buttonhole. Lady
+Charmington was talking to Lord and Lady Rugby. Lord Rugby was
+explaining with tactful grace that it was lucky Sainty had been born in
+the summer, otherwise he, as a M.F.H., could not possibly have been
+present on the occasion. From Easter to the beginning of the cub-hunting
+he was, so to speak, at leisure, and had nothing to do but talk of last
+winter’s hunting. Lady Rugby, though also a keen sportswoman, was
+capable of other forms of amusement, and said for her part she liked a
+‘bit of season,’ but ‘poor Rug was so bored in London it was a terror to
+see him.’ She was dressed with the uncompromising neatness affected by
+hunting-ladies; her complexion had that bricky tint that results from
+much exposure to the weather at the covert side, and fashion decreeing
+undulation, her naturally straight brown hair was crimped into a series
+of little ridges and furrows, whose hardness of outline and mathematical
+regularity suggested corrugated iron. Somewhat to Sainty’s surprise, Ned
+fell into easy conversation with this horsey person, rather suggesting,
+though he did not actually say it, that he spent his life in the saddle.
+
+But now the duchess appeared in all her glory, and dinner being
+announced, Sainty offered his arm to his grandmother and headed the long
+procession to the dining-hall.
+
+‘Well, my dear boy,’ she began, when they were seated, ‘and how have you
+been lately? You don’t look strong; you must take care of yourself. What
+do you drink? you look as if you wanted red wine. My doctor has put me
+upon whisky. I hate it, but he says I am _goutteuse_. They call
+everything gout nowadays; too silly, isn’t it?’
+
+‘I am sorry you haven’t been well, gr----’
+
+Sainty paused, and ‘grandmother’ died in his throat. It seemed so
+ludicrously inappropriate to this festive apparition at his side. He
+glanced with quite a new tenderness to where old Lady Firth sat huddled
+in shawls and then back to the lady on his right. Above the thick
+frizzle of sherry-coloured chestnut that descended to the carefully
+pencilled brows shone one of the duchess’s smaller tiaras--the great
+Sunborough family crown was being kept for the ball on Thursday--the
+little nose gleamed unnaturally white between the tired eyes heavily
+rimmed with paint and the puffy cushions beneath them that merged into
+the vivid carmine of the cheeks. The wrinkles under the chin were
+gathered tightly into a great collar of diamonds and pearls sewn on a
+broad black velvet. Below it the shoulders sloped away in their still
+beautiful curves, displaying to the world with the indifference of long
+habit their great expanse of lustreless pallor. The little of her
+grace’s dress that was visible above the line of the table-cloth was of
+a delicate peach colour embroidered in silver, and a huge bunch of
+purple orchids cut with an almost brutal contrast against the excessive
+whiteness of the flesh. She sat erect, placid, exhaling a faint
+sweetness, not unlike the idol of some monstrous worship.
+
+‘Do you like the smell of my _verveine_?’ she asked. ‘I think every
+woman should have her own _parfum_. I have it sewn into all my
+_corsages_. I never could bear strong coarse scents. My daughter has
+rather brutalised herself, and is quite capable of using patchouli.
+Horror!’
+
+‘I’m afraid I don’t like scent at all,’ Sainty avowed penitently; ‘it
+makes me feel rather sick always.’
+
+‘And now, tell me who every one is,’ continued the duchess affably. ‘Who
+is the champagne blonde with the iridescent perlage trimming next your
+brother?’
+
+‘That is Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘Oh! of course, she has been at Sunborough House at parties; one sees
+her everywhere. I ought to have remembered her’; and the duchess sent a
+gracious smile towards Lady Eccleston. ‘And the pretty girl that Claude
+is flirting with is her daughter--one can see the likeness. _Elle est
+très bien, la jeune fille_; charming. Madame de Lissac I know: she is
+_richissime_ and very generous; and your mother tells me she was your
+governess once; that is very romantic. The black girls are not her
+daughters, _n’est-ce pas_?’
+
+‘Her step-daughters.’
+
+‘Ah yes. And the men? Pryor I know; they say he is making money and will
+get on. The pink boy is _encore_ a (what did you say?) Eccleston. They
+resemble each other like peas, that family. And the untidy young man who
+is amusing Aimée Winston so much? By the way, how came _she_ here? With
+your Aunt Eva, of course. She is not a nice girl.’
+
+The duchess delivered this condemnation with a most majestic air of
+virtue. ‘I do not like a girl to be talked about,’ she continued;
+‘afterwards, _je ne dis pas_; but before marriage a girl cannot be too
+careful. She always succeeds with men, however. The duke declares she is
+very clever; and one can see she is pleasing Mr.---- Who did you say he
+was?’
+
+‘He is a Cambridge friend of mine; his name is Parsons.’
+
+‘He seems a nice fellow,’ Lady Rugby cut in from the other side of
+Sainty. ‘I wonder if he is anything to do with the Leicestershire
+Parsonses. My old uncle, Sir Tom Whittaker, who hunted the Scratchley
+for years, married a widow, and one of her daughters married a Parsons.
+I know it used to be a great joke in the family because he was a Parson,
+don’t yer know.’
+
+‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ Sainty answered; ‘you will have to ask him.’
+Really, Ned was fitting in beautifully, and if only his relationship to
+Lady Whittaker could be established, he felt he need trouble no more
+about him.
+
+The duchess yawned. ‘They are all charming, no doubt,’ she said; ‘but,
+my dear boy, none of these people give much _éclat_ to your coming of
+age. I felt you must have a few people whose names people would know,
+just to put into the _Morning Post_. And your mother has lived so long
+out of the world she knows no one--but no one. I believe she is angry
+with me for insisting on the Dalsanies and Vere Deans; but I am used to
+that; she has always been angry with me.’ This was getting on dangerous
+ground.
+
+‘It is very good of you to take an interest,’ Sainty said in his
+stiffest manner; but the duchess did not in the least wish to be treated
+as family; she thought it _was_ good of her.
+
+‘Oh! _du tout_,’ she said suavely. ‘Besides, it was not all unselfish.
+Ella Dalsany plays piquet with me, and Dalsany takes a very good hand in
+the duke’s whist. I suppose,’ she added tentatively, ‘your mother would
+not allow a baccarat?’
+
+‘Good gracious!’ cried Sainty, much alarmed, ‘I don’t suppose there is a
+card in the house.’
+
+‘Oh, I always travel with my little box,’ said his grandmother. ‘But we
+must respect the prejudices of the _châtelaine_; we will only play
+whist.’ This was before the days of the tyranny of bridge.
+
+The duchess glanced at Sir John Trafford, who was sitting at her right,
+and seeing his attention engaged by the lady whom he had taken in, she
+leaned a little towards her grandson, and sinking her voice
+confidentially she murmured, ‘When I knew that your cousin here was
+coming, I felt it was only kind to ask the Dalsanies; and if Ella had
+her cavalier, then poor Dalsany must have _la belle comtesse_ to amuse
+him; he couldn’t be left out in the cold, poor dear.’
+
+‘Scandal, Hélo,’ Lady Rugby called out--(the duchess liked the younger
+members of her family to call her by her Christian name). ‘When you have
+on that expression, and I can’t hear what you say, I always know you are
+taking away some one’s character.’
+
+‘Whose character is the duchess taking away?’ asked Sir John; ‘not mine,
+I hope’; and this struck her grace as so humorous that she almost
+choked.
+
+Sainty sat bewildered and vaguely pained. In the mouth of an old woman,
+and that old woman his dead father’s mother, the playful innuendoes,
+which to the duchess seemed only the ordinary small change of
+dinner-table talk, struck him as signs of a monstrous depravity. He
+glanced round the great room with its ceiling by La Guerre, and heavy
+gilt decorations, and the rows of portraits by Vandyke and Lely, down
+the long table with its lights and flowers and massive plate, at the two
+rows of flushed, eagerly talking people stretching away on either hand,
+and his heart failed him. He wondered sadly why Ned Parsons, who was one
+of six children in a little shabby rectory, and the de Lissac girls,
+whose grandfather was said to have been a rag and bone merchant, should
+seem perfectly at home among all these splendours, while he, the founder
+of the feast, the owner of the house, who had been born and bred in it,
+felt so curiously ill at ease at the head of his own table. Arthur, just
+fresh from school, was chattering away to Lady Eccleston and Nora de
+Lissac, between whom he sat, with the ease and assurance of an old
+London diner-out. It was neither birth, breeding, nor custom, then,
+which made people feel at home in society. Whence came this horrible
+sensation of being out of place? After all, these people, who together
+produced such a dazzling effect of glittering festivity, were
+individually nothing but relations, old friends, undergraduates,
+schoolboys. His mother, his grandmother, his uncle Cor, his aunts, his
+former governess, his cousins, his brother; he had sat down with each
+and all of them to a score of meals without feeling like the lady in
+_Comus_. He feared it was very snobbish of him to be so disagreeably
+affected by dining in an unaccustomed room and with an unusual number of
+guests. Perhaps it was the duchess, with her shocking old shoulders and
+naughty hints, and the little scent bags sewn into her bodice, who
+brought such a disturbing atmosphere of the great world into his life.
+If so, how much worse was it going to be next day, when she would be
+reinforced by these threatened strangers of her own undoubted fashion
+and loose morality? The thought of all these guilty married people,
+cynically invited ‘for’ each other, filled him with horror. No doubt he
+exaggerated, and took the whole matter more tragically than the
+circumstances warranted, but he was very young and very unsophisticated,
+and things that were not right appeared to him terribly and
+portentously wrong. He felt as though the home of his mother, of his own
+innocent childhood, were being turned into a house of ill fame.
+
+But Tuesday, if it brought this last brimming influx of unwelcome
+strangers, brought with them one supreme compensation in the person of
+Gerald Newby. Gerald, who was making a cross-country journey, was
+arriving at a different station from the other guests, several miles in
+an opposite direction, and Sainty decided to drive his own confidential
+pony to meet his friend. His mother looked grave when she heard of it,
+and asked if he did not think it would be more civil for him to be there
+to receive the Dalsanies and Lady Deans. ‘Oh no, mother; the last person
+they would care to see is their host,’ Sainty said. ‘You will be here,
+and Uncle Cor has promised to be about; he knows them all. I shan’t be
+missed.’
+
+For once Sainty had his way, and drove off rejoicing in his escape. He
+was generally nervous of driving alone, his lameness making him so
+helpless in case of an accident; but to-day, that his conversation with
+his friend might be quite free, he would not even take a groom with him.
+He had so much to say to Gerald, so much which he could say to no one
+else, that he wanted to pour it all out unchecked by fear of listening
+ears. As he drove to the little roadside station in the shimmering heat
+of the August afternoon, by great fields of waving corn, and under the
+thick sleepy woods knee-deep in fern where he could hear the pheasants
+scuttling and clucking, he felt a weight lifted off his heart; now at
+last he would have some one to talk to, some one who understood. The
+train was late, and the flies bothered the pony dreadfully, but at last
+the long wait came to an end, and Newby, bronzed by foreign suns and
+very cindery and dusty, emerged smiling from the station, and climbed
+into the cart beside him.
+
+‘Oh! you have come yourself,’ he said; ‘that was very kind. Where’s your
+man?’
+
+‘I came alone,’ Sainty answered; ‘I wanted to talk. I wanted you all to
+myself, and your portmanteau must sit behind; there was no room for the
+groom.’ Something in Gerald’s face made him add playfully, ‘Did you
+expect a coach and four? Am I not receiving you with sufficient
+ceremony?’
+
+‘Oh, _me_!’ said Newby, with a little deprecating gesture of quite false
+humility.
+
+Sainty wanted to hear all that his friend had been doing, of the
+countries he had visited, the walks he had taken, the peaks he had
+climbed; but for once Newby did not seem to be inclined to talk about
+himself. He leaned back, beaming lazily on the passing landscape.
+
+‘After all,’ he said, ‘one may go where one will, to the grandest of
+Swiss peaks, or the sunlight and flowers of Italy, but there is nothing
+like this English country in the summer; it is so prosperous, so
+established, at once homelike and ineffably high-bred, like the best of
+our old landed aristocracy.’
+
+‘O Lord!’ Sainty cried. ‘That same landed aristocracy is smothering
+_me_. Wait till you see the awful specimens who have come together to
+rejoice in a new recruit to their ranks.’ And he launched out into a
+tirade, as enthusiastic young people will, on the barbarism of the
+English upper classes, their want of education and refinement, their
+inability to appreciate intellectual pleasures, their low standard of
+morality, and, above all, their entire self-satisfaction and conviction
+of their own perfect rightness.’
+
+‘Look at the duke,’ he said; ‘there’s a man who owns the finest private
+library in England. I don’t believe he knows even its chief treasures by
+name. If it was sold to-morrow, and the shelves fronted with sham
+book-backs, like the doors in the library at Belchamber, it wouldn’t
+make the smallest difference to him. Rugby could keep his collection of
+riding and driving-whips in them; I am told it is unique. He is a kind
+of centaur; he can, and will, recount to you every run of last winter,
+without omitting a fence or a ditch; but if you ask him the simplest
+question about the history or archæology of the country he hunts over,
+he will stare at you as if you were a madman. What have I in common with
+such people? By what curious freak of nature have I been born among
+them?’
+
+‘Lord Rugby is the Duke of Sunborough’s eldest son, isn’t he?’ asked
+Newby. ‘And the present duchess, if I’m not mistaken, is your
+grandmother. I like to know who the people are that I’m going to meet.’
+
+‘My grandmother!’ said Sainty tragically. ‘Well, she’s my father’s
+mother, and I mustn’t say how she affects me; but oh! heavens, Gerald,
+wait till you see her! And she has asked some other people, whom I don’t
+even know, but who all seem to be in love with each other’s wives, and
+to have to be asked to meet each other as you would engaged couples. It
+sickens me, I tell you. It’s an atmosphere I can’t breathe.’
+
+Somehow Newby, whom he had often heard give vent to sentiments of a
+lofty and republican purity, and in whose mouth a favourite phrase was
+‘the aristocracy of intellect,’ did not seem to enter as sympathetically
+into his feelings as he had hoped. He continued smiling peacefully on
+the prospect around him.
+
+‘And where do you begin?’ he asked presently, a little inconsequently.
+
+‘Where do I begin? How do you mean?’ Sainty stammered.
+
+‘I mean your property, your land. When do we come to your boundary?’
+
+‘Oh! the property,’ Sainty answered. ‘It’s pretty well all Belchamber
+all the way, except just for a bit on the left of the road soon after we
+started, where the Hawley woods cut in, in a sort of wedge.’
+
+Gerald nodded placidly, as if the thought gave him pleasure.
+
+‘I expect you’re tired after your journey, this hot weather,’ Sainty
+said, finding his friend so languid. ‘Shall we shirk all the crowd, and
+go and have some tea in the schoolroom when we get in?’
+
+‘Whatever you say, my dear boy,’ Newby agreed. ‘I am entirely in your
+hands.’
+
+Sainty was aware of the slightest, most impalpable change in his
+friend’s manner towards himself, just the faintest tinge of something
+that might almost be called deferential in a person so naturally
+authoritative as Newby; and this seemed to accentuate itself with every
+acre of Chambers land across which they drove. It made him vaguely
+uncomfortable; his denunciation of his peers seemed somehow to dwindle
+and lose force in such an unfostering atmosphere. He had still a great
+deal on his heart of which he longed to unburthen himself, but Gerald
+was perversely interested in the size of the park and the number of
+deer, and paid but a polite and perfunctory attention to his host’s
+exposition of the sins of the British aristocracy. Later on, when they
+joined the rest of the party, and Sainty, having been himself presented
+to the newcomers, proceeded to perform the same office for Newby, he
+noted with terror something that in any one else he would almost have
+called obsequious in his friend’s attitude. He resolutely shut his eyes
+to it; it was of course out of the question that a person of Newby’s
+commanding intellect and noble independence of character could be in any
+way affected by the mere baubles of wealth or rank in the people with
+whom he came in contact. He wondered he could be so snobbish as to think
+of such a thing, even to deny it; but he couldn’t help seeing that
+Gerald’s manner to the duke and even his uncle Firth and Lord Dalsany
+was not absolutely frank and unembarrassed.
+
+‘He is trying to make himself agreeable for my sake,’ Sainty thought. ‘A
+man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble
+thought cannot feel _at home_ in the exhausted receiver that is called
+“society”; but if he only knew how much better he appears with his own
+natural manner, though it _is_ a little dictatorial, he would not try
+and soften it even for the sake of being civil to my guests.’ What with
+trying not to observe that Newby smiled and bowed too much, and not to
+watch for indications of the good understanding at which his
+grandmother had hinted as existing between certain members of the party,
+Sainty spent an even more miserable evening than he had done the night
+before.
+
+When the duke and Lord Nonsuch had smoked their elderly cigars and gone
+to bed, he succeeded in persuading Newby that he was tired, and leaving
+the rest of the party listening to Lord Dalsany’s Irish stories, he
+accompanied his friend to his room, bent on having out the rest of the
+talk of which he had been defrauded in the afternoon.
+
+‘It is awful, simply awful!’ he burst out, as he shut the door, ‘all
+this horrible display and waste of money! I feel like Nero, sitting
+through these long steamy dinners with too much to eat and too much to
+drink, and thinking of the thousands of starving people who could be fed
+for months on the money we waste on a meal.’
+
+‘That is very good of you, my dear lad,’ Newby answered, stretching
+himself luxuriously in the armchair which he wheeled up to the open
+window, ‘but not at all what Nero would have felt.’
+
+‘Don’t laugh at me, Gerald,’ Sainty said piteously. ‘I know it’s absurd
+to rant and be highflown; but it nauseated me to hear Lady Deans talking
+about these new clubs and restaurants and saying what a mercy it was to
+have some place where one could get decent food. I thought of that woman
+never spending less than a pound on her dinner, and thinking it was a
+merit, while people were starving a few streets off. My bookseller told
+me he wanted her to buy a six-shilling book the other day, and she said
+she couldn’t afford it, she should get it from the library.’
+
+‘That tall lady on your left with the black pearls was the Countess
+Deans then, whom one hears so much about,’ said Newby. ‘I didn’t catch
+her name when you introduced me, but I thought it was she from her
+photographs, though they don’t do her justice.’
+
+‘Grandmamma says she and Lord Dalsany are _au mieux_. Good God! what
+does she mean? And that Lady Dalsany----Faugh! I can’t stir about this
+dirt. Is this just their silly way of talking, or are they all really
+people whom decent folk oughtn’t to ask into their houses?’
+
+‘Oh, you exaggerate,’ said Gerald, waving his hand gently. ‘You have
+lived the life of an anchorite. These Londoners have their shibboleths,
+and understand each other; the badinage of a great city is not meant to
+be taken literally,’
+
+‘What _you_ must think of it all!’ cried Sainty affectionately. He had
+an uneasy feeling that Newby was not as much horrified as he ought to
+be. ‘I hoped,’ he went on, ‘that you might have found some congenial
+companionship in my uncle; but Uncle Cor disappoints me. When he gets
+with all these smart people, he seems to sink to their level. I can’t
+make him out. Seeing him to-night you would never guess what real
+convictions he has. I have looked up to him all my life, but this
+evening he appeared frivolous and cynical; I could hardly believe it was
+he talking.’
+
+‘I thought Lord Firth charming,’ Gerald replied, with real conviction.
+‘His talk seemed to me in just the right tone of easy playfulness for
+light social intercourse, with ladies present. He was not in his place
+in the House of Lords; nothing called for a profession of faith.’
+
+‘And I hate all this Unionist business,’ Sainty continued. ‘I never
+thought I should live to see Uncle Cor, who has always been a Liberal,
+and from whom I imbibed all my own politics till I met you, making up to
+that old Tory duke. They tried to get some expression of agreement out
+of me last night, but I wouldn’t say what was expected of me. You know
+I’m a Radical, and a Home Ruler.’
+
+‘That is all very well for _me_,’ Gerald answered, ‘but, my dear child,
+doesn’t it seem a little absurd in _your_ position? Oh, don’t mistake
+me. I don’t want you to deny your convictions, but there are so many
+things one believes without flourishing them in the face of the public.
+You wouldn’t, for instance, care to tell your mother just how you feel
+about the doctrines of revealed religion----’
+
+Sainty drooped with discouragement. ‘It is true; it is hideously true,’
+he said. ‘One is tied and bound with the chain of a hundred shams. Shall
+I never be able to say what I really think? To-morrow, for instance,
+nothing would content my mother but that the performances should begin
+with a sort of thanksgiving service at Great Charmington. It is meant as
+a solemn dedication of me. If I were really brave and honest, I should
+refuse, but I think it would break my mother’s heart.’
+
+‘You are quite right, quite right; and why _should_ you refuse? I am
+sure you _do_ dedicate yourself to the principle of good which rules the
+universe. What more do you mean, what more need you mean?’
+
+‘My mother will take it as meaning much more, and I know that she does,
+and so will Mrs. de Lissac and her dear old father; they will look on it
+as giving in a solemn adherence to all their doctrines.’
+
+‘You take things too seriously, my Sainty,’ said Gerald, with an
+indulgent smile.
+
+‘But it is you who have always exhorted me to take things seriously; I
+have heard you inveigh a hundred times against the careless flippancy
+that is the curse of our generation.’
+
+‘Good heavens!’ said Newby, suppressing a yawn; ‘have I invented a
+Frankenstein monster, who is going to turn and devour me?’
+
+‘I don’t know you to-night, Gerald,’ Sainty said reproachfully. ‘You are
+like my uncle; you seem changed somehow. Surely if there is ever a time
+for serious thought and serious talk, it is the vigil of one’s
+twenty-first birthday.’
+
+‘Ah yes,’ said Newby solemnly. ‘Don’t think I minimise the importance of
+all to-morrow means to you. You are coming into your kingdom, and must
+rule it wisely and well; but I don’t want you to make your first
+appearance in arms tilting at windmills, my dear fellow, and alienating
+all the people who are your natural allies.’
+
+‘I wanted to consult you,’ Sainty said, ‘about my speech to the tenants,
+but you are tired and sleepy; it is a shame to keep you up.’
+
+‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Newby politely, with the most transparent
+effort at interest.
+
+‘I was going to show you some heads I had put together, but I think I
+won’t bother you; there is only just one thing I want to ask you. Ought
+I to tell them what I really think and feel about things, about Home
+Rule, for instance? Some sort of utterance will be expected of me about
+politics, I feel sure.’
+
+‘Your uncle was talking most sensibly to me after dinner about that very
+thing. “My family,” he said, “have always been Liberals, but this is a
+Conservative county, and the agricultural population is always
+Conservative. I have had, as you know, to differ from the chiefs of my
+own party. It is a painful position. Luckily for Belchamber, he has not
+been required to make the choice that I have found so hard; he inherits
+his politics as he inherits his estate, both, I flatter myself, the
+better for a little enlightened handling by his mother and myself. He
+will not be a worse statesman for having come under some Liberal
+influences in his youth.” It struck me as admirable.’
+
+‘Then you would have me be merely colourless, indulge in a few
+platitudes, instead of saying what I think?’
+
+‘What good could you effect by starting in to preach Radicalism to a
+tentful of Conservative farmers merry with beef and ale, supported on
+one side by a duke who is a member of a Tory government, and on the
+other by a Unionist earl?’
+
+Sainty sighed. ‘You know it is always fatally easy to me to hold my
+tongue and let people think that I agree with them,’ he said bitterly;
+‘courage has never been my strong point.’ He had looked to his friend
+for counsel, for support, for the strength to tell the truth in the face
+of all the world, the strength in which he felt himself so sadly
+lacking. He left him baffled and discouraged, and all at sea as to what
+he would do and say on the morrow.
+
+As he passed down the long corridor of bedrooms, he saw the last door
+before the staircase open noiselessly a very little way, as if some one
+were looking out. When he came quite near to it, it was swiftly, but
+still silently, closed again. The hinted scandals that had oppressed him
+came crowding to his mind, thoughts of shameful, illicit things being
+done in the great silent, dark house. He could not resist the curiosity
+that made him lift his candle and read the name on the little ticket on
+the door: it was Miss Winston’s.
+
+Sainty and Arthur still kept the rooms they had occupied as boys, which,
+with the old schoolroom and another that had once been the tutor’s and
+was now Claude’s, formed a small pavilion adjoining the west wing, and
+consequently at the opposite extremity of the house from the guest
+chambers. To regain his own room he had to cross the whole great central
+part, now black and quiet as the grave. Just as he reached the door that
+shut off the family wing, he heard some one behind it. No doubt the
+tapping of his stick had warned whoever it was of his approach, for as
+he opened it he saw a figure swiftly vanish into the room on the right.
+His first impulse was to pass on and take no notice; then it struck him
+that it might be a thief, and with the sudden courage of nervous people
+he went into the room holding his light high, and cried ‘Who’s there?’
+He found himself face to face with his cousin. The stable clock struck
+two at the moment.
+
+‘Good heavens! Sainty,’ said Claude, with an uneasy laugh, ‘who expected
+to find _you_ prowling about the house at this unearthly hour?’
+
+‘I have been sitting up talking to Newby,’ Sainty said rather sternly.
+‘What are _you_ doing dodging into rooms in the dark?’
+
+‘We have only just left the smoking-room. I came in here to get a book
+to take up to your friend Parsons; he said he should like to see it.’
+
+‘Your candle is out; shall I give you a light?’ said Sainty.
+
+‘So it is,’ said Claude; ‘the draught from the door, no doubt. How lucky
+I met you. Good-night, dear old man.’
+
+‘Good-night,’ said Sainty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Whether or not there was truth in what Lady Charmington had said, that
+no one took so little interest in the festivities of his coming of age
+as Sainty himself, it certainly came about that hardly any one took so
+little part in them.
+
+The memory of his birthday remained with him as a shifting
+phantasmagoria of painful images that partook of the nature of a
+nightmare. To be the principal figure in any pageant must always have a
+charm for the imagination of youth, if combined with the ability to play
+the part becomingly; but it is a very different matter for one conscious
+in every nerve of his own inadequacy to be set up a butt for
+disappointment, and a peep-show for ridicule.
+
+The day had begun with a message from his mother that she would like to
+see him before prayers. He found her in her private sitting-room, where
+the picture of his father which he had worshipped as a child was
+enthroned on its gilt easel in the corner. Lady Charmington was clean
+and cool from her morning toilet, her hair even smoother and tighter
+than usual. She was dressed in her Sunday black silk, and seated in a
+high-backed chair beside a little table, with the air of a priestess at
+the altar. Her large serviceable hands were crossed on the Bible on her
+lap. They had big knuckles and many rings, some of which, having been
+her late husband’s, were more massive than is usual in a woman’s.
+Sainty’s quick eye noticed that a signet she habitually wore was not
+among them. He also saw that on the table beside her was an imposing
+pile of ledgers, a small morocco box, and a book which, from its being
+bound in black with depressing-looking soft flaps folding over the edges
+of the leaves, he rightly conjectured to be a work of devotion.
+
+Lady Charmington was not a demonstrative woman, and she was a very shy
+one. She drew her son towards her, and gravely kissed him on the brow,
+by no means a daily occurrence or matter of course between them; then
+she plunged rather nervously into a little speech she had prepared for
+the occasion.
+
+‘This is a solemn day for both you and me, Belchamber’ (he noticed that
+she did not call him by the familiar nickname), ‘and one to which I have
+long looked forward. I have worked hard,’ and she glanced at the pile of
+account-books beside her, ‘in your interests. God forgive me if it is
+wrong, but I fear it is not without pride that I come to you to-day to
+give an account of my stewardship.’
+
+Sainty gently pressed his mother’s hand, which he still held. ‘Dearest
+mother,’ he said, ‘I know well how hard you have worked, and all you
+have done for me. I assure you I appreciate----’ But Lady Charmington
+withdrew her hand, and held it up in deprecation.
+
+‘I do not wish to boast or to be thanked,’ she said, ‘but I think I may
+truly say I have spared neither time nor labour. It has been my object
+to be able to hand over the estate to you free of debt and unencumbered,
+and I can do so. To-day my stewardship ends.’
+
+‘But oh, mother!’ Sainty broke in, ‘it mustn’t end to-day, nor, I hope,
+for many days to come. You know how utterly inexperienced I am, and then
+I have got to go back to Cambridge till I have taken my degree. You
+won’t refuse to go on looking after everything just as you have always
+done, will you?’
+
+Lady Charmington had lost the thread of her discourse; she looked rather
+anxiously at her son.
+
+‘We have no time to-day to go into accounts,’ she said; ‘but some day,
+when all these people have gone, you must give me an hour or two, and we
+will go through everything.’
+
+‘Very well,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘Before we go down,’ his mother went on, ‘I must wish you many happy
+returns, which I haven’t done yet, and give you my little presents. The
+new set of harness for your cart is with the other things; you saw that:
+Arthur says your old one is a disgrace; but, besides that, here is your
+father’s signet-ring, which I want you to wear,’ and she produced from
+the morocco case the ring he had missed from her finger. ‘And this is a
+little book I want you to use every morning and evening; you will find
+it very helpful.’
+
+Sainty just touched the ring with his lips before he slipped it on his
+finger, and glanced with passionate tenderness at the simpering image in
+the corner. Then he began turning over the leaves of the little book
+with its limp cover that reminded him of French plums. He was wondering
+if honesty obliged him to say that he did not use such aids to devotion,
+did not, in fact, very often pray at all. Finally, he decided that he
+had not the courage to say anything of the sort, so he accepted the
+volume without much enthusiasm, and put it in his pocket. Then,
+detaining his mother as she was preparing to leave the room, ‘I want to
+tell you, mother,’ he said, ‘that, though I don’t _say_ much, I do
+really value all you have done for me, and been to me, and Uncle Cor
+too. Between you, you have almost done away with the disadvantage that
+every boy must be under who has no father.’
+
+Lady Charmington was faintly stirred--probably she was pleased.
+
+‘There are many things, my son, that I should like different about you,’
+she said, ‘and especially I wish you stronger. But no one can say you
+have ever been anything but a good boy.’ They went downstairs, both a
+little moved by having performed the operation so difficult to the
+British race, of displaying feeling.
+
+At breakfast the question had arisen of which of the party would attend
+the service at Great Charmington parish church. This part of the
+proceedings did not seem to find favour among most of the company, and
+Lady Charmington’s brow grew dark as one after another excused himself.
+The duchess was of course out of the question, as she seldom appeared
+before lunch, her elaborate construction being a thing of time and
+caution. To Lord Nonsuch, communion after breakfast was nothing short of
+sacrilege; he was a leading light in the High Church party, and this was
+his first appearance at Belchamber since a memorable occasion many years
+before, when he had said Lady Charmington was an Erastian, and she had
+called him a Jesuit.
+
+‘_I_ should _love_ it, dear Sarah,’ said Lady Eva, ‘but a poor literary
+hack’s time is not her own. I _must_ work this morning, to be free this
+afternoon.’
+
+‘What has your mother got to do?’ asked Cissy of Claude. ‘Is she writing
+a book?’
+
+‘Didn’t you know mamma was “Maidie,” who does “the girls’ tea-table” in
+the _Looking-glass_? She has very nearly got the sack because she never
+gets her article ready in time; but she takes herself very seriously as
+a journalist, I assure you.’
+
+The Dalsanies were Roman Catholics, and Lady Deans nothing in
+particular; and Gerald Newby, when he found that the people of higher
+rank were shirking, discovered that he had letters to write which could
+not be put off; but the climax of Lady Charmington’s displeasure was
+reached when Arthur announced he would rather stay at home and play
+lawn-tennis with Parsons. Lord Firth had not intended to go, but he
+sacrificed himself to mollify his sister. His religion was of that
+comfortable, rational kind in which there is more state than church, and
+which is first cousin to agnosticism, but infinitely more respectable.
+He took a great interest in the distribution of bishoprics and the
+proper conduct of the service, which, however, he rarely felt called on
+to attend, except in such cathedrals and college chapels as gratified
+his fastidious taste and fondness for sacred music.
+
+Finally, a dozen people had been got together, and made a sufficiently
+imposing appearance. Old Lady Firth, Mrs. de Lissac and the girls, and
+Lady Eccleston went as a matter of course. Claude went to please his
+aunt, Cissy because Claude did, Johnson because Cissy did, and Tommy
+because his mother told him to. ‘I never have _any_ trouble about church
+with my boys,’ Lady Eccleston said. ‘I never have _made_ them go, even
+when they were little. I let them play tennis or do whatever they like,
+till the time comes; if I’ve time I play with them. Then I just
+cheerfully say “Now, boys, who’s for church?” and they nearly always
+say, “All right, mother, we’ll go,” unless they’re ill.’
+
+Lady Charmington, sore over Arthur’s defection, was in no mood to admire
+the success of this plan. ‘Do you mean to say you play lawn-tennis on
+Sunday?’ she asked frigidly; and Lady Eccleston discovered she ‘must fly
+and put her bonnet on, or she’d be late.’
+
+Through the service in the church, and the subsequent ceremony of
+presenting him with a silver salver and an address from the tradesmen of
+Great Charmington, the headache with which Sainty had most inopportunely
+begun the day grew steadily worse. The thought of all these poor men
+putting their hard-earned pounds together to give a great ugly useless
+thing to him, who had already so much more than he wanted, unmanned him;
+the tears were in his eyes as he tried to thank them. Nor was he less
+cruelly embarrassed by the discovery that the guests in the house had
+all thought it necessary to come laden with gifts. In his life no one
+but his mother and uncle had ever given him anything; he was not
+accustomed to presents, and received them with an awkward sense of
+obligation.
+
+Belchamber being peculiarly rich in beautiful old plate, Arthur
+presented him with a huge heraldic claret-jug of monumental hideousness,
+for which long afterwards he paid the bill, when settling his brother’s
+debts. The duchess gave him a cabinet inlaid after the manner of
+Sheraton, in which a whole army of tumblers and sodawater-bottles,
+lemon-squeezers, spirit-cases, and cigar-boxes rose and sank and
+manœuvred with incredible ingenuity on innumerable springs. Down to Lady
+Eccleston, who brought the latest fashionable invention for tearing the
+leaves of his beloved books, no one was missing from the list; even Lady
+Deans and the Dalsanies contributed their tale of paper-knives and
+cigarette-cases.
+
+The only person whose gift showed any care or knowledge of Sainty’s
+tastes and wants was Claude, who had taken the trouble to get from Paris
+a really beautiful cane, a true Malacca, strong enough to be a support,
+with tortoiseshell crutch encrusted with little gold stars, and an
+indiarubber shoe to prevent its slipping on the floors of the house.
+Sainty flushed with pleasure at sight of the charming thing, which
+seemed to adorn his lameness with a certain elegance. He wondered why
+his cousin, who was full of such pretty little cares and tendernesses,
+should be so wanting in moral sense. His heart yearned over him. ‘Ah
+Claude,’ he said, and could say no more.
+
+‘Dear old boy,’ said Claude, pressing his hand, ‘what do I not owe you?
+There is nothing that a pauper like me can give to _you_; but such as it
+is my little present brings real affection and heartfelt wishes for your
+happiness.’
+
+Sainty’s head was by this time aching cruelly, his temples throbbing
+like sledge-hammers; he was feeling worn out mentally and physically,
+ravaged by conflicting emotions. Having what was very rare with him, a
+slight flush, he looked less ill than usual, and nobody thought of his
+being tired; but it was at the tenants’ dinner that he set the seal on
+the ignominy of his failure.
+
+In consideration of the fact that this was a long and crowded day for
+one who was not robust, it had been settled that he should not preside
+at the meal, but merely come in and take the chair, for the healths and
+speeches, when the solid business of feeding had been satisfactorily
+disposed of. It was between three and four o’clock, the hottest part of
+the afternoon; and though the sides of the tent had been opened here and
+there, the atmosphere was stifling, heavy with the odours of meat and
+drink and the acrid exhalations of humanity. Sainty almost reeled on
+entering, and had to steady himself by Arthur’s arm. There were some
+seventy or eighty men present of all ages and degrees of stoutness, all
+very hot, and mostly somewhat red in the face. Many of them were
+intimately known to Arthur, who stopped several times in the progress
+up the tables to shake hands right and left. He met them at the covert
+side, he shot over their farms, he played in cricket matches with them.
+Sainty would have given anything for a touch of that happy graciousness,
+that power of being hail-fellow-well-met. Circumstances had combined to
+make him almost a stranger to the men who were on such friendly terms
+with his younger brother. He knew that in his heart he had far more real
+brotherhood with these sons of the soil, a much more jealous respect for
+their manhood and independence; but his very sense of equality made him
+feel the falseness of his position, whereas Arthur’s easy familiarity
+sprang from a firm conviction of his own unquestionable superiority.
+Sainty was only too well aware, as he took his seat in gloomy silence,
+that his grave bow in answer to their friendly greetings, would be set
+down to pride by most of the people present. When, after loyally
+drinking the Queen’s health, the guests were once more seated and their
+glasses filled, the oldest tenant rose to propose the toast of the
+occasion. He began by complimenting the young man on attaining his
+majority, spoke shortly of his attachment to the place and the family,
+and at great length on the badness of times and the difficulties of the
+agriculturist, which he seemed in some mysterious way to attribute to
+Mr. Gladstone. The voice went droning on, monotonous by reason of its
+very emphasis, until Sainty felt almost hypnotised by it and by the
+buzzing of the numberless wasps and flies that were hovering over the
+remnants of food and drops of beer on the table-cloths. Sainty had quite
+ceased to attach any meaning to the sounds, when suddenly the voice
+stopped; the old man was sitting down; the audience, which had been
+dozing, shook itself and sat up alert, and all eyes were turned on the
+hero of the occasion. For weeks past Sainty had given anxious thought to
+what he should say to his tenants. He had never before had to make a
+speech, and he had rehearsed many alternative utterances in the privacy
+of his chamber. He had felt somehow that this was going to be his
+opportunity, the electrical moment when he was to make himself known to
+those for whom it was of such importance what manner of man he was. He
+would let them see that he was not an indifferent invalid, still less a
+selfish pleasure-seeker, a careless eater of the produce and neglecter
+of the producer; he would tell them how much he had their welfare at
+heart. In carefully prepared sentences he would allude to his great
+obligations (which incidentally were theirs also) to his mother’s long
+laborious stewardship, his uncle’s enlightened economic teaching. He had
+devoted hours to the consideration of just how much it would be well to
+hint at his political convictions; sometimes he had been pleased to
+fancy himself electrifying his hearers by a militant profession of
+faith, but in calmer moments more moderate counsels prevailed.
+
+Now the time so anxiously anticipated had actually arrived. With a great
+shuffling of feet the company got to its legs; some one started ‘For
+he’s a jolly good fellow’ rather shakily, which was promptly taken up
+and cheerfully shouted in a great variety of keys, and then all settled
+down to await the answering speech.
+
+Sainty rose unsteadily and passed his hand across his forehead; for a
+second he stood silent, while the guests greeted his rising by drumming
+on the tables with their knife-handles. Then it seemed as though a
+crushing weight descended through the top of his head to his brain, the
+hum of the insects swelled to an organ roar in his ears, the hundred
+faces before him seemed to float and swim in a mist, and with a kind of
+gasping cry he sank back unconscious in Lord Firth’s arms.
+
+After this there could be no question of his appearing at the monster
+fête and garden-party which had been organised for the afternoon. The
+distant braying of a band, the sounds of many voices and laughter, and
+the scrunching of innumerable wheels upon the gravel were borne to him
+on the summer breeze, as he lay prostrate upon his bed. He had not yet
+come back to any sense of shame or distress; for the moment, pure
+physical pain was almost a relief, a restful half-consciousness that,
+with no effort of his, a solution had been found, a way out of all
+difficulties and disagreeables.
+
+Not till late next day did he crawl downstairs, feeling very weak and
+battered, to receive the hollow sympathy and polite inquiries of his
+guests, and apologise with what grace he might for having failed so
+lamentably in his duties as a host.
+
+Arthur had got up a cricket match. ‘You needn’t worry, old man,’ he said
+cheerfully, as he carried out his bat and found Sainty among the group
+of spectators. ‘You weren’t missed a bit. The duke made a speech after
+dinner, and proposed your health, and I returned thanks for you, and
+said all sorts of nice things about you, which you never could have said
+for yourself. I did it much better than you could have done, because I
+was rather drunk, which you would never have been.’
+
+‘O Lord Arthur! how _can_ you say Lord Belchamber wasn’t missed?’ cried
+Lady Eccleston. ‘We all missed you dreadfully, didn’t we, Cissy? But
+your brother did do his best to supply your place, and really made a
+delightful speech; and I do hope your head is better; it was too bad
+your breaking down, and we were all quite miserable about you.’
+
+‘I wanted to send you some really wonderful nerve tonic Dr. Haslam gave
+me,’ said Lady Firth. ‘I’m sure it would have done you good, but your
+mother said you had everything you wanted.’
+
+Sainty insisted on showing himself at the ‘treat’ for the children and
+the labourers; this was the one part of the ‘rejoicings’ in which he
+took a personal interest; but after a very brief appearance he was
+forced to go and lie down again till dinner, if he hoped to receive the
+guests at the great ball which was to wind up the proceedings of the
+second day.
+
+The ball was a very grand affair indeed; there must have been over five
+hundred people present. Every woman there had put on her most gorgeous
+raiment, and the best of her jewellery. The duchess positively shone in
+white and gold brocade, hung in ropes of pearls, and with a great crown
+upon her head. Even Lady Charmington had had what she considered a
+low-necked dress made for the occasion, and had withdrawn the Belchamber
+emeralds from their twenty years’ seclusion at the bank for the pleasure
+of wearing them before her mother-in-law. Sainty’s share in the
+entertainment was strictly limited to standing by his mother, under the
+portrait of his great-great-grandfather, leaning with his left hand on
+the crutch stick which his cousin had given him, while his right was
+shaken by a long procession of people, who all one after the other said:
+‘I must--er--congratulate you, Lord Belchamber, on this auspicious
+occasion. Sorry to hear you weren’t well yesterday; hope you’re all
+right again.’ To which he had to reply, ‘Thanks awfully, very good of
+you; so glad you could come; you’ll find the dancing through that next
+room, straight on.’
+
+By the time he had repeated this phrase between three and four hundred
+times, and the guests had all defiled before him, he felt so sick and
+giddy that he had to be helped to bed by his valet, where he lay awake
+hour after hour, listening to the distant strains of the dance music,
+and picturing the scene in the great saloon to himself. He thought how
+nice it would be to be an ordinary normal, healthy, courageous young
+man. He did not desire to be exceptionally gifted, strong, or beautiful,
+only just like any one of a hundred youths who were at that moment
+whirling in his ballroom, or eating his supper. Surely, he thought, no
+one had ever got so little fun out of his own coming-of-age ball before.
+He thought how pretty Cissy Eccleston had looked, all in delicate pale
+green, with a sort of white butterfly of some shimmering stuff just
+poised on her bright curls for only ornament--not a jewel on her
+beautiful neck or arms. He fancied her, aglow with dancing, sitting to
+rest under the great palms and banana-trees of the winter-garden, and
+perhaps Claude ensconced beside her in one of those nooks that he had
+watched his cousin arranging, ‘for flirtations,’ as he said.
+
+It was in these sleepless hours of the early morning that he decided to
+say something to Claude Morland which he had had on his mind for two
+days, and the first time he got him alone, he put his head down, dug
+his nails into his palms, and said, ‘Claude, may I ask you something?’
+
+‘Of course; what is it?’
+
+Sainty gulped and was silent. He had made up his mind to speak the first
+time he got an opportunity, but he had been genuinely relieved by every
+interruption, and was conscious that he had even purposely avoided being
+alone with his cousin.
+
+‘It is rather a queer question,’ he said, ‘and one which you may
+resent.’
+
+Claude was lolling in a deep chair with a book; his hat tilted over his
+eyes left little of his face visible but his moustache and the soft
+curve of his chin.
+
+‘How could I resent anything from you, old chap?’ he said sweetly, but
+without looking up. ‘For which of my many sins am I to be taken to task?
+Fire away.’
+
+‘I know I’ve no right to ask such a question, but I wish you would tell
+me if there is anything between you and Miss Winston.’
+
+Claude gave an almost imperceptible start, and sank lower into the deep
+chair. Sainty was conscious that under his air of supreme nonchalance he
+was suddenly tensely on his guard. ‘Between us?’ he murmured
+interrogatively.
+
+If Sainty were going to be indiscreet, his cousin obviously did not
+intend to make it easy for him.
+
+‘I mean, are you in love with each other, or engaged, or anything?’
+Sainty persisted. Claude gave a little laugh; he was evidently trying to
+keep a certain relief out of his voice as he answered in his usual soft
+tones, ‘I would not be so rude to our dear Aimée as to say I was not in
+love with her; I have been in love with her any time these two years; as
+to being _engaged_, you really do ask the most simple-minded questions.
+Will you tell me just what you think I have to marry on? Am I in a
+position to think of marrying, especially another pauper like myself?’
+
+‘That’s just what I was coming to,’ said Sainty eagerly. ‘I didn’t ask
+from mere idle curiosity. But if you are in love with Miss Winston, of
+course you _want_ to marry her, and you think you ought not to propose,
+because you are not in a position to support a wife--isn’t that so?’
+
+‘Well--no, dear boy,’ answered Claude slowly; ‘to be honest, I don’t
+exactly know that it is. Aimée and I understand one another perfectly,’
+he added, after a little pause.
+
+‘Do you think she _does_ understand? Don’t you think you may have given
+her the impression that you mean more than you do?’
+
+‘I am not the first man Miss Winston has met,’ said Claude, turning
+rather an ugly grin upon his cousin; ‘the dear creature was having her
+little flirtations before I went to Eton.’
+
+‘Of course, if you don’t want to, and you are sure she doesn’t want to,
+there is no more to be said. I only wanted to say that if you were being
+held back by want of money, perhaps I--perhaps we--you know--I mean,
+that part might be arranged, don’t you know,’ and Sainty blushed hotly.
+
+Claude reached out a long white hand, and very gently pressed Sainty’s
+knee. ‘You really are more kinds of an angel than any one I know,’ he
+said, laughing softly, ‘but you need not worry about Aimée Winston; she
+has no vocation for matrimony; if she ever makes up her mind to marry it
+will be some one who can give her a far larger share of this world’s
+goods than even you could spare for my dot. And as for me, if I should
+ever find myself, either through your kindness or in any other way, in a
+position to take to myself a wife, she would be a very different person
+from _la belle Aimée; elle n’est pas de celles que l’on épouse’_; and
+Claude turned again to his book in such a way as to intimate that the
+subject was closed.
+
+By the time that the opportunity for this singularly abortive
+conversation presented itself the house-party had dwindled sensibly.
+Those who came to please the duchess, to meet each other, and to lend
+the support of names well known to the chronicles of fashion, had fled
+the day after the ball. They had come for an ‘occasion,’ and the moment
+existence at Belchamber threatened to resume a course remotely
+resembling home life, they departed to other ‘occasions,’ with all their
+baggage and camp-followers. Lord Nonsuch could not spend a Sunday where
+the services were conducted according to the ideas of Lady Charmington;
+and by the Monday all had gone except old Lady Firth, the Morlands, the
+Traffords, and the Ecclestons, who somehow or other contrived to stay on
+till they should be due at another country-house.
+
+Lord Firth, ere he departed for Scotland, had a talk with his nephew.
+‘It has all gone off very well, my boy, on the whole,’ he said,
+‘considering how new you and your mother were to anything of the sort.
+Your breakdown was unfortunate, of course, but it couldn’t be helped.
+You had better come up to Fours for a bit next month; it’ll do you good;
+and in November you ought to have another party here, for the covert
+shooting. You will have to live suitably in the place in future; all
+these new servants will get lazy and demoralised unless you give them
+something to do.’
+
+‘But I shan’t be here in November,’ said Sainty, ‘I shall be back at
+Cambridge, you know.’
+
+‘Your mother and I were thinking that perhaps you wouldn’t want to go
+back to Cambridge now you are of age,’ said his uncle.
+
+‘Not go back to Cambridge!’ Sainty interrupted, with unfeigned horror;
+‘not take my degree!’
+
+‘Many people don’t, you know; and in your case, though it was no doubt
+right for you to have a little taste of university life, there seem to
+be claims which call for you more urgently elsewhere.’
+
+‘Don’t ask this of me, Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said earnestly. ‘You and I
+have both been workers; in my way I have worked as hard as you. You can
+understand what it must be to be told when one is in sight of one’s goal
+that one must give it up and not try for it. I gave up the scholarship
+because I saw that it was a shame to take it from men who needed it; but
+this is different. I stand no chance with Cook; he deserves to be
+senior classic, and is safe to be; he has nothing to fear from me, or
+any one; and if I beat any of the men who come next, well, it won’t hurt
+them; they will have their first class all the same, and it makes no
+difference to a man if he is second, third, or fourth.’
+
+‘Do you care as much as all that?’ asked Lord Firth.
+
+‘Yes, I do,’ said Sainty.
+
+His uncle appeared to consider. ‘Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘I don’t
+see, if you want to go back and take your degree, why you shouldn’t; but
+couldn’t you come down for a week, say, for the pheasants?’
+
+‘Uncle Cor,’ said Sainty, ‘why _should_ I come down, just in the middle
+of my work, and idle away a whole week, in order that other people
+should shoot pheasants? I don’t shoot, myself; I hate the sound and
+sight of shooting.’
+
+‘Don’t you think you could get to like it? Of course it’s out of the
+question for you to hunt, but you could quite well shoot, with a quiet
+pony and little cart, or even from a campstool, if you couldn’t walk.’
+
+‘I don’t _want_ to shoot; I should hate it. And in my case, the one
+excuse, the tramping, the manly exercise, would be wanting. I should
+seem to myself a kind of monster, dragged out to the work of slaughter
+in some form of machine; sitting down to butchery, like Charles IX.
+firing on Huguenots out of a window.’
+
+‘Well, I only thought it would give you something more in common with
+your fellow-men, make you more like other people.’
+
+‘Oh yes, I know; it’s the old story, my unlikeness to other people, my
+hopeless incurable unfitness for my position in life. I do so hate my
+position in life.’
+
+‘Many people would be glad to change with you, my boy,’ said his uncle
+gently.
+
+‘I wish they could, with all my heart,’ said Sainty. ‘Oh, I fully
+realise, no one more, what an anomaly I am. If only some one of the
+hundreds of nice impecunious young men with a public school education
+and no taste for work could have it all instead of me! Arthur, for
+instance, would be ideal. He would hunt, shoot, play cricket, captain
+the Yeomanry, be popular, successful, suitable, and enjoy the whole
+thing immensely into the bargain.’
+
+‘My dear boy,’ said Lord Firth, taking refuge behind Providence with a
+simple piety worthy of his sister, ‘does it never occur to you that if
+it had been intended that Arthur should have your birthright, he would
+have had it?’
+
+‘Oh, if you come to what was “intended,”’ Sainty answered, ‘I give up. I
+don’t pretend to understand.’
+
+‘It comes down to the simple old rule that you learned in your
+catechism,’ said Firth, in a more natural manner; ‘“to do my duty in
+that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.” (I quote
+from memory.) You can surely understand _that_?’
+
+‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘I can understand _that_ right enough, as a
+principle; but it is when you come to the question of just what _is_
+one’s duty that the difficulty comes in. For instance, I don’t believe
+that it is a duty incumbent on me from any religious point of view to
+sit in a chair and shoot tame pheasants, nor to waste money in
+expensively feeding a whole tribe of people with whom I have no sympathy
+whatever.’
+
+‘We must “use hospitality,”’ quoted Lord Firth a little half-heartedly.
+
+‘Oh, if you quote Scripture on that matter,’ said Sainty, not without
+malice, ‘I think you would find I was enjoined to entertain a very
+different class of person from the duke, or Lady Deans, or the
+Dalsanies. Indeed, I am not without the highest authority for selling
+all I have and giving to the poor; I sometimes think it would be the
+best solution, as it would certainly be the simplest.’
+
+‘And how about the entail?’ asked his uncle.
+
+The wholesale disposal of his property being thus declared out of the
+question, Belchamber had to try and find some other answer to the riddle
+of life. For the present he was contented to have carried his point
+about going back to Cambridge; the terrible coming of age was safely
+past, and the danger of his university career being cut short averted.
+As he had not gone up till he was nineteen, he had still a year of happy
+college life before him, a year of peaceful study, of stimulating
+discussions, of congenial society, a year of hard work for a definite
+object. With a sigh of relief he found himself once more in his old
+rooms, surrounded by the dear familiar shabbinesses, his accommodation a
+bedroom, sitting-room, and Gyp-closet bounded by a battered ‘oak’; his
+establishment the tenth part of an old woman in a sat-upon black bonnet,
+and a twenty-fifth share in the services of a Gyp, but lord of his own
+soul, and free to follow his own bent, an undergraduate among
+undergraduates, and not the slave of a cumbrous estate and an unwieldy
+palace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Sainty did not think it necessary to go home for the covert shooting,
+and it is doubtful if he was much missed. Young Traffords and
+Montgomeries came as usual, Lord Firth brought an older man or two, and
+Arthur acted as host, not without a few skirmishes with his uncle, who
+had been accustomed to appear in that capacity on such occasions. Arthur
+was now at a crammer’s preparing for the army, but he had none of
+Sainty’s objection to breaking in on his studies for a little sport, and
+every one thought it quite right and natural that he should do so. It
+might be all very necessary that he should help to slaughter his
+fellow-men by and by, but the immediate duty was the destruction of
+pheasants; and whatever might be the shortcomings of the absent lord of
+the mansion, Arthur and the guests assembled at Belchamber had a proper
+sense of their responsibilities in this respect.
+
+Sainty only wished that his brother would take his other duties in life
+as seriously; there was permanently at the back of his mind an anxiety
+about Arthur, which, like some latent poison in the blood, might lie
+dormant for months, but was liable to stir up and give pain at any
+moment. A certain sense that his own existence, unreasonably prolonged,
+was, as it were, keeping his brother out of his inheritance, added
+poignancy to all Sainty’s feelings about him. But for the unfortunate
+accident of his own eighteen months’ seniority, Arthur would have
+stepped naturally into his appropriate position, and found congenial
+occupations, duties, pleasures ready to his hand. He felt that anything
+that might go wrong with his brother before his own death made tardy
+restitution, would be almost his fault. It did not occur to his morbid
+apprehension that with superior means at his command all Arthur’s
+vicious tendencies would have increased a hundredfold; he only saw the
+boy who had no aptitude for study obliged by circumstances to work that
+he might pass examinations, and driven from healthy and innocent
+recreations at Belchamber into a world of dangerous companions and
+temptations which he lacked self-control to resist. Sainty appeared to
+himself as an unwilling Jacob, who by no act or fraud of his own stood
+possessed of the birthright which was only a burthen to him, and who yet
+had no appetite for the pottage for which a younger Esau’s full red
+mouth watered so hungrily. As in the nursery days when he had decided to
+die young that his brother might succeed him, he still cherished an
+undefined feeling that he was only occupying for a time. He would never
+marry; all must eventually go to Arthur and to Arthur’s children; but he
+was possessed of an ever-growing terror lest meanwhile, before this
+desirable end should be reached, his brother might steer the frail bark
+of his good behaviour to some irreparable shipwreck, commit himself
+irrevocably in some way that should disqualify him for the position ere
+it should come to him.
+
+Sainty mused much on abdications, on men who had cast aside rank and
+wealth for the peace and seclusion of the cloister; the monastic calm of
+his beloved courts drew him like a spell; had he been born in the
+turbulent times of his fighting ancestors he would probably have been
+violently dispossessed and immured in some convent of holy monks. He
+began to wonder whether in spite of all the boasted progress of the
+centuries they had not managed things in a simpler and more effectual
+manner in the middle ages. He even went so far as secretly to consult a
+solicitor as to whether a peer could legally renounce his title and
+estates in favour of the next heir entail, with the discouraging result
+that he learned that while he lived no act of his, short of high
+treason, could make him other than Marquis of Belchamber in the eye of
+the law, or bestow that title on any other human being.
+
+‘It seems hard,’ he said to Newby one day, ‘that a man can be born into
+a position with no act or consent of his own and bound in it for life;
+struggle as he will he cannot free himself.’
+
+‘Are we not all alike in that respect?’ asked Gerald. ‘Are not
+circumstances, as they are called, the fetters that each man wears? We
+delude ourselves with a phantom of free-will, but I suspect that men are
+really born as irrevocably parsons, doctors, politicians, as you are a
+peer. Who shall free himself from the bonds of fate?’
+
+‘You are strangely inconsistent, Gerald. I can fancy no one less of a
+fatalist than yourself.’
+
+‘The doctor varies his medicines according to the disease of the
+patient,’ said Newby sententiously. ‘When men come prating to me of
+fatality as an excuse from all effort and responsibility, I have a very
+different word to say to them; but in your case, when you complain of
+being fettered by your position, I wonder whether some of those who
+perhaps think they would like their path thus plainly marked for them,
+may not really, by inherited tendencies and a hundred other intangible
+threads, be as truly constrained in their life choice as yourself.’
+
+‘“All men are born free,”’ quoted Sainty. ‘There never was a more
+deplorable fallacy; for my part, I feel like the ghost in Dickens’s
+story, who had to drag that chain of cash-boxes and keys and
+deposit-safes wherever he went. Perhaps it is my lameness which
+accentuates this sense of being hobbled. I can’t take a step without
+feeling the pull of the whole Belchamber estate; it is hung round my
+neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.’
+
+‘You certainly have a most deplorable trick of mixing your metaphors,’
+said Newby. ‘But,’ he added, with the mild awe of which Sainty had been
+so disagreeably sensible at Belchamber, ‘yours is certainly a great
+position, a grave responsibility.’
+
+‘If I might have gone in for a scholarship, like you, and stayed and got
+work in the college till I could try for a fellowship!’ Sainty sighed.
+‘The life would have suited me down to the ground.’
+
+‘There are many leading that life who would be glad to change with you,’
+Gerald answered with conviction.
+
+‘That is just what my uncle says, “many people would be glad to change
+with you.” It is the old saying of our nursery days--“Many a poor man in
+the street would be glad of that nice pudding.” Do you think it makes
+unpalatable food more savoury to feel that one is keeping what one does
+not like from some one to whom it would perhaps be an escape from
+starvation? It is the strangest doctrine.’
+
+‘Nevertheless Lord Firth is a very sensible man,’ said Newby; ‘and I
+don’t feel disposed to pity you overmuch.’
+
+‘I don’t think I want pity,’ said Sainty, ‘I want help. It seems too
+deplorable that there should be no way out of an undesirable position. I
+think it is this sense of being shut in that drives men to suicide far
+more than great grief. Is any situation really hopeless, unalterable by
+human effort? If any one were once persuaded of that, he _must_ go mad.
+I suppose the pistol or the overdose of chloral is the last supreme
+refusal to accept such a belief. “What!” you say, “no way out of this
+_impasse_? Well, there is always this.”’
+
+‘How theatrical!’ said Newby. ‘You are talking claptrap. Who ever heard
+of a man committing suicide to avoid a marquisate and £50,000 a year?’
+and he resolutely led the talk into other channels.
+
+Arthur hadn’t been a month at his crammer’s before he began to justify
+his brother’s anxiety. Of course he broke all the rules of the
+establishment, came and went as he pleased, drove tandem, and hunted
+several days a week. Then there were complications about dogs, of which
+he kept a perfect kennel of all sorts and sizes, which raided the
+reverend gentleman’s poultry-yard, killed his cat and his children’s pet
+rabbits, and harried his wife’s old pug. Sainty had always wanted a
+dog, but had never been able to have one because Arthur’s perpetually
+changing menagerie had kept Lady Charmington’s powers of endurance
+stretched to their easily reached limit.
+
+In the Christmas vacation Arthur had already stigmatised the
+establishment to his brother as a ‘damned hole,’ where a gentleman
+couldn’t live, and obliged him with graphic accounts of his many
+differences of opinion with its principle.
+
+‘But doesn’t he _mind_ your setting your dogs on his pig?’ Sainty asked.
+
+‘Mind? of course he minds; it makes him wild. But you should see the old
+woman; she gets twice as mad as he does. She’s always telling us we are
+“no gentlemen,” and that we shouldn’t do the things at home, and why
+don’t we treat her as we would any other lady.’
+
+‘And why don’t you?’ asked Sainty, with delicate irony.
+
+‘What, _her_!’ with fine contempt; ‘the fellows say she was the old
+man’s cook, and that he _had_ to marry her, ‘cos he’d got her into
+trouble. You should see her in the evening in a greasy old black satin
+and a sham diamond locket; she’s awfully particular about our dressing
+for dinner, so Wood came in the other evening in muddy shooting-boots.
+She asked if he wanted to insult her, but he said he was awfully sorry
+but he couldn’t find his pumps, and glanced significantly at her toes
+that were sticking out of her gown: she has enormous beetle-crushers,
+and had sported a brand-new pair of patent-leather shoes. She fairly
+cried with rage.’
+
+Sainty saw the futility of trying to suggest the poor lady’s side of the
+question; Arthur was never very quick at seeing other people’s point of
+view.
+
+‘I just don’t pay ’em any attention,’ he said; ‘the old ‘un is always at
+me about not working. Says I shall never pass my prelim., and objects to
+my hunting. I tell him it’s necessary for my health.’
+
+‘And how often _do_ you hunt?’
+
+‘Oh, well, not more than two days a week mostly, never more than three.
+You see, I’ve only got two hunters there; it’s so infernally expensive
+keeping ’em at livery, and I have to pay for the man’s keep too. It runs
+into a devil of a lot of money.’
+
+After several such conversations, Sainty was not altogether surprised to
+hear from his mother that a three days’ absence without leave to attend
+a race meeting had brought matters to a crisis, and that the care of his
+brother’s education had been transferred from the church to the army.
+Arthur went to this new place with only a pony cart and a bicycle,
+promising great things; the hunters had been suppressed and the kennel
+cut down to two fox-terriers and a bob-tailed sheep-dog. Sainty was
+rather surprised at hearing nothing from him for several weeks--not even
+the familiar demand for money had broken the silence between them--and
+the day he came home for the Easter vacation he made haste to ask for
+news.
+
+He was sitting in Lady Charmington’s sitting-room, where she had
+conceded a cup of tea to his fatigue after a journey, but was rigorously
+abstaining from refreshment herself. Sainty was drinking his tea and
+eating cake, while his mother hastily ran through some farm accounts she
+was going to submit to him.
+
+‘How does Arthur get on at Colonel Humby’s?’ Sainty asked.
+
+Lady Charmington looked up from her ledger with an abstracted air and
+her mouth full of figures. ‘Thirty-seven, forty-two, fifty, fifty-six,
+fifty-six pounds, seven and fourpence halfpenny,’ she murmured. ‘Didn’t
+I tell you he’d moved?’ and she noted the sum at the bottom of the page
+and turned over.
+
+‘What! again?’ cried Sainty in dismay.
+
+‘He said he couldn’t get on there; he felt he wasn’t making any
+progress, and he didn’t seem to like the men there; apparently they
+weren’t a very nice set.’
+
+‘He’ll never pass his exams. if he keeps chopping about like this, a
+month in one place, a month in another. I’m afraid as long as he’s
+expected to do any work, he’ll never find a coach who quite suits his
+views. Where has he gone now?’
+
+‘His friend, young Hunter, who was with him at Oxbourne, had gone to
+that man in London they say is so wonderful----’
+
+‘Mother! you _haven’t_ let him go to London?’
+
+‘Why not? The boy seemed to think he should do better at Monkton’s; it
+is such a new thing, as you say yourself, for Arthur to want to work,
+that it seemed a pity to balk his good intentions.’
+
+‘But surely you must see--London! Dear mother, won’t there be many more
+distractions there for a boy of Arthur’s temperament than at a dull
+place like Hog’s Hill?’
+
+‘He said that was one trouble with Colonel Humby’s place, that it _was_
+so dull; there was never anything to do there. If he wanted any
+amusement, he always had to go away for it, and this broke into his
+work, interfered terribly with it, in fact.’
+
+‘And so you think he’ll be likely to do more work when the things that
+break into it are under his hand? Oh! why didn’t you ask me before
+agreeing to this?’ cried Sainty in genuine distress.
+
+This being his first day at home, Lady Charmington only smiled
+indulgently at the suggestion. She was not in the habit of consulting
+other people before making up her mind, and least of all Sainty. ‘My
+dear boy,’ she said, ‘you are scarcely older than your brother, and in
+some ways have really seen less of the world. Why should you think you
+can settle things for him so much better than he can for himself? or,
+for that matter, than I, who have been accustomed for years to arrange
+your lives for both of you?’
+
+Sainty felt despairingly that there was nothing to be done with his
+mother in that direction. He had come to know the signals, and to
+recognise Lady Charmington’s ‘no thoroughfare expression’ as though it
+were written on a notice-board. He wondered sometimes if she were really
+as much at ease about her younger son as she seemed, but he never dared
+try to find out, for fear of awakening in her heart the uneasiness that
+oppressed his own. It was incredible that a woman so shrewd and
+far-seeing in most of the relations of life as his mother, should really
+feel a restful confidence about Arthur. To be sure, she was ignorant of
+many things that he knew only too well, such as the younger boy’s habit
+of betting and constant appeals to his elder for money; on the other
+hand, Arthur took but little pains to conceal his views of life, and
+occasionally delivered himself in his mother’s presence of remarks
+which, it seemed to Sainty, could not fail to enlighten a much more
+obtuse intelligence than Lady Charmington’s.
+
+When he came to breakfast next morning he found her entrenched behind
+the zareba of teapots and kettles, under the shelter of which she
+habitually partook of that meal. She looked up from her letters with a
+certain air of triumph to say, ‘I have a letter from Arthur; he is
+working so hard that he will not even come home for Easter; he says he
+might run down just for the Sunday and Monday, but he thinks it would
+only break into his work, and that on the whole it is best for him not
+to come away at all.’ That was all the voice said, but the eyes said
+quite plainly, ‘You see!’
+
+Sainty said nothing. He went and peeped into the dishes on the
+sideboard, and picked himself out a poached egg with no great appetite.
+This habit of his of saying nothing when he had nothing to say was
+called ‘rudeness’ by some people, by others ‘pride’ or ‘indifference.’
+If he had spoken out his real thought to his mother she would have told
+him he was suspicious and could never believe any good of his brother,
+and would probably have exhorted him to watch against such an unamiable
+disposition.
+
+The breakfast, the day, the weeks passed in this silence between the
+two, a silence eloquent of disagreement, yet broken only by a few words
+on indifferent subjects, except when the presence of guests made
+necessary some form of conversational rattling of peas in a bladder.
+
+Whether it was duty or pleasure that kept Arthur away, the house seemed
+strangely empty and silent without him, even when some of the inevitable
+family party were gathered together in it--perhaps most so then, for
+though Arthur put himself out for no man, the mere fact that his
+pursuits were those of the normal young Englishman made him an important
+help in the entertainment of cousins. Sainty took endless trouble, but
+sent the men after rabbits who were secretly pining for the last meet of
+the season, and mounted the only Trafford who hated horses and had come
+down burning to throw the first fly of spring. Claude made things easier
+when he arrived a little later, but now that he was the duke’s private
+secretary, his presence was generally required at one of his grace’s
+numerous country-houses on the festivals of the Church, so that he was
+much less at Belchamber than formerly.
+
+‘I’m worried about Arthur,’ Sainty said to him the first time they were
+alone. ‘You know he’s left the second place he went to, and my mother
+has let him go to London to read at Monkton’s. They don’t even board
+there, you know; he has rooms somewhere near.’
+
+Claude’s eyebrows arched themselves, and he gave vent to a low but
+expressive whistle.
+
+‘Yes,’ said Sainty, ‘that’s what _I_ think; I feel sure he must be in
+mischief, he’s keeping so quiet. He wouldn’t even come home for Easter;
+it’s incredible that a woman of mother’s cleverness should really
+believe that it springs from excessive devotion to work.’
+
+‘Have you told your mother what you think?’
+
+‘I’ve tried, but there’s the difficulty. She thinks it is only my base
+jealousy and suspicion. I wonder why she so readily believes all good of
+him, and never gives me credit for even decent feelings. I’ve tried all
+my life to please her, studied her, thought what she’d like, and I don’t
+believe Arthur has ever done or given up one single thing for her sake;
+yet she cares more for his little finger than for my whole body.’
+
+‘Oh, the secret of Arthur’s favour is not hard to guess. In the first
+place, he’s got nothing, and you’ve got everything. On the face of it,
+that seems like an injustice to him; so, with true woman’s logic, she
+takes it out by being thoroughly unjust to you.’
+
+‘Got everything! Heavens! Do you suppose I wouldn’t rather be tall and
+strong and straight like Arthur, be liked by men and admired by women,
+than own half England and be fifty Lord Belchambers?’
+
+‘Very likely; though a woman of my aunt Sarah’s respect for “plenishing”
+is not likely to appreciate that point of view. But the real reason of
+her partiality is that Arthur is just the one person in the world who
+isn’t afraid of her. Oh yes, you are afraid of her; it’s not the least
+use your saying you’re not, and so am I, and so’s every one about the
+place. Whereas Arthur doesn’t care a damn _what_ she thinks; he does
+jolly well what he pleases, and, _maîtresse-femme_ as she is, she can’t
+help admiring him for it.’
+
+‘Well, never mind about that; I didn’t mean to complain; that any one
+should prefer Arthur to me is not a phenomenon that needs explanation. I
+only deplore this particular result of her devotion to him for _his_
+sake. What am I to do about it?’
+
+‘It’s a good thing you mentioned it to me; I must see what I can do.
+Perhaps I shall be able to keep an eye on Master Arthur to a certain
+extent.’
+
+It is true that his cousin’s influence had hitherto been unmixedly bad,
+yet he seemed so sympathetic, so anxious to help, so entirely at one
+with him in his desire to keep Arthur from making an ass of himself,
+that Sainty went back to Cambridge vaguely consoled, and with a feeling
+that Claude, being on the spot, might really perhaps be able to exercise
+some kind of check on the object of their common solicitude.
+
+This was his ninth and last term, the term of his tripos exam. and his
+degree, and he was so busy that he had but little time for thinking of
+his brother. Lady Charmington mentioned him but rarely in her letters,
+beyond a casual observation that Arthur was as hard at work as ever.
+Arthur himself wrote even less than usual, but he did vouchsafe a few
+brief notes, saying he was ‘all right,’ and ‘sapping like the devil,’
+and ending with the usual demands. In spite of his close attention to
+business, London seemed by no means an economical place of residence.
+‘His landlady robbed him shamefully; he was told they all did; and
+though he was sure of the fact, he knew too little about such things to
+be able to spot her.’
+
+One day Sainty showed one of these epistles to Newby, and hinted at his
+uneasiness. ‘You remember my brother Arthur?’ he added, seeing Gerald
+look a little vague.
+
+‘Remember him? of course I do. A nice lad, a very jolly lad; an awfully
+charming type of healthy English boyhood.’
+
+‘Oh yes, he’s all that,’ Sainty assented; ‘but I wish he wasn’t knocking
+about in lodgings in London by himself. He’s very young, and awfully
+fond of pleasure, and hasn’t a great deal of self-control.’
+
+‘Let him alone, my dear boy,’ returned Newby airily. ‘He must sow his
+wild oats, like another; but he won’t go far astray. _Bon sang ne peut
+mentir._’
+
+‘Oh, can’t it?’ groaned Sainty; but his friend wouldn’t hear of any
+danger.
+
+‘That kind of healthy well-bred English lad always comes out all right
+in the end,’ he said. ‘You can’t ride a thoroughbred with a curb.’
+
+‘Dear me, how sporting you’ve become; you’re as horsey as Ned Parsons
+when he talked to Lady Rugby.’
+
+‘Talking of Ned, have you heard about his book?’
+
+‘No--what book?’
+
+‘Why, he’s written a book which they say is going to be the success of
+the year; it ought to be out by now. I saw some of the proofs, and
+thought it deplorably flippant and vulgar, as anything by him was sure
+to be, but undeniably clever in a way.’
+
+‘Is it a novel?’
+
+‘Yes, a novel of society--as if Ned knew anything about society!’
+
+‘How came you to see the proofs? Did he show them to you?’
+
+Newby’s pale cheek took on a faint flush. ‘Well, some one told me he had
+put _me_ into it; there is a young don in the story, and of course some
+one who wanted to be clever immediately decided it was meant for me, so
+I just taxed Parsons with it the first time I met him. “I hear you’ve
+been putting me into your book,” I said.’
+
+‘And what did he say?’
+
+‘At first I thought he looked a little queer, then he laughed one of
+those irritating insolent laughs of his and said he’d send me the
+proof-sheets of the chapter where his young don was described, and I
+could judge for myself.’
+
+‘Well?’
+
+‘Oh, of course, as soon as he offered to show it to me I knew it must be
+all right, and directly I saw it I found as I expected the character
+wasn’t the least like me. The fellow was a most egregious prig, and not
+only that, but a snob; and whatever my faults, _that’s_ a thing my worst
+enemy couldn’t say I was, could he?’
+
+‘I’m glad it was all right,’ said Sainty. ‘It would have been too
+caddish of him to return all your kindness in that way, and somehow I
+don’t think Ned’s a bad sort at bottom.’
+
+As the tripos drew nearer Sainty had less and less time for anything
+outside his work. It may be said at once that he took a very good
+degree. In country rectories and cheerful middle-class households from
+which the clever son of the family had been sent to college at the cost
+of some privation and not a little grumbling, a place among the first
+six in the Classical Tripos would have been acclaimed with grateful
+pride and rejoicing. In Sainty it was accounted an innocent eccentricity
+to care what degree he took, or whether he took one at all. Lord Firth,
+who was the most understanding among his kinsfolk, wrote a kind little
+note of congratulation. Lady Charmington was mildly gratified to find
+that her boy had brains and the grit to work for a desired end, but she
+frankly acknowledged that she could see no use his first class would be
+to him in after life, nor how it would help him to manage his estates.
+Arthur said ‘his brother was the rummest devil he ever came across, he
+was hanged if he could understand him.’ They would all have been
+infinitely better pleased had Sainty taken his uncle’s advice, bought a
+gun and gone shooting in some form of movable go-cart. It was the more
+remarkable that he should do so well, as he was always more and more
+preoccupied about Arthur. Once the examination was over, and his mind at
+ease on that score, the old anxieties came crowding back upon him, and
+he decided to go to London and try and find out for himself what his
+brother was about. He would come up again for his degree. Meanwhile, his
+work was done and he had kept his term, so there was no difficulty about
+getting an exeat for a day or two, and he wrote to his uncle to ask if
+he could put him up.
+
+After old Lord Firth’s death his widow had given up the house in
+Bryanston Square and retired to Roehampton with an elderly companion, an
+elderly maid, and an elderly Blenheim spaniel; and the present peer had
+bachelor quarters somewhere near Whitehall, close to the House of Lords,
+and with a sidelong squint at the river if you got very close to the
+windows.
+
+Having arrived and ascertained that his uncle would probably not be in
+till dinner-time, Sainty went westwards in search of his brother. The
+educational establishment, familiarly known to candidates for the army
+as ‘Monkton’s,’ was situated in the wilds of South Kensington, and in
+order to be handy for his place of study Arthur had taken rooms in the
+same respectable region. But neither at the crammer’s nor his lodgings
+did Sainty find trace of him. At the former he heard that his brother
+had been there in the morning, but had not returned since lunch, and his
+rooms seemed an even more unlikely place to obtain tidings of the
+studious youth. ‘Oh yes!’ the maid said who opened the door, ‘’is
+lordship ‘as rooms ’ere right enough, but ’e isn’t often in ’em; ’e
+generally either calls or sends for ‘is letters most days, and once in a
+way ’e’ll sleep ’ere, but it isn’t often. Sometimes I don’t clap eyes on
+‘im for days together.’
+
+Neither this information nor the fact that his brother’s ideas of
+‘sapping like the devil’ were consistent with taking the whole
+afternoon, from lunch on, for amusement, struck Sainty as very
+reassuring. However, there was nothing to be done except to write on a
+card a request that Arthur would come and see him at his club on the
+morrow, and trust that it might be one of the days when ‘’is lordship
+called or sent for ‘is letters.’
+
+As his hansom bore him eastwards again, he could not help having his
+mind diverted from his anxieties by the rush of London life at five
+o’clock of a day in the season unrolled before him like a picture-book.
+The streams of vehicles of all sorts flowing in either direction made
+progress necessarily slow, and gave ample time for studying their
+occupants. He was not yet twenty-two, and had hardly ever been in
+London; the whole pageant was absolutely new to him, and it is small
+wonder if he found much to interest and amuse him. The great toppling
+vans and omnibuses were interspersed with equipages beside which the
+renovated carriages of Belchamber seemed suddenly rustic and
+old-fashioned. Little victorias slid past, bearing beings in shining
+raiment and crowned with improbable headgear. Family landaus containing
+no less gorgeous matrons, and perhaps a brace of pink-cheeked
+sulky-looking daughters in clouds of blue and white feathers, or small
+parterres of roses nodding in the summer breeze, made stately progress
+towards the park, or to fetch papa from his club. One of the prettiest
+of the passing girls leaned forward in sudden recognition and touched
+her companion’s arm, and Sainty found himself responding to a volley of
+smiles and bows from Cissy Eccleston and her mother, which at a touch
+made him part of the great glittering show, and no longer a mere
+onlooker and outsider. It occurred to him with a little thrill that it
+only rested with himself to come in and take his place among all these
+people, the place that was his by right of birth. Already invitations
+had poured in, more or less unheeded, on such an eligible young man.
+Unversed as he was in the ways of the world, he knew enough to be aware
+that a fatherless peer with a long minority behind him, an unencumbered
+rent-roll, and one of the show places of England, would not be forced to
+take the lowest room at the various feasts to which all these votaries
+of fashion were so eagerly pressing.
+
+But this unusual uplifting of his horn was of brief duration. One glance
+at the little mirrors on either side of the cab in which he rode, and he
+would have bartered all his advantages for the health and good looks of
+the poorest of the well-groomed, broad-shouldered youths in shiny boots
+who trod the pavement of Piccadilly with floating coat-tails and such a
+happy insolence. At one point where the throng was thickest, Sainty’s
+attention was arrested by a tall and very showy-looking young person in
+a smart private hansom going in the opposite direction from his own. She
+was much dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, and wore what
+is called a ‘picture hat’ adorned with a great number of nodding plumes.
+Her charms, deftly enhanced by art, were of the more obvious order, and
+she scattered smiles broadcast among the throng of young men, where
+dogskin-covered hands flew up to many a burnished hat as she passed,
+enjoying a sort of triumphal progress with the western sun shining full
+on her flashing gems and dazzling complexion. As the two cabs came
+almost abreast of one another she leaned back to say something to the
+man beside her, and with a clutch of the heart Sainty recognised in the
+slim youth leaning lazily back with his hat tipped over his eyes, who
+looked so distressingly boyish beside all this full-blown beauty, his
+brother Arthur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Belchamber’s first feeling was that it was a judgment on him for having
+allowed his mind to wander to worldly frivolities and thoughts of
+personal amusement. Certainly he had been brought up with a round turn.
+His next was one of bewilderment as to what it behoved him to do under
+the circumstances. Ought he to let his mother or Lord Firth know what he
+had seen? He recoiled with all the force of schoolboy traditions from
+the idea of telling tales. Had Arthur recognised him? he wondered, and
+would he come to the rendezvous at the club next day, even supposing
+that he got his message? He had been on his way to call on his
+grandmother, and, as he omitted to give the driver any fresh
+instructions, he presently found himself at Sunborough House. Having
+ascertained from the porter that the duchess was out, he was turning
+away when he saw some one signalling to him from one of the ground-floor
+windows, and Claude came running bareheaded down the steps.
+
+‘My dear old boy! this _is_ nice,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea you were in
+town. I saw you from the window of my room. Come in and have some tea,
+and I’ll tell them to let us know when grandmamma comes in.’
+
+Sainty was drawn affectionately into a large room near the front-door,
+which Claude explained was his peculiar sanctum. ‘It used just to be a
+sort of waiting-room, and was much wasted, so I got the Pompier to let
+me have it for mine. That bell rings from his study, so he can get at me
+whenever he wants me.’
+
+It was a pleasant room, with two high windows draped with some sombre,
+respectable, woollen fabric. Its original furniture consisted of a
+large writing-table with a gallery, and a set of green leather chairs,
+two high-backed mahogany bookcases with brass lattice-work in their
+doors, and several good old engravings on the walls, the duke’s father,
+mother, and grandfather, after Lawrence, Mesdames Taglioni, and Fanny
+Ellsler, Count d’Orsay, the Queen on horseback, and the Duke of
+Wellington. On this severe ground Claude had, so to speak, embroidered a
+fantasia of more modern objects--little tables, low easy-chairs,
+cigarette-cases, a vase or two of flowers, several books, reviews, and
+paper-knives, and a vast quantity of signed and framed photographs of
+all shapes and sizes. With the exception of an eminent man or two, and a
+few sleek young peers, they all represented beautiful ladies--ladies
+looking over their shoulders, with their hands behind their backs,
+ladies with sheaves of lilies and baskets of flowers, ladies looking out
+of paper-mullioned windows wreathed in sham ivy, ladies with children in
+lace frocks, ladies in ball dress, court dress, fancy dress, or simply
+what may be called photographic dress, consisting of the sitter’s best
+low-necked gown and a hat, a combination which no one could be expected
+to believe was ever worn outside the studio. Three large official
+dispatch-boxes with paper tags hanging out of their ends stood on the
+writing-table, and a receptacle like a good-sized dog-basket bulged with
+letters for the post.
+
+His cousin was so cordial and affectionate, did the honours of his
+official residence with such charming grace, that Sainty felt impelled
+rather against his will to tell him of his late encounter. Perhaps if
+circumstances had not thrown him so immediately in his way, he might not
+have selected Claude as his confidant; but he desperately needed help
+and counsel, and here was some one ready with both, some one whom to
+tell would have none of the grave, official importance of a report to
+Lady Charmington or his uncle. Warmed by tea and his cousin’s
+enthusiastic welcome, he had not been ten minutes in the room before he
+had confided to its occupant all his uneasiness and its latest cause.
+
+‘Really! Arthur _is_ an ass!’ was Claude’s comment. ‘What strikes me
+first of all is the infernal imprudence of the whole thing. Why can’t he
+go and see the lady quietly, instead of flourishing about Piccadilly in
+a hansom with her at five o’clock in the afternoon? He’s just as likely
+as not to meet grandmamma or your uncle as any one else, and then all
+the fat will be in the fire.’
+
+There was a ring of very genuine annoyance in Claude’s voice; and
+Sainty, though he smiled at the aspect of the matter that so
+characteristically presented itself to Morland as the important one,
+felt that he had not brought his troubles to an indifferent or
+unsympathetic person.
+
+‘But who do you suppose it is?’ he asked, ‘and where can Arthur have
+made her acquaintance? Perhaps it may not be--what I fear; but she
+looked rather--well, rather----’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Claude, laughing; ‘I should say it was ten to one she _was_
+“rather.”’
+
+‘It’s no laughing matter,’ cried Sainty. ‘It was bad enough when I
+thought he was only neglecting his work, and just idling and amusing
+himself; but this makes it all much more serious. But Claude, can’t you
+help? Can you not guess who it might be?’
+
+‘Oh, it might be any one of a dozen people,’ said Claude indifferently.
+‘It doesn’t so much matter _who_ it is,’ he added; ‘the great thing is
+to try and get him not to make a fool of himself. You know, dear Saint,
+it is useless to expect the high moral view from _me_. What you want is
+that Arthur shan’t go and do anything idiotic, isn’t it? Well, I’m much
+more likely to prevent his giving the whole show away than you are,
+ain’t I? You leave it to me; I’ll see what can be done.’
+
+It was on the tip of Sainty’s tongue to say that the eye which Claude
+had promised him at Belchamber to keep on Arthur, could not have been
+peculiarly vigilant; but he did not wish to alienate the one person who
+might perhaps help him, so he expressed gratitude and a confidence he
+did not wholly feel; and just then a footman came in to say that ‘’Er
+grace had come in, but was dining out, and must rest before dressing,
+and she ‘oped Lord Belchamber would come to luncheon next day.’
+
+‘By the way, yes,’ said Claude, when the man had left them. ‘To-night is
+the dinner at the French Embassy, and then there is the ball at
+What’s-their-names, and grandmamma must shed her day-skin and give the
+new one time to harden.’
+
+‘What do you _call_ her, Claude?’ asked Sainty. ‘I never feel as if I
+_could_ call her “grandmamma.”’
+
+‘Oh, I never call her that to her face, _bien entendu_. It was a
+dreadful question at first. I couldn’t call her Hélo as her stepsons do;
+but I’ve hit on a lovely plan. I call her ‘Grace,’ suggesting
+facetiously ‘Your grace,’ do you see? and it sounds like a cross between
+a Christian name and a sort of compliment, grace personified, that kind
+of business. Well, good-night, old chap, if you must go. Don’t worry
+about the little blessing; you had much better let me see what I can do.
+Right you are. And for the Lord’s sake, don’t say a word to your uncle
+or any of ’em.’
+
+‘Don’t worry,’ that was still the burthen of such very various
+counsellors, as Gerald Newby and Claude Morland, and more or less the
+line his mother took, who was again so unlike either of them; and
+meanwhile he was expected to stand by and see Arthur drifting to ruin
+under his eyes. However, he so far obeyed Claude’s injunctions as to say
+nothing to Lord Firth on the subject, when they presently dined
+together, though his principal object in coming to town had been to ask
+his advice.
+
+‘Have you seen Arthur?’ his uncle asked in the course of dinner, and
+Sainty only said, ‘I called at Monkton’s and at his lodgings, but I
+didn’t find him.’
+
+‘It was a rum idea of your mother’s, letting him come to London, but it
+seems to be working, and so does he. I’ve asked him once or twice to
+come and dine, but he hardly ever comes. He says the evening is one of
+the best times he has for work.’
+
+Sainty had but little chance of private talk with Claude the next day,
+when he lunched at Sunborough House. His cousin drew him gently to a
+window when he arrived, while the numerous chance guests were awaiting
+the appearance of their hostess.
+
+‘I’ve thought of who it very likely was,’ he said, with engaging
+frankness. ‘If it’s the person I think, she’s a good girl, and won’t do
+him any harm. You know you can’t expect to keep Arthur away from women;
+the important thing is that he shouldn’t get into bad hands, and I’ll
+drop him a hint to be more careful and not to go and _afficher_ himself.
+Hush! here’s our respectable ancestress. Well, Grace, here’s your _good_
+boy come to see you, to make a change from your bad one.’
+
+Sainty never knew whether it was circumstances or design that made it
+impossible for him to get another word alone with Claude. He did not
+feel that Morland’s help would be exactly of the kind or in the
+direction that he wanted, and he was more than ever anxious to see his
+brother himself, and try and find out just how much was wrong. He went
+early in the afternoon to a club in St. James’s Street, of which he had
+lately become a member, so as to be sure not to miss Arthur if he should
+come there. To his surprise, the porter handed him a letter as he went
+in, which proved to be a note from Lady Eccleston asking him to dine the
+same evening. He thought it would be pleasant to accept, but decided to
+keep it till he had found out if Arthur had any plans for the evening;
+so he put it into his pocket, and turned into a room on the ground
+floor, where some of the latest publications were displayed on a long
+table.
+
+A group of young men who were laughing uproariously over a book desisted
+rather suddenly on his entrance, as one of them, in whom he recognised
+the young stockbroker Pryor, looked towards him and whispered something
+to the rest. They faced round and stared at him much as sheep look at a
+dog, while Austin Pryor came forward holding out his right hand, with
+the book still in his left.
+
+‘I say,’ he said, ‘how odd you should come in just this minute! Have you
+seen this book of your friend Parsons’? It’s only out to-day, and they
+say you can’t get a copy for love or money. Wasn’t he that untidy chap
+with a fishy eye who was at your coming of age last year? I’m blowed if
+he hasn’t gone and stuck the whole show into his book, only he’s made
+your brother the hero instead of you, he’s turned you into a girl, a
+great heiress with rather jimmy health and a cork leg, who’s in love
+with the villain. But the rest of us are there, even down to poor little
+me. Your mother, your uncle--oh! and the duchess--he’s touched the old
+duchess off to the life, even to the colour of the gowns she wore at
+dinner. Well--he’s made his fortune. They say he’s been offered ten
+thousand for his next book, if he’ll only guarantee two well-known
+people bein’ in it. It’s better biz than the House; here am I come away
+at three-thirty; absolutely nothing doing, I give you my word. I haven’t
+made a fiver this account. Here--would you like the book? I’ve got to go
+out, and some one’ll grab it like a shot if you don’t lay hold of it.’
+
+The other youths seemed to have melted away during this speech, so that
+when Mr. Pryor, convinced that he had made himself most agreeable,
+handed him the fortunate novel of the season, and hurried away to gossip
+about it in as many drawing-rooms as he could work in before
+dressing-time, Sainty found himself alone with the book in his hand. He
+sat down to wait for Arthur, and began turning over the pages.
+
+So it was for this that Parsons had wanted to come to Belchamber. Now he
+understood. As Pryor had said, they were all drawn to the life. ‘Well,
+it doesn’t demand much imagination to write a book in that way,’ he
+thought. Presently he came to the passage about the young don, and found
+he was smiling in spite of himself at Newby’s happy confidence that the
+character could by no possibility have been drawn from him. The portrait
+was one-sided and most malevolent, but quite unmistakable. A year ago he
+would have been beyond words indignant at this ill-natured caricature
+of his friend and hero. Now he could not repress a faint feeling of
+amusement. What had happened to him in the meanwhile, he wondered; he
+felt ashamed of his want of loyalty. ‘Lord Arthur Chambers askin’ for
+you, m’lud,’ a discreet club waiter murmured in his ear; and he
+remembered with a start that in life as in Ned Parsons’ story, the
+protagonist of the moment was not himself but his younger brother.
+
+‘Infernally thirsty weather,’ Arthur remarked, as he dropped gracefully
+into a chair. ‘May I have a whisky and soda?--thanks.’ Then to the
+waiter, without allowing Sainty time to answer, ‘A large whisky and
+soda, please, with some ice and a slice of lemon. Well, old chap,’ he
+continued, turning again to his brother as the man departed, ‘and what’s
+brought you to town?’
+
+‘You,’ answered Sainty severely.
+
+‘O God! old man, not a jaw,’ Arthur pleaded wearily; ‘it’s too hot’
+
+‘Did you see me yesterday?’ Sainty asked suddenly.
+
+‘No, old boy--where?’ said Arthur, with slightly awakened interest.
+
+‘About five o’clock, in Piccadilly. You were in a hansom.’
+
+Arthur flushed crimson all over his handsome face. ‘The devil!’ he said
+simply, in a manner which told more plainly than words that he had _not_
+seen his brother.
+
+‘Think of the imprudence of it,’ Sainty remonstrated (quoting Claude,
+rather to his own surprise; it was not in the least what he had meant to
+say). ‘You might just as likely have met Uncle Cor as me, or some one
+who knew you, and might have written to mother.’ He did not like to name
+Lady Eccleston, who was the person he had in his mind.
+
+‘I wasn’t doing anything I was ashamed of,’ Arthur answered doggedly.
+
+Then there was a little pause, during which the waiter reappeared with a
+long clanking tumbler, and the brothers sat and looked at one another
+gloomily.
+
+‘Well?’ asked the younger, as he sipped his refreshment.
+
+‘Do you often drink between meals?’ Sainty asked. ‘Are there none of the
+stereotyped bad habits that you haven’t contracted yet?’
+
+‘An occasional whisky and soda when one’s thirsty doesn’t make a man an
+habitual drunkard----’
+
+After a second pause, ‘I suppose you want to know who it was?’ Arthur
+suggested, with another blush.
+
+‘I don’t know that I do,’ Sainty answered. ‘It was evident enough the
+sort of person----’
+
+But Arthur cut him short. ‘I won’t hear a word against her,’ he said
+hotly. ‘Of course she’s an actress, and that’s enough to make people say
+deuced ill-natured things; but she’s as good a girl----’
+
+‘Do you mean to say----’ Sainty was beginning, when Arthur suddenly
+melted, leaned forward, and laid an affectionate hand on his.
+
+‘Look here, old man,’ he said, ‘of course I don’t mean that she’s
+immaculate; but she’s told me a lot about herself, and I’m sure she’s
+more sinned against than sinning, you know, and all that. And I’m
+awfully in love with her; you may as well know it first as last. And I
+can’t stand hearing her talked about as if she was just a common woman.
+What are you doing to-night? I’ve persuaded her to come to supper with
+me, and asked some of her pals; will you come to the theatre with me and
+see her act, and come and meet her at supper? You’ll see for yourself
+how awfully respectable and jolly and all that she is.’
+
+Sainty’s mind flew to the little note in his pocket; he would much
+rather have dined with the Ecclestons, but perhaps it was his duty to go
+and inspect the syren who had captured his brother, and he was not
+without curiosity as to a side of life with regard to which he was as
+ignorant as a girl. ‘How can I help him,’ he thought, ‘if I know no more
+of his life and temptations than mother does?’ And he shuddered to think
+of the light in which Lady Charmington would view his acceptance of the
+proffered supper-party.
+
+‘You had better dine here with me first,’ he said resignedly; ‘Uncle Cor
+is dining out.’
+
+Arthur was so delighted at the ease with which he had brought his
+brother into line with his plans, and so excited by the anticipation of
+the evening’s amusement, that Sainty found it impossible to get anything
+out of him as to the extent to which he had been neglecting his work.
+All mere prosaic questions of that sort seemed to the enamoured swain so
+entirely trivial that Sainty himself began to wonder why he attached
+such undue importance to them. Under the influence of what seemed almost
+like an unselfish passion, Arthur appeared so much more amiable than
+usual, that he, who had come to lecture, came perilously near remaining
+to sympathise. He learned that the lady of the hansom was Miss Cynthia
+de Vere, who was performing in a piece called ‘_Africa Limited, or the
+Day of All Jeers_,’ a really rattling piece, in which she was perfectly
+ripping, that she had a not very important _rôle_, as far as words went,
+which was of course due to professional jealousies, but she was on the
+stage nearly all the time, and wore some ‘clinking’ costumes.
+
+‘By the way,’ Sainty inquired, just as Arthur was about to leave him,
+‘how did you come to meet Miss de Vere?’
+
+‘Oh, Claude introduced me to her, one of the few good things I owe him.’
+
+‘Claude!’ Sainty bounded. He could only gasp, as the full measure of his
+cousin’s duplicity forced itself upon him.
+
+‘You needn’t think the worse of her on that account,’ Arthur said. ‘She
+doesn’t like our slimy cousin; she told me so. She says he’s a bad lot,
+and so he is. Between you and me, I think he’s behaved badly to her in
+some way. She said she’d no cause to love him, but of course I couldn’t
+_ask_ her anything about it. Tata, old chap; see you later. I must go
+and tell a certain person you’re coming; she’ll be awfully pleased.’
+
+_Africa Limited_ was one of the first of those musical farces which have
+revolutionised the English stage; it had a great quantity of characters,
+and no particular plot. The first act took place in England, the second
+in what was supposed to be Algeria, and was represented by a mixture of
+the tropics and a pantomime transformation scene. There were any number
+of songs and dances, that could be introduced or omitted at will, and
+the time of day was morning, sunset, limelight, or back to high noon,
+with bewildering rapidity, and a total disregard of the ordinary
+sequence of the hours. There were a pair of serious and lyrical lovers,
+who discoursed sentimental ballads and duets; a pair of secondary
+lovers, more facetious and less sentimental; an excruciatingly funny
+comic man from the halls, who assumed every kind of disguise for no
+particular reason; a barbarous potentate, who turned out to be Irish,
+and the comic man’s long lost grandfather; several dancers of
+_pas-seuls_, and last, but not least, a number of extremely handsome
+young ladies, who did not seem to have much connection with the story,
+but who turned up in the most unlikely places, always gorgeously
+dressed, and had each three sentences to say in the course of the
+evening. It was one of this frolic band whom Arthur shyly indicated to
+his brother as Miss Cynthia de Vere, and in whom Sainty without much
+difficulty recognised the damsel he had seen in Piccadilly. Across the
+footlights and out of the pitiless sunshine of a summer day, she made a
+striking and picturesque appearance enough. She smiled affably at the
+brothers, and at several other acquaintances in the stalls and boxes,
+and took a most perfunctory interest in what was going on upon the
+stage.
+
+A rather _recherché_ dandyism was at that moment the correct style for
+young men about town, and Arthur was got up to kill, with a vast expanse
+of shirt-front illuminated by a single jewel, white kid gloves, and a
+cane, his fair curls cropped, flattened, and darkened as near to the
+accepted model as nature would allow, and his face very pink and solemn
+over his high collar. He went out between the acts ‘to smoke a
+cigarette,’ and returned with a new buttonhole and a peculiarly fatuous
+smile never produced by tobacco.
+
+As they drove to the restaurant where they were to sup, he obliged
+Sainty with a catalogue _raisonné_ of the guests. ‘Charley Hunter’s
+coming, and Agnes Baines, the girl next but two to Cynthia, because
+Charley’s awfully mashed on her; Mabel Hodgson, that handsome girl at
+the other corner from Cynthia; and I had to ask that little cad Harry
+Atides, because he won’t let her go anywhere without him; they say he
+beats her. Cynthia has such an awfully good heart; she asked me to ask
+her, because she has such a dull life. I don’t see why she stays with
+that little beast. Then there is Elise Balbullier, the French
+girl--she’s awfully amusing and clever; Clara Bingham, one of the chorus
+girls--she’s a pal of Cynthia’s; and Colonel Hoby--he knows all the
+girls, and they like him, and he chaffs ’em, don’t you know.’
+
+Some of us not yet in our dotage can remember when it was by no means an
+easy thing to find a place in London whereat to sup; but about the time
+that pieces of the type of _Africa Limited_ came into fashion, the
+play-going public discovered that it was unequal to the intellectual
+effort of witnessing them without the support of two dinners, and the
+first house of entertainment to cater for this new need was the Hotel
+and Restaurant Fritz, so called after its enterprising manager.
+Everything was on a scale of hitherto unprecedented luxury and
+proportionate expense; the waiters, of every conceivable nationality,
+wore short jackets and white aprons like those in a French café. A real
+chef directed an army of myrmidons in the adjoining kitchen. There were
+shaded electric lights, and little vases of flowers on the tables, among
+which dignified head-waiters walked like dethroned potentates in
+irreproachable evening dress, while a string-band made conversation
+appear a superfluity. A negro in a fez made Turkish coffee at a sort of
+altar in the midst, and the decorations suggested the saloon of the most
+expensive Atlantic liner.
+
+The brothers had to struggle to the cloak-room through a crowd of all
+ages and sexes, the women with fresh powder on their noses pulling out
+their crushed laces, the men settling their ties and stroking their back
+hair. Among these latter they suddenly found themselves face to face
+with Claude. Arthur pushed past him with a sulky nod. Claude jerked his
+head after him. ‘So you’ve got hold of the culprit,’ he said; ‘is it all
+right? have you got anything satisfactory out of him?’
+
+‘I have got the most surprising things out of him,’ answered Sainty
+witheringly, looking his cousin straight in the eye.
+
+Claude did not seem to notice. ‘I’m waiting for Lady Deans and Lady
+Dalsany,’ he said. ‘Women take such an infernal time prinking. Have you
+seen your cousin Trafford? He’s supposed to be supping with us, or
+rather we with him; but what are _you_ doing in this unlikely place?’
+
+‘Oh, _I_’m supping in quite a different _monde_,’ said Sainty in a low
+vibrating voice, which he tried to keep very steady and sarcastic; ‘my
+brother has invited me to meet the girl of his heart. I really must
+offer you my sincerest thanks for the admirable way you’ve looked after
+him for me.’ He was swelling with righteous indignation and a
+consciousness of having driven a nail of incisive bitterness through the
+counterfeit coin of his cousin’s sympathy, as he rejoined Arthur and
+delivered up his hat to the attendant.
+
+Possibly with some touch of quite new prudence born of his conversation
+with Sainty, but much more probably with a view to doing proper honour
+to his fair guest, Arthur had retained a private room, rather, as it
+appeared, to the disappointment of the ladies, who had looked forward to
+seeing and being seen in the big restaurant, but immensely to the relief
+of his elder brother. The table was profusely decked with long trails of
+smilax and a quantity of those florists’ roses that are all of one size
+and shape and colour, and seem to have been manufactured by the dozen,
+ready packed in cardboard boxes, having no more suggestion about them of
+growth by any natural process than the little red silk shades on the
+electric lights.
+
+Miss de Vere, resplendent in green velvet, with a vast number of diamond
+ornaments, hearts, stars, crescents, arrows, and even frogs and spiders,
+pinned into the front of her gown, sat on Arthur’s right and between
+the two brothers. She just touched a string of pearls at her throat,
+smiling archly on her host, as she took her seat. Long afterwards,
+Sainty had the opportunity of verifying his surmise that it was a
+present from that open-handed youth, when, in settling his brother’s
+outstanding liabilities, he came across it in Messrs. Rumond & Diby’s
+little account in company with the claret jug that had figured on the
+occasion of his own majority.
+
+Seen at close quarters, the fair Cynthia was a little coarse looking,
+and it seemed to Sainty that a person to whom the art of painting her
+face must be professionally familiar, ought to have acquired more
+delicacy of touch. Her eyes were very large, and what the French call _à
+fleur de tête_; her lips were too full, too red, and seemed to show too
+much of their linings; and her teeth, which had flashed so brilliantly
+across the footlights, were less dazzling on a nearer inspection. Her
+figure and carriage were superb, but her hands, though unnaturally
+whitened, were not pretty, and her nails were ill-cared for and perhaps
+a little bitten. She was extremely gracious to Sainty, and evidently
+anxious to impress him with her _tenue_ and the elegance of her manners.
+
+‘I met Lady Deans in the cloakroom,’ she began; ‘isn’t she a handsome
+woman? I _do_ admire her. Isn’t it odd, her Christian name’s Vere, and
+so’s my surname? and we’re both so tall. Some one once said we might be
+sisters, but of course that’s nonsense. I know she’s a great deal better
+lookin’ than me.’
+
+‘It had not occurred to me that you were alike----’ Sainty was
+beginning, but Arthur cut in. ‘Rats,’ he said. ‘You know she isn’t a
+patch on you,’ for which gallant speech he was rewarded by a rap on the
+knuckles from his enslaver’s fork. Though he gazed enraptured in her
+face, she paid him very little attention, and continued to address her
+conversation to Sainty.
+
+‘We had a little supper at my place last night; I wish I’d known you
+were in town; your brother was there. Oh, all very quiet, of course;
+only a little soup, and lobster cutlets, and nothing else hot but the
+fowls; a few little things in aspic, and some plover’s eggs, that’s all;
+but we were very jolly. Straddles came, the famous _comique_, and sang
+some of his songs and made us roar; and one or two other people sang,
+and then we cleared away the furniture and had some dancing. We kept it
+up till four o’clock. I declare I’m quite sleepy; ain’t you, Clara?’
+
+Miss Bingham, a little, heavily painted black and red lady, replied from
+the other end of the table that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. ‘Lor!
+we did have fun, though,’ she said; ‘how was the poor piano this
+morning, after those boys pouring the champagne into it?’
+
+‘Oh, don’t speak of it,’ said Miss de Vere. ‘You know that lovely new
+drapery I’d got for it, plush and Liberty silk; they completely ruined
+it. I was really cross. I don’t see any fun in spoiling people’s
+things.’
+
+‘What a shame!’ said Arthur. ‘May I give you a new one?’
+
+‘No, naughty boy, don’t you be extravagant. Why didn’t _you_ come?’ she
+added, turning to Miss Hodgson, the beautiful statuesque lady who sat on
+Arthur’s left with a fixed smile on her lovely mouth that recalled the
+hairdresser’s window. She was eating a good deal, but not adding much to
+the conversation. Thus appealed to, she glanced towards the little
+Greek, still with the same amiable absence of expression, and nodded
+gently.
+
+‘Do you mean I wouldn’t let you go?’ snarled Mr. Atides.
+
+‘Oh no,’ she cooed.
+
+‘Then why the devil didn’t you go? _I_ don’t know----’
+
+‘_Petit monstre_,’ murmured Miss Balbullier to Sainty. ‘_Est-il
+insupportable! V’là longtemps que je l’aurais planté là si j’etais
+Mabel._ ‘Oby, what is “planted there” in English?’
+
+‘Chuck ‘im, give ‘im the mitten,’ promptly responded that gallant
+officer.
+
+Sainty wondered just what kind of weird irregular regiment could once
+have been commanded by this blue-nosed veteran, with his dyed moustache
+and damp grizzled curls; his hands and eyes were so much older than
+anything else about him, as to give an uncanny suggestion of magic, as
+of some imperfectly transformed Faust.
+
+‘_Tiens! la mitaine?_ I ignore the phrase,’ said mademoiselle.
+
+Mr. Atides continued to growl into his plate with a very evil
+expression, like a dog over a bone, and Agnes Baines, a very pretty fair
+girl with a pronounced Cockney accent pursued an eager conversation
+across him with Miss Bingham, as though he were an empty chair.
+
+‘’E’s given ’er a tiara,’ Sainty heard her say; ‘none of your little
+‘undred-pounders, a real fine one with big stones in it.’
+
+‘Isn’t Agnes vulgar?’ Cynthia murmured to him, very impressive and
+supercilious from the heights of her superior gentility. ‘She’s had so
+few advantages, poor girl! but she is pretty, don’t you think?’
+
+‘They say he’s goin’ to marry ’er,’ Miss Baines continued.
+
+‘Your English girls are so kveer,’ the French lady remarked to Sainty;
+‘zay sink of nozzing but gettin’ married. To me zat seem so sorrrdid,’
+As Mademoiselle Elise was credited with having already ruined three
+young men during the brief period of her sojourn on these shores,
+without any thought of ceremonial formalities, this sentiment was
+perhaps not so disinterestedly high-minded as it sounded.
+
+Charley Hunter, who had been vainly trying to attract Miss Baines’
+attention--though perhaps more of her conversation was addressed to him
+than he realised--and gnawing his beardless lips at the ill success of
+his manœuvres, here turned his back squarely on her and addressed
+himself to Arthur.
+
+‘They say they’re going to raise the standard; isn’t it beastly? as if
+the damned exams. weren’t hard enough as it is.’
+
+‘My little feller from Aldershot says they are going to make ’em so
+stiff that none of you Johnnies will be able to pass unless you jolly
+well buck up,’ remarked Miss Bingham cheerfully.
+
+‘I hope you will use your influence with my brother to make him work,’
+Sainty said, turning to Cynthia; ‘it’s very important he should pass.’
+
+‘He’s a bad boy,’ said Miss de Vere playfully, ‘but I’m always at him
+not to be so idle.’
+
+This speech being greeted with derisive laughter by some of the company,
+the lady indignantly demanded if they didn’t believe her.
+
+‘There were no exams. in my day,’ cried Colonel Hoby, ‘and damn me if I
+think they turned out less good officers than the damned spindle-shanked
+round-shouldered crew of short-sighted asses you have in the army
+nowadays. They ought to be parsons.’
+
+‘Hear, hear! Fieldmarshal,’ said Arthur. ‘I wish we had you in Pall
+Mall; there’d be a lot more good fellows in the army than there are, if
+you were Commander-in-chief.’
+
+Sainty was growing weak with the effort of trying to find something
+agreeable to say to either of his neighbours. He was oppressed with a
+sense of the dreariness of the whole function. He had come prepared to
+be a little shocked, but half hoping for a touch of reckless gaiety. If
+this was the sort of entertainment Tannhäuser found in the Venusberg, he
+thought the pilgrimage to Rome must have been an exhilarating change. He
+found himself almost wishing for the young men who had poured champagne
+into Miss de Vere’s piano, to lend some semblance of liveliness to the
+proceedings. With its banal unimaginative luxury and sordid second-rate
+chatter, this one excursion of his into Bohemia was as dull as one of
+his mother’s religious dinner-parties. And to think that it was for the
+privilege of frequenting this sort of society that dozens of young men
+of Arthur’s stamp ruined themselves yearly, on the very threshold of
+life! Uncle Cor might not be very exciting, but he surely was better
+company than Atides or Colonel Hoby. But then Sainty was
+constitutionally unfitted to give its due importance to love’s young
+dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Sainty rather expected a letter with some attempt at exculpation from
+his cousin; but Claude was evidently aware that in many awkward
+positions there is no course so expedient as silence. Had circumstances
+made a meeting with Sainty seem imminent, he might have thought
+otherwise; but, as things were, having nothing to say, he said nothing,
+and trusted to time to take the edge off the situation. Sainty composed
+several very withering answers to the possible letter, but as it never
+came he had no occasion to send them.
+
+He had not contrived to get a word with Arthur after the memorable
+supper. ‘Hope you won’t mind, old man, promised to see Miss de Vere
+home; only civil,’ the boy had murmured, as he slipped into the little
+hired _coupé_ that was waiting. Mademoiselle Balbullier had hinted that
+a like attention would not be unwelcome from himself, but finding her
+hints disregarded, had driven off in a hansom with Miss Bingham,
+laughing very shrilly at some joke that seemed to tickle them hugely.
+
+Sainty returned to Cambridge more than ever persuaded that if anything
+was to be done for Arthur it must be done quickly. He had for some time
+had a scheme in his head, which had been germinating slowly, but for it
+to come to blossom, let alone fruit, he needed above all things the
+co-operation of Gerald Newby. He therefore made haste to seek his friend
+and lay his plans before him. He found Newby for a wonder alone.
+
+‘So you’re back,’ Gerald said, pushing the papers together on his desk
+and pulling the blotting-paper over them, a little trick of his which
+always exasperated Sainty, who would rather have died than look at
+anything not meant for him.
+
+‘Are you busy?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got something special to talk to you
+about.’
+
+‘I’m not too busy to be at the service of any one who wants me,’ said
+Newby. ‘Mere college work never seems to me as important as real human
+needs.’
+
+‘Ah! I’m so glad to hear you say that; it gives me a better hope in what
+I have to say to you.’ Sainty had thought so much over the scheme he had
+to propose--it was so important to him--that now it was trembling on the
+threshold of utterance he feared lest he should not put it before Newby
+to the best advantage.
+
+There was so long a pause that the young don came round from his
+writing-table to a position from which he faced and dominated his
+interlocutor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m all attention.’
+
+‘First of all about my brother,’ Sainty began, with some hesitation.
+‘You must know that I’ve found things even worse than I expected; it’s
+not merely idleness and waste of time, as I feared; there’s a woman in
+the case.’
+
+Newby frowned. He had an almost feminine prudery. The fact was he knew
+very little of such things, and what he did not know always seemed to
+him dark and dangerous, a subject to be as much as possible avoided in
+conversation. ‘I am very little qualified to advise----’ he began.
+
+‘Oh! that’s not what I wanted your help about,’ Sainty assured him; ‘at
+least, not directly; but you know I’ve often told you how I wished I
+could get rid of my most unsuitable part in life.’
+
+Newby made an almost imperceptible gesture of impatience, as who should
+say, ‘We are back to that old game, are we?’
+
+‘It was not mere talk,’ Sainty went on. ‘I have thought and thought
+about it, till I really have evolved something; I have once or twice
+wanted to speak to you about it, but have been afraid. Why I mentioned
+Arthur just now, was that a great factor in my desire for a change of
+life was that I thought I saw my way to helping him, perhaps to _saving_
+him; and what I’ve seen in this visit to London convinces me that I’ve
+no time to lose.’
+
+‘You interest me,’ said Newby patronisingly. He went across and fastened
+his outer door. ‘If what you have to say to me is so important,’ he
+said, ‘we may as well secure ourselves against interruption.’
+
+‘Ever since I was a child,’ Sainty began again, ‘it has been borne in on
+me that my brother was as pre-eminently fitted for my place in the world
+as I was _un_fitted for it. I used to think I was sure to die young, and
+that so matters would adjust themselves naturally without my
+intervention. Well--I’m nearly twenty-two, and I seem to get stronger
+every year. I don’t say I’m a tower of strength, but I fancy I’m less
+likely to die than many more robust men. For one thing, I do no
+dangerous things. You can understand that the idea is not a pleasant one
+to me that my one business in life is to keep my brother out of his
+birthright.’
+
+‘It isn’t his birthright; it’s yours.’
+
+‘That’s as you happen to look at it; it’s not my view. I can’t feel as
+if I had any right to what is only a hindrance and clog to me, and would
+be such a help to him.’
+
+‘But you can’t change places with him, however much you may wish to.’
+
+‘Legally and physically, no; virtually, yes. For ever so long I’ve been
+hatching a pet scheme, but I can’t carry it out without your help. I’ve
+not the health, the will, nor the intellect necessary; but you would be
+the ideal person to do it, and you would help and cheer me when I
+failed.’
+
+‘May I know what this wonderful idea of yours is?’
+
+‘I can’t make him Lord Belchamber--I wish I could; but I can practically
+give him the position, if I hand over the place and income to him. He
+would be able to marry some nice girl; he is one of those who ought to
+marry young. With a healthy, out-of-door life and plenty of innocent
+congenial occupation, and the influence of a good woman at his side, all
+that is kindly in him would have room to develop. He is not naturally
+vicious, only weak and incurably headstrong and obstinate.’
+
+‘And what do you propose to do with _yourself_?’
+
+‘Ah! that is it; that’s where _you_ come in. The whole thing hangs on
+you.’ Sainty looked appealingly in his friend’s face. ‘I’m half afraid
+to put it to the touch,’ he said; ‘I have it so much at heart.’
+
+‘I can’t give you my views on your Utopia unless you tell me what it
+is.’
+
+Sainty detected and grieved at the faint sneer in the use of the word
+‘Utopia.’
+
+‘You don’t encourage me,’ he said.
+
+‘How can I, till I know what you propose?’
+
+‘I thought we might go, you and I, into one of those East End parishes
+and start a place something on the lines of Toynbee Hall, a sort of
+university for the poor, a centre of culture and light and civilisation
+in the middle of all that dreariness and barbarity; I to find the money,
+and you practically everything else, with me for your lieutenant to work
+under your orders.’
+
+Sainty brought it all out with a rush, when once he had come to the
+point, and then paused breathless to hear how his idea would be
+received. Newby sat silent for a moment or two; at least he took the
+matter seriously.
+
+‘Have you thought at all what it will cost?’ he asked.
+
+‘Yes,’ cried Sainty eagerly, ‘I’ve gone into all that rather carefully.
+Say that it costs £20,000 to build the place--it could be done for that,
+very simple and plain; a big hall to begin with, and perhaps a cloister,
+and a few sets of rooms like college rooms. After the initial expense I
+don’t think it _could_ cost more than £2000 or £3000 a year. Of course
+we should live in the simplest way--there would be no luxury; and
+gradually I should hope the place would begin to help pay for itself; it
+wouldn’t be a charity, you know.’
+
+‘And the land?’ asked Newby; ‘is that included in your £20,000? You
+would want a good big plot, for the heart of London, to put up such
+buildings as you propose.’
+
+‘Oh, that could be managed. I might pay for half and raise the other
+half by mortgage on the property, or even the whole. There need be no
+difficulty about the money part of it; _I_’d see to that. The question
+is, will you help? All the rules, all the details of the working of the
+thing would have to come from you. You would be absolute master. I
+thought,’ he added a little piteously, ‘that it would appeal to you as
+an opportunity of carrying out some of your ideals. It would, of course,
+be entirely undenominational; people of all creeds should be invited to
+explain their views. It might be the beginning, the nucleus of your idea
+of universal belief and brotherhood.’
+
+The pleading eyes fixed on his face seemed to make Newby vaguely ill at
+ease. While Sainty was talking he had shifted his position, got up and
+walked to the window, and sat down again at his desk, on which he
+drummed a little with his fingers. Now he rose and came back to his
+friend. There was a touch of embarrassment and something like
+compunction, as he said--
+
+‘My dear fellow, it’s impossible, simply impossible.’
+
+Sainty, glancing round the charming room with its air of dignified calm
+and severe luxury, saw suddenly how sham was its austerity, how real its
+comfort.
+
+‘I am asking a great deal of you,’ he said; ‘too much, I’m afraid.’
+
+‘Don’t say that,’ said Newby eagerly. ‘Don’t think I would hesitate at
+any little personal sacrifice; that is indeed a low view of me. But,
+believe me, I see the impracticability of the whole thing.’
+
+For a few seconds there was an uneasy silence. The summer breeze from
+the open windows faintly stirred the pictures on the wall. Voices
+softened by distance and pleasant outdoor sounds came wafted to them
+where they sat. It occurred to Sainty that it was not necessary for a
+young man to ‘have great possessions’ ‘to go away sorrowful’ when
+confronted by the opportunity of the supreme sacrifice for others. No
+one knew better than he that Newby’s way of life would have been far
+harder for him to give up than his own; and this knowledge lent a great
+tenderness and humility to his voice as he asked, ‘Why impracticable if
+we are both willing?’
+
+‘Take yourself to begin with,’ Newby answered; ‘think of your people,
+your mother, your uncle, the duke and duchess--what would they say to
+such a scheme?’
+
+‘Oh, they’d be horrified at first; but I don’t think they would offer
+any very strenuous opposition to such a simple plan of disposing of me
+in favour of Arthur.’
+
+‘Then, think how _I_ should appear in the matter. What would they say of
+me?--that I had acquired a great influence over you, and then used it to
+make you devote yourself and your money to the support of myself and the
+furtherance of my crack-brained schemes. It’s ten to one against their
+even allowing me any sincerity; far more likely they would think my one
+object was to advertise myself while living at your expense.’
+
+‘And do you care so greatly what people say of you?’
+
+‘Yes, I do. My dear boy, you are one of the great ones of the earth and
+can afford to be thought eccentric if you please; but I am a poor
+scholar--my good name is everything to me.’
+
+‘You said once that we could never hope to do anything unless we were
+prepared to be misunderstood; that no man could really be good for
+anything of whom the commonplace respectable people spoke well.’
+
+‘Good heavens!’ cried Newby, with not unnatural exasperation, ‘I wish
+you wouldn’t cast snatches of things I may have said in some quite
+different connection in my teeth.’ He made another excursion to the
+window and stood looking out for a second or two. Presently he turned
+and said in a much more chastened manner, ‘Then there’s what I’m doing
+here. You yourself can bear witness that I am not without influence on
+a number of young men, an influence you have told me was good. Have I a
+right to give up my work here, my power of influencing unnumbered young
+lives towards higher and purer ideals, for a quite problematical chance
+of doing good to costermongers, and incidentally enabling your brother
+to stand in your shoes?’
+
+For a few moments neither spoke.
+
+‘Then you refuse?’ said Sainty almost under his breath. ‘Is it quite,
+quite irrevocable?’
+
+‘My dear boy, some day you will see the matter in its true light and
+will thank me for having saved you from following the will-o’-the-wisp
+of your own too precipitate philanthropy. The idea is purely fanciful;
+believe me, it would never work. In the first place, the mortifications,
+the disappointments, the roughness of the life, would kill you in a
+year.’
+
+‘And if meanwhile my money and my feeble efforts had served to start a
+really useful work, to launch you on a career of helpfulness, what would
+that matter? Would it not even be the simplest solution of all? Arthur
+would then step into the place in which it is so much my object to
+establish him.’
+
+‘Quâ method of suicide the machinery is cumbrous and expensive,’ said
+Newby, with dreary facetiousness; ‘and you can’t seriously expect me to
+aid and abet you in committing the happy dispatch.’
+
+They talked much longer, Sainty still pleading for his idea, though
+without much hope of success, Newby, gaining assurance from the sound of
+his own voice, pouring more and more cold water on the project and
+abounding in excellent reason. Sainty could not but see the sense of
+much that Gerald said; yet he came away from the interview not only
+depressed and disappointed at the ruthless killing of his cherished
+scheme, but with an uncomfortable sense of having caught a glimpse of
+his idol’s clay feet, always one of the saddest experiences of life. He
+felt too a certain closing in on him as of fate; his attempts to mould
+events or to avert catastrophes had met with singularly little success.
+Was all struggle useless, then? was it true that we were only puppets
+in the iron grip of destiny? To a person of his temperament it was only
+too easy to believe it, yet youth’s everlasting assertion of free-will
+dies hard in our twenty-second year, and it was not without many
+searchings of heart that Belchamber settled down to the conviction that
+there was nothing to be done. To say that his brother was never out of
+his thoughts would be an exaggeration. Happily for us, there is no such
+thing as complete absorption in one idea. When we have lost all that
+made life worth having, if we were honest we should own that at certain
+moments the most trivial of daily preoccupations drove our grief
+completely out of our minds. There is no evidence to show that the
+inhabitants of Herculaneum were other than cheerfully busy; and we all
+pursue a hundred frivolous objects, though lying every one of us
+inexorably under sentence of death.
+
+In the year that followed Sainty thought much and anxiously of Arthur,
+but he also thought of many other things. For one thing, the management
+of his estate was beginning to interest him. Having originally turned
+his attention that way purely to please his mother, he had gradually
+come to some appreciation of what he could do for his fellow-creatures
+over an area for which he was more or less responsible. Whatever his
+views might be as to the position of the land-owning class, while he
+held such a position it undoubtedly entailed many duties and
+responsibilities. Whether his land were eventually to pass to the State
+or be cut up into peasant properties, as long as it remained his it was
+clearly better that the people on it should live in well-drained,
+weathertight houses, than in insanitary hovels; that they should be as
+far as possible provided with regular employment, educated, amused, kept
+from the public-house. While Cambridge and his work for the tripos held
+him, he had thought less of all these things, secure in the conviction
+that his mother and uncle were giving them careful attention. To tell
+the truth, he had a little feared to absorb himself in them while he
+still cherished a hope that his work in life might lie in far other
+fields, that all this might be Arthur’s business, not his. In his
+immediate neighbourhood there was no very terrible distress to stir his
+imagination; by the poor on the place Lady Charmington had scrupulously
+done something more than her duty, and hard as were the lives of the
+agricultural labourers, at least their lot had fallen to them in
+pleasant places--their work was done in the pure air of heaven. It was
+for the huddled degraded masses of the great cities, and especially of
+London, that his soul felt the overwhelming sickening pity which had
+threatened to drive him out into the wilderness. Now that he personally
+seemed to be barred from effort in that direction, that his
+long-cherished hopes of seating his brother in his place had proved
+quite impracticable, and all the fabric raised by his dreams on that
+foundation had fallen in ruins about his ears at the blast of Newby’s
+inexorable common-sense, the plain duties that lay immediately around
+him presented themselves as something to be clutched with an almost
+despairing intensity. Here, at least, was work ready to his hand, and he
+promised himself it should be done thoroughly. He absorbed himself in
+his mother’s big ledgers, her detailed and carefully kept accounts of
+all the workings of the great property, with the same student’s passion
+for mastering his subject that he had brought to his Cambridge studies.
+Had Lady Charmington been a less conscientious woman, the thought that
+her power was passing from her might not have been without a sting; but
+she had talked so much of ‘giving an account of her stewardship,’ and so
+often lamented Sainty’s want of interest in his own possessions, that,
+whatever slight pangs she may have had to stifle, she had not the face
+to express anything but pleasure at his changed attitude. So far, too,
+he was still her pupil, eagerly learning all she had to tell, and
+accepting her word as final. It is possible that she took a genuine
+pleasure in introducing him to his duties, and she may well have been
+forgiven some moments of pride in displaying to him both the quantity
+and quality of her work during his minority. Sainty, on his side, began
+to understand all that his mother had done for him, and his wonder was
+only equalled by his gratitude.
+
+Lady Charmington’s confidence in Arthur’s application to his studies
+began to be shaken about this time by his ignominious failure to pass
+his examination; and here it was she who turned to Sainty for
+help--Sainty who, impossible as it seemed, had been right where she was
+wrong.
+
+‘I can’t make it out at all,’ she would say; ‘he seemed to be working so
+hard. You recollect he wouldn’t even come home last Easter; and then in
+the summer he went off on that reading party.’
+
+Arthur, in fact, after a fortnight at Belchamber--a fortnight during
+which he had been moody, restless, unlike himself, and had carefully
+shunned all possibilities of private or personal talk with either his
+mother or brother--had left hurriedly on a mysterious ‘reading party.’
+
+Sainty wrote often to the London lodgings, but seldom got any answers,
+and doubted whether many of his letters ever reached the person to whom
+they were written. It became increasingly difficult to pacify Lady
+Charmington, who passed by a rapid transition from her serene optimism
+to the depths of the gloomiest apprehension. Sometimes for days she
+would hardly talk of anything else, expressing wonder, surprise,
+disappointment, all of which Sainty had more or less to pretend to
+share, with a sense of deceit when he reflected how little surprised he
+really was, and how much he could have enlightened the poor lady.
+
+At Sainty’s earnest request Arthur came again to Belchamber in November
+for the shooting, his last visit, as it proved, for many a long day.
+Sainty argued, remonstrated, implored. ‘What was he doing? What did he
+intend to do? Didn’t he _want_ to go into the army? He must know he
+could never get in if he didn’t work or pass his exams.’ It was all to
+no purpose. The boy took refuge in a surly silence. He had two such
+terrible scenes with his mother that for the first time in his life he
+spent Christmas away from home. ‘I’m going to the Hunters,’ he wrote.
+‘If I come to Belchamber there will only be a repetition of the ghastly
+rows I had with mother in November, and what’s the good? I hate rows;
+jawing never did me any good yet.’
+
+Lady Charmington appealed to her brother. Lord Firth saw Arthur when he
+came up for the meeting of parliament. Sainty could never learn
+accurately what passed between them, but his uncle, that most amiable
+gentleman, said he would not willingly speak to the boy again.
+
+The spring wore away miserably in sickening suspense. Arthur was still
+nominally working at ‘Monkton’s,’ but several letters had come from the
+principal of the establishment, complaining of the slackness of his
+attendance, which had not tended to soothe his mother’s feelings.
+
+It was getting on for a year after the supper at the Hotel Fritz, when
+Sainty, seeing a number of letters, most of which had a bill-like look
+about them, on the hall table for Arthur, took them to his room to
+re-direct. He was just about to do so, when he noticed that they had all
+originally been sent to Monkton’s, and had been forwarded from there.
+The postmarks of some of them were several weeks old, from which it was
+evident not only that Arthur had not been at the crammer’s at all for
+some time past, but that the people there believed him to be at home.
+The pen dropped from Sainty’s hand, and he sat staring at the envelopes,
+shuffling them idly from behind one another, as though they were a hand
+at cards. Finally, shutting them sharply together, he thrust them into
+his pocket, and went in search of his mother.
+
+Since his defection at Christmas and the failure of Lord Firth to bring
+the culprit to reason, Lady Charmington had talked much less of her
+second son; for the most part she maintained a grim and offended
+silence. Sainty wondered sometimes what this changed attitude might
+mean. He was certain that she did not think less of Arthur, or worry
+less about him. Was it possible that she had begun to distrust his
+co-operation for any reason, and was trying to find out something for
+herself without his help? Her manner, when he spoke to her on this
+particular day, was stranger than ever, and she looked at him with a
+sudden hard scrutiny which chilled him, when he asked if she did not
+think it might be well for him to go to London and look Arthur up.
+
+‘He never writes, and we don’t know what he may be doing,’ he said. ‘I
+can’t let things drift in this way any longer.’
+
+He said nothing of the letters in his pocket. Lady Charmington looked as
+if she were on the point of saying something, and then decided not to.
+
+‘Very well,’ she answered quietly; ‘how long shall you be gone?’
+
+‘I don’t know; it will depend on what I find. Mother,’ he added, ‘don’t
+you agree? don’t you think it will be well for me to go?’
+
+Again his mother looked at him as if she would have read his soul; it
+was the old glance that had made him stammer and look down as a child,
+the look that said more clearly than words that she thought him a liar.
+He had never been able to meet it. Instinctively he looked away.
+
+‘Go, by all means,’ he heard her say, and he knew that her eyes were
+still upon his face, the eyes of a judge, almost an accuser. ‘Go and see
+what you can do. You may have means of getting at the truth not open to
+me.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Without seeing any one at Monkton’s but the servant, or even disclosing
+his identity, Sainty was able in a very few words to establish the
+correctness of his surmises. Arthur had not been there for weeks. ‘I can
+get you ‘is address, if you’ll wait a minute,’ the man said; ‘’e’s down
+at ‘is own ‘ome; I forwarded some letters to him a day or two back.’
+
+‘Oh, thanks; if he’s there, I know the address and need not trouble
+you,’ and Sainty turned again to his hansom. He reflected that to find
+Miss de Vere was to find his brother, and supposed, in his innocence,
+that he had only to apply at the theatre to learn the young lady’s
+address. But when he presented himself at the stage-door and blushingly
+demanded it, he was informed that Miss de Vere was not acting at
+present, and that, in any case, they were strictly forbidden to give the
+private address of any of their ladies or gentlemen. A letter sent to
+the theatre for Miss de Vere would be forwarded.
+
+This was an unlooked-for check, and he wondered blankly what he was to
+do next. He sent away his cab and began to wander slowly westward again;
+he could think better on foot. He was walking sadly along Pall Mall,
+when he was passed by a young man with wonderfully broad shoulders and a
+wonderfully small waist, who paused, looked at him, and finally held out
+his hand. Sainty recognised Algy Montgomery.
+
+‘Hulloa!’ said the guardsman, with the smileless gloom of the
+fashionable London young man. ‘Where are you off to? I’m just on my way
+to call on my stepmother; I understand she says I never come near her.
+Why don’t you come along and see your revered grandmother?’
+
+Sainty had been trying to make himself go and ask Claude for the address
+he wanted; he had not once set eyes on his cousin during the past year,
+and to appeal to him again for help was a bitter pill. Think as he
+would, he could evolve no other way of arriving at his end, and this
+chance meeting and invitation to Sunborough House seemed like a leading.
+He would go and see the duchess--what more natural? and if Claude
+happened to be there, how could he help it?
+
+‘All right,’ he said; ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
+
+The pair walked in silence for a few seconds, Lord Algernon trying to
+accommodate his long stride to his companion’s limp.
+
+‘Come up to look after your young brother?’ he asked presently, through
+the cigar which he held tightly between his teeth. ‘He’s making no end
+of an ass of himself with Topsy de Vere; he never leaves her for a
+minute----’
+
+To talk casually to a comparative stranger of what was gnawing his
+vitals was gall and wormwood to Sainty, but he grunted some sort of an
+assent, and then asked as indifferently as he could, ‘You don’t happen
+to know Miss de Vere’s address, do you?’
+
+Lord Algy laughed. ‘No, for a wonder, I don’t,’ he said; ‘but I tell you
+who ought to--your precious cousin Morland. I fancy he knew his way
+there quite well at one time.’
+
+‘Oh! did Claude----’
+
+‘Got tired of the lady; or perhaps found her rather too expensive (I
+suspect his grace don’t do his secretary particularly well), so passed
+her on to the little cousin. Sharp fellow, Morland.’
+
+The duchess, whom presently they found having tea in company with Lady
+Rugby and Lady Eva, had also a word to say of her prodigal grandson.
+‘Arthur _s’encanaille_,’ she remarked. ‘He is bad form; he lets himself
+be seen everywhere with _cocottes_; the young men of to-day have no
+_tenue_--none. Formerly, yes, I don’t say men were any better--they
+have always been monsters; but they did not throw _ces demoiselles_ in
+the face of the world.’
+
+Lady Eva murmured something to the effect that Arthur was a dear, and
+dropped a platitude about wild oats.
+
+‘Oh, I don’t want a boy to be a _merle blanc_,’ her mother rejoined.’
+Sainty would be all the better if he were just a little naughty,
+wouldn’t you, my child? I don’t suppose Algy here, or your own boy, are
+models of virtue, but there are ways of doing things. By the way, where
+is Claude? Ring the bell, Algy, and we will see if he is in; he will
+like to see his cousin.’
+
+Sainty did not feel at all sure that he would, but when Morland
+presently appeared in answer to the duchess’s message, he was as easy
+and unembarrassed as usual; it was Belchamber who was awkward and ill at
+ease. There was, perhaps, just a shade of reproachful tenderness in
+Claude’s greeting, an eloquent glance, a silent pressure of the hand, as
+who should say, ‘You may be as cantankerous and unreasonable as you
+like, my patience with those I love is practically inexhaustible.’ At
+the merest hint from Sainty that he had something to ask him, he carried
+him off to his own room, and when the request for Miss de Vere’s address
+had been stammered out, produced a little address-book from a locked
+drawer, and began to search in it with a great appearance of assiduity.
+
+‘Here it is--no, let me see, she left there, that’s her old address; how
+stupid of me. Ah! this is it, a flat she took; I remember now. But she’s
+always moving, I don’t guarantee that you’ll find her there; but they’ll
+be able to tell you if she’s flitted again.’ His voice was dry and
+business-like; Sainty wanted an address, he was trying to help him to
+it, as he would try to do anything he wanted. Why he had need of it was
+no affair of his. Claude prided himself on his power of implying much
+that his tongue never uttered.
+
+He wrung Sainty’s hand at parting. ‘Good luck to you,’ he whispered.
+‘_I_ could do no good; may you be more fortunate! And oh! by the way, I
+wouldn’t mention _me_ there; I’m not popular in that quarter. Cynthia
+has taken one of those absurd unreasoning dislikes to me that
+half-educated people do, and has set Arthur against me. I suppose she
+was afraid I might try and get him away from her. It’s a bad business.
+Well, _addio_, and best wishes.’
+
+Oddly enough, Claude was right in his surmise that Miss de Vere might
+have moved, but Sainty did at last discover her present abode, and
+arriving there about noon of the following day, found that she had gone
+to a rehearsal, ‘but the gentleman was in.’ Sainty was not sorry to find
+Arthur alone. The boy was at first of course very much on the defensive;
+the elder brother had to walk most warily among the eggshells of
+suspicion and susceptibility, but he soon discovered that his coming was
+not altogether unwelcome. Arthur did not attempt to disguise the fact
+that he was living with Cynthia; ‘he had made her give up her flat, and
+had taken these rooms for her; they had the whole house, and the people
+of the house looked after them; it saved the bother of servants; he was
+answerable for the rent and the housekeeping; naturally he couldn’t live
+at her expense; otherwise she wouldn’t take a penny from him, she was
+very high-minded; it was as much as ever she would let him give her a
+little present now and then. Anything she made professionally was no
+business of his; she had gone about a new engagement this morning.’
+
+‘But how do you do it? Surely to take a whole house like this on the
+footing of lodgings is the most expensive arrangement you can make.’
+
+‘It ain’t done for nothing, I can tell you,’ Arthur said ruefully. He
+was not sorry to unburthen himself a little to his brother. Sainty had
+had no idea to what extent a young man of family could live on credit in
+London, for a time at least. By carefully never paying ready money where
+it was not absolutely necessary, it was astonishing what a lot you could
+do.
+
+‘But what’s it all going to lead to?’ Sainty asked. ‘Do you propose to
+give up the army, never do anything--just live on here with her from day
+to day? Even supposing you were me, and had all the money you wanted,
+would this life satisfy you?’
+
+‘I believe you, my boy,’ said Arthur heartily.
+
+‘It may for a time; it won’t, it can’t, for long,’ Sainty said eagerly.
+‘And mother? Don’t you care about her? Mother’s awfully cut up about
+your not passing your exam. There’s another coming on in the autumn;
+it’ll be your last chance. Don’t you mean to try?’
+
+Arthur’s brow grew dark at the mention of his mother. ‘By Jove!’ he
+said, ‘you don’t know the things she said to me. She _can_ let you have
+it, when she isn’t pleased, the mater can.’
+
+‘Well, you must admit she had some reason _not_ to be pleased,’ said
+Sainty.
+
+‘Lots of fellows muff the first time,’ said Arthur lamely. ‘I’ve got
+another try.’
+
+‘But are you any more likely to pass the next time? Are you doing a
+stroke of work for it?’ And he narrated to Arthur how it had come to his
+knowledge that he had not been at Monkton’s for weeks. ‘I happened on
+these,’ he said, producing the letters he had found in the hall at
+Belchamber, ‘but mother might just as well have found them. She doesn’t
+know yet that you’ve dropped work altogether, but she must find it out
+soon. Monkton may write to her any day and ask when you are coming
+back.’
+
+‘Damn it all! I hadn’t thought of that.’
+
+‘No. You never think of anything half an hour ahead, do you?’
+
+Then Sainty told him how people were talking about him--his grandmother,
+Aunt Eva, Algy Montgomery (he did not mention Claude). ‘Don’t you see
+that in a dozen ways the whole thing may come out to mother at any
+moment?’
+
+Arthur was very stubborn, took refuge in the reiteration of his devotion
+to Cynthia and his determination not to be parted from her. Once or
+twice Sainty almost lost patience.
+
+‘You say you _won’t_ leave her, and you _won’t_ do this or that or
+anything you don’t choose,’ he said with some warmth; ‘but what are you
+going to live on? You own you’re up to your ears in debt, and that
+people are getting impatient. What can you do if mother cuts off your
+allowance?’
+
+‘I’m of age; I’ve got my own money.’
+
+‘Five hundred a year! You can keep up this sort of life so easily on
+that, can’t you? You know you can’t touch the principal. I don’t suppose
+the next two years’ income would begin to pay what you owe now.’
+
+Arthur looked doubtful; he began to see the weakness of his position. He
+tried a few platitudes about ‘working his fingers to the bone for
+_her_,’ at which Sainty, miserable as he felt, couldn’t help laughing.
+
+‘You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life,’ he said, ‘and you
+would find it so easy to get employment, wouldn’t you? You would be so
+valuable in a house of business!’
+
+He wisely refrained from any suggestion that the lady’s affection might
+not be proof against the trials of poverty.
+
+Finally, after long argument and entreaty, Arthur was persuaded to say
+he would go to a new crammer in the country till after the next
+examination, and would do his best to pass. ‘It is no good my trying to
+work at Monkton’s,’ he said candidly; ‘I should always be bolting back
+to Cynthia. You can’t think how good she is; she’s always telling me I
+ought to work and pass my exams, and please you. Don’t try and make me
+give her up or say I won’t have anything more to do with her, or any rot
+of that sort.’
+
+Sainty, too glad to have carried his point about the work, was ready to
+promise anything--payment of debts, help in the support of the lady, in
+short, whatever Arthur liked to demand. ‘And first of all,’ he said
+pleadingly, ‘you will come down home for a few days before you go to the
+new place. Poor mother’s sore and wretched at the way you’ve treated
+her. She doesn’t _show_ much, but she feels a lot, and you’ve always
+been her favourite. Come and be nice to her for a bit before you take up
+your work again.’
+
+‘By Jove! you make me do everything you want,’ said Arthur tenderly.
+Sainty could not help smiling at the thought of how very far this was
+from being the case, but he was thankful for small mercies. He
+reflected that he had been lucky in hitting on a propitious moment, when
+the narrow matters of the house had begun to press rather importunately
+on Miss de Vere’s lover. To grant a favour, accepting the money he
+needed as a condition, was in every way pleasanter to Arthur than having
+to sue for help.
+
+Sainty declined to stay and lunch and see Miss de Vere. ‘I want to get
+home this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Mother’ll be so glad to know that you
+are going to work and do your best to pass; and also that you’ll come
+home for a bit. You haven’t been at Belchamber since November, and this
+is May; I don’t think you’ve ever been away for so long at a stretch
+before.’
+
+He travelled down to the country that same afternoon with a lighter
+heart than he had carried for many months, pleased to find he still had
+some influence over his brother, glad to be reconciled to Claude, and
+rejoicing in the pleasure he should be able to give his mother in the
+announcement of Arthur’s visit and his promise of industry and
+reformation. He pondered anxiously on the question how much he need say
+of the temptations and distractions of London life, to explain Arthur’s
+desire to leave Monkton’s and once more try a country crammer’s, and
+concluded that there was no necessity to breathe a word of the nature of
+the occupation that had kept his brother from working in town. He only
+trusted other people might be equally reticent. He had telegraphed,
+before leaving London, to his mother that he would be back to dinner,
+and as soon as he arrived at Belchamber he was met by a message that she
+would like to see him at once in her own room. It was in vain that he
+told himself she was naturally impatient to hear what news he brought;
+it was with an uneasy foreboding that he approached her door, and he had
+to pause and brace himself before he summoned courage to turn the
+handle.
+
+His first glance at his mother confirmed his worst anticipations. She
+was walking up and down the room, so that her back was towards him as he
+entered; but the white set face she turned on him as he closed the door
+showed him at once that she knew everything. It was terrible to see this
+silent, dignified woman so ravaged and shaken out of her habitual
+self-control. Even at that moment he noticed with surprise the curious
+staginess of her movements and method of speech. It was true, then, that
+people in times of strong emotion did really behave in this way; and
+these gestures and phrases which he had always supposed to be pure
+literary and theatrical conventions derived from something in nature
+after all.
+
+‘So,’ she cried, sweeping round upon him, ‘I find what I have long
+suspected was true: my boy, who, if he was thoughtless and a little
+idle, I thought was a pure-minded, healthy boy, has been degrading
+himself with loose women; and this has been going on for a year past; it
+has been common talk; every one has known it; every one but his poor
+blind idiot of a mother. We must never know anything, of course; our
+sons may be drifting to perdition, but there is no one who will come and
+tell a poor woman. People stand by and laugh; I suppose they think it
+funny; all the godless, indecent, modern books say so. No one, no one
+will say a word till it’s too late, too late to do any good.’
+
+She was in a white heat of rage, tearless, tragic, almost distraught,
+all the mother and the puritan in her crying out in revolt against the
+eternal mystery of the flesh, the triumph of the senses in the young
+male. Yes, in the abstract she knew of it, recognised that men were
+sinners and full of carnal appetites; but that _her_ boy, her child whom
+she had nursed and tended, whom but a few years back she had held upon
+her knee, that this pure, bright young creature should voluntarily turn
+from her to smirch its white raiment in the slough of sensuality--it was
+not to be believed. If sacred art represented the mother of the one
+sinless son with seven swords in her heart, what symbol can adequately
+depict the woes of the mothers of men?
+
+Sainty, with his quick sympathy, divined something of all this in the
+awful moments that he stood for the first time face to face with his
+mother. His curious, guarded, sheltered youth, his unhealthy, abnormal
+perception of other people’s feelings, as well as the something feminine
+and maternal in his relation to his robuster brother, combined to give
+him a vision of an agony vouchsafed to few of his sex. He saw his
+mother, his cold, chaste, proud mother, stricken at once in her
+motherhood, her pride, her chastity, and yet he understood the situation
+as she could never understand it, as it could never be possible for him
+to make her understand. His whole heart yearned over her with a pity he
+seemed to have been specially created to feel in its full force. He made
+a step towards her with his arms held out, but she turned on him as if
+she would have struck him.
+
+‘And _you_,’ she cried, blazing with denunciation, ‘_you_ come to me
+with a lying pretence of sympathy; you who have talked to me a dozen
+times of your anxiety about your brother, and seemed at one with me, so
+unselfishly, nobly distressed about him. You have known of this all
+along, have aided and abetted him in his infamy. You, who are too
+sexless and poor a creature to have known his temptations, have helped
+him in cold blood to his undoing, and with this in your heart have come
+to me to consult what was best to be done for him. Oh! you were always
+subtle and sly when you were hardly more than a baby.’
+
+‘Mother, mother! for God’s sake stop; you don’t know what you’re saying.
+What do you mean?’
+
+‘Oh! you don’t know, do you? Do you deny that you have known this all
+along? A year ago, didn’t you go up and sup and carouse in this
+creature’s company and that of her vile companions? Answer me that. Yes
+or no? Did you, or did you not? You see, you can’t deny it. For all I
+know, you have been with them often. Is it from her house you have come
+to me now? to me, the mother of you both!’
+
+‘Perhaps I have been wrong, mother, but I don’t deserve this at your
+hands. I have done what I could. I have just come from Arthur. You know
+he is not very manageable; I have not had an easy part to play. And I
+have got him to promise to come away; he will come home and----’
+
+‘Has he said he won’t go back?’ She flashed it at him like a whiplash,
+and her gesture spoke impatient contempt as he answered--
+
+‘No, I can’t make him say that, but I hope much from home influences;
+when we get him here, surrounded by all that will speak to him of his
+childhood, of all he owes to you----’
+
+She cut him short. ‘You temporise with evil. Your arguments are those of
+the worldly wise.’ She was regaining her calm; argument was steadying
+her, and the old habit of rebuke brought back the judicial tone to her
+voice. ‘There are only two ways,’ she said, ‘right and wrong. You cannot
+palter and hold diplomatic parleys with vice. I am willing--I should
+_like_--to believe that your motives have been good, but I hope you see
+the harm you have done by your attempts at compromise. Why, oh why,’ she
+broke out again, ‘knowing all this, haven’t you told _me_? Surely _I_
+was the person to know, to be consulted on the subject.’
+
+‘I wanted to spare you, to save you pain. I may have been mistaken; I
+haven’t seen very clearly what was best, but I hoped to get him away,
+and that perhaps you might never have the sorrow of knowing. I knew how
+bitter it would be to you.’
+
+‘Oh! this eternal deceit! When will you learn that there can be no
+question of “not seeing what was best”? My early training of you must
+have been strangely defective, if at your age you can’t tell good from
+evil. How can it ever be anything but right to tell the truth?’
+
+‘It is no new burthen I’ve had to bear,’ Sainty answered, ‘to be alone
+in my knowledge of what was going on. For years I’ve stood between
+Arthur and your knowledge of the scrapes he was in.’
+
+‘You have, have you! So there has been a conspiracy between you to keep
+me in the dark. I don’t want to be unjust to you; you have not a strong
+or courageous character; you may have honestly believed you were being
+kind; but see what has come of your duplicity. Had I known, I might
+have said a word in season. Arthur would always listen to _me_.’
+
+Sainty thought of the tempests that had raged when Lady Charmington had
+said a word in season in the autumn on a much less ticklish subject, but
+he forebore to press this home.
+
+‘Well,’ his mother resumed, with a certain grim ferocity, ‘I’ve written
+now. _I_ am not subtle or diplomatic, I have borne my testimony quite
+simply and faithfully.’
+
+Sainty’s heart sank. He thought of his long and anxious contest, of how
+hardly at length he had prevailed. Of his mother’s methods of plain
+dealing he had just had a specimen; he knew, none better, Arthur’s
+impatience of the smallest interference, and the spirit in which he
+would receive even the tenderest animadversion on Cynthia.
+
+‘Mother!’ he cried, ‘what _have_ you said?’
+
+‘Said! What should I say? _I_ haven’t temporised and beat about the
+bush. I have said plainly that he was living in mortal sin, and
+imperilling his soul; and I’ve bidden him leave that woman at once, or
+never see me again.’
+
+Sainty sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. He saw all
+he had striven for, all he had effected, swept away at a touch; he saw
+too that the mischief was done, and irrecoverable; there was no good in
+saying a word. The despair his attitude expressed must have touched some
+tenderer chord in his mother. She came across to him, and laid her hand,
+not unkindly, on his shoulder.
+
+‘Pray,’ she said sternly. ‘Pray to God for help; He alone can turn this
+wretched boy from his evil courses. Vain is the help of man.’
+
+Sainty never knew how he got through the next two days. He had put a
+strain upon himself far beyond his feeble strength; the two railway
+journeys would in themselves have told on him, but the unresting
+hurrying hither and thither in London, the emotion of meeting Claude
+again, the terrible nervous excitement of his long argument with his
+brother, and then, on the top of all, when he was worn out in body and
+mind, the shock of seeing his mother as he had never seen her, the
+bitter disappointment of finding all he had done rendered useless at a
+blow, crushed him utterly. He was glad to take refuge in physical stupor
+and exhaustion from the bitterness of his own reflections.
+
+In the morning of the third day, when he was gradually coming back to a
+sense of what had happened, his mother came to his room with an open
+letter in her hand. Her face was grey and drawn, and she seemed suddenly
+to have become an old woman. Her voice was hollow and unnaturally quiet.
+‘Read that,’ she said, and tossed the letter on to his bed. Then raising
+her hand, which shook as she held it up, ‘I curse him,’ she said, still
+in that same even, horrible tone. ‘Remember that you have heard me curse
+my son’; and she went slowly out of the room.
+
+With trembling hand Sainty drew the paper to him; he recognised Arthur’s
+schoolboy scrawl. The letter was meant to be very dignified.
+
+‘My dear mother,’ the boy wrote, ‘I have received your letter; I will
+not notice your insults to a woman I love. You say I am living in sin.
+Very well, then--so be it. I will do so no longer. I came of age last
+week and am my own master, and curse me if I’ll take it from you or any
+one. I have to announce to you that I was married yesterday at the
+registry office in Mount Street to Miss Cynthia de Vere.’ He had begun
+another sentence, ‘Till you are prepared,’ but apparently thinking
+anything more would weaken the effect of what he had said, he had run
+his pen through the words. The letter wound up, ‘I am your son,
+
+                                          ‘ARTHUR WELLESLEY CHAMBERS.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+No one can live at the height of great crises. After the storm, when the
+wind has sobbed itself to sleep, the sun comes peeping shyly to count
+the damage done, the draggled, flattened flowers begin to lift
+themselves and look about, the fallen trees are sawn up and carted away.
+
+Sainty might take to his bed, and lie there groaning at the wreck of all
+his hopes and plans for his brother. Lady Charmington might say dreadful
+violent things, and indulge in the cheap gratification of cursing her
+son. But sooner or later Sainty must get up and dress, must come
+downstairs and see the agent and the butler, and his mother must wash
+her hot eyes and flatten down her hair, must order dinner, and scold the
+maids, and sit at the head of the table as though nothing were amiss.
+And it is just this that saves us from madness; the more we have to do,
+the less time we can afford for sitting down with our sorrow in darkened
+rooms, the better for us. Kings and business men, and the labouring
+classes generally, whose work must be done no matter what happens, have
+a great advantage over leisured mourners. Sainty crept out, battered and
+disheartened, to face a new world which yet had a great deal in common
+with the old one. He had to provide himself with a new set of motives,
+desires, objects in life. But outwardly nothing was changed. The very
+book he had put down when he left the library to find the letters for
+Arthur in crossing the hall, was still on the same table with his
+paperknife laid between the leaves to mark the place.
+
+He never knew how his mother had come by her information. Sometimes he
+thought of Lady Eccleston, sometimes of the duchess. Her reference to
+the supper and his own presence at it had suggested a sickening
+suspicion of a new treachery on the part of Claude, but he finally
+decided that this was unlikely. A dozen other people might have seen him
+going in, and gossiped about his presence. Claude had mentioned that he
+was supping with Johnny Trafford; it might have come round through his
+aunt Susie. He did not want to think any worse of his cousin than he
+need, and he did Claude the justice to recollect that if he never shrank
+from doing a mean action when he had anything to gain by it, mere
+purposeless mischief was not in his traditions; indeed, he would rather
+take trouble to keep things straight. He was not one of those who turned
+explosive truths loose in the world--who ‘thought people ought to know’;
+on the contrary, on general principles he was all for people _not_
+knowing, especially awkward facts about their own relatives. On the
+whole, the causes of the catastrophe seemed to Sainty far less important
+than the consideration of what, under the circumstances, was left for
+him to do for his brother.
+
+Lady Charmington, on his screwing up courage to ask if she had any views
+on the subject, forbade him peremptorily to mention Arthur’s name to
+her.
+
+Lord Firth said the young ass had done for himself irretrievably, but
+agreed that he couldn’t be left to starve. He was much inclined to
+think, however, that the younger brother’s £500 a year, which was all to
+which he had a legal claim under his grandfather’s will, was quite
+enough for him. ‘If you give him any more, he’ll only chuck it away.’
+
+‘Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said, ‘what’s the good of talking like that? You
+know as well as I do that Arthur will never live on £500 a year. I see
+nothing to be gained by pretending that he will. _I_ could easily, but
+_he_ never will. And do you suppose I could serenely sit in this huge
+house, and spend £50,000 a year, and know my brother was in want?’
+
+‘Whatever you give him, you may be sure he’ll spend double,’ said Lord
+Firth; ‘so I should recommend your not beginning with too large a sum;
+you had better keep something for the debts you will assuredly be
+called on to pay from time to time.’
+
+‘I’d so much rather give him a decent allowance to start with, one that
+he _could_ live on and _not_ get into debt.’
+
+‘You rebuked me just now,’ his uncle replied blandly, ‘for not looking
+facts in the face. Might I suggest that the aspiration you have just put
+forward is based on a hypothesis quite as visionary as my proposal that
+Arthur should live on £500 a year.’
+
+Sainty was forced to admit the contention. He wrote, therefore, a letter
+from which he tried as far as possible to banish all useless
+recrimination, offering to pay his brother’s debts if he would send him
+the bills, and to allow him a thousand a year; to which Arthur in due
+course returned a most characteristic reply, beginning with a
+magnificent declaration that he wanted nothing of people who were not
+prepared to recognise or receive his wife, and repetitions of his
+readiness to ‘work his fingers to the bone for her,’ and ending with a
+bitter complaint of his brother’s meanness in not making him a larger
+allowance. In due course, however, the bills arrived, and made Sainty
+gasp; nor did he find when he placed the first quarter’s allowance to
+his brother’s credit that it was returned to his own.
+
+There is a certain repose in the fact that the worst which one has
+dreaded has happened. To some temperaments anxiety is far harder to bear
+than sorrow, and the mother who killed her baby because she was so
+dreadfully afraid that it would die, presented only an extreme case of a
+not uncommon frame of mind.
+
+The sun shone, the birds sang, the early and late summer were not less
+glorious than usual on the great well-kept lawns and terraces of
+Belchamber. The places that have known us do not put on mourning for our
+departure unless it withdraws from them some fostering care, and
+Arthur’s effect upon a garden was mostly written in broken branches and
+footprints on the flower-beds. When people have been more than usually
+disappointing, we turn with an added tenderness to things, and Sainty,
+whose regard for his beautiful inheritance had always been sentimentally
+great, began to take a more intelligent interest in the possessions he
+had been so anxious to renounce. Since it seemed that he could not shake
+off his responsibilities, he would embrace them with fervour. He found
+himself wandering about the great historic house and eagerly learning
+all he could of the treasures it contained; and he started to rearrange
+and catalogue the huge library, which had been much neglected and had
+got sadly out of order. Soon finding this a task utterly beyond him
+without expert help, he imported as librarian a young _protégé_ of
+Gerald Newby from the library of his college, with whom he spent long
+mornings exploring chests and closets where dusty folios had been
+ruthlessly heaped together and left to rats and spiders. They made the
+most wonderful finds of whole boxes of manuscripts, family papers,
+parchments, letters. Among other things, they discovered one day the
+original plans on which the grounds had been laid out, signed by
+Perrault, and though there had been many subsequent alterations, Sainty
+was delighted to find how much the main lines had remained intact. The
+orangery with its enclosed garden, the bowling-green by the canal with
+its formal pleached alleys, and the whole system of waterworks, ponds,
+cascades, and fountains, were all more or less as the great Frenchman
+had designed them. Here and there his long sweeping vistas across the
+park had been cut by stupid little plantations of conifers, coverts for
+game, and these Sainty was eager to remove, reopening the grand
+perspectives. He planned, too, to restore the dignified simplicity of
+the forecourt, with its great oval expanse of turf and five statues of
+Flora and the Seasons, according to the original drawing. The statues
+had been removed and dotted without method up and down the long
+shrubbery, the great wrought-iron grille and gates carried away to one
+of the lodges, the turf broken up with flower-beds and terracotta
+baskets. It would be delightful to put everything back in its proper
+place.
+
+To these and many other schemes his mother lent an indulgent ear. She
+had that curious instinctive taste in gardens and houses which so many
+of her countrywomen combine with an utter absence of the æsthetic sense
+in all that concerns the fine arts or their own personal adornment; she
+was quite incapable of real sympathy with his joy in musty old documents
+and letters, but alterations in the garden were more in her line, and if
+she did not always think what he proposed an improvement, at least it
+was natural and normal that a man should take pleasure in his own
+possessions, instead of wishing to give them away and live in the East
+End. Sainty consulted her about everything, not merely from long habit
+of deference, but from real respect for her judgment.
+
+A more powerful bond of union than any alterations in house or garden
+were certain schemes for the benefit of their fellow-creatures. In their
+more radical youth Lady Charmington and her brother had started many
+such, a co-operative dairy-farm, settlements of model cottages, schools,
+benefit clubs, and a system of old-age pensions that should not lessen
+the self-respect of the recipients. Sainty’s interest in all these
+matters was no new thing, though he had formerly rather carefully
+repressed it. Now he took them up with a zeal not even second to Lady
+Charmington’s own. It was not to be expected that he and she should be
+always in absolute agreement, but on the whole they worked surprisingly
+well together. There were concessions on both sides. On his they had the
+ease of long habit, and he was astonished by a quite new tendency in his
+mother to consult his wishes and defer to his opinions.
+
+Though she never mentioned his brother’s name, Sainty had a conviction
+that she knew by some means or other what he had done for Arthur, and
+was silently grateful to him for defying her resentment. She helped him
+to establish himself in the west pavilion, now become uninterruptedly
+his own, and to arrange his few personal possessions that had come from
+Cambridge. The old schoolroom became his study; he turned Claude’s room
+into a workroom and place for extra books, with a writing-table for the
+librarian if he wanted him near him; but Arthur’s chamber was left by a
+tacit agreement as it had always been, and sometimes Sainty would wander
+in there and look disconsolately on the sporting prints, the school
+groups, the faded blue cap dangling from a nail, the old Eton bureau
+decorated by a red-hot poker with its owner’s name, a very large ‘Chamb’
+and a very small ’ers,’ owing to the artist’s miscalculation of the
+space at his command. Sainty did not want Claude in the old schoolboy
+quarters, and explained to that accommodating person that he needed more
+space for his books, and thought his cousin would be more comfortable in
+one of the many guest-rooms.
+
+By and by other people besides Claude began to occupy these apartments
+again. There were no regular parties during the year after Arthur’s
+marriage, but gradually Lady Charmington took to asking a few people at
+a time; his Aunt Susan and her sons, the Rugbies, the Ecclestons, Alice
+de Lissac and her step-daughters. His mother even suggested that Sainty
+should invite some of his own friends, and Newby came several times and
+was satisfactorily interested in his many undertakings.
+
+‘I like to see you taking your proper place,’ he said complacently, with
+the air of an artist contemplating his own work; but the old spring of
+grateful devotion no longer gushed responsive to Newby’s lightest word
+of commendation. To begin to grow away from a friend is a terrible
+experience, and few things are harder than to keep up the pretence that
+no such change is taking place; but when the friend in question has been
+less the equal comrade than the Gamaliel at whose feet one has sat, the
+strain of preserving the old attitude is increased to infinity. There is
+no furniture so encumbering as a fallen idol; we trip over it a dozen
+times a day. Already the blush of shame had tinged the corner of
+Sainty’s smile at Parsons’ lampoon, and now he was constantly to
+experience similar compunctions. Gerald took a great fancy to Claude
+and held forth to him unsparingly on many subjects.
+
+‘Your cousin is a real Prince Charming,’ he would say to Sainty; ‘very
+refreshing, and such quaint views of things, without the university
+flavour one gets so sick of; he is of immense use to me.’
+
+Morland listened to Newby’s lucubrations with an air of grave sympathy,
+but made fun of him behind his back. Sainty was exasperated all round;
+he hated Gerald’s making an ass of himself, hated Claude’s gibes at his
+expense, hated himself for being amused by them against his will. Cissy
+Eccleston, on the contrary, was always ecstatically giggling at the
+young man’s witticisms.
+
+The Ecclestons had begun to be a great deal at Belchamber; Lady
+Charmington seemed to have endless philanthropic projects to discuss
+with her friend, which needed the latter’s constant presence.
+
+‘I have asked Lady Eccleston to run down for a few days,’ became a
+recognised formula; ‘I want to ask her about the G.F.S. meeting’; or,
+‘She has got to consult me about the concert at Middlesex House for Lady
+Stepney’s Home for Inebriates; she wants the duchess to be a patroness.’
+And Lady Eccleston ‘ran down,’ always taking care to thank Sainty
+effusively for ‘letting her come’; ‘I had heaps to talk over with your
+mother, and it saves such a lot of tiresome letter-writing; it _is_ good
+of you to have us.’ In Lady Eccleston’s train came Lady Eccleston’s
+daughter, and sometimes a son or two. Sainty had come to have quite a
+friendly feeling for Tommy; he was such a good soul, so reposefully
+commonplace, and so unfeignedly happy and grateful at Belchamber.
+
+‘You don’t know what it is to a chap to get out of that damned London,’
+he said fervently. Poor Tommy, not being very good at examinations, had
+had to bow his neck under the yoke of a house of business, for which,
+after the manner of English boys, his whole previous training had most
+elaborately unfitted him. Sainty was glad to give him the pleasures
+which would be no pleasures to himself, and Tommy responded with a sort
+of wondering gratitude made up in about equal parts of admiration and
+contempt. Once he rather tactlessly tried to express his regret over
+Arthur. The Ecclestons were at the moment the only guests, and Sainty
+said something about its being very dull for him having to go out
+shooting alone.
+
+‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Thomas; ‘though, of course, I miss your
+brother. Awfully good chap, your brother. I was deuced sorry he went and
+muckered the whole show like that. Hard luck on all of you.’
+
+Sainty winced, but he liked the boy for liking Arthur, and silently
+pressed his arm.
+
+‘Beg pardon,’ said Tommy, getting very red.’ Stupid of me to say that.
+The mater would comb my hair if she knew.’
+
+Lady Eccleston indeed was almost distressingly tactful on the subject,
+stepping round it on elaborate tiptoe, as some people go about a
+death-chamber.
+
+She and Cissy were full of interest in all Sainty’s undertakings. They
+watched with breathless excitement the works for reinstating the grille
+and the statues, and allowed themselves to be patiently bored by long
+readings from some of the old documents which Sainty was editing for
+publication by the Historical Society.
+
+When there were no other young people in the house, Sainty felt it no
+less than his duty as host to try and entertain the young lady, and she
+was always ready to accompany him on his drives about the place and
+visits to the outlying farms and cottages. He thought of himself so
+little in the light of a young man for whom a girl could possibly
+entertain a warmer feeling than friendship, that it never occurred to
+him to imagine any possibility of objection to these long expeditions,
+practically _tête-à-tête_ with only a stolid little groom as chaperon;
+and indeed the two mammas smiled very indulgently on them as they drove
+off. He showed Cissy all over the co-operative dairy-farm and explained
+the system of its working, and if her remarks did not display a very
+thorough grasp of its aims, she listened with the politest attention to
+his explanations. Whether the two widowed mothers, when left alone,
+confined their conversation exclusively to topics of external
+benevolence may be doubted; but anyway they always seemed to have plenty
+to talk about, and to be quite able to spare their children; and
+meanwhile Sainty drove along the avenues of the park, or the roads and
+lanes of the countryside, with Cissy tucked in beside him and chattering
+like a sparrow. The girl had a certain sense of humour, strictly limited
+in scope, but diverting as far as it went. It is true that it mostly
+took the form of personal ridicule, and Sainty was rather scandalised at
+the frequency with which it was turned upon her mother, but he couldn’t
+help laughing at some of the revelations. ‘And, after all,’ he thought,
+‘she would not make fun of her if she did not love her; it is the
+light-hearted thoughtlessness of a child.’
+
+‘Mamma is very low to-day,’ Cissy said, bursting with laughter. ‘You
+know, she takes the _Exchange and Mart_ and is always swopping something
+or other. I don’t think she does very good business, but she likes the
+fun of writing to people she don’t know, and the bargaining. Well, she’s
+got an old black silk gown, quite good still, it was a good silk; she
+bought it at Woolland’s at a sale (she goes to all the sales), but she’s
+worn it three seasons and it’s old fashioned, and every creature we know
+is sick of the sight of it, so she has been trying to get rid of it in
+the _Exchange_, and what do you think she was offered for it this
+morning? A goat! Think of us in Chester Square with a goat! Tommy says
+we can keep it in the back-yard and he’ll milk it, and it will save the
+dairy bill; but mamma is not amused.’ And Cissy went off into peals of
+laughter in which Sainty could not help joining.
+
+This power of making him laugh was the great secret of his pleasure in
+her society. At most times they might not have had much in common, but
+after all he had been through, her irresponsible frivolity was very
+restful. His morbid conscientiousness seemed overstrained and absurd by
+comparison, and he was ashamed to be frightened by life in the presence
+of a creature who took it so lightly, displaying such a careless front
+to the slings and arrows of a quite insufficient fortune. With more
+humour than delicacy she gave him glimpses of many of her parent’s
+little economies and contrivances. ‘I’ve got to be turned out smart, you
+know, and we give awfully nice teas, lots of teas--even the little
+Sunday dinners ain’t badly done; but no one dropping in unexpectedly to
+lunch--no thank you! and if she and I dine out it’s cold mutton for the
+boys and none too much of it. You’re awfully good to Tommy; it’s just
+heaven for him being here, poor boy!’
+
+‘It’s delightful being able to give any pleasure to any one. I have
+never been able to make any one happy though I’ve tried.’
+
+‘Oh, come, cheer up! I assure you, you are giving a lot of pleasure to
+the Eccleston family at this moment; it really is ripping of you asking
+the whole family. Did you know, by the way, that your mother has said
+the two boys could come next week when Harrow breaks up, and that we
+might all stay over Christmas?’
+
+‘Yes, of course I knew, seeing that it was I who suggested it. I thought
+if you had your little brothers here it would not be so dull for you,
+and my friend Newby will be here, and Claude----’ The vivid colour came
+and went so quickly under the fair skin that Sainty could not be sure if
+it were Claude’s name that called up the faint flush. It might have been
+caused by the pleasure Cissy’s next words expressed.
+
+‘Oh, it was you! How angelic of you! As for me, I don’t think my young
+brothers add much to my enjoyment of life, nor I to theirs; besides, I
+am quite happy in this dear, beautiful place, and going all about your
+improvements and things with you is so jolly; but I’m awfully grateful
+to you all the same, and you will be more in mamma’s good books than
+ever; and with mamma, you must know, “good books” is not a mere phrase.
+She has a red book in which she enters all her friends according to
+what they have done for her; not an ordinary visitor’s-list. She puts
+down “Lady So-and-So--asked us to her squash, but gave a dance and did
+not ask us”; or “Mrs. Snooks--dined with us, but didn’t ask us back:
+Mem.--not again till she does,” and so on. It’s capital reading; if I
+can get hold of it some day I’ll show it to you.’
+
+‘Do you mind if we get out at the end of the shrubbery and walk home?’
+Sainty asked; ‘I want to see how they are getting on with moving one of
+the statues.’
+
+‘Oh, do let’s! I should love to see Spring (isn’t she Spring, the fat
+woman with the sort of trumpet with the apples? Oh no, of course,
+Autumn) swinging in mid-air. They had just got the thing rigged up
+yesterday afternoon when I walked my parent round there. I do hope they
+haven’t got her into the cart yet.’
+
+They visited poor Autumn, whose head was reposing in rather a ghastly
+manner in a heap of straw on a trolly, while her trunk and cornucopia
+hung perilously from the pulleys, and her legs still graced a florid
+Dutch pedestal.
+
+‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Cissy said. ‘I do think it’s so clever of you putting
+them all back where they belong. I should never have had the energy to
+take all this trouble once they were here and established.’
+
+‘The worst of it is,’ Sainty admitted, ‘that now the thing is decreed, I
+feel almost sacrilegious tearing them from the places where I have
+always known them. If I had known what a business it was going to be,
+and what a lot it would cost, I should never have had the courage to
+undertake it.’
+
+‘It must be lovely to have lots of money to spend,’ Cissy interjected
+almost under her breath.
+
+‘What I can’t understand,’ Sainty went on, ‘is the frame of mind of the
+person who spent such sums on _destroying_ a good design; he must have
+disturbed his own early associations as much as I am doing, yet without
+the same reason for doing so.
+
+‘I suppose he thought he was improving things, just as you do,’ said
+Cissy cheerfully. ‘All the things people give such heaps for nowadays
+are what our grandmothers put in the garrets. Probably the people who
+come after you will think Faith, Hope, and Charity, or whoever the
+ladies are, would look much nicer in the park, or on the roof, or at the
+bottom of the big pond.’
+
+‘The people who came after him!’ The phrase struck cold upon his ear.
+Who was there to ‘come after’ him? Lady Arthur? Good heavens! Sainty
+shuddered to think what _her_ notions of the æsthetic might involve. He
+had a fleeting vision of Belchamber rearranged according to the standard
+of taste suggested by the plush piano drapery so fatally baptized in
+champagne.
+
+This question of who was to enter into his labours and gather the fruits
+of all that he was doing contained within itself the germ of paralysis.
+The works for the outward beautifying of the place were the smallest of
+his preoccupations; but what would his successor care for all his other
+hopes, his projects for bettering the condition of the ‘poor about his
+lands’? The thought that whatever he might effect would pass with his
+own feeble and precarious life, and leave no trace behind it, was one of
+the sharpest darts in the quiver of his familiar fiend.
+
+They walked back to the house almost in silence, Sainty revolving these
+unhappy thoughts, Cissy, for once, not chattering. Sainty stole an
+occasional glance at his companion, wondering at her unusual quiet. Her
+eyes had a far-away look, which gave a great sweetness to her face; he
+feared to intrude on some tender maiden thoughts which he felt tolerably
+sure had little to do with him or his concerns. As they came out upon
+the lawn they saw Lady Charmington approaching from the village, bearing
+a small tin-lined basket in which she conveyed cold slabs of pudding to
+some of her dependants. Cissy waved her muff and ran forward, insisting
+on relieving her from the burthen which she was perfectly capable of
+carrying on one stalwart finger. Miss Eccleston’s manner to her hostess
+was the perfection of pretty girlish deference and service, and Lady
+Charmington’s grim countenance relaxed at sight of her.
+
+‘Have you had a pleasant drive?’ she asked. ‘I hope Sainty has taken
+good care of you.’
+
+‘Lord Belchamber has been delightful,’ Cissy answered, ‘and shown me all
+sorts of interesting things. We came back by the shrubbery, to look at
+one of the poor ladies who has had her head cut off. Now I must go and
+tell mamma we are back. I will leave your basket in the little hall for
+you, dear Lady Charmington, I know just where it lives.’
+
+Lady Charmington turned to Sainty as the girl skipped away. ‘Give me
+your arm, my son, I am a little tired,’ she said. Now Sainty was well
+aware that his mother was never tired, and would rather have died than
+own it if she had been. ‘Good heavens, mother, aren’t you well?’ he
+asked in alarm.
+
+‘Oh yes, dear, quite well; but I am getting an old woman. It is a good
+thing that you have begun to look after things yourself. What you ought
+to do for me now is to give me a nice young daughter-in-law to look
+after _me_, and some dear little grandchildren to pet and spoil.’
+
+Sainty was startled; it seemed almost as if Lady Charmington were
+answering the thoughts that had oppressed him on the way home. He smiled
+parenthetically at the vision of his capable energetic mother in the
+character of the feeble old lady cared for by pious children; nor did he
+see her ‘petting and spoiling’ any one.
+
+‘I am not likely to marry,’ he said. ‘With the best will in the world, I
+might find it difficult. Fairy princesses do not marry the yellow
+dwarf!’
+
+Lady Charmington’s unwonted mildness fell from her miraculously. ‘You
+are almost bound to marry--_now_,’ she said, the last word pronounced
+with a sudden sharp inspiration that told how much the reference cost
+her.
+
+‘Dear mother,’ Sainty said gently, ‘who could possibly fill your place
+here? Who would do all that you do, or do it nearly as well?’
+
+‘I can’t live for ever. As I tell you, I am getting old; already I
+can’t do all that I could. The thought of that woman in my place gives
+me fever. Do you want her to succeed me--do you?’ And Sainty felt the
+hand on his arm tighten to a clutch.
+
+‘We have both got to die before that happens, mother. If you are not in
+your first youth, you are very strong, and if I am not a tower of
+strength, at least I have youth on my side; we may both have more
+vitality than many younger or stronger people.’ Alas! that his chances
+of long life, once so fiercely resented, should have come to be the
+buckler on which he counted to interpose against the speedy succession
+of his brother, which in those days he had so ardently desired!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It was natural that with other people in the house Sainty should see
+less of Cissy; he told himself so several times a day, yet the thought
+was not altogether a pleasant one that she only welcomed his society as
+a refuge from solitude or Lady Eccleston. The frost had put a stop to
+the works in front of the house, and a bad chill and sharp attack of
+neuralgia warned Sainty to discontinue his drives until milder weather.
+Skating on the big pond became the amusement of the moment, a pastime in
+which his lameness prevented his joining. Gerald Newby, in a straw hat,
+spent hours upon the ice, and fell down with Spartan perseverance in his
+determination to accomplish figures of eight.
+
+‘Why is it a necessary part of the make-up of the good young man to wear
+a straw hat in the winter?’ Claude asked; ‘I notice that serious youths
+always do, curates and schoolmasters. Is it a mark of asceticism, as
+being obviously not the comfortable thing to do, or to give the
+impression that their brains are overheated with excess of thought?’
+
+Claude, who skated, as he did everything else that he attempted, with
+elegance and precision, had undertaken to instruct Cissy in the art, and
+Sainty had to watch them gliding about together, both her hands tightly
+clasped in his, and even a sustaining arm occasionally flung out when
+the maiden was more than usually wobbly. It was all perfectly natural;
+there was not the smallest ground for objecting. Lady Susan Trafford and
+her sons, Claude’s mother, Newby, and Cissy’s three brothers were all on
+the ice the whole time; the pond, though a good-sized sheet of water,
+was visible from end to end; there were no corners or islands behind
+which the flirtatiously-inclined could disappear; yet the sight of
+those perpetually clasped hands became a constant irritation to
+Belchamber, and it was quite vain for him to reiterate that with her
+mother and brothers in the house, it was less than no business of his
+how Miss Eccleston amused herself. ‘Had it been any one else but
+Claude,’ he thought, ‘he should not have minded.’
+
+It soon became evident to him that he was not alone in the apprehension
+with which he watched the growing intimacy between Cissy and his cousin.
+Lady Eccleston, it was plain, viewed it with quite as little favour as
+he did. Swathed in furs, and with a blue nose, the poor lady fluttered
+on the bank, in a manner strongly suggestive of a hen whose ducklings
+have taken to the water. One day, having invited him to take her for a
+walk, while the hoar frost crackled under their feet in the winding
+mazes of the shrubbery, she quite unexpectedly unburthened herself to
+him on the subject.
+
+‘I can talk to you, dear Lord Belchamber,’ she said, ‘as I would to an
+older man; you are so good, so pure, so unlike the others, and I am so
+sorely in need of advice.’
+
+‘Good gracious! Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, with hypocritical
+surprise, ‘what’s the matter? How can I help you?’
+
+‘I’m so afraid you’ll think it strange of me to talk to you on such a
+subject, but, as I say, you are not like an ordinary young man; you have
+always been so serious for your age, and then, you know your cousin
+better than any one; you have been boys together.’
+
+‘Claude?’
+
+‘Yes, Mr. Morland. How kind of you to understand and help me out; but
+you _are_ so sympathetic, more like a woman in some ways, I always say.’
+
+Sainty was only partially pleased by this equivocal compliment. ‘What
+about Claude?’ he asked.
+
+‘I will be quite frank with you; you won’t misunderstand me, I know. A
+mother’s solicitude; and, after all, what can be more natural? Left so
+early a widow, and with these young ones to guide and bring up. If my
+dear husband had lived it would all have been so different; but I have
+no one to turn to. Tom is a mere boy, really no more help than the young
+ones. Ah! Lord Belchamber, children are a sad responsibility.’
+
+‘Yours seem to be very good ones,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘You _do_ think so? I _am_ so glad. Yes, I think they are, but of course
+I feel a mother is not a judge--her great love blinds her; but they
+_are_ good children, I must say they give me very little trouble. Only
+the high spirits of youth are always a pitfall. And Cissy--she’s a dear,
+good girl, and we haven’t a secret from one another; we are more like
+sisters. Yet it is for her that I sometimes feel the greatest anxiety.’
+
+‘Yes?’
+
+‘Some people think her pretty; again, of course, my partiality prevents
+my judging; but lots of people have told me she was pretty. _Do_ you
+think her pretty?’
+
+‘I should think no one could help admiring Miss Eccleston,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘Ah! that’s it. There’s no denying it. I can’t help seeing it; why
+should I pretend I don’t? The girl does have a lot of admiration; I _do_
+hope it won’t turn her head. She’s as good as gold, but London’s an
+awful place. I’ve done all I can to keep her from all knowledge of evil,
+and so far, thank God! the child is a thoroughly healthy-minded, pure
+girl. Doesn’t she strike you so?’
+
+‘Oh, certainly; but what----’
+
+‘You were going to say “What has all this to do with Mr. Morland?” You
+won’t mind my talking to you quite frankly? it _is_ such a comfort.
+Well--any one can see your cousin admires Cissy immensely. And of course
+she’s pleased by his attentions. I must admit he is charming; but _is_
+he the kind of young man a mother would like to give her daughter to?’
+
+‘Have you any reason to suppose your daughter cares at all for Claude?’
+
+‘Oh no, no, no! don’t misunderstand me; I’m quite _sure_ she doesn’t.
+But girls are so thoughtless; the more innocent they are, the more
+imprudent. If I so much as try to venture a hint to her to be a little
+more circumspect, she says, “I don’t know what you _mean_, mother,” and
+she looks at me in such a way I’m quite ashamed, I really am.’
+
+‘Of course Miss Eccleston is all that is delicate and refined, but if
+you are certain she does not at all return my cousin’s partiality----’
+
+‘Oh, of that I’m _sure_; she’s such a mirror of candour--if she had the
+very smallest feeling she would have told me--but your cousin is most
+fascinating, that I must admit, and she _might_ get to think she cared.
+Now, I ask you, who know him so well, _is_ he just the sort of man in
+whose hands a very pure-minded girl with high ideals would be happy? I
+know my child so well; if she were ever to find out that the man she
+married had been at all fast, it would simply kill her. And the young
+men of the day _are_ so wicked, or so they tell me. One can’t help
+hearing things _de temps en temps_ in London, no matter how much one
+hates gossip, and _no_ one hates it as I do.’
+
+Sainty thought he knew some one who hated it at least as much as her
+ladyship. He was wondering what Claude really felt for Cissy. In the
+light of their conversation about Miss Winston, he found it difficult to
+believe that his cousin was courting a portionless girl with a view to
+marriage; but he could not catechise him as to his intentions towards
+every young woman with whom he ever saw him, especially after the scanty
+encouragement he had met with on that occasion. Were he to answer Lady
+Eccleston truthfully, there could be little doubt of what he must say;
+but the thought of acting secret police in this fashion was not
+agreeable to him.
+
+‘You must see----’ he began.
+
+‘Oh! I do, I do,’ cried the lady; ‘I see _just_ how unpleasant it would
+be for you to have to say a word against your cousin, and, dear Lord
+Belchamber, do let me say how much it makes me like you, though, to be
+sure, that wasn’t necessary, for I’ve always said you were my ideal
+young man. Cissy and I have so often agreed in talking over some of the
+young men we know, Tom’s friends, and the men we see at balls, and
+others, that there is _no_ one quite like you.’
+
+‘No, I’m well aware that I am not like other young men----’
+
+‘Ah! be thankful you’re not, dear Lord Belchamber; the young men of the
+day, I’m _sorry_ to say, are not nice. And thank you so much for
+listening to me so patiently, and telling me _just_ what I wanted to
+know. I can’t tell you the comfort this little talk has been to me. You
+see, I have no one to turn to, and I do think it so sweet of you not to
+want to say a word against Mr. Morland.’
+
+Sainty wondered a little afterwards just what the information was for
+which Lady Eccleston was so grateful, for though the interview was
+nominally sought with a view to consulting him, while he had received a
+number of interesting confidences, he could not recollect having
+expressed any opinion at all. Lady Eccleston, however, had apparently
+found him a satisfactory counsellor, for the next day she returned to
+the subject.
+
+‘You remember what I said to you yesterday about Cissy and Mr. Morland,’
+she whispered, dropping down beside him on one of the seats in the
+winter-garden after lunch. ‘I’m more than ever convinced she doesn’t
+care for him; it is foolish of me to take fright as I do, but there is
+just one point I _do_ want to put myself right with you about. I was so
+afraid afterwards you might think--and yet--no, come to think of it, I’m
+sure you wouldn’t; but I should like just to say that I hope you
+_didn’t_ think what I said had _any_thing to do with Mr. Morland being
+poor, or what the world would call not a good match. As long as he was a
+good man, and a man of principle, and some one in her own _monde_, I’ve
+always said I didn’t care who my girl married. No one can say I’m
+mercenary. My poor dear husband and I married on next to nothing, and
+there never was a happier marriage. I wish you had known Sir Thomas,
+you would have loved him,’
+
+Sainty expressed a suitable regret at having missed the pleasure of Sir
+Thomas’s acquaintance. ‘Some people,’ Lady Eccleston continued
+pensively, ‘some people think I’m wrong. Only last week a dear friend of
+mine said to me that it was all very well to despise money, but that
+other things being equal, it was a great power, and that in this age of
+the world it was impossible to get on without it. I said “You may be
+right, dear, and I don’t deny that for my children’s sake I’ve sometimes
+wished I had a little more of it, but money isn’t everything. It can’t
+give happiness.”’ And her ladyship raised her eyes to a statuette of
+Venus in a cluster of palms, with the expression of a dying martyr
+regarding a crucifix.
+
+‘No, Lord Belchamber, if a man’s a gentleman and a good man, for me, he
+may be as poor as--as he pleases--_that_ isn’t what I fear; but though
+Cissy seems such a child, she has a very strongly marked character, and
+intensely deep feelings, and were she to marry a man she could not
+respect, she would never know a moment’s happiness. What she needs above
+all is a man of strict principles, of high ideals, and with a pure mind
+and life, and where is such a man to be found? But forgive me for boring
+you with all this; it can’t interest you. George, dear,’ to her second
+son, who passed at the moment, ‘are you going skating? Do you know where
+Cissy is? Is she going with you? I want to speak to her’; and with a
+little nod of good understanding to her host, Lady Eccleston skipped
+with her usual amazing agility off the ottoman, and departed with her
+arm twined about the boy’s waist.
+
+Belchamber pondered much on these conversations. ‘The ordinary clever
+man,’ he thought, ‘who prides himself on knowledge of human nature,
+would be sure that Lady Eccleston was trying to “hook him” for her
+daughter, and would, as usual, be wrong. If the lady is not, a monument
+of wisdom, at least I give her credit for not being so obvious as
+_that_. No; she is treating me, as women always do, as a creature
+removed from all thoughts and hopes of love, a sexless being set apart
+like the priest in Catholic countries to be the safe recipient of tender
+confidences in which he can have no personal concern.’ Still he
+sometimes dreamed (as who may not at twenty-three?) of what life might
+come to mean if Love should breathe on its dry bones and bid them live;
+if it were possible that some maid more discerning than her fellows
+should see with the eye of the soul, beneath his dreary, unattractive
+exterior, the wealth of love that was waiting like the sleeping princess
+for the awakening kiss! ‘Perhaps I might even have the luck of the
+unhappy monster in _L’Homme qui rit_, and meet with a blind girl!’
+Hideousness, even deformity, was no bar to the love of woman, that he
+knew. He thought of Wilkes, of Mirabeau, of many others who had been
+more passionately loved than your pretty fellows. Deep in his heart he
+knew his real disability; it was not his lack of personal beauty, nor
+even his lameness that was the bar, but his miserable inherent
+effeminacy. A man might be never so uncouth, so that the manhood in him
+cried imperiously to the other sex and commanded surrender. ‘More like a
+woman in some ways.’ Had not Lady Eccleston said it? There lay the
+sting. And yet--who could tell? Might not a miracle be worked? Might he
+not some day find himself face to face with this stupendous, unhoped-for
+happiness?
+
+He wrote many poems at this time, poems not addressed to any concrete
+personality, but to that ‘not impossible she,’ the divine abstraction
+who should recognise and respond to what lay hidden in his heart. He
+felt very sure that Cissy Eccleston, with her frank pagan enjoyment of
+life and the moment, was not the lady of his dreams. Those little curved
+lips of hers might seek the red mouth of a lover, but would never bestow
+the heroic salute that should cleanse the leper, or restore his true
+form to the enchanted beast. Yet, forasmuch as he had seen so few girls,
+his Beatrice sometimes came to him clad in something of the outward
+semblance, the virginal candour and freshness of this sojourner within
+his gates. He found himself wondering if Lady Eccleston’s account of her
+daughter’s ermine-like recoil from all contact with moral impurity had
+any foundation in fact, or whether this fancy portrait of the girl dying
+of a stain on the premarital robe of her husband were not as purely
+fallacious as some of his mother’s theories about Arthur. It had been
+borne in on him that mothers were not always infallible in what
+concerned their children’s characters; he was farther rendered a little
+sceptical as to the young lady’s excessive innocence by some of her own
+conversation, and notably a certain curiosity displayed with what seemed
+to him a lack of delicacy on more than one occasion as to his
+unfortunate sister-in-law.
+
+‘Of course one knew all those girls by sight,’ she remarked, with
+engaging candour, ‘but I’m not sure just _which_ was Cynthia de Vere; it
+_was_ the tall one with the beautiful legs and the rather big mouth,
+wasn’t it? I told Tom so, and he said it wasn’t; but I’m sure I’m right,
+ain’t I?’
+
+On another occasion she startled him by the plainest possible reference
+to the relations of Charley Hunter and Miss Baynes.
+
+‘I didn’t know young ladies knew anything about such things,’ Sainty
+said rather severely.
+
+‘They do now,’ said Cissy, ‘whatever they used to; but I suspect they
+always knew more than they let on. There was a friend of mine who
+married Teddie Hersham last season; I was one of her bridesmaids; she
+was awfully proud of taking him away from Totty Seymour; she used to
+boast of it to all her friends.’
+
+‘I can’t bear to hear you talk like that,’ Sainty answered. ‘It would
+give people who didn’t know you such a wrong idea of you.’
+
+‘I’ll try not to, if you don’t like it; but it isn’t easy for me to
+pretend to be different to what I am.’
+
+‘I don’t want you to. I only ask you to be true to yourself, and not say
+things that I am sure are quite foreign to you for the sake of startling
+people.’
+
+‘Well, I must own I do enjoy shocking _you_. You are so awfully proper,
+you know; but why should you care what I do or say?’ she added, with a
+little arch glance.
+
+‘I don’t know, I’m sure, but I do. I suppose I--I like you too well not
+to mind your behaving in a way I don’t think worthy of you.’
+
+What wonder if Miss Eccleston found Claude Morland a more amusing
+companion than his cousin? Sainty was the first to admit the likelihood.
+He was well aware that Claude would not have offended her by championing
+her innocence against herself, or have made any difficulties about
+gratifying her girlish curiosity as to that other world of which she
+knew so little. The thought of Morland’s long, deft fingers delicately
+removing the bloom from this young creature irritated him unaccountably.
+Oh no! it was not jealousy; that, again, was what the stupid, knowing
+people would think; he could never care for this empty-headed little
+thing in that way, and knew only too well how much more impossible it
+was that _she_ should care for _him_. Only, he did not want her to
+suffer, nor to coarsen and deteriorate.
+
+He was revolving some such thoughts as these as he walked by himself one
+day, perhaps a week after his conversation with Lady Eccleston, when he
+was startled by loud cries from the neighbourhood of the pond, and made
+all the haste he was able in that direction. The air was certainly
+milder; there had been unmistakable premonitions of a thaw. He
+remembered the discussion at breakfast as to whether the ice would still
+bear, and the eager affirmations of the young Traffords and Ecclestons
+that it was as sound as ever. Bertie Trafford and Randolph Eccleston had
+been sliding all over it, and had even stamped in places to see if it
+would give way; but Mr. Danford, the agent, had come in in the course of
+the morning to say that it had a damp look about the edges he did not
+like, and to advise them to keep off it. Sainty had not been greatly
+interested; the pond, though large, was mostly artificial, and nowhere
+more than three or four feet deep, and if the boys liked to risk a
+wetting, it did not seem to him to matter much. Now his thoughts flew
+to Cissy; he wondered he had not thought of her before, and the next
+moment he turned a corner, and found himself one of an excited group,
+the centre of which was Claude, hatless, dishevelled, and very wet,
+bearing in his arms the inanimate form of Miss Eccleston. Her eyes were
+closed, and every trace of colour was gone from her face; her lips were
+blue, and the water ran in streams from her clothing. The boys crowded
+round, all talking at once, and making a number of foolish suggestions.
+
+‘Is she drowned? Is she dead?’ wailed little Randolph, and was sternly
+bidden by George not to be an ass unless he wanted to get kicked.
+
+‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ asked Sainty, and was conscious
+of saying the silly thing even before Claude answered with studied
+politeness, ‘Don’t you see? Miss Eccleston has caught fire, but we have
+luckily extinguished the flames.’
+
+Claude was seldom cross, but he hated scenes and emotions and spoilt
+clothes. ‘If some one would help me to get her up to the house it would
+be some use,’ he added; ‘and can’t any one lend a dry coat to wrap round
+her? Mine’s no good, it’s as wet as a sponge. Oh! not _you_, Sainty,
+_you_’ll catch cold.’
+
+A little way from the house they encountered Lady Eccleston, who had got
+wind of the catastrophe, and was hurrying to meet them; and Sainty was
+struck by the change in her manner in face of emergency. Her foolish
+flightiness seemed to have dropped from her like a garment that an
+athlete throws off. She had all her wits about her, and gave the most
+sensible directions. She had her daughter upstairs and in bed between
+warm blankets in less time than it takes to write it down, and by the
+afternoon she was able to report to them that Cissy was quite
+comfortable, only a little feverish and upset by the shock; but she did
+not think she would be much the worse for her wetting.
+
+Cissy, however, was a most unaccountable time in getting over that
+shock. Lady Eccleston expressed herself as amazed that her daughter
+should take so long to recover from so small a thing.
+
+‘Really, Lord Belchamber, I’m ashamed; you’ll think you are never going
+to get rid of us; but the doctor says positively that the child mustn’t
+come down yet. I can’t understand it at all, for the chill she has
+_quite_ got over. Of course she had a dreadful feverish cold, and at
+first we thought it would settle on her lungs, but, thank God! all
+danger of that seems at an end. Then I ask _what_ is the matter? and Dr.
+Lane says, “It’s the shock to the nervous system.” But I’m mortified. I
+really am. Do you know how long we’ve been here?’
+
+‘I don’t want to know, Lady Eccleston. I only know we are too glad to
+keep you as long as you can stay, and I am sure my mother feels as I do
+about it.’
+
+‘Oh! you are too kind about it, both of you! But one has _some_
+compunctions, you know. And after all your goodness about the boys and
+all!’
+
+George and Randolph had returned to Harrow, and Tom to his hated office
+in Throgmorton Avenue, Claude’s presence had been once more required by
+his respected chief, and the rest of the party had melted like the snow
+that had followed the long frost; but still Cissy lay in a most becoming
+pink dressing-gown in a small boudoir that had been arranged for her
+next her bedroom. It took Lady Eccleston days of modest trepidation to
+bring herself to admit Sainty to these sacred precincts. ‘Was she very
+unconventional? Well, she supposed she was--people always said so--but
+she was weak where her children were concerned, and Cissy had said, “Why
+_shouldn’t_ Lord Belchamber come to see me, mamma?” Not for worlds would
+she have introduced the ordinary young man’; and then Sainty was once
+more assured of his ‘difference,’ his purity, the perfect confidence an
+anxious mother could repose in him.
+
+‘Her brothers are gone, you see, and she misses them so, poor child. And
+though we are _such_ friends, an old woman is dull company _pour tout
+potage_; and then my wretched throat gives out; I am no good for reading
+aloud. Now it would be _angelic_ of you, if you would read to her a
+little; _would_ you? Oh! _how_ kind! She is a perfect baby about being
+read to; and you are so clever; you will know just what to read; you
+have such literary taste; everybody says so.’
+
+Thus Sainty found himself installed as reader to the invalid, and spent
+many hours a day by her sofa. At first Lady Eccleston was always there;
+then, when they were deep in their book, she would sometimes slip away
+to her voluminous correspondence or long consultations with her maid
+over the endless transmutations of her wardrobe. Sometimes Lady
+Charmington would look in, with a few words of grim tenderness, and lay
+a large cool hand on Cissy’s hair. Gradually the young people came to be
+left alone for longer and longer intervals. Belchamber rather wondered,
+himself, at the relaxation of all watchfulness on the part of their
+chaperons. ‘It is the old story,’ he told himself gloomily; ‘I am
+certainly not considered dangerous.’
+
+One day Lady Eccleston was much perturbed at breakfast over her letters.
+
+‘I don’t know what to do,’ she cried, ‘it is most unfortunate; do advise
+me, dear Lady Charmington. There are a dozen things I ought to be in
+London for. I have a committee on Tuesday; they say they can’t do
+without me; and things seem to be all at sixes and sevens at home: poor
+Tommy writes that he is most uncomfortable; he says the maids are always
+out, and he believes the cook gives parties; that there are--what is it?
+Oh! yes, here--“sounds of revelry by night”; he is always so absurd,
+poor dear; but it _is_ hard on him. I really feel we ought to go, and
+Cissy is just beginning at last to be a little better.’
+
+‘Why don’t you run up for a day or two, and do what you have to, attend
+to your committee, and give an eye to things in Chester Square?’ said
+Lady Charmington. ‘Leave Cissy to us, if you will trust us; we will take
+every care of her.’
+
+‘O dear Lady Charmington, I _couldn’t_; that _would_ be an imposition.
+Of course she would be ever so much better here, and she is so happy,
+poor child; Chester Square is so noisy, and of course directly she gets
+back to London, people will begin to want her to do things, and I shall
+never keep her quiet. But I simply couldn’t; it would be monstrous to
+put on you to such an extent.’
+
+‘Nonsense,’ said Lady Charmington. ‘It is a thousand pities to take her
+back to town just when she is getting on so well; a few weeks more of
+good air and rest will do everything for her; she must come downstairs
+first, go out for a few drives, before she thinks of a journey. Don’t
+you agree with me, Sainty?’
+
+‘Of course we shall be only too glad, if you think Miss Eccleston would
+not be dull----’ Sainty began.
+
+‘Ah! dear Lord Belchamber! dear Lady Charmington! how good you both
+are!’ cried the tender mother. ‘I am ashamed, positively ashamed, but
+what can I say? She will be overjoyed. She had to gulp down a big lump
+in her throat when I told her we must go home; she was so good, she
+wouldn’t say anything, but _I_ could see; love sharpens our wits when it
+is a question of our children’s happiness, doesn’t it, dear?’
+
+‘It is generally not difficult to see through young people,’ said Lady
+Charmington. Sainty was wondering if the necessity for Lady Eccleston’s
+presence in London had arisen out of the letters she had received since
+she came downstairs, when she could have had the conversation on the
+subject which had brought the lump into her daughter’s throat, but he
+was too polite to inquire.
+
+The conclusion of the whole matter, as might have been foreseen, was
+that Lady Eccleston departed to London, leaving Cissy at Belchamber, and
+the readings were continued with even less supervision than before.
+
+Cissy’s literary taste was decidedly undeveloped, and it may be doubted
+if some of her host’s finest reading was not merely an accompaniment to
+the thinking out of new hats; but Sainty enjoyed immensely introducing
+a novice to his best beloved authors, and the new sensation of being
+able to minister to a sufferer, and lighten the long hours of some of
+their dullness and depression. He wasted an immense amount of care and
+thought on the selection of suitable gems, passages that should be
+characteristic and of the highest beauty, and yet milk to the
+intellectual babe. Sometimes he almost forgot his listener in the
+pleasure of voicing things long dear to himself, especially poetry, and
+he read a good deal of poetry. Cissy displayed but little enthusiasm;
+she always thanked him very prettily when he finished, if she was not
+asleep, and ‘hoped it didn’t bore him awfully,’ but she made few
+comments, and listened for the most part in silence and often with her
+eyes closed. Sainty put down her apparent indifference to the languor of
+convalescence. Once, indeed, she startled him by the energy of her
+appreciation. He was reading _Maud_ to her, and she had several times
+disappointed him with a calm ‘very pretty’ when he had paused after some
+exquisite lyric that left him vibrating like a harpstring. When,
+however, he came to--
+
+    ‘Oh that ‘twere possible
+      After long grief and pain
+     To find the arms of my true love
+      Round me once again!’
+
+her quickened respiration showed her interest; and at the stanza
+beginning ‘When I was wont to meet her,’ she half raised herself, saying
+eagerly, ‘I like that; read that bit again, please; do you mind?’ and on
+Sainty’s complying, she repeated dreamily to herself, as though the
+words called up some image that gave her pleasure,
+
+    ‘We stood tranced in long embraces,
+     Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter
+     Than anything on earth.’
+
+‘Who did you say wrote that?’ she asked. ‘Oh! of course, yes, Tennyson,’
+and with a great sigh she sank back on her cushions. Then she looked
+suddenly at him, as though she feared she had betrayed something, and
+flushed crimson. ‘Go on,’ she murmured; ‘beg pardon,’ and relapsed into
+her habitual expression of polite endurance. Next day she asked him to
+lend her the book, as she wanted to copy some of it out.
+
+Sainty was delighted, but surprised.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Lady Eccleston’s business kept her in London longer than she expected.
+Each day brought hurried notes from her, full of regrets and apologies,
+compunction for all the trouble they were giving, but joy that her dear
+child was in such good, kind hands, and a plentiful supply of a mother’s
+blessings. She was a swift and copious letter-writer, economising time
+by the ruthless excision of articles, pronouns, and other short words.
+Tommy always declared that his mother could write two letters at once,
+one with each hand, and interview the cook at the same time.
+
+Breakfast in bed was the last lingering trace of Cissy’s mysterious
+ailment, by the time her parent reappeared upon the scene.
+
+‘What have you done to my little girl?’ cried Lady Eccleston in a
+transport of gratitude; ‘she is a different child.’ And truly it would
+have been hard to find a more blooming specimen of girlhood. Indeed,
+when you come to think of it, six weeks is a liberal allowance of time
+for a perfectly healthy young woman to get over the effects of a
+momentary immersion in cold water.
+
+‘You have been so kind to my darling,’ Lady Eccleston said to Sainty.
+‘She has been telling me of all your delightful talks and readings; it
+is just what she needed, a little intercourse with a really cultivated
+mind. She has always felt the dissatisfaction of the frivolous life of
+society; there has been the desire to improve herself, the love of
+reading, but no one to guide her taste, or put her in the right way.
+Now, if you would draw up a little table of reading for her, tell her
+_what_ to read, and in what order and connection, it would be just
+everything for her; and perhaps even her ignorant old mother might find
+a little leisure now and then to profit by your help. One is never too
+old to learn, you know.’
+
+So Sainty drew up tables, lent books, and marked passages, like the
+simple little pedant that he was, but without producing any very marked
+impression on Cissy’s fundamental ignorance. Sometimes he wondered if
+the girl were not very dull at Belchamber, and how it was that people
+who had always seemed to have so many engagements could spare so much
+time to one house. It is true that Lady Eccleston was perpetually
+threatening departure, but she was as often persuaded to remain by the
+very mildest expostulation that civility demanded.
+
+At last a date was definitely fixed, and Sainty had to acknowledge to
+himself that he would miss the charming companion of his walks and
+drives. He felt tolerably sure that he was not in the least in love with
+Cissy, but he had come to feel a sort of tender protecting friendship
+for her, an interest in her welfare, and a desire to shield her from
+evil and unhappiness. Thus, one day, when he had heard raised voices and
+rather excited talking as he passed Lady Eccleston’s door, and Cissy had
+appeared at lunch with red eyes, he burned to know what was wrong, and
+if possible to help and comfort her. Sorrow seemed so inappropriate to
+this bright young creature; yet, during the last few days of the
+Ecclestons’ stay, the air was heavy with suppressed tears. It was like
+the weather when people look each evening at the clearing heavens and
+say, ‘There must have been a storm somewhere’; an actual shower would
+have been a relief. To a person of Sainty’s temperament such a state of
+things was unendurable. He could not ask Cissy what was wrong; she who
+had been so ready to walk, or drive, or read, seemed suddenly to have
+become unapproachable.
+
+One day he watched the mother and daughter returning from a walk. They
+were talking excitedly in low hurried voices and with a good deal of
+gesture; it was obvious even at a distance that they were discussing no
+ordinary topics, and what is more that they were having a decided
+difference of opinion. Lady Eccleston seemed to be appealing urgently
+about something. Sainty saw her lay her hand not too gently on her
+daughter’s arm, but the girl threw it off with an impatient gesture,
+broke from her, and fairly ran towards the house.
+
+So swift and unexpected was her coming that Sainty had no time to
+withdraw, and they met in the hall. Cissy’s face was working, her eyes
+dry and burning.
+
+‘Miss Eccleston--Cissy,’ said Belchamber, ‘what is wrong? Can I do
+anything----’
+
+At sight of him she started away like a shying horse.
+
+‘Oh, let me alone!’ she cried, and hurried upstairs, and Sainty could
+hear her sobbing as she went. At that moment Lady Eccleston appeared
+upon the scene, with heightened colour and decidedly out of breath. An
+indefinable change came over her expression as she saw the young man, a
+certain exultation seemed to leap in her eyes, to be immediately
+extinguished in a confusion which had every appearance of being genuine.
+
+‘Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, moving eagerly to meet her, ‘what is the
+matter with Cissy?’ He did not notice that in his excitement he had
+twice called the girl by her Christian name.
+
+‘O Lord Belchamber, how unfortunate! I would have given worlds not to
+have met you just now. Give me a minute or two, I’m all upset.’
+
+Sainty opened the door of the morning-room and ushered the agitated lady
+in there. His heart was beating uncomfortably; he felt something
+decisive was going to happen. Lady Eccleston sank into a chair and
+struggled with emotion, giving vent to a series of little sniffs and
+hiccoughs, and dabbing her eyes and mouth with her pocket-handkerchief.
+
+‘To-morrow we should have gone, and you need never have known,’ she said
+at last in broken accents.
+
+‘Known what? I don’t understand.’
+
+‘I blame myself,’ Lady Eccleston went on, not heeding the interruption.
+‘It was my fault; I ought to have had more foresight and discretion; I
+see it all now. If Sir Thomas had only been spared it would never have
+happened; he had such sterling sense.’
+
+‘Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’ Sainty asked.
+
+‘I alone am to blame,’ Lady Eccleston repeated tragically. ‘Of course I
+see it now. You are both so young, so pure-minded, so unsophisticated;
+and dear Lady Charmington has lived so long out of the world; but _I_
+ought to have seen. Oh! I am inexcusable. But I did hope at least _you_
+would never know’; and like Agamemnon she once more veiled her grief.
+
+‘I might have known, I might have been sure,’ she continued after a
+pause. ‘Heaven knows I have enough reason to know how malicious people
+are, but my belief in my fellow-creatures is incurable. I can _not_
+bring myself to realise the love of scandal in evil-minded people.’
+
+‘Good heavens!’ said Sainty, now thoroughly alarmed. ‘What can you mean?
+Surely no one has presumed----’
+
+‘People have talked,’ Lady Eccleston mourned. ‘Cissy being here so long,
+and my leaving her here, and all. It seems people have drawn all sorts
+of silly conclusions. I have been asked---- I can’t say it; you can
+guess what; and the poor child has had letters, hints, and
+congratulations, and all that; you can fancy it has upset her terribly;
+she is almost beside herself; I can do nothing with her; you saw her
+just now’; and Lady Eccleston took a little side-glance at Sainty behind
+her pocket-handkerchief. ‘Of course, _I_ understand perfectly, and so
+does she; but I see how it would strike outsiders. Oh! why is one always
+wise after the event? Now you see why I am so angry with myself.’
+
+Sainty was much perturbed. ‘This is monstrous, monstrous!’ he cried;
+‘that she should be annoyed, distressed in this way, is horrible. I
+hope, Lady Eccleston, you don’t think that I have behaved badly, that I
+have taken any advantage of the confidence with which you have honoured
+me.’
+
+‘Oh dear no, Lord Belchamber; you have been kindness itself, and so has
+your dear mother. I never can forget all your goodness. I knew how
+absolutely I could trust _you_; but I ought to have thought, to have
+remembered. Well, I had hoped and meant that at least we alone should
+bear the burthen. This is an ill return to make to you for all your
+sweetness and hospitality. You will wish you had never heard our name.’
+
+‘Believe me, I am not thinking at all about myself. The one question is,
+how is Miss Eccleston to be shielded from any annoyance in the matter?
+It is intolerable that she should have to suffer.’
+
+‘How like you! always so noble and unselfish,’ said Lady Eccleston
+fervently. ‘I shall always remember how splendidly you have behaved. I
+don’t blame _you_ for a single instant, but I can never forgive
+_myself_. It is so like me; I am so impulsive. I thought only of the
+immense benefit it would be to her intellectually, the intercourse with
+such a mind as yours. I should have recollected there were dangers; that
+at her age the intellect plays but a very small part beside the
+heart----’
+
+‘Good gracious! you don’t mean that she has thought me capable of
+pestering her with my attentions? I knew well enough that I was only
+allowed such liberty because--because I was different from other men.’
+
+‘No, no; I don’t _think_ she thought anything of it. _I_ should have
+known that it was only your kindness to a poor little invalid, your
+desire to instruct a little ignoramus. But Cissy is very young; she may
+have fancied---- Oh! I don’t know what I’m saying.’
+
+Sainty had grown very pale; he had to hold on to a table for support.
+
+‘Lady Eccleston,’ he said in a low voice, ‘you can’t mean to imply that
+Miss Eccleston could possibly care for _me_ in that way.’
+
+‘Lord Belchamber, this is unfair,’ cried Lady Eccleston, starting up.
+‘You have no right to try and force the child’s poor little secret from
+me. You found me all unstrung after a terrible talk with her, and I have
+let out far more than I should. I have told you I entirely exonerate you
+from all blame; I appreciate that your motive was pure kindness. Is not
+that enough for you? If people have been tiresome and tactless it is not
+your fault, still less hers, poor girl. I blame _myself_, as I say, more
+than I can tell you, but that has nothing to do with you. If I have been
+foolish I am more than punished; but I only regret that I cannot bear
+_all_ the punishment; we never can. The fault or folly, call it what you
+will, was mine, but much of the price must be paid by my poor innocent
+child--that is the thought that unnerves me’; and her ladyship once more
+had recourse to her pocket-handkerchief. ‘She has no father,’ she
+wailed; ‘her brothers are mere children in knowledge of the world; and
+I, her mother, who should have shielded her from trouble, in my blind,
+foolish desire to procure her a little intellectual advantage, have
+brought on her the bitterest trial of her life.’
+
+Sainty was twisting his stick in his fingers in great agitation. ‘It is
+too bad, too bad,’ he said, ‘that she should be pestered like this and
+made unhappy. I would do anything in my power to repair the harm of
+which I have been the unwitting cause. But if the trouble is, as I
+suppose, only what stupid people have been saying or writing to her, I
+don’t see what I can do. Poor child! I can well understand how her pride
+and delicacy must have been hurt.’
+
+‘No, no; there is nothing to be done, nothing,’ said Lady Eccleston. ‘I
+never meant that you should know; and, Lord Belchamber, promise me one
+thing: never refer to this to Cissy; she would die of shame, if she
+thought I had told you. We are going to-morrow; try and forget what I
+have said, especially--especially----’ and she broke off abruptly, and
+made a stumbling grope at the door-handle, as though she would leave the
+room.
+
+‘Stop a minute, please,’ Sainty cried, interposing. ‘Don’t go. I don’t
+want to be indiscreet, but you said something just now which seemed to
+hint---- Oh! I know it’s incredible; but don’t you see, it would make
+all the difference whether her distress came _only_ from the
+mortification of people having coupled our names, or if it was possible
+that she could look on me as--as----’
+
+‘Say no more, say no more. I understand you perfectly,’ interrupted Lady
+Eccleston. ‘You are the soul of punctilious honour. You are capable of
+any sacrifice, if you thought that even, as you said just now,
+_unwittingly_ you had made a poor girl care for you; but I have not said
+it, and I will not say it. I have pride for her, as I should have it for
+myself. I would _never_ admit it. You are perfectly justified in
+believing that her distress arises _solely_ from what people have said,’
+and this time the lady, with a magnificent gesture of renunciation,
+really did get to the door, and left Sainty in a whirl of conflicting
+emotions. Was it possible that he had touched the heart of this
+beautiful young creature? It was inconceivable that _she_ should be in
+love with _him_, and he turned with a pathetic smile to the long glass
+between the two tall windows. Yet her mother had seemed to hint it. If
+it were so, then there was nothing simpler than saving her from trouble.
+A word would do it. But it could not be; the thing was unthinkable. And
+he fell to wondering if he wished to think it, or not. What was his
+feeling towards her? Was this protecting, pitying tenderness, this
+longing to interpose between her and sorrow, was this love? It was very
+unlike what he had dreamed it to be. But was not everything in life
+strangely unlike our young idea of it? And ought he to consider his own
+feelings in the matter at all? If, however innocently, he had led her to
+think he cared for her, if in her youth and inexperience she had
+mistaken his friendship, his interest in her studies, for a warmer
+feeling; above all, if the inscrutable workings of the female heart had
+led her for some mysterious reason to return it, was he not in honour
+bound to think only of her happiness in the matter? If a young and
+beautiful woman had done him this honour, was it for him, him of all
+people, to feel anything but humblest gratitude? The thought was not
+without a certain sweetness that a woman had recognised the qualities of
+his head and heart, to the extent of forgetting his lack of all that
+women most prized in man, strength, courage, virility. He acknowledged
+that a man could not have done so, that had the positions been reversed,
+had he been handsome, vigorous, physically attractive, she ugly,
+misshapen, unhealthy, no beauties of the soul would have stirred in him
+the wish to make her his wife. He bowed his head in awe before the
+greater spirituality of woman; even a thoughtless London girl brought up
+among worldly surroundings and low ideals was capable of higher flights
+than the most refined and least carnal of men. And he had presumed to
+patronise, almost to look down on her, because she had not dulled the
+edge of her originality with much reading. After all, why did he
+hesitate? Had he not dreamed of some such possibility as this, yet
+hardly dared to hope for it? Was it likely that two women would be found
+willing to overlook his many deficiencies? was not this precisely the
+one chance of his life? His mother had said she wished him to marry. His
+mother! Strange that he had not thought of her sooner! He would go and
+consult his mother; _she_ would know better than any one how to advise
+him.
+
+Lady Charmington listened indulgently to his recital. She did not seem
+surprised.
+
+‘I thought all that poetry reading would come to something of the sort,’
+she said.
+
+‘I can’t make out now,’ said Sainty, ‘whether what is troubling her is
+anything more than resentment of idle gossip, the natural repulsion of a
+delicate-minded girl from having her name coupled with a man’s.’
+
+‘Oh, I suspect it is more,’ said his mother. ‘But you? Are you fond of
+the girl on your side?’
+
+‘I don’t know that I am in love with her, even now, and I certainly
+never dreamed of the possibility of _her_ being in love with _me_.’
+
+‘Well, her mother certainly gave you to understand that she was; it is
+unfortunate if you have made the poor girl care for you, and don’t feel
+you can return it.’
+
+‘Good heavens, mother! If it were possible that such a creature had
+really stooped to love me, I ought to thank her on my knees.’
+
+‘I don’t quite see _that_; but I should be sorry to have any one able to
+say that you had trifled with her. You see, her mother left her in my
+charge; and I suppose I ought not to have let you be so much alone
+together.’
+
+‘But surely,’ cried Sainty, ‘you don’t think I am capable of taking
+advantage of the confidence reposed in me, to--to---- Oh! the idea is
+ludicrous; you must see its absurdity.’
+
+‘I must say you have given the girl every reason to think you liked
+her,’ said his mother judicially. ‘I have never seen you show the same
+desire for anybody’s society before; it is not surprising if she mistook
+the nature of your attentions. Pretty girls are not in the habit of
+having young men so devoted to the improvement of their minds.’
+
+‘I would not “behave badly,” as people call it, for worlds,’ said
+Sainty. ‘I only can’t get over the extreme grotesqueness of its being
+possible for me to do so. In spite of both you and Lady Eccleston, it
+still seems to me quite incredible that I should rouse any such feeling
+in her.’
+
+‘There is a very simple way of finding out,’ said Lady Charmington.
+
+‘But how if in her kindness and inexperience she is mistaking pity,
+gratitude, affection--call it what you will--for Love? It is possible
+even (God forgive me for thinking of such a thing!) that the
+surroundings, the place, the name, the whole business may have acted on
+her almost unconsciously, and helped her to mistake her own heart.’
+
+‘Judge not,’ said Lady Charmington, with all the air of one who had
+never done such a thing in her life; ‘I should be sorry to think so
+badly of the poor child as that.’
+
+‘Oh, I didn’t mean to blame her. I am sure she would not _consciously_
+have let such considerations weigh with her; but it seems so abnormal
+that any woman should feel anything like love for me, that I am still
+trying to find some explanation to fit the facts.’
+
+Lady Charmington laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘My dear boy,’ she said,
+‘you are not called upon to understand _her_ feelings; what you have got
+to do is to try and understand your own. It has been the dearest wish of
+my heart to see you happily married; especially since your brother’s
+behaviour has brought such bitter sorrow and disgrace upon us all. Here
+is a nice, good girl, well brought up, and I think she loves you. The
+question is whether you like her well enough to make her your wife.’
+
+Sainty shook his head. ‘The question is whether I could make her happy,’
+he said; ‘what have I to give her in exchange for the priceless treasure
+of a good woman’s love?’
+
+Dinner that evening was a cheerless meal. Lady Charmington, never a
+great talker, was more than ordinarily silent. Belchamber made several
+attempts to start a conversation on indifferent subjects, and Lady
+Eccleston chattered feverishly, with one eye on him and one on her
+daughter, who sat sullen and defiant and ate nothing. Sainty’s heart
+smote him as he looked on her. Whether their two mothers were right or
+not, he would speak to her after dinner. If she took him, he would
+consecrate his life to her happiness. If, as he still thought far more
+likely, their wishes had misled them, and she did not care for him, she
+had only to refuse him, and her pride was healed. Then, when her friends
+said, ‘We thought you were going to marry Lord Belchamber,’ she would
+only have to say, ‘He wanted me to, poor man, but I couldn’t do it.’
+That he was thinking entirely of _her_ happiness showed how little he
+was really in love with her, but that neither affected his decision nor
+seemed to him to matter in the least.
+
+Lady Charmington was a skilled and experienced knitter, and Lady
+Eccleston, who kept a bit of property crochet to hook at when she was
+with other women who worked, became surprisingly interested in the
+intricacies of the garment on which her friend was engaged. Her voluble
+inquiries and apologies for her own stupidity kept up a running
+accompaniment to the click-clack of the needles and Lady Charmington’s
+occasional terse explanations. Cissy had withdrawn to the extreme other
+end of the long room in which they sat, and pretended to immerse herself
+in a book. Sainty drew a chair up to hers, so as to interpose the view
+of his own back between her and the two older women.
+
+‘Miss Eccleston,’ he said, ‘I have got something I want to say to you.’
+
+Cissy looked up from her book. ‘Yes?’ was all she said. Her attitude
+expressed only weariness; she did not appear to be at all fluttered.
+
+‘You are worried, unhappy,’ Sainty went on. ‘I am afraid you have been
+annoyed by people gossiping about your stay here, about the relations
+between you and me.’ He spoke in a low voice, for her ear alone; he was
+looking into her eyes, trying to surprise some indication of what effect
+his words had on her. Cissy did not look down or betray any
+embarrassment.
+
+‘I suppose mamma told you that?’ she said.
+
+‘I can’t bear to see you like this, and to know that, however
+unintentionally, I am the cause.’
+
+‘Oh! that’s all right; I am sure you meant nothing but what was kind.’
+
+‘Miss Eccleston--Cissy, I want to tell you I am quite well aware of the
+extreme unlikelihood of your being able to care for me. I understand
+that you should be angry and sore at vulgar people’s mistaking the
+nature of our friendship. I am not silly or vain enough to suppose that
+you would be willing to marry me; but remember if any one ever says
+anything more to you about this, your position is quite simple; you have
+only to say you have refused me----’
+
+Cissy never shifted her calm, level gaze. ‘Lord Belchamber,’ she said
+quietly, ‘am I to understand that you are proposing to me?’
+
+‘I don’t for a moment expect you to accept me; I just want you to know,
+and other people to know, that if you don’t it is entirely because you
+don’t wish to.’
+
+‘I see; you mean you will make me a sham proposal, on the distinct
+understanding that I say “no,” so that I may have the satisfaction of
+telling my friends that I might have been a marchioness if I’d liked;
+but you’d be awfully sold if I said “yes.”’
+
+‘You know I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ said Sainty. ‘But I know
+how hopeless it is that a girl like you should care for a man like me,
+and I wouldn’t insult you by supposing that anything I have to offer
+could make any difference. I don’t want to add to your troubles the pain
+of thinking I had hoped you might accept me and that you have got to
+disappoint me.’
+
+‘Then it _is_ a _bonâ fide_ offer that you are making me?’ said Cissy
+sardonically; her tone expressed anything but exultation, and though she
+still looked at him her eyes seemed to be looking at some one else a
+long way off. ‘It’s the queerest proposal, I should think, any one ever
+made,’ and she gave a little dry laugh. ‘Take care I don’t accept it.
+Whatever you may think, a little pauper like me might well be tempted by
+what you have to offer, as you call it.’
+
+‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that,’ Sainty said. ‘I know it is
+only a joke, but there are things I don’t like joked about. That’s the
+way you used to talk, but you’ve been so different lately.’
+
+‘Lord Belchamber,’ said Cissy, ‘let’s understand one another. If you are
+making me an offer out of chivalry, that I may have an answer to
+people’s malicious chatter, I can only say I’m very much obliged to you;
+but if you really want me to marry you, I’m quite ready to do so. I
+can’t say fairer than that, can I? After all,’ she added in a softer
+tone, ‘quite apart from worldly considerations, I think I might do much
+worse for myself; you’ve been very good to me, and you’re a much better
+sort than--than most of the men I’ve met,’ and for the first time she
+looked away, and gave a little sigh.
+
+Sainty was much moved. ‘Cissy,’ he said, ‘do you really mean that in
+spite of everything you think you could love me a little?’ and he tried
+to take her hand; but at the touch of him the girl flung herself back
+into the furthest corner of the big chair in which she sat, and her
+glance once more crossed his, steel-bright like a rapier. ‘Do I
+understand,’ she asked, ‘that I have your authority to announce our
+engagement to our respective parents?’
+
+Sainty stared blankly; he could only nod. Cissy wheeled her chair
+sharply back, and called out, ‘Mamma! Lord Belchamber has proposed to
+me, and I have accepted him.’
+
+Lady Eccleston was across the room in two bounds. ‘My darling, what a
+way to tell me such a thing! You really are the strangest child. What
+can Lord Belchamber and Lady Charmington think of you? Dear Lady
+Charmington, you must forgive my Cissy; she’s so excitable, I think
+happiness has turned her head a little; and mine too, for that matter,
+for it would be useless to pretend I’m not delighted, only it is all so
+sudden, so unexpected,’ and she clasped her daughter to her heart, and
+kissed and wept over her in the most approved fashion. Cecilia did not
+return her mother’s kisses; she looked at her with a very queer eye
+indeed, before which Lady Eccleston’s effusiveness drooped a little. She
+turned to her future son-in-law and held out both her hands. ‘Dear
+Sainty (I may call you Sainty?), I must kiss you too,’ she cried.
+
+As Sainty submitted to the threatened salute, it struck him as grimly
+humorous that it should not be his intended who kissed him, but her
+mother.
+
+Cissy crossed the room, and picked up the ball of wool which Lady
+Eccleston had shed in her rapid transit, and by which she was still
+fastened like a spider to the place where she had been sitting. ‘Lady
+Charmington,’ she said, ‘mamma has adopted your son with great
+readiness; have you nothing to say to me? Are you not pleased?’
+
+Lady Charmington had risen and laid aside her work. ‘Of course I am
+pleased,’ she said; ‘I have wished, of all things, to see Sainty
+married; but, my dear,’ she added, something in the girl’s manner
+seeming to strike her as peculiar, ‘I hope you are not taking this
+solemn step lightly; have you examined your heart, and asked God’s
+blessing on what you are doing? Are you sure you love my son enough to
+be happy with him, and to make him happy?’
+
+But Lady Eccleston was a whirlwind of tears, protestations, laughter,
+and congratulation; she caught them all up, and swept them away in the
+current of her rejoicing. No one else was allowed to say anything.
+
+Sainty also had drawn near, and now stood before his mother. She took a
+hand of each of the young people in hers, and said solemnly ‘God bless
+you, my children.’
+
+At the moment Sainty had a vision of the intensity with which she had
+cursed her other son, on a like occasion, and thought irresistibly of
+the fountain that ‘sent forth sweet water and bitter.’ The context rang
+in his head like a knell: ‘My brethren, these things ought not to be.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The wedding was fixed for the first week in June. As Lady Charmington
+said, there was no reason for delay, though it must be owned that
+neither of the young people seemed very eager to press on the date. Lady
+Eccleston could not have borne a wedding in Lent, and Lady Charmington
+had a lingering old Scottish superstition, of which she was heartily
+ashamed, against May marriages. All things considered, the beginning of
+June seemed plainly indicated. Everybody would be in town then, and it
+was to be a London wedding. Cissy grumbled a good deal at having to miss
+the season; but her mother affected to treat her lamentations as a joke.
+
+‘Of _course_ she doesn’t mean it,’ she said, in answer to Sainty’s
+expression of his willingness to consult Cissy’s wishes in everything.
+‘You know how absurd my children are; they always must make a joke of
+everything, but it doesn’t mean that their hearts are not in the right
+place; under all their nonsense, which I never check, for I do so love
+to see them merry, they have very serious feelings about all the big
+things of life.’
+
+A cousin of Lady Eccleston’s, who was married to a newly-made peer with
+a large income, and who had never before shown the slightest inclination
+to do much for her poorer kinsfolk, expressed her approval of Cissy’s
+brilliant match by offering the use of her house for the occasion.
+
+‘It is very good of dear Louisa,’ said Lady Eccleston, ‘and I must own
+we should have been sadly squashed in our little _bicoque_. Still, if we
+hadn’t always been _as_ sisters, I couldn’t have taken it from her. Poor
+dear! It is such a bitter regret to her having no children of her own.
+Naturally, mine are a great deal to her; and I can quite understand her
+pleasure in having Cissy married from her house. Don’t think I’m
+ungrateful to the dear creature, Sainty, but I own in my heart I would
+rather have had the girl go to her bridal from her own and her mother’s
+little home; but that is _entre nous_, my dear boy; I wouldn’t hurt poor
+Louisa’s feelings for worlds.’
+
+Sainty found being engaged very different from anything he had read of
+it. Things seemed so little changed with him, that he wondered at times
+if it could really be he who was to be married in a few weeks. Was it
+possible that at a date definitely fixed, and not very far distant, his
+whole being was to undergo this tremendous transformation, was
+henceforth to be linked in closest union with a creature of whom he knew
+practically nothing, and that not for a season, like any other
+circumstance in life, but as long ‘as they both should live,’ ‘till
+death did them part’? The prospect terrified rather than attracted him.
+
+Sometimes he tried to feel elated at the thought that he was to join the
+ranks of normal happy people who love and are loved, was to lead about a
+wife like other men, and hold up his head among his fellows. He told
+himself that this supremest gift was far beyond anything he had dared to
+hope. It was to no purpose. He might be flattered, grateful, touched,
+but he was conscious of none of that blissful thrill that is said to
+transfigure existence and make a heaven on earth. Sometimes he wondered
+how it had all come about so suddenly. Everything he had done had seemed
+not only natural, but inevitable at the time. He had walked into the
+situation as simply as going in to dinner; yet now there were moments
+when the thought of what they had both undertaken appalled him. He was
+as frightened for Cissy as for himself. Did she know what she was doing,
+what it meant? A dozen times a day he recalled the scene in the library,
+her hard, unflinching gaze, the mocking tones of her voice. Was that the
+way that a woman made the ‘irrevocable sweet surrender’ to a man who had
+won her heart? If she had made a mistake, if she did not love him,
+ought she not still to be saved from the fate she had accepted, even at
+the eleventh hour?
+
+He saw extremely little of his betrothed. He had never had much to do
+with engaged couples, but he had an impression that they were generally
+left a good deal alone together, that people and things combined to
+respect the privacy of mutual love; yet from the day of his engagement
+it was no exaggeration to say that he had hardly seen Cissy alone for
+five minutes. It is true that she had not actually left Belchamber next
+morning; but after their surprising freedom from other claims, both she
+and her mother seemed now all impatience to be gone, and during the time
+that they remained, they were mostly shut up in their own rooms
+announcing the event to a hundred correspondents, or dashing off their
+thanks for the congratulations that arrived by every post. ‘She must
+really get home, and begin to see about clothes; there was none too much
+time, and this was such a bad time of year; just when every one was
+busy.’ Cissy was sure, if she delayed another day, she ‘shouldn’t have a
+decent rag to her back, and should have to be married in her
+petticoats.’
+
+From the day they went to town there began a round of shoppings and
+tryings-on, of scribbling notes, unpacking, cataloguing, and rapturously
+thanking for wedding-presents, which, as Cissy was marrying a rich man
+with a house full of beautiful things, were, of course, far more
+numerous and costly than if she had married a curate, or a captain in a
+marching regiment. Then the list of people to be invited to the wedding
+had to be discussed _ad infinitum_, at first with regard to the size of
+the house in Chester Square, and after the cousin’s offer, to be
+enlarged, amended, and corrected. With every fresh batch of presents,
+the number swelled of those whom it was deemed indispensable to ask,
+till it seemed to Sainty that there was not a stranger in the whole
+great indifferent city who had not been called in to assist at his
+nuptials.
+
+He also had come to town, as in duty bound, and was staying with his
+uncle Firth, but though he spent several hours a day in Chester Square,
+he found himself horribly in the way there. Lady Eccleston and Cissy sat
+squashed sideways by the open drawers of their respective
+writing-tables, like people playing a perpetual duet on two organs with
+all the stops pulled out. The absurdly inadequate pieces of furniture on
+which women transact business became so littered with lists, letters,
+acceptances, refusals, the drawers so bulged with stacks of
+silver-printed invitations and stamped envelopes, that the little hands
+with the scratching pens seemed by their perpetual movement to be
+feverishly preserving an ever narrowing space for themselves, as ducks
+keep a hole open in a rapidly freezing pond.
+
+Of happy interchange of rapturous feelings, murmured talks in quiet
+corners, or those long palpitating silences that lovers know, too
+blissful to be marred by talk, our engaged couple had no experience.
+Though Sainty was far too delicate-minded for the mere physical aspects
+of courtship to appeal strongly to his imagination, it did occur to him
+that an occasional embrace was not inappropriate between people about to
+be married; but on the one occasion when he attempted anything of the
+sort, he had been repulsed with such energy and decision that he had
+immediately desisted. He had a conviction that Cissy thought him a fool
+for accepting defeat so easily, but to struggle for a kiss like an
+enamoured costermonger was repugnant to all his ideas. So he continued
+to meet and greet his promised bride as though she were the most
+indifferent of strangers.
+
+One morning at breakfast he asked his uncle if he ought not to make his
+betrothed a present. Lord Firth came out from behind the morning paper
+with a bound.
+
+‘My dear boy! do you mean to say you haven’t done so?’
+
+‘Not yet,’ said Sainty; ‘but I supposed, of course, I should have to.’
+
+‘Not even a ring?’ asked Lord Firth. Sainty was forced to admit it.
+
+‘Why, the very day she accepted you, you ought to have given her a ring;
+if you hadn’t got one fit to offer her, you should have telegraphed to
+town at once for some. You must get one at once and take it to her; and,
+of course, you must give her other things too, a tiara or necklace or
+something really handsome, and a bag or dressing-case. You know the kind
+of thing. Find out from her mother what she’s got, and which she would
+like, and get the duchess to help you choose things; _she_ knows what’s
+what. They must think it very odd that you haven’t done it already.’
+
+‘There are the emeralds,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘Of course she’ll have them to wear,’ said his uncle, ‘but you can’t
+_give_ them to her, because they are heirlooms. As it happens, the one
+thing you are rather poor in is jewellery. Your grandmother had a lot,
+but it was her own, and you may believe she didn’t leave any behind her;
+your mother never cared for it, and never had much. She will probably
+give your wife, or leave her, what she has; but of course you must see
+that she has the proper things, and do the thing well. Don’t be stingy
+about it.’
+
+The duchess was delighted to help, and echoed Lord Firth’s astonishment
+at Sainty’s dilatoriness in the matter.
+
+‘You really are the most extraordinary boy,’ she said. ‘I’m just going
+for my walk; we’ll go round to Rumond’s at once and see what he’s got.’
+
+‘We’ve been expecting a visit from your lordship,’ said the great
+jeweller unctuously, ‘ever since we heard the happy news. May I be
+permitted to offer my congratulations on the event? We have always had
+the honour of supplying your family, and hoped that on such an occasion
+you would not desert us. I was remarking to Mr. Diby only the other day
+that I had been wondering we did not get a telegram to go down to
+Belchamber--either he or I would have been delighted; but you preferred
+to wait till you came to town: quite right, quite right.’
+
+They were ushered into a little sanctum, where presently on a mat of
+dark blue velvet were displayed treasures which made Sainty blink, and
+of which the prices gave him cold shivers down his back. The duchess
+handled and appraised the gems with the sangfroid of long habit; but her
+grandson had never in his life had occasion to buy any jewellery, and
+had not the faintest idea of what such things were worth. To deck the
+bright curls of a woman with the cost of a hospital, or hang the price
+of a working-men’s college round her neck, seemed to him absolutely
+vicious; it had a horrible flavour of that life into which he had
+obtained his only glimpse at Arthur’s supper-party--poor Arthur, whom
+almost alone he would have cared to have near him on his wedding-day,
+and who he knew would not be there, because his wife could not be asked.
+
+He left the shop with a horrible sense of guilt, and a feeling that the
+act which in him would be applauded as a fitting generosity was very
+much in the same category with his brother’s prodigalities, not
+differing in kind, but only so much more blameworthy as it was so much
+greater in degree. Arthur, he felt sure, would not have hesitated to
+hang the girl of his heart in jewels, nor have wasted a thought on what
+it cost, and again he wondered whether his qualms were the result of his
+well-known parsimony, or one more proof that he was not really in love
+with her who was to be his wife.
+
+It was soon clear that Cissy did not share his views on these subjects;
+the evening on which his presents arrived in Chester Square was the only
+occasion since their betrothal on which she expressed anything
+resembling affection for him. Her eyes sparkled like the diamonds in her
+little crown as she tried the things on, and pirouetted about the room
+with them. She waltzed up to Sainty and dropped him a deep curtsey. ‘How
+does my lord and master think I look?’ she said coquettishly; and then
+in a sudden gust of gratitude she caught his hands in hers, and for the
+first time bent forward and kissed him. Sainty blushed hotly; this kiss,
+which spontaneously given would have meant so much to him, was like the
+stamp on a receipt for cash value received; and it was the last, as it
+had been the first, of their singular courtship.
+
+As the weeks passed, Cissy grew stranger and more unlike herself. The
+intervals of feverish gaiety, which had marked the earlier stages of her
+engagement, became rarer, and were succeeded by fits of gloom and
+depression that seemed utterly foreign to her nature. Whatever she might
+be at other times, that came to be the mood in which she invariably
+received Belchamber. She never willingly addressed him, and there were
+days when it seemed beyond her power to speak peaceably to him.
+Sometimes she was so rude that Lady Eccleston would playfully
+remonstrate, or Tommy would burst out with, ‘Hang it all, Cissy, you’ve
+no right to speak to Sainty like that. If I was him, I’m jiggered if I’d
+stand it.’
+
+They had never from the first been allowed many unwitnessed interviews,
+but now it seemed to Sainty that it was Cissy herself who carefully
+avoided any occasion of finding herself alone with him, and if ever she
+could by no means escape, she would take refuge from his attempts at
+conversation in sullen monosyllables, and sometimes even in absolute
+silence.
+
+One day he asked her in desperation if she felt she had made a
+mistake--if she wanted to be released. ‘It is not too late,’ he said,
+‘but it soon will be; if you repent of what you have done, if you want
+me to give you back your freedom, in mercy to yourself, to me, speak
+while there is yet time.’
+
+‘Cissy,’ he pleaded, after waiting in vain for any answer, ‘if you don’t
+feel that you love me enough, don’t do a thing that will ruin both our
+lives.’
+
+‘Do I seem as if I loved you?’ she asked brutally.
+
+‘So little, that I can’t help feeling that the idea of marrying me is
+repugnant to you. If so, never mind me; have the courage to put a stop
+to the whole thing; a word from you will do it.’
+
+‘Oh! will it? It is not as simple as all that.’
+
+‘I will help you in any way I can; I will do anything you want.’
+
+Cissy continued to stare into the fire in silence; she had never once
+looked at him. ‘I don’t know what I do want,’ she said at last,
+hopelessly.
+
+Sainty was about to say more, but at that moment, with a great
+admonitory rattling of the door-handle, Lady Eccleston hurried in, with
+her arms full of parcels.
+
+‘More presents, children,’ she cried gaily; ‘here, Sainty, come and take
+this top one off, or I shall drop it. That makes three hundred and
+seventy-nine. Ouf! I’m glad I’ve no more daughters to marry.’
+
+‘Listening! I thought so,’ cried Cissy, starting up, and without a
+glance at the gifts from which her mother was beginning to remove the
+wrappings she left the room. At No. 379, fans and smelling-bottles, and
+even small articles of jewellery, were becoming a drug in the market.
+Lady Eccleston got very red, but took no notice, affecting to be
+absorbed in undoing a bit of ribbon that had got into a knot. ‘“With
+best wishes, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter,”’ she read; ‘really very good
+of them. We hardly know them, and I hadn’t meant to ask them. It is the
+seventeenth pair of paste buckles, but they are pretty though not old,
+and they come in for shoes. Who’s this? “Every good wish, Mr. Austin
+Pryor.” What a beauty! It is the prettiest fan she has had; really
+charming! What _can_ this be? A pincushion! “Fondest love from Miss
+Henrietta Massinger.” What rubbish. I wish people wouldn’t send all this
+trash. Give me the green book on my writing-table, Sainty, and let’s
+enter them before I forget it. Three more notes for that poor child to
+write, and she’s tired out; any one can see it.’
+
+‘Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, ‘do you think Cissy’s _only_ tired? To me
+she seems very unhappy----’
+
+‘Tired, my dear boy, worn out; her nerves are in fiddle-strings; I shall
+be thankful for her sake when it’s all over,’ and she murmured as she
+wrote, ‘Pair of paste buckles, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter, 377.
+Tortoiseshell fan, Watteau subject, Mr. Austin Pryor, 378. Embroidered
+velvet horseshoe pincush----’
+
+‘Do stop writing a minute, and listen to me,’ said Sainty. ‘It’s your
+daughter’s happiness that is at stake. Tell me, truly, do you think she
+loves me?’
+
+‘Loves you! My dear Sainty, what a question! _Of course_ she loves you,’
+cried Lady Eccleston. ‘Miss H. Massinger, No. 379,’ and she looked up
+with a bright smile, as she rubbed energetically on the blotting-paper.
+‘Have you been having a lovers’ quarrel?’ she asked.
+
+‘No, no, nothing of that sort; but you yourself must have seen how oddly
+she behaves. She never will be alone with me for a minute if she can
+help it; she hardly ever speaks to me, and if I speak to _her_, as often
+as not she doesn’t answer me. It is the queerest way of showing love.’
+
+Lady Eccleston smiled again, a little indulgent smile full of _finesse_.
+
+‘My dear child,’ she said, ‘is _that_ all? How little you know girls.
+Can’t you understand that to a girl of Cissy’s temperament, so
+absolutely pure and modest, marriage represents the unknown, the
+terrible; the prospect of it fills her with a thousand tremors and
+apprehensions. Believe me, a girl who can approach her wedding-day with
+calm nerves and a cheerful, smiling face, is either a cow, and has no
+sensibilities, or else she knows a great deal too much.’
+
+‘But she looks at me really as if she _hated_ me,’ Sainty persisted. ‘If
+she has mistaken her feelings, if the idea is repugnant to her, if she
+feels that, having once given her word, she is bound, either out of
+consideration for me, or fear of all the talk, to go through with
+things, is it not our duty, yours and mine before all others, to save
+her from herself while there is yet time?’
+
+‘Dear modest fellow! Every word you say makes me love you more, and
+convinces me how exactly you are suited to such a nature as Cissy’s; I
+see how well you will understand her; how patient, how gentle you will
+be with her. As to her behaviour to _you_, I know; I feel for you a
+dozen times a day; but you must not doubt her affection. Good gracious!
+I treated my poor dear husband a thousand times worse when we were
+engaged. My mother used to say she didn’t see how he stood it; but the
+dear man had endless patience; he never doubted; and he soon succeeded
+in reconciling me to my fate,’ added the lady, with a modest simper,
+‘when once we were married.’
+
+‘Maidenly tremors are all very well,’ said Sainty, ‘but Cissy’s
+behaviour gives me the impression of a much deeper seated repugnance.
+Don’t, for pity’s sake, let her wreck her life if she isn’t sure she
+cares enough for me to marry me.’
+
+‘You are generous, considerate, unselfish as ever,’ cried Lady
+Eccleston. ‘But trust _me_ who know her so well. My dear Sainty, do you
+suppose if I were not absolutely sure this marriage was for my child’s
+happiness, that I, her mother, who must have her welfare at heart,
+should not be the first to oppose it?’
+
+After that there seemed nothing more to be said. Still Sainty was not
+satisfied, and he determined to carry his perplexities to his uncle, on
+whose sterling commonsense he had often leaned comfortably in boyhood.
+
+Lord Firth looked grave, and pursed up his mouth judicially.
+
+‘This is awkward,’ he said, ‘infernally awkward. Do you mean to say you
+want to get out of it?’
+
+‘Oh no! not for myself at all. I don’t say I’m desperately in love; but
+I don’t know that I ever should be. As long as I thought Cissy cared for
+me, I was very much honoured, and ready to devote my life to making her
+happy; but as the time comes nearer, I am more and more convinced that
+she does not love me. She may have felt sorry for me; she may have let
+herself be dazzled by what she would gain in a worldly way. I don’t
+pretend to understand why she took me; but I am sure that she repents
+what she has done, that, if it could be managed for her, she would be
+glad to be released.’
+
+‘Have you told her so? Have you offered to release her?’
+
+‘Yes.’
+
+‘Well, what did she say?’
+
+‘She said nothing. When I pressed her she said she didn’t know what she
+wanted. Then her mother came in, and Cissy went out of the room.’
+
+‘Did you say anything about it to the old woman?’
+
+‘Yes; I said what I’ve just told you.’
+
+‘And what did _she_ say?’
+
+‘Oh, she said girls were always like that, that I didn’t understand
+them--which God knows I don’t--that a modest girl was always in a funk
+before marriage, and that she would be all right afterwards.’
+
+‘Hm,’ said Lord Firth. ‘Well, I’m an old bachelor, and don’t know much
+about them either; they’re queer creatures. I always vaguely distrust
+that Eccleston woman; but I’ve no reason for supposing she would sell
+her daughter, and I must say the girl never struck me as being
+particularly under her mother’s thumb. On the contrary, she’s always
+been rather pert to her when I’ve seen her.’
+
+‘I can’t make it out; it all seems a hopeless tangle,’ said poor Sainty.
+
+‘The whole business struck me, when I heard of it, as being rather rash
+and ill-advised,’ said his uncle. ‘If I had been consulted, I should
+have suggested you had better both have been a little surer of your own
+feelings before announcing the engagement. I suspected your mother and
+Lady Eccleston of cooking up the affair when I heard of the Ecclestons
+being so much at Belchamber, but I didn’t feel called upon to interfere.
+It was obviously desirable that you should marry, and if you fancied
+Miss Cissy, I knew nothing against the girl, though I don’t much care
+for the mother. Besides, you are of age, and capable of arranging your
+own life without the interference of a guardian.’
+
+‘Then you think there is nothing to be done?’
+
+‘I don’t see what. You say you’ve offered the girl to break it off, and
+she didn’t seem to wish it, or at least wasn’t sure, and that her mother
+assured you she was only shy. What more can you do? If _you_ want to
+back out, it’s another matter. Though it would look very bad so near the
+time, I suppose it might be done.’
+
+As a last resort, Sainty wrote to his mother, though he felt sure what
+her answer would be; and sure enough Lady Charmington wrote with no
+uncertain pen. ‘If you had any misgivings you had better not have been
+in such a hurry to propose. Now it is altogether too late to go back on
+your word. I consider that you are bound in honour almost as if you were
+already married. It would be abominable to throw the girl over at the
+eleventh hour, when she has got her things, and all the invitations are
+out for the wedding. Think of the mortification to her, of the scandal
+it would cause. People might even say you had found out something
+against her. It would be enough to prevent her making another match, for
+every one would know of it, and talk about it.’
+
+Sainty was struck for the hundredth time with the inevitability of his
+mother’s misapprehension. She passed over in silence all question of
+Cissy not caring for him, which was the one point on which he had
+insisted, and instantly assumed that his misgivings arose from nothing
+but the fatal weakness of his character, which made flight his one
+impulse in face of any decisive act.
+
+Sainty had made his last effort, and proceeded to drift resignedly with
+the stream. There was just one other person to whom he had momentarily
+thought of applying for counsel and help, and that was his old friend
+Mrs. de Lissac; but Alice had behaved rather strangely, he thought,
+about the whole matter. On first coming to London, he had gone to see
+her as a matter of course; but though she had made a grand dinner for
+him and Cissy in honour of the engagement, and had showered magnificent
+presents on them both, the old cordial welcome was somehow lacking. She
+seemed ill at ease with him, and had fluttered hastily away from all
+attempts on his part to talk about Cissy, displaying positive terror if
+he showed any disposition to become confidential.
+
+Nothing was easier than to discourage Sainty from talking about
+himself. If his confidences were not met, as Alice de Lissac had always
+hitherto met them, more than half-way, they died a natural death.
+
+The day of Belchamber’s nuptials dawned inevitably in its turn. No
+convulsion of nature destroyed Lord Firth’s comfortable bachelor
+quarters, or buried the north side of Chester Square in ruins. Sainty
+got through the morning somehow, in a sort of waking dream, listening
+abstractedly to Gerald Newby, who had come up from Cambridge at his
+request to act as his ‘best man,’ and had much to say on many subjects,
+from the marriage-service of the Church of England--of some parts of
+which he strongly disapproved--to the tyranny of custom which imposed
+the high hat and frock coat, garments neither comfortable, convenient,
+nor æsthetically beautiful.
+
+Lady Charmington, who was staying at Roehampton with old Lady Firth,
+brought her mother in for an early lunch as the wedding was fixed for
+half-past two.
+
+At the appointed time Sainty found himself planted by a great bank of
+palms and heavy-scented white flowers that made him feel sick. From
+where he stood the whole great church was visible. Dimly, as through a
+mist, he could descry his mother, straight and stern, in puritanical
+drab, beside the huddled white chuddah and nodding plumes of his
+grandmother, the duchess strapped into a petunia velvet, with a silver
+bonnet whose aigrette seemed to sweep the skies, his Aunt Eva in a
+Gainsborough hat, taking rapid notes for the _Looking-glass_, and
+Claude, slim, cool, and elegant, his beautifully gloved, pearl-grey
+hands crossed upon his cane, which he had rested on the seat beside him
+as he stood sideways looking for the bride. Behind them a sea of faces,
+mostly unknown, of light colours and black coats, of feathers, flowers,
+and laces, stretched back to where, in a cloud of pink and white, the
+bridesmaids clustered round the door, holding the great bouquets of
+roses he had so nearly forgotten to order for them.
+
+The organ boomed, and the knowing-looking little choristers in their
+stiff surplices went clattering down the aisle followed by a perfect
+procession of smug ecclesiastics, among whom Sainty caught a fleeting
+glimpse of dear old Meakins from Great Charmington. Lady Eccleston,
+emotional, devotional, and gorgeous as the morning, rustled hastily to
+her place in the front pew where George and Randolph were already
+nudging each other and giggling. Then the little white-robed boys began
+to come back, shrilly chanting, and as the choir separated to right and
+left Sainty could see Tommy, very solemn and as red as the carnation in
+his buttonhole, and on his arm a vision of soft shrouded loveliness,
+coming slowly towards him. All the riddle of the future was hid in that
+veiled figure. How little he really knew what was in the little head and
+heart under all that whiteness; was it happiness or misery she was
+bringing him? an honoured, dignified married life, an equal share of
+joys and sorrows, ‘the children like the olive branches round about
+their table’? or a loveless existence, the straining bonds of those
+unequally yoked, the little sordid daily squabbles that eat the heart,
+perhaps even shame, dishonour ...? What thoughts for a bridegroom
+stepping forward to meet his bride at the altar! But who is master of
+his thoughts?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+The Duke of Sunborough having only a castle in Scotland, a palace in the
+Midlands, a detached house with a garden in the centre of London, a
+shooting-lodge in the north of England, and an old manor-house on the
+border of Wales, had acquired in his stormy youth a little place in
+Surrey some twelve or fifteen miles from town, a villa with terraces and
+cedar-trees and hothouses and shady lawns sloping to the river, where,
+if Rumour may be credited, there had sometimes been fine goings-on, but
+which was now only used on rare occasions for what it has become the
+fashion to call ‘week-end parties.’
+
+This modest retreat, which would have seemed to most people a good-sized
+country-house, had been lent to the young couple for their honeymoon,
+and thither they repaired, for greater state and privacy, in a large
+closed carriage with four horses and postillions, their two new
+dressing-bags sitting solemnly opposite to them on the back seat, while
+the servants and luggage went by train.
+
+Cissy, attired in the latest fashion and the palest hues, with a very
+white face and very red eyes and nose, sat huddled in one corner and
+stared out of the window, occasionally dabbing her features with a
+little damp ball of a pocket-handkerchief. From the other end of the
+long seat, on which a third person could easily have found room between
+the little bride and bridegroom, Sainty watched her compassionately. He
+contrasted the woebegone aspect and silent aloofness of his companion
+with the cheerful garrulity of the same young lady when she had driven
+about the country with him only a few months before. Then, had she
+seemed depressed or unhappy, he would not have hesitated to ask the
+cause of her melancholy, to offer help or at least consolation. Why,
+now, was he afraid to attempt to comfort or even to make a movement
+towards her? The explanation seemed a strange one: then she had been an
+acquaintance, now she was his wife. His wife! The words struck with a
+certain irony on his startled consciousness. It was that half-hour in
+church which was to make them ‘one flesh’ which had thrust them so far
+asunder.
+
+At last the silence became unendurable.
+
+‘Cissy,’ he said suddenly, ‘are you very miserable?’
+
+His voice breaking in on the monotonous sounds of their progress
+startled himself hardly less than his companion.
+
+Cissy shook herself and raised her head.
+
+‘Yes,’ she said defiantly, without looking round.
+
+‘Because of me?’
+
+‘Yes--because of you.’
+
+‘Why, what have I done?’ There was a relief in speech. If she would only
+talk, no matter what she said; she might abuse him, accuse him--anything
+was better than that horrible mute damp woe. But Cissy would not answer.
+
+‘Won’t you tell me how I have offended you? What have I done that you
+don’t like?’
+
+‘You’ve married me,’ she snapped at him.
+
+‘Isn’t that a little unjust?’
+
+‘Most likely it is, horribly unjust. I don’t care if it is. I hate
+myself and you and everybody, and I wish I was dead.’
+
+‘Cissy, Cissy,’ cried Sainty, dreadfully pained, ‘don’t say such
+things.’
+
+‘Then why did you ask me?’ she retorted; ‘why can’t you let me alone?’
+
+Sainty told himself that if there was ever a moment for patience it was
+now; so much might depend on what he said next. He made a motion as
+though he would take her hand, but at that there flashed out of her face
+a look so evil, such a genuine naked horror as civilisation seldom lets
+us show. Sainty fell back appalled; he felt that he had seen in her eyes
+the very bottom of her feeling towards him, and viewed in the light of
+that revelation the whole hopelessness of their future relations stood
+momentarily clear before him. He lay back dazed and frightened, thankful
+as a man to whom lightning has shown the danger of his surroundings for
+the friendly darkness that once more veils them from his sight; and for
+the rest of the drive neither occupant of the carriage said a word.
+
+When at last they drew up at their destination the house was on Cissy’s
+side, and as soon as a bowing servant had opened the carriage-door she
+jumped out before Sainty could offer her any assistance. A little shower
+of rice that had lodged in the folds of her gown fell pattering from her
+in the precipitancy of her flight, which caused a discreet grin on the
+damp, red faces of the postillions and of the duke’s under-butler, who
+had been sent down to help Sainty’s valet with the service.
+
+Belchamber caught a glimpse of an inscription framed in laurel leaves
+stretched across the lintel, of which all that was clear to him were the
+words ‘happy pair,’ as he followed his bride into the hall. Here the
+women who had charge of the house were drawn up together with Cissy’s
+new maid and his own valet.
+
+The housekeeper had embarked on a little speech, evidently prepared with
+care. ‘May I be permitted,’ she was saying, ‘on behalf of myself and
+fellow-servants, to welcome your ladyship on this auspicious occasion,
+and to wish you and the marquis every happiness, and I am sure we shall
+do our very best to make you comfortable, and his lordship too.’ Seeing
+that Cissy stared at the woman with a dull eye, Sainty came to the
+rescue.
+
+‘I am sure we are both very much obliged to you all,’ he said, ‘but Lady
+Belchamber is very tired, and would be glad to see her room, if you will
+show it to her.’ Cissy started at the sound of her new name in the mouth
+of her husband, but moved off in the wake of the housekeeper, who had
+dropped from the monumental tone of her welcome into a more comfortable
+colloquialism. ‘I am sure your ladyship _must_ be tired--it’s a most
+trying day; and you’ll like to see your room, and would you like a cup
+of tea or anything after your long drive? Dinner isn’t ordered till
+eight, and it’s only half-past six. Tea is set out in the morning-room,
+but it will be quite easy to bring it up to you. I have tried to think
+of everything, but, of course, anything your ladyship wishes
+altered....’ Sainty heard her voice growing fainter down the corridor as
+Cissy and the maid followed her to the staircase. He watched the little
+procession out of sight and then turned wearily into the first room he
+came to and dropped with a long sigh upon the gaudy chintz flowers of a
+comfortable easy-chair. For him, too, the day had been ‘trying’ in more
+ways than one.
+
+His man brought him a cup of tea and said that ‘her ladyship’ was having
+hers in her room and was going to rest till dinner-time. He had not yet
+been four hours wedded, and he noted with shocked surprise the distinct
+relief with which he hailed the prospect of being free for a little from
+the strain of his wife’s presence. Four hours! The morning seemed a
+hundred years ago! For the rest of his natural life had he got always to
+face this mute resentment? And for what? He had not forced her to marry
+him; indeed he had adjured her not to. It was unheard of that she should
+treat him as a criminal; he examined his conscience and found that so
+far from having anything with which to reproach himself, he had behaved
+to her throughout with the most scrupulous consideration. Could Lady
+Eccleston be right, and might Cissy’s behaviour be nothing but the
+natural nervousness of a modest young woman? Were girls always so
+terrified in presence of the bridal mysteries? If that were all, she
+might count on his perfect sympathy. No girl could be more of a stranger
+to all that side of life than he, or approach it with more invincible
+shyness. In all their talks it had seemed to him that the balance of
+true modesty had been rather on his side than hers; he had often been
+shocked by things she had said, but he could recollect no occasion on
+which any remark of his had appeared to embarrass her in the least.
+
+Tired nature must have come to rescue him from his many perplexities,
+for he was recalled to consciousness from a doze by the clock striking a
+half-hour, and finding it was half-past seven, he decided to go upstairs
+and get ready for dinner. He had no difficulty in finding his room.
+Through almost the first door on the upper landing he saw his new
+brushes adorning the dressing-table, his clothes laid out upon the bed.
+As he turned in, he noticed the sharp click of a key in another door
+from that by which he had entered, and which evidently communicated with
+the next room, for behind it he could hear sounds of people moving
+about, the opening and shutting of drawers and cupboards, and
+occasionally Cissy’s voice speaking to her maid. That he heard all these
+sounds but indistinctly was presently explained to him. Having changed
+his clothes he tapped discreetly, and receiving no answer proceeded to
+turn the handle; to his pleasure it yielded; he had been mistaken then;
+she had not the distrust of him he had fancied. But his gratification
+was shortlived; there were double doors between the rooms, and the inner
+one was quite securely fastened.
+
+‘Who’s there?’ cried Cissy sharply.
+
+‘I hope you’re rested,’ Sainty called in a voice which he tried to make
+pleasantly indifferent; ‘I’m going down, shall I tell them to get
+dinner, or are you not ready?’
+
+‘I’ll be down in a minute. Don’t wait for me,’ she called back, but made
+no offer to undo the door.
+
+Dinner was not a cheerful meal, when presently Cissy appeared in a smart
+new tea-gown, and took her place opposite to him. She crumpled her bread
+and drank a great deal of water, and played with the wine-glasses and
+her rings and the lace upon her dress. The meal passed almost in
+silence, the two men gliding softly about and handing the dishes. Cissy
+ate nothing, and Sainty felt obliged to break and taste a long
+succession of undesired meats.
+
+‘They have given us much too much,’ he said. ‘We must tell that good
+lady to-morrow that we don’t want all these things.’
+
+Cissy assented indifferently.
+
+‘You’re not eating anything,’ Sainty said, after a pause.
+
+‘I’m not hungry. I had tea so late.’
+
+Sainty found himself talking to the servants, and asking for things he
+did not want, to break the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.
+
+If Cissy ate nothing while the servants were present, she made up for it
+when they had left the room, by piling a whole dish of strawberries on
+her plate, covering them with cream, and eating them voraciously. Sainty
+watched her uneasily, with a sudden dread that she might be going mad.
+
+Things were not much more lively after dinner. The smiling housekeeper
+had explained that she had not had the drawing-room lit up as she
+thought they would be more ‘cosy’ in the ‘boodwar.’ Cissy sank deep in a
+big armchair, and appeared to be immersed in a novel she had brought
+with her. Sainty tried to read too, but his attention wandered; his eyes
+fell first on his companion, the swirl of diaphanous drapery that
+escaped from the arms of her chair and flowed out upon the floor like
+water between the piers of a bridge, the little foot in its bead-wrought
+slipper, the hands flashing with new rings that held the gaudy
+book-cover like a shield between her face and him. From her they roved
+to her surroundings. The room in which they sat had been decorated about
+the year 1860 by Italian artists. Trellised grape vines were painted on
+the walls, mixed with roses and large blue flowers of the convolvulus
+family. Birds of gay plumage and highly imaginative butterflies were
+sprinkled about them, and here and there a plump cupid in a pink
+loincloth stood poised on one foot among the foliage, swinging a basket
+of flowers. Cupids, indeed, were everywhere; several of them floated
+round a hook in the sky-coloured ceiling, and made believe that it was
+not it, but they, who supported the glass chandelier. They crawled in
+white marble all over the bulging sides of the low flamboyant
+mantelpiece. On the French clock above it, a gilt Eros perpetually
+clasped his Psyche, while from the console between the elaborately
+draped windows, a biscuit representation of the same divinity held his
+finger discreetly to his lips.
+
+The note of old-fashioned gaiety which is somehow lacking in our more
+correct modern apartments seemed specially to fit the place to be the
+frame of love. Its amoretti and impossible flowers, its white marble and
+gilding and pale silks, suggested accustomed complicity. In presence of
+what human kisses had those little ormolu lovers continued their
+indifferent embraces? What scenes of passion had been multiplied in
+endless reproduction by those tall opposing mirrors? Perhaps in that
+very room, Sainty thought, his grandmother might have been tempted
+towards the breaking of those same vows he had that day taken on
+himself. He came on her portrait presently in a book of beauty, bound
+with much tooling in faded crimson calf, which he was idly turning over
+on the red velvet centre-table. He took it over and showed it to Cissy.
+
+‘Look at grandmamma,’ he said; ‘wasn’t she beautiful?’
+
+Cissy took the picture and stared at it with no answering smile. It
+seemed to have a curious fascination for her. ‘How like!’ she murmured.
+‘How very like!’
+
+‘Oh! come,’ said Sainty, glad to get her to talk about anything. ‘I
+can’t say I think her grace looks much like that nowadays.’
+
+‘I didn’t mean that it was like the duchess,’ said Cissy with a
+hysterical gulp. ‘But don’t you see the extraordinary likeness to Cl----
+to your cousin Mr. Morland?’
+
+Sainty could not have explained why the sudden mention of Claude was
+displeasing to him.
+
+‘He is thought like our grandmother,’ he said shortly, ‘but he is not
+nearly so good-looking; the duchess was a great beauty in her youth.’
+
+Cissy did not discuss the question, but she kept the book absently in
+her lap, and when Sainty had returned to his reading, he could see her
+turning the pages.
+
+As the long hours wore away, Belchamber became intolerably weary, and he
+suspected Cissy of being not less so; but when taxed with fatigue, she
+eagerly repudiated the idea, and professed a tremendous interest in her
+book. ‘I _must_ see how it is going to come out,’ she said; ‘it’s
+awfully exciting.’
+
+Sainty ached all over, but he could not insist. He returned to his own
+reading, which he found less stimulating than Cissy seemed to find hers.
+After a while he noticed that she had moved into a harder and more
+upright chair. She was struggling against sleep; in half an hour she had
+not turned a page of the work she found so enthralling. Finally, towards
+midnight, he saw the book waving to and fro, the fair head bowed almost
+down on it. He went softly over to her, and touched her. With a cry she
+started to her feet; the book fell on the floor with a bang.
+
+‘You must go to bed, Cissy,’ Sainty said kindly; ‘you’re dropping with
+sleep.’
+
+‘I’m not tired; I’m not sleepy,’ she cried. ‘I must finish this--it’s so
+interesting.’
+
+‘Nonsense. I’ve been watching you; you haven’t read a page in half an
+hour; you can’t keep your eyes open.’
+
+Her eyes were open enough now, wide and strange, like those of a hunted
+animal. She made a gesture with her hands as though to thrust him back.
+‘I can’t--I won’t,’ she panted. ‘You shan’t make me. Keep away. Don’t
+touch me.’
+
+‘My poor child,’ Sainty said, ‘what are you afraid of? Do you think I
+would do anything you don’t like? You can’t sit up all night. You are
+dead tired, and must have rest. I won’t come near you, if you don’t wish
+it.’
+
+She looked at him but half reassured. ‘Do you mean it?’ she said
+doubtfully. ‘Can I trust you?’
+
+‘I am not accustomed to lie,’ Sainty answered. ‘Do you think I would
+take advantage of you by a shabby trick?’
+
+She sighed, and half turned away, then suddenly faced him again. ‘It is
+not enough,’ she cried. ‘It is not only to-night. You may as well know
+it first as last. You are odious to me--horrible. I can
+never--never----’
+
+‘Hush, hush!’ Sainty interrupted her. ‘Take care what you say. You are
+tired, excited, overwrought. So am I. Go to bed now, in God’s name. You
+know you have nothing to fear. We will talk of this some other time,
+calmly if we can, but not to-night, not to-night.’
+
+‘Yes, now, to-night,’ she insisted. ‘Why put it off? It’s got to be
+faced, and why not at once? I tell you you are repulsive to me. I can
+never be your wife in anything but name. I thought I could, but when it
+comes to the point, I can’t do it. It’s stronger than me. It’s no use.’
+She spread her hands with the gesture of one who renounces a struggle.
+On her finger blazed the ring he had given her, and below it shone the
+plain gold hoop which he had placed there that morning, the outward and
+visible sign of the obligation she was repudiating.
+
+Sainty staggered as though she had struck him in the face. ‘I don’t
+understand,’ he whispered. ‘If you feel like this towards me, if I am
+repulsive, loathsome to you, why did you marry me?’
+
+‘Oh, it’s simple enough,’ she answered, with a little cruel laugh. ‘You
+had so many things that I have always wanted, money, position, rank,
+everything I have been brought up to think desirable. Since I can
+remember, not a girl has been married among our friends that the first
+question has not been, was she making a “good” marriage? which meant,
+was she getting a big enough share of all these things in exchange for
+herself? No one could say I wasn’t. I’ve made the match of the season.
+There isn’t a girl I know, or a mother, who isn’t green with envy of me.
+You can’t say it wasn’t a temptation.’ And she laughed again
+hysterically.
+
+‘But feeling as you did about me, as you must before the end have known
+you felt, why in heaven’s name didn’t you turn back, when I gave you the
+chance, before it was too late?’
+
+‘Do you think I was allowed a minute to think? Wasn’t my mother there
+every minute of the day? At the very time you speak of, wasn’t she
+listening at the door, and didn’t she come hurrying in before I’d time
+to answer? If for a moment I ever forgot the title, and the money, and
+the jewels, the big house, all the things I’d set my heart on, she was
+always ready to talk about them, to dangle them before me. If I ever
+wavered, she would tell me what a slur it was on a girl whose engagement
+was broken off, how no one would ever believe I had given up all these
+things of my own free will, how people would say there was something
+against me, and how I should never marry. There wasn’t an oldish poor
+girl we knew, losing her looks, and still tagging about to balls, and
+trying to pretend she was cheerful, that she didn’t remind me of. Never
+directly, mind you. They were just casually mentioned. O Lord! if I so
+much as suggested to her that she wanted me to marry for money, she was
+all virtuous indignation.’
+
+‘How ghastly!’ Sainty whispered in horror. ‘I’ve read of such things, of
+mothers selling their daughters, bullying them into marrying men they
+couldn’t love for the sake of an establishment; but I’ve always thought
+it was exaggerated, not true to life. I didn’t think a mother _could_
+condemn her own child to lifelong misery.’
+
+‘Oh, you mustn’t be too hard on mamma,’ Cissy said. ‘She thought she was
+doing the best thing for me. Remember she has the very highest opinion
+of you, and was quite sure you would make an excellent husband; and she
+knew how much I wanted all the other things. If marriage were nothing
+but that, nothing but living in the house with a person who was
+good-natured and never interfered with one, and provided all the good
+things of life for one, it would be well enough. That is what every one
+in England always talks to girls as if it were. Mamma would have thought
+it most indelicate to suggest there was another side. You are made to
+forget that as much as possible. Oh, of course I _knew_, because I’m not
+a fool, and girls are not such ninnies as people think them; but I tried
+to forget, and when I didn’t see you, I _did_ forget. That was why, when
+I did see you, I was always so beastly to you; for I’m quite ready to
+admit I _was_ beastly to you.’
+
+As Cissy’s terror abated, her engaging frankness began to return to her.
+Sainty couldn’t help liking her for it. He began to be so full of
+sympathy with her point of view, so sorry for all she must have
+suffered, that he almost forgot the cruel wrong she had done him.
+
+‘Mamma knew I should never be happy with a poor man,’ she went on. ‘She
+knew how I cared for all the things you could give me. She was quite
+right, I _did_ want them; I wanted them awfully; I want them still as
+much as ever: only when it comes to the point I can’t give the price. I
+thought I could, but I can’t. Mamma was so far honester than me. She
+never supposed that once the bargain was made I should hesitate to pay.
+It’s so like me to want things dreadfully, and not to have the courage
+to do what’s necessary to get them.’
+
+Sainty was appalled by her cynicism, even while he admired her
+straightforwardness. What became of his dreams of romance, of the eye
+that had seen beneath his unattractive exterior, and loved him for the
+beauties of his soul? The blue eyes had seen nothing but the sparkling
+of diamonds. In her vision of married life he had been only the
+necessary evil, the odious, inevitable condition to which she must
+submit, if she would have his name and money, as the princess in the
+story had to kiss the swineherd to get possession of the toys she
+coveted. Still the princess _had_ kissed the herd, and even after all
+that she had said he thought he would make one last appeal to her. If
+she realised how much he felt for her, how entirely he understood her
+unwillingness, how patient, how gentle he was ready to be, perhaps she
+might be touched, might learn to think of him with something less of
+horror. To him who had all his life wished for nothing but to make other
+people happy, it was intolerable to think of himself as the brutal
+gaoler, the tyrant before whom this young thing paled with terror.
+
+In the eagerness of her explanation, Cissy had come nearer to him. They
+were standing quite close together, face to face. ‘Cissy,’ he said
+gently, ‘is it quite, quite impossible? Do you think that if we lived
+together for a long time, you might in the end get used to me, even come
+to care for me a little?’ But at that she sprang back from him again
+with an unmistakable gesture of repugnance that said more than words.
+‘No, no, no--never,’ she cried hurriedly. ‘I’ve told you it’s no good. I
+can’t help it, my mind’s made up. I’d rather give up everything, face
+anything, for of course I can’t expect you to keep me. You can send me
+back to my mother. Life’ll be hell upon earth, but it’ll be better than
+_that_.’
+
+With all his desire to be fair to her, Sainty could not but be struck by
+her intense egotism, her inability to appreciate any point of view but
+her own. She was evidently unaware of the brutality of her attitude
+towards him. To his morbid self-depreciation her undisguised horror of
+him appeared only too natural. Still, no one likes to be told these
+things quite so bluntly.
+
+‘You have nothing to fear,’ he said a little loftily. ‘After what you
+have said, you may be sure I shall never ask the smallest thing of you.
+It is a little unfortunate that you didn’t make up your mind rather
+earlier, as you have made it up so irrevocably now. Had you but been as
+sure of your feelings a month, a week, even twenty-four hours ago, you
+might have saved us both from what I hardly dare look forward to.’
+
+‘I can go home; I had better go home,’ Cissy whimpered. Of course the
+sight of distress melted Sainty at once.
+
+‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘that to go home now would make just five
+hundred times the talk and scandal that you felt you couldn’t face if
+you had broken off your engagement?’
+
+‘It can’t be helped,’ Cissy sobbed.
+
+‘You have brought us both into a horrible situation,’ Sainty answered,
+‘and I frankly don’t see just now what is best to be done; but I’m sure
+that further talk will do no good just now. It is long past twelve
+o’clock, and we are both tired out; you can’t go back to Chester Square
+to-night, if you want to ever so much. If I were you I shouldn’t get up
+to breakfast. Good-night.’
+
+Some compunction seemed to seize Cissy as she got to the door. She
+turned. ‘I’m awfully sorry, you know,’ she said. ‘I suppose, when you
+come to think of it, I haven’t treated you any too well; and--and--of
+course what I said wasn’t very civil, but I thought it best to be
+honest----’
+
+‘All right, all right,’ Sainty answered hastily; ‘please don’t say any
+more about it.’
+
+As he lay sleepless and uncomfortable on his lonely bed, he wished that
+the necessity for honest dealing had impressed itself on his wife a
+little sooner. He thought of the night three years before, when he had
+lain awake (as he lay now) listening to the sounds that celebrated his
+coming of age. Somehow the great festal days of his life did not seem to
+bring him personally much enjoyment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+The Belchambers took possession of their new town-house just in time for
+the opening of Parliament in the ensuing year. It was only partially
+furnished as yet, and most uncomfortable; but, as Lady Eccleston
+remarked with great originality, ‘the only way to get the workmen out of
+a house was to move in yourself.’ The first-floor rooms still echoed
+with shouts and hammerings, but the upper part of the house was more or
+less ready, and so were the dining-room and some back rooms on the
+ground-floor, which Cissy had reluctantly decided should eventually be
+given up to Sainty. It was astonishing how swiftly she had
+
+    ‘Shaped her heart with woman’s meekness
+     To all duties of her rank,’
+
+except the vulgar and obvious one which she would have shared with the
+humblest of wives. Having once made it quite clear that she was to
+receive everything and give nothing, she soon ceased to talk of
+returning to her mother, and Sainty was amazed at the ease with which
+she adapted herself to the awkwardness of the situation. In her place,
+he felt sure, he would not have rung a bell, or asked for a postage
+stamp, but it never seemed to occur to Cissy that there was anything
+curious in the arrangement; she annexed all her husband’s possessions
+without scruple or hesitation as soon as she discovered that no
+embarrassing condition attached to doing so.
+
+In spite of her son’s entreaties that she would stay with them, Lady
+Charmington had retired to the dower-house immediately after the
+marriage, and they had barely returned from their brief and dismal
+honeymoon in the duke’s villa before Cissy began to dispose of
+everything at Belchamber as if it had all been hers from earliest
+childhood. There had been some talk of a wedding-journey on the
+Continent, but Cissy had no desire to prolong the _tête-à-tête_ with
+Sainty, which she did not enjoy. It was England, which she knew and
+understood, that was to be the scene of her triumphs; and the sight of
+strange lands had no charms for her compared to the fun of swooping down
+as mistress on the great house, where she had been an unconsidered
+little guest, settling which should be her own rooms, having them
+redecorated according to the taste of the latest fashionable
+upholsterer, and moving into them whatever took her fancy in other parts
+of the house.
+
+She was so happily busy that she almost forgot to regret the Season, and
+gave up Ascot without a sigh, contenting herself with Cowes and
+Goodwood, which she did with great _éclat_ from a friend’s yacht, while
+Sainty enjoyed a fortnight of peace and seclusion.
+
+Congenial as she found the task of establishing herself in her husband’s
+ancestral home, it was nothing to the delirious enjoyment of selecting,
+decorating, and furnishing a big London house, regardless of expense;
+and all the time she could spare from entertaining shooting parties in
+the autumn was devoted to the feverish prosecution of this new delight.
+
+Of course every one agreed that they must have a town-house. The duke
+and Lord Firth were not less convinced of its necessity than the large
+circle of acquaintances who hoped to be entertained in it. Even Lady
+Charmington, while she winced at the recklessness of the expenditure,
+was partly consoled by the sight of her son taking what she considered
+‘his proper position in the world.’ She consoled herself with the
+thought that it was her long years of careful management that made all
+this profusion possible. Sainty must attend the debates in the House of
+Lords, and though she was rather scandalised by his Radicalism, she
+reflected that the limited number of peers on that side, since the Home
+Rule split, made some small office not improbable for him, when the
+Liberals came in again.
+
+And Sainty, though he cared for none of these things, had no heart to
+refuse them to the girl whom he had married. The fact was that the more
+he thought about the matter the sorrier he felt for his wife. For his
+part, he told himself, he was not made for love, had never expected it
+to play any part in his life, and was no worse off than he was before.
+The disadvantage of taking a consistently humble view of one’s own
+attractions is not without its compensations; thus the wound to his
+self-love, of which a vain man would almost have bled to death, was to
+Sainty, who had no vanity and very little self-love, only in the nature
+of those scratches which smart and feel sore, but rob us of no drop of
+heart’s blood. Life was not perceptibly more unpleasant to him than it
+had been before, and he had still the same substitutes for a more active
+happiness with which he had been accustomed to fill it, his studies, his
+schemes of beneficence, the management of his property. But this poor
+child, so well fitted by nature to love and be loved, whose one chance
+of rising above the empty frivolity of her surroundings might have lain
+in the ennobling influence of a great passion, for something how much
+less satisfying than a mess of pottage had she bartered her birthright,
+a handful of tin counters, a paper crown! In spite of what he considered
+her generosity in taking the blame on herself, he was more and more
+inclined to regard her as the victim of her mother’s worldliness,
+enmeshed like himself in the toils of that careful schemer. It was not
+in nature that a creature so young and fresh should be so greatly
+influenced by considerations of wealth or rank; he could not think it.
+These things had been dangled before her eyes till she had been dazzled
+by their false lustre. She was too innocent, he reflected, to realise to
+what extent she had sacrificed all chances of woman’s best happiness to
+gain them. The question was how to shield her from the consequences of
+her own act, to save her from the bitter repentance only too likely to
+follow. To do so might not be permanently in his power; but meanwhile,
+if she so keenly desired the undesirable as to be ready to risk the ruin
+of her life for it, what was simpler than to give it to her? Jewels,
+clothes, a house in town, the means to feed the thankless rich, the
+power to walk out of the room before older women--if these things could
+make her happy, as far as they were his to give, let her take them in
+full measure. They were freely hers. He had no particular use for them
+himself.
+
+Perhaps the spectacle of the ease and gusto with which she flung herself
+into her new _rôle_ of the great lady was not without a certain satiric
+amusement for him.
+
+One day he would find her on the pavement before the house, attended by
+Algy Montgomery and a grave professional gentleman who looked the ideal
+of a racing duke, while a pair of high-stepping bays were driven up and
+down for her inspection. ‘Haven’t we more horses than we know what to do
+with?’ Sainty would ask.
+
+‘My dear boy!’ Cissy cried, ‘a parcel of old screws. Jane Rugby was
+saying only the other day that we hadn’t a decent pair o’ horses in the
+stable.’
+
+On another, she would be busy comparing designs for carriages. ‘Those
+old bathing-machines at Belchamber,’ she remarked loftily, ‘are all very
+well for the country; but in my position it would be too grotesque for
+me to be seen driving about London in them. The duchess has been awfully
+kind about advising me. It was her idea to send for the old chariot and
+see if it can’t be done up for drawing-rooms. She says unless it has got
+dry-rot or anything, that a couple of hundreds spent on it ought to make
+it as good as new; and of course I don’t want to waste money on a
+tiresome thing one would never use on other occasions, if by spending a
+little on the old one it can be made to do. But I _must_ have a decent
+brougham and open carriage at once; you must see yourself there are no
+two ways about it. And, come to think of it, you ought to have a
+brougham of your own. We are sure to clash and want it at the same time,
+if we try and do with one.’
+
+‘Perhaps one of the bathing-machines from Belchamber might do for _me_,’
+suggested Sainty, not without malice.
+
+‘Well,’ said Cissy quite gravely, ‘I don’t know that it mightn’t.’
+
+‘Who told you of these people?’ Sainty asked, examining the neatly
+painted little pictures.
+
+‘Oh, they make all the duke’s carriages, and _they_ are always smartly
+turned out. Your cousin Claude told them to send me these sketches, and
+he has promised to go with me to Longacre to see what they have in the
+shop.’
+
+Since she married, Cissy had ceased to mention Claude as ‘Mr. Morland,’
+and the prefix ‘your cousin’ was bridging the narrow chasm between that
+and calling him ‘Claude.’ Morland was able to be uncommonly useful to
+the pretty new cousin; not only at the coachbuilder’s were his taste and
+knowledge invaluable, but at the upholsterer’s, the _bric-à-brac_ shops,
+the sales at Christy’s, and he had even been called on to give his views
+(and very sound views too) in the more intimate province of the modiste
+and the dressmaker. Sainty was obviously of no assistance. What could be
+more natural, if the lady needed counsel in such matters, than to turn
+to a near kinsman of her husband, and one so well qualified to help? It
+is true that Lady Eccleston was more than ready to assist her daughter
+in mounting her establishment on a suitable scale, and would very
+willingly have accompanied her to the shops, not, perhaps, without a
+hope of gleaning a few scattered ears on her own account from the
+harvest Cecilia was reaping with so large a hook; but that unnatural
+young person seemed to prefer almost any advice or companionship to her
+mamma’s. Ill as he thought of her, for the manœuvres with which she had
+compassed his union with her daughter, Sainty could not help a secret
+sympathy with the poor lady, who bore her pitiless relegation to a back
+place with a smiling stoicism worthy of a Red Indian. The old fiction of
+the perfect confidence and sisterlike relation between herself and her
+daughter was still gallantly maintained even to him, and when he
+reflected what potentialities of tearful complainings she had
+heroically foregone, he came near to feeling actual gratitude. But he
+need have been under no apprehension of plaintive confidences; anything
+natural or direct had long ceased to be possible to Lady Eccleston.
+
+‘I cannot have mamma dropping in to lunch whenever it suits her,’ Cissy
+remarked ruthlessly. ‘I have told her she must not come more than once a
+week, unless she’s asked.’
+
+‘But I thought you said you meant to let people know you were always at
+home for lunch?’
+
+‘So I do; it is a very convenient way of seeing my friends. That’s just
+why I’ve had to speak to mamma. I should have her here every day if I
+didn’t. And it would bore a lot of younger women, who don’t know her
+particularly well, like Vere Deans or Ella Dalsany, to find her here
+perpetually--not to speak of the men.’
+
+Sainty did not retort that Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany were not so very
+much younger that Lady Eccleston. It was no affair of his; and it soon
+became evident that Cissy’s mother was not the only relation whom it
+bored her friends to meet at her luncheon-table. Sainty had been brought
+up in a certain old-fashioned code of manners. His mother, seeing that
+he was shy and awkward in company, and being not less so herself, had
+insisted rather unduly on the ceremonial side of social life. He had
+been taught that hospitality demanded that he should receive and take
+leave of guests with some form, accompanying them to their carriages,
+and putting on their cloaks, which the groom of the chambers, who was
+much taller and unencumbered with a stick, would have done much better.
+But he was not long in discovering that these attentions were by no
+means demanded by the ladies of the set into which the duchess and
+Claude had made haste to introduce his wife.
+
+If Cissy’s friends found Sainty tiresome, it must be admitted that he
+found them no less so. The repulsion was certainly mutual. He wondered
+sometimes what had become of all the people she had known and liked, and
+from whom she had received kindness, during the three or four seasons
+that had preceded her marriage; they seemed to have vanished like smoke.
+She was absorbed in a little knot of married women, for the most part
+considerably her seniors, much in the world’s eye, and none of them
+exactly qualified for the _rôle_ of Cæsar’s wife. Their conversation was
+extremely esoteric, and the minute fragments of it which were
+intelligible to him shocked him profoundly. Occasional paragraphs in the
+papers assured him that ‘young Lady Belchamber,’ or ‘pretty little Lady
+Belchamber, who was among the most attractive of last season’s brides,’
+was ‘very smart’ or ‘quite in the innermost set’; from which he was fain
+to derive such comfort as he might. He once ventured to ask Cissy why
+she never saw anything of the de Lissacs; he had hoped something for her
+from Alice’s influence. ‘I thought you and the girls were very
+intimate,’ he said.
+
+‘Oh! girls bore me,’ she answered; ‘and besides, they are not the least
+in it; they wouldn’t have anything in common with the people they’d meet
+here. Of course with their money they _might_ have done anything, but
+poor dear Mrs. de Lissac has no _flair_, don’t you know; she simply
+doesn’t take any trouble. I’ll ask them, if you like, some day when I’m
+having a duty dinner.’ And she did.
+
+‘Why do we never see anything of you?’ Sainty asked of his old friend on
+that occasion. ‘I had hoped that when we came to town we should be much
+together.’
+
+‘Well--here we are!’ said Alice, with rather frosty playfulness. ‘And
+you know,’ she added more gently, ‘how welcome you always are in
+Grosvenor Square.’
+
+‘Cissy is always at home at lunch, you know,’ Sainty persisted. ‘Why
+don’t you come in sometimes?’
+
+‘Lady Belchamber has never told either the girls or me that she was at
+home at lunch,’ said Alice, freezing again, and went on hurriedly to
+praise the beauty of the house and the taste of its mistress. Sainty
+looked round him. ‘Cissy has a genius for spending money,’ he said
+gloomily. ‘Wait till you see the drawing-rooms; these rooms are nothing
+to the plunges she is making upstairs.’ Before Mrs. de Lissac could
+answer, they were swooped upon by Lady Eccleston bringing Lady Deans
+with her.
+
+‘Dear Alice,’ she cried, ‘Lady Deans fears you don’t remember her; you
+met at Belchamber. She is going to have a stall at the World’s Bazaar,
+and this is such an opportunity to have a little quiet talk about it. I
+have been telling Lady Deans that you are one of our _very_ kindest
+helpers, and that you have given the most superb things; a few _really_
+good things that can be raffled for are such a help, and one can always
+raffle the same things two or three times over--no one ever knows.’
+
+‘Why shouldn’t we have a lottery?’ asked Lady Deans. ‘I mean a _real_
+lottery, not for sofa-cushions and things, but for money prizes like
+they have abroad. I’m sure it’ld catch on.’
+
+‘But I thought lotteries were illegal,’ Sainty objected.
+
+‘Oh! not at bazaars, or for a charity,’ cried Lady Eccleston. ‘I know
+dear Father Stephen of St. Rhadegund’s, Houndsditch, told me they had a
+most successful one for their parish room and made heaps of money. I
+think Lady Deans’s is a lovely idea.’
+
+‘Well--it’s gambling, you know,’ said Sainty. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t
+allow a roulette table----’
+
+‘Why don’t you have a Derby sweep while you’re about it?’ suggested Algy
+Montgomery. ‘You could sell the tickets at the bazaar, and as the Derby
+won’t be for a good couple o’ months later you could forget to draw it
+at all. People would only suppose some other fellow had won, don’t yer
+know.’
+
+Lady Eccleston was enchanted with the notion. ‘Dear Lord Algy! _Could_
+you work it for us?’ But Mrs. de Lissac, inured as she was to bazaar
+morality, was, as a clergyman’s daughter, a little alarmed at any
+connection with the turf. ‘How are you getting on with the people for
+the Café Chantant?’ she asked, to change the subject.
+
+Lady Eccleston rattled off a list that seemed to contain every one of
+any celebrity in the theatrical or musical world.
+
+‘And have you got them all?’ asked Lady Deans.
+
+‘Well, I’ve written to a good many of them, and one or two have
+answered,’ said Lady Eccleston; ‘but I shall pop them all down--their
+names will look splendid on the programme.’
+
+‘But will they come?’ asked Sainty.
+
+‘Oh _dear_ no, they won’t come; very few of them will _come_. But some
+will; I shall make sure of one or two, and we can get some really good
+amateurs; and every now and then some one can get up and say that Ellen
+Terry regrets she couldn’t manage it at the last moment, or something.
+We shall let people in for ten minutes at a time in batches; they’ll
+think they just missed some of the best people----’
+
+‘Seems to me you _will_ “let ’em in,”’ chuckled Lord Algy.
+
+‘Do you think,’ asked Lady Deans, ‘there would be any chance of getting
+Lady Arthur to sing or dance, or anything? I suppose, Lord Belchamber,
+_you_ couldn’t ask her for us?’
+
+‘But she never _could_ sing or dance, or do anything,’ interposed Lord
+Algernon.
+
+‘Oh! that wouldn’t matter, as long as she would appear. You see, all the
+story of her marriage and everything made her a celebrity.’
+
+‘But it was all two years ago,’ Lady Eccleston interrupted. ‘People have
+forgotten all about it,’ and she deftly piloted the discussion to other
+projects, so that Sainty was spared the necessity of making any answer
+to this astounding proposition.
+
+The bazaar in connection with which so many happy suggestions had been
+offered was one of Society’s periodic sacrifices to philanthropy.
+Certain fair ones, to whom no form of self-advertisement came amiss,
+were ready to dress up in the cause of charity and display themselves to
+a wider public than that which usually had the opportunity of admiring
+them, on the understanding that none of the trouble of organisation
+should fall upon them, and that the date should be fixed for before
+Easter, when there wasn’t much else going on. On these conditions, Lady
+Eccleston and a little band of zealous fellow-workers had secured a most
+imposing list of stall-holders. It was calculated that the suburbs and
+the Stock Exchange would come in their thousands to see and converse
+with the ladies whose names and doings Lady Eva Morland made weekly
+familiar to them in the pages of ‘Maidie’s Tea Table’ in the
+_Looking-glass_. The proceeds were to be handed to a charity in which a
+very great personage was interested, and the bazaar was to be opened on
+at least two of its three days by different members of the royal family.
+Lady Eccleston was in her element, and running the whole concern. If it
+was not she who had the brilliant inspiration of making the various
+stalls represent the countries of the earth and dressing the fair
+vendors in national costume, at least she took the credit for it. In
+spite of his mother-in-law’s repeated injunctions to him to attend the
+opening, Sainty had not the slightest intention of doing so. Indeed, he
+had hoped, by liberal contributions, to get off altogether, but Alice de
+Lissac had reinforced Lady Eccleston with gentle persistence.
+
+‘I think you should put in an appearance,’ she said, ‘just to support
+your wife, you know; it will look queer if you don’t, when she and her
+mother are so much interested. _I_ should have thought you would come to
+the opening’; and finally Sainty was fain to buy immunity from being
+present at this ceremony with a promise to visit his wife’s stall in the
+course of one afternoon. It was not till somewhat late on the last day
+of the three that he brought himself to redeem his given word.
+
+By the time he arrived, the whole show, though brilliantly lighted and
+to his perception still disagreeably crowded, had become a little the
+worse for wear. The stalls were denuded of half their contents, the air
+had a vitiated second-hand taste, and a fine impalpable dust, raised by
+the passing of so many feet, hung like a light haze over everything.
+Tired dishevelled girls, looking curiously sham in their fancy dresses
+by the side of people in everyday garb, and flushed under the rouge that
+had been thought a necessary part of their costume, moved among the
+crowd making a last effort to dispose of the remainder of their wares,
+excited by competition to perilous lengths of flirtation with unknown
+and rather common young men, with whom on no other occasion they would
+have thought of exchanging a word.
+
+Sainty was patiently elbowing his way like Parsifal among the
+flower-maidens, and meditating on the mystery of what was and was not
+permitted to the London girl, when he was suddenly confronted by Mr.
+Austin Pryor. Every buttonhole of the young stockbroker’s neat
+frock-coat was decorated with faded vegetation and his arms loaded with
+a number of quite useless purchases.
+
+‘Well, Belchamber,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with your wife;
+too bad of her, I call it. I’d an awful good time here yesterday with
+her, and she made me promise to come again to-day and bring a lot of our
+fellows from the city. I told ’em all how ripping she looked in her
+Polish get-up, and now they’ve all come and she isn’t here; she’s gone
+and given us all the slip. Most unprincipled of her, I call it.’
+
+Sainty, while expressing suitable distress at the faithless behaviour of
+his spouse, was secretly not sorry to be spared her encounter with the
+gallant Lotharios of Throgmorton Street, when he thought of the
+fragments of conversation he had already overheard in passing.
+
+‘I don’t know what has happened to her, I’m sure,’ he said politely; ‘I
+expected to find her here myself.’
+
+When at last he arrived at the lath and canvas pavillion, much bedraped
+with liberty muslin and flags, across the front of which a scroll
+displayed the legend, ‘Poland--Marchioness of Belchamber,’ he found only
+the de Lissac girls and another maiden, clad in little hussar caps and
+dolmans hung coquettishly on one shoulder, resentfully eyeing the ebbing
+tide of custom, while Alice and Lady Eccleston, aided by her obedient
+son Thomas, were feverishly tying parcels in the background.
+
+‘Have you written on that one, Tommy,’ Lady Eccleston was saying, ‘Mrs.
+Brown, Elm Lodge, Streatham? Oh dear, _which_ parcel is the big yellow
+cushion? I am sure that was the one she bought. Well, never mind, this
+is a cushion anyway, it feels soft; that’ll do. Ah, Sainty, you’ve come
+a little late, dear. Everything is over.’
+
+‘What’s become of Cissy?’ Sainty inquired.
+
+The young ladies were evidently not in the best of tempers, and this
+innocent question served to open the floodgates of their wrath.
+
+‘Cissy’s gone,’ Norah de Lissac said crossly, ‘and left us in the lurch.
+She _said_ she was tired, but _I_ think she was only bored. When it got
+dull and shabby and all the nice people had gone it didn’t amuse her any
+more.’
+
+‘It puts us in such a foolish position,’ Gemma chimed in. ‘People
+naturally come here to see her, and when they don’t find her they are
+not best pleased. One man asked me if I was Lady Belchamber, and when I
+said I wasn’t, he said, “Then which of you is?” Of course I had to say
+we none of us were, and then he was quite rude and said, “Then you’ve no
+business to put her name up over the stall.” It wasn’t at all pleasant.’
+
+Norah took up her parable again. ‘She didn’t even take the trouble to
+put on her costume to-day, just came in her ordinary clothes, and of
+course we looked like dressed-up fools beside her. If she had just sent
+us word she wasn’t going to we wouldn’t have put ours on either.’
+
+‘Oh, dears, it would have been a great pity,’ said Lady Eccleston,
+emerging from a pile of brown paper with her mouth full of pins. ‘You
+look charming in your dresses; they really suit you better than Cissy;
+and it would have been so flat if none of you had been in costume, for
+there really _is_n’t much in the stall itself to suggest Poland, I must
+admit I think Cissy really _was_ tired, you know; she has had a hard two
+days of it.’
+
+‘Well, we were tired too,’ said the implacable Norah. ‘She’s not the
+only person who has had a hard two days. Can’t we go home now, at
+least, and get off these ridiculous clothes?’ she asked, turning to her
+step-mother. Alice looked distressed and murmured something about ‘not
+deserting Lady Eccleston.’
+
+‘Oh, don’t _think_ of me,’ cried that lady. ‘You and the dear girls go.
+Tommy and I can soon finish what’s left to do. The people are thinning
+fast, and we’ve done very well. I _can’t_ thank you enough for all your
+splendid help’; and she embraced the whole party with a last galvanic
+effort at cheerful enthusiasm.
+
+Sainty saw the de Lissac party to their gorgeous equipage, and was just
+turning away from the door when a small voice at his elbow demanded,
+‘Shall I please to call the kerridge, m’lord?’ and looking down he had a
+vision of two large appealing eyes and a white kid forefinger pressed
+tightly to a curly hatbrim. He recognised the diminutive boy who
+decorated Cissy’s coach-box when she rode abroad.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said; ‘if the brougham is here, I may as well take it. Lady
+Belchamber has gone home.’
+
+In the course of the drive he wondered why he had taken the trouble to
+come to the bazaar, and who had been benefited or pleased by his visit.
+
+He had hardly got to his room and sat down to his book by the fire, with
+a sigh of relief, when a servant came to him.
+
+‘If you please, my lord, Gibson wants to know if there are any more
+orders for the carriage.’
+
+‘Not for me,’ Sainty answered, his mind on what he was reading. ‘Ask her
+ladyship.’
+
+The man looked surprised and still lingered doubtfully.
+
+‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘what is it?’
+
+‘If you please, my lord, my lady hasn’t come in yet.’
+
+‘Oh, I think she must have----’ Sainty was beginning but stopped
+himself. He saw no reason for discussing Cissy’s movements with the
+servants. ‘Then you must wait for orders till she does,’ he said.
+
+He wondered a little why, if she left the bazaar because she was tired,
+she had not come home. But after all, Norah’s explanation was probably
+the correct one. She was bored with the whole thing and took the
+shortest cut for freedom; it was not Cissy’s way to allow herself to be
+bored. ‘In any case it is no affair of mine,’ he thought, as he turned
+again to his book.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+After Easter, when Cissy had a morning-room and a boudoir, and the
+drawing-rooms were practically finished, Sainty entered into undisputed
+possession of his two back rooms, and spent more and more of his time in
+them. Only faint echoes of the turmoil in which Lady Belchamber had her
+being penetrated to that peaceful seclusion. Evening after evening Cissy
+would dine out with a few of her special cronies and their attendant
+swains, and go to the theatre or the opera till it was time to begin the
+round of balls or parties, from which she returned in grey summer dawns,
+far too tired for there to be any question of her coming down to
+breakfast next morning. Sometimes Sainty did not set eyes on her for
+days together. Gradually he slipped back into his old studious life,
+snatching sketchy little meals from trays, when he remembered to eat
+anything, and as little a part of the life of the house as if he were in
+lodgings round the corner.
+
+In May, Lady Charmington came to town, to attend the meetings of the
+‘Ladies’ No Popery League,’ of which she was a leading member.
+
+‘My mother writes me she is coming to London,’ Sainty said. ‘Of course
+she will come to us.’
+
+‘Well, she can, if you wish it,’ Cissy answered; ‘but I warn you you’re
+preparing trouble for yourself. She won’t like the way we live, and when
+she doesn’t like a thing, she is not always silent and accommodating.
+She’ll expect a family breakfast at 9.15, with prayers at 9. I don’t
+suppose she ever breakfasted in her room in her life. I don’t know where
+_you_ breakfast, but _I_ certainly shan’t come down.’
+
+‘I suppose you couldn’t, just for the time she’s here?’ Sainty
+suggested.
+
+‘I’m not such a humbug as to alter my way of life to please her. She may
+as well find out first as last that I am not cut on her pattern.’
+
+‘I think she has pretty well made that discovery already,’ Sainty
+retorted.
+
+‘Well,’ said Cissy, ‘she can come if she likes, and if you want her, but
+she must take us as she finds us. I told you she wouldn’t like it. She’d
+be a great deal happier at Roehampton with Lady Firth. She could come in
+to her meetings, and if she wanted to lunch here any particular day, I
+could always tell people to keep out of the way.’
+
+‘You can’t say I interfere with you much, or often ask you to do
+anything to please me,’ said Sainty earnestly; ‘but when we have a great
+house here, and my own mother wants to come up, I do think it would look
+strange for us not to take her in.’
+
+‘Well, please yourself. After all, I was only thinking of you. _I_ can
+generally hold my own, but if your mother gets her back up, as she
+inevitably will, _you_’ll have the devil of a time of it.’
+
+Sainty had presently occasion to prove the accuracy of his wife’s
+forecast. Acting on Cissy’s hint, he dutifully appeared each morning to
+give Lady Charmington her breakfast. The first day, she lingered before
+sitting down, as though she were waiting for something.
+
+‘Won’t you make the tea for me, mother?’ Sainty asked. ‘It’s like old
+times, you and I having breakfast together.’
+
+‘You don’t have prayers, I see,’ Lady Charmington remarked, as she took
+her seat. ‘Or were they earlier? I can quite well come down sooner, if
+you wish it.’
+
+‘Well, you see, Cissy never comes down to breakfast, and, as you know, I
+am not a great eater, so when we are alone, I generally have a cup of
+tea and an egg in the study.’
+
+‘Why doesn’t your wife come to breakfast? is she ill?’
+
+‘Oh no, she’s well enough. But she’s out late at parties and things
+every night, and I’m glad she _does_ rest a little in the mornings; it’s
+the only time she does.’
+
+‘I confess I’m a little disappointed in Cissy,’ Lady Charmington
+remarked, after contemplating the toast-rack judicially for a time in
+silence. ‘I never thought her a very deep or earnest nature, but I did
+_not_ expect to find her so entirely given up to worldly pursuits.’
+
+‘Cissy’s young and pretty, and people make a great deal of her. After
+all, it’s natural at her age that she should like to enjoy herself.’
+
+Lady Charmington sniffed. ‘Enjoyment! People nowadays seem to think of
+nothing but enjoyment. We were not put into the world to enjoy
+ourselves.’
+
+‘Well, most of us fulfil the object of our being pretty thoroughly
+then,’ Sainty said, ‘and yet every one seems to _want_ to be happy; and
+it is a good deal to expect of the few who have it in their power that
+they should voluntarily forego what most people fail to obtain.’
+
+‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that, my boy; you don’t seem to have
+a proper sense of your blessings. You have very much to be thankful
+for.’
+
+Lady Charmington saw nothing incongruous in finding fault with some
+acrimony if things were not to her liking, but she was always swift to
+rebuke a complaining spirit in others.
+
+‘Her poor mother, who, if a little too fond of society, has a very
+sincerely religious side to her, must be sadly distressed at her
+daughter’s light-mindedness.’
+
+The thought of Lady Eccleston as a pious matron wounded by her child’s
+care for earthly matters was too much for Sainty.
+
+‘Why, Lady Eccleston goes wherever a candle’s lighted,’ he said; ‘or if
+she doesn’t, it’s because she’s failed to get an invitation.’
+
+‘Censorious, censorious!’ replied his mother. ‘Who art thou that judgest
+another man’s servant? You should watch against that spirit; it’ll grow
+on you.’
+
+Sainty was only too glad to have diverted the precious balms to his own
+head, which had been accustomed to that form of unction for too many
+years to be easily broken. He saw his mother off to the first of her
+meetings before there was the smallest chance of her encountering her
+daughter-in-law, and then betook himself to his own rooms to read the
+papers. As he drew near to the fire that his languid blood demanded in
+this uncertain season, his eye fell on the letters he had not as yet
+thought of opening. As a rule his correspondence was not exciting. It
+consisted mainly of advertisements and begging letters. The first that
+he took up this morning had such a family look of these last, that he
+opened it with a weary certainty of his correspondent’s need for £3, 5s.
+6d. to prevent the bed being taken from under his sick child; but though
+it was written on cheap paper in a hand carefully made to appear
+illiterate, its contents were far other than he had expected.
+
+‘Ask your wife where she was on the third afternoon of the World’s
+Bazaar. A friend.’
+
+Sainty had never in his life received an anonymous letter, and the
+experience was distinctly unpleasant. He shook it off into the fire as
+St. Paul did the other venomous thing, but failed to get the poison out
+of his system so cheaply. In case it should not work, his nameless
+‘friend’ took care to repeat the dose, and several other communications
+of a like tenor followed the first, but none of them produced in him the
+unpleasant sensations of that chilly May morning, when he stood watching
+the sparks run along the blackened paper and the gray ash writhe and
+twist for its final flight up the chimney. After a time he came to
+regard them as more or less in the natural order of things, and even
+ceased to read them; but the writer showed such skill in varying the
+address, that in no case was he able to detect one without opening it.
+Some contained but a single sentence, others were much longer, but all
+suggested doubts of his wife’s conduct, and recommended a surveillance
+of which the very notion was repugnant to him. Of course he could take
+no notice of such things. He wondered if he ought to speak to Cissy
+about them, only to dismiss the idea as impossible. Still less could he
+mention them to any one else. Eventually he decided that there was but
+one way to treat an anonymous letter, which was to behave as if it had
+not been received. None the less they stirred in him a vague uneasiness.
+The feeling that somewhere about one an unknown enemy is watching for a
+chance to hurt, fills life with an unpleasant sense of ambush. He could
+think of no one who had cause to wish him ill. The enmity, then, must be
+to Cissy. A disappointed rival? He needed no reminder of the extreme
+unlikelihood of any one’s grudging her the possession of his affections.
+But how if the rivalry were for the possession of some one else’s
+affections? That possibility was not without its sting. For him there
+could be no question of jealousy, in the ordinary sense of the word; but
+he began to apprehend the possibilities of scandal, to understand that
+his acceptance of the anomalous part which his wife had thrust upon him
+by no means exhausted her power of injuring his happiness or his honour;
+in short, that he was saddled with an obligation to guard what he did
+not possess.
+
+Meanwhile he found himself in the no less ironical position of having to
+champion her many doings, which in his heart he disliked, against his
+mother, with whom he secretly sympathised. Lady Charmington was far from
+having said all her say on that first morning at breakfast. Cissy’s
+prediction of her disapproval of their London life was amply verified.
+Occupied with the matters that had brought her to town, and going into a
+totally different world from her daughter-in-law’s, she was as ignorant
+as her son of the things that would most have stirred her wrath; but she
+found quite enough to rebuke in the house itself. Cissy’s idleness and
+dissipation, her late hours, her card-playing, her neglect of her
+household duties, and the consequent waste and profusion, her
+Sabbath-breaking, and the completeness with which she ignored her
+husband and her home (not to speak of her guest and mother-in-law) were
+each and severally the subjects of the elder lady’s severe
+animadversions to the offender herself when occasion offered, but far
+more often to the patient ears of poor Sainty, who had to defend the
+culprit as best he might.
+
+Another fruitful topic of maternal discontent was Lady Belchamber’s
+failure to provide an heir to the property. This, it may well be
+supposed, was not an agreeable topic to Sainty, nor one on which he had
+any ready rejoinders at his command.
+
+‘You have been married close on a year,’ said Lady Charmington, ‘and I
+see no signs or hope of a child. I said something to Cissy about it one
+day, and she laughed disagreeably, and said she was glad of it. I asked
+if she didn’t think she had any duty to the family in the matter. I am
+almost ashamed to tell you what she answered: that a baby was a great
+tie and a nuisance, and she hoped if she had to have one, it would be at
+a convenient time of year, when it didn’t interfere with things.’
+
+‘I don’t suppose very young women ever _want_ to have a baby,’ Sainty
+said doubtfully, feeling something was expected of him.
+
+‘Cissy is not so young as all that. She must be two-or three-and-twenty.
+I can’t imagine any woman marrying and _not_ wanting to have a child. I
+am sure when I married I prayed most fervently that I might give my
+husband a son.’
+
+‘Well, you know, the answer to your prayer was not quite all you could
+have wished,’ suggested Sainty.
+
+Lady Charmington ignored the interruption. ‘It is not as though she were
+not a perfectly normal healthy young woman,’ she said, ‘for I never was
+taken in for a minute by all that business of the shock to her nervous
+system at Belchamber. Constant dissipation, racketing about morning,
+noon, and night, and tight lacing are not the ways to go about having an
+heir. I only hope she mayn’t do anything else, if she’s so afraid that
+the duties of a wife and mother will cut her out of a party or two.’
+
+‘O mother!’ Sainty expostulated.
+
+‘If she is not going to have any children, what was the use of your
+marrying?’ continued his aggrieved parent. ‘We are just where we were
+with regard to that other woman. _She_ has children fast enough! Cissy
+seems to think she has come into the family merely to have what she
+calls a good time, and spend the money that I pinched and scraped
+together for you for so many years. I have _never_ seen such sinful
+waste as goes on in this house.’
+
+Lady Charmington was only putting into words what her son had often,
+with some bitterness, asked himself. What was the use of his marrying?
+He had not perhaps quite so crudely admitted, even in his inner
+consciousness, how much he had been influenced in making up his mind to
+such a step by the thought of excluding the children of Lady Arthur from
+the succession to his name and estates, but it had none the less been a
+powerful motive with him. Had his brother passed his examinations, gone
+into the army, and in due course married some commonplace,
+unobjectionable young lady, it is more than doubtful if even Lady
+Eccleston would have succeeded in dragging Sainty into matrimony. For
+one thing, she would have had to reckon with Lady Charmington as an
+enemy instead of an ally, which would have put a quite different
+complexion on the affair. The young man reflected sometimes with dumb
+rage on how his life was turned topsy-turvy, haled from familiar field
+and woodland to this hated city, that a girl, who was really no more to
+him than any other, should junket from morning till night with a set of
+people he could not endure, and squander money, with which he might have
+benefited millions of his fellow-creatures, on her senseless, unoriginal
+pleasures. And all for what? Sooner or later the children of his
+undesirable sister-in-law would sit in his place, and inherit his
+patrimony as surely as if he had followed his natural bent, and led a
+peaceful, laborious life remote from all connection with Lady Deans and
+her play-fellows. And with it all Cissy had not even the common decency
+to avoid the tongue of scandal, as these odious anonymous letters showed
+him. He really did think she might have spared him that. Day after day
+he thought of saying something to her on the subject, and always he was
+prevented by lack of courage or opportunity, or else some unfortunate
+speech of his mother drove him back into the position of his wife’s
+involuntary champion.
+
+‘Cissy tells me she is going away for Whitsuntide,’ Lady Charmington
+announced one day, with the sniff that indicated much more than met the
+ear in this apparently simple announcement.
+
+‘Is she?’ said Sainty, anxious not to commit himself.
+
+‘Has she not even deigned to let you know?’ inquired her ladyship
+scornfully.
+
+‘I think she _did_ say something about the Suffords having asked her
+there.’
+
+‘Were _you_ not included in the invitation?’
+
+‘I really don’t know; I never asked. I didn’t want to go. I suppose Lady
+Sufford went through the form of asking me, but she probably knew I
+shouldn’t come. It would be too terrible if I were obliged to go
+wherever Cissy does.’
+
+‘The arrangement seems to suit _her_ perfectly,’ said Lady Charmington;
+‘but I can’t see why you shouldn’t go.’
+
+‘It would add to no one’s pleasure, and take away considerably from
+mine,’ said Sainty promptly.
+
+‘Always pleasure!’ cried Lady Charmington. ‘The invariable argument! no
+thought of duty!’
+
+‘If a thing which is purely a question of amusement doesn’t amuse one,
+why make a duty of it?’ argued her son.
+
+‘Well, if it is not your duty to go about with your wife, I should have
+thought it was hers to stay at home with you. Of course I quite
+understood that she mentioned her plans to me with the delicate
+intention of letting me see that she could not keep me beyond next week;
+but she need not trouble; I had settled to go to mother on Tuesday in
+any case. She has failed very much lately, and I shall have to be with
+her more. By the way, I found she was rather hurt that Cissy had never
+once been to see her since she came to town in February, nor asked her
+to come in and see your new house.’
+
+‘Dear me!’ said Sainty, ‘I ought to have thought of it. Of course we
+should have been only too delighted to see granny, if I had only thought
+she would care to see the house; but she seems always so absorbed in
+other things, it never occurred to me. It was very stupid of me. I’ve
+been several times to see her, but she always talks as if it was such a
+business to drive into London. I never dreamt of asking it of her. And
+she says her sight has got so bad, that I wasn’t sure how much she would
+see if she came.’
+
+‘She would probably see a great deal that would shock her, as I have,’
+said Lady Charmington. ‘Have you ever calculated at all what this house
+is going to cost you by the time it is finished?’
+
+‘Oh, I’ve kept pretty good track of the expenses. I’ve paid for a good
+deal of the work as it went along. It has all been done much more
+extravagantly than I thought necessary. Indeed, as far as I am
+concerned, I shouldn’t care if we had no London house at all; but Uncle
+Cor seemed to think it indispensable, and he doesn’t consider that we
+have done much we need not. He is always afraid that, with my saving
+tendencies, I shall fail to do myself credit. He needn’t be uneasy as
+long as Cissy is on hand to provide the antidote.’
+
+‘There is a great difference between having things suitable to your
+position and being foolishly and wickedly extravagant,’ remarked Lady
+Charmington.
+
+‘Perhaps I have deliberately rather given Cissy her head about this
+house,’ Sainty answered, ‘to keep her hands off Belchamber; there was a
+great deal she was thinking of doing there, but I hope I have put a stop
+to that.’
+
+‘Belchamber!’ cried out his mother in horror. ‘What could she want to do
+there? It was always kept in perfect repair; there wasn’t a door knob
+missing nor a tap out of order, and when you came of age there was an
+immense amount of money spent in cleaning and restoring. I always
+thought it quite unnecessary her doing up those rooms in that ridiculous
+way last summer. They looked to _me_ more like an improper person’s
+apartments than like anything in an English lady’s house.’
+
+‘Well, I can’t say I always admire Cissy’s taste, myself; there’s a
+little want of knowledge about it.’
+
+Sainty did not judge it necessary to tell his mother how far reaching
+had been Cissy’s plans for the remodelling of Belchamber; he had
+surprised them by an accident, and had promptly and firmly opposed them.
+He could not bear the desecrating touch of fleeting fashion on anything
+so artistically and historically complete as the home of his childhood,
+and had been glad to purchase its immunity from the threatened changes
+by larger concessions in the matter of the London house. Perhaps, even
+so, Cissy would not have abandoned her projects without a struggle, but
+for the appearance of a most unlooked-for ally to her husband in the
+person of Claude Morland, who had supervened in the height of the
+discussion and thrown all the weight of his authority into the scale for
+the saving of Belchamber.
+
+‘Sainty is perfectly right,’ he said, with his most pontifical air; ‘it
+would be vandalism. There isn’t a more beautiful specimen of its period
+in England than the great saloon or the Vandyke dining-hall; they are
+perfect. And the red, yellow, and green rooms, though they are later and
+not so pure, have a great _cachet_ of their own, and are perfectly _de
+l’époque_ as far as they go. No, no, my dear Cissy, it would be a sin. I
+am all for your using the rooms, and living in them; but, believe me,
+you mustn’t touch them. Do what you like here; you have a clean slate to
+work on; but don’t attempt to “improve” Belchamber.’
+
+Sainty was astonished at the meekness with which Cissy abandoned her
+cherished schemes, but much too grateful to Claude for backing him up to
+resent this evidence of his cousin’s greater authority. He knew, too,
+that he owed it to him that the London house, if a little over-decorated
+and too obviously costly, was, on the whole, harmonious and in good
+taste.
+
+By dint of unremitting vigilance and almost superhuman tact, the date of
+Lady Charmington’s departure had almost been reached without any more
+serious encounter than a few skirmishes between her and her
+daughter-in-law; but one afternoon, having heard his mother come in, and
+gone in search of her, Sainty saw at a glance that a battle royal was
+raging. Cissy was lolling exasperatingly calm and contemptuous among the
+piles of cushions she delighted to heap upon the furniture, while Lady
+Charmington sat stiffly erect, an ominous light in her eye, and a pink
+spot burning in the centre of each sallow cheek. Her son heard her voice
+as he entered, and quailed at the familiar tone of it.
+
+‘I am well aware,’ she was saying, ‘that nothing _I_ say will have the
+smallest influence on your behaviour, but none the less I feel it my
+solemn duty to protest, when I see things going on of which I entirely
+disapprove.’
+
+‘Why trouble, if you are so sure that you will produce no effect?’ asked
+Cissy.
+
+‘Because _I_ have some consideration for my son’s honour, to which you
+and he seem to be equally indifferent.’
+
+‘Oh! His honour!’ protested Cissy.
+
+‘Yes; his honour,’ persisted Lady Charmington. ‘When I was first
+married, a young woman of your age, a young wife not a year married, who
+received men alone, sprawling about on sofas in that kind of indecent
+clothing, would have been considered to have lost her character.’
+
+‘Mother!’ interposed Sainty.
+
+‘Oh, it’s largely your fault for allowing such things,’ his mother
+flashed out at him. ‘If you were more of a man, your wife would never
+dare treat you as an absolute nonentity in your own house.’
+
+‘But what’s it all about?’ asked Sainty. ‘What has Cissy been doing?’
+
+‘I’m sure _I_ don’t know,’ answered Lady Belchamber. ‘You had better ask
+your mother.’
+
+‘I came in just now,’ said Lady Charmington,’and found her with that
+flimsy rag she calls a tea-gown half off her back lolling about among
+the cushions there with Algy Montgomery. I don’t call it decent.’
+
+‘Why, Algy’s a sort of relation, you know,’ answered Cissy; ‘his
+stepmother’s Sainty’s grandmother; it makes him a kind of uncle.’
+
+‘Kind of fiddlestick! a good-for-nothing young rip in the Life Guards,
+of six-or seven-and-twenty at the outside.’
+
+‘Do you suppose, if I were doing anything that wasn’t perfectly
+innocent, that I shouldn’t have taken jolly good care that you didn’t
+come spying in?’ inquired Cissy, with lofty scorn.
+
+Lady Charmington choked. ‘It is not my habit to spy,’ she cried, ‘and I
+am not accusing you of actual misconduct; but it’s not only to-day that
+I object to. It’s your general mode of going on. Yesterday you were shut
+up for ever so long with that vulgar little Mr. Pryor, and you drive
+Claude all over London in your brougham. No honest woman should take any
+man in her brougham, no matter who it is, that isn’t her husband or her
+brother.’
+
+‘Would her grandfather be admissible?’ asked Cissy sweetly. ‘I must say
+for a high-minded person who angrily repudiates the idea of spying, you
+seem to be strangely well informed as to all my movements.’
+
+‘Cissy!’ expostulated Sainty.
+
+‘Well, what is it?’ she asked, turning to him politely.
+
+‘I have been deceived in you, very much deceived,’ Lady Charmington
+broke out. ‘When you wanted to marry my son, you were all sweetness and
+honey to me; now you’ve attained your object, you insult me. From the
+day I arrived here you have studied in every way to let me see I was
+unwelcome; there wasn’t an attention you could have paid me you didn’t
+pointedly omit, or a possible slight that you neglected to put upon me.
+I can well see that a mother-in-law in the house by no means suited your
+book.’
+
+‘Even such a sweet affectionate one?’ interposed Cissy.
+
+‘Mark my words,’ continued the exasperated dowager, ‘you will come to
+grief. You are playing a dangerous game, my lady. You have no
+conscience, no principle, no sense of duty to restrain or save you. If
+you forget God and go after your own vain amusements from morning till
+night, you will assuredly make shipwreck in the end.’
+
+‘Well, at least you will have the satisfaction of thinking it was not
+for want of being warned.’
+
+‘Your sarcasms will never prevent my speaking my mind. I have seen
+nothing in this house against which I do not think it incumbent on me,
+not only as the mother of your husband but as a Christian woman, to bear
+testimony--luxury, waste, riotous living, and indelicate behaviour. I am
+going away, and I know you will be glad to be rid of me, but I couldn’t
+have reconciled it to my conscience to go without speaking.’
+
+‘I must say you have eased your conscience very thoroughly, and most
+agreeably. Is there anything else your sense of duty impels you to
+mention before you go?’
+
+At this, Lady Charmington fairly lost her temper. She strode over to
+Cissy, and Sainty flung himself between them, afraid that she was going
+to strike her. ‘You little minx!’ she cried. ‘You little selfish, vulgar
+minx! You have lied and wheedled your way into this family, and grabbed
+all you could lay your hands upon, and what have you done in return? The
+one thing that was asked of you, to bear a child, and give the house an
+heir, you have most lamentably failed in doing.’
+
+Cissy sprang to her feet, a curious evil look in her face, and for a
+moment the two women looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Oh! in the matter
+of a baby, take care I don’t astonish some of you yet,’ she cried.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+‘But you will come to _my_ ball,’ said the duchess with decision. The
+‘but’ was in answer to Sainty’s assertion that he did not go to balls.
+‘_Vous vous faites ridicule, mon enfant._ That you shouldn’t accompany
+your wife everywhere, that I can see; it would be silly; but equally it
+is not right never to be seen at all. People ask if anything is wrong
+with you that you can’t appear, if you are half-witted or have fits.’
+
+‘It is very kind of them to occupy themselves with my affairs,’ said
+Sainty. ‘I shouldn’t have supposed that most people remembered that I
+exist.’
+
+‘But it is perhaps as well they _should_ remember it sometimes,’ said
+his grandmother, with a significant glance at Cissy.
+
+‘I should have thought the one form of entertainment from which a lame
+man might have been held excused was a dance,’ Sainty persisted.
+
+‘Ah! there are dances and dances,’ replied the duchess. ‘This is not a
+dance _où l’on dansera_, it is a serious entertainment. I don’t say it
+will be amusing; I don’t give this kind of thing for my own amusement or
+for other people’s; there will be ministers, public men, royalties;
+_enfin_ a solemn thing, and you are of the family. You must come,
+mustn’t he, Cissy?’
+
+‘Oh, certainly, if you wish it, dear,’ Cissy answered lightly. ‘I should
+think it would just suit him. He will find people to whom he can talk
+about the housing of the working classes. You know how I always _love_
+coming to Sunborough House, but not to _this_ kind of thing; you have
+said yourself how it bores you.’
+
+Sainty smiled at his wife’s complete assumption of equality with his
+grandmother, both in age and position. He couldn’t help reflecting how
+enchanted Lady Eccleston’s daughter would have been a short year ago at
+the prospect of attending the function of which she now spoke so
+slightingly as being for the uninitiated.
+
+‘Well, you will both come, like good children,’ said the duchess easily.
+‘We don’t live only to amuse ourselves, you know.’
+
+And so it came about that Belchamber found himself attending the ball in
+question, and very much lost in that glittering throng. At first he had
+been amused by the show, as he might have been by a scene in a
+pantomime. The pompous men, bearers of great names or high positions,
+stuck about with orders, the indecent bejewelled women, the lights, the
+flowers, the music: it all made an effect of some gorgeousness, with the
+really stately beautiful house as a background. But after an hour or so
+he became aware of a sense of intolerable weariness. He had taken it for
+granted that he and Cissy would be entirely independent of each other,
+and that after he had shown himself to his grandmother and the duke, and
+amused himself for a little while with the pageant, he would be free to
+depart whenever it pleased him; but to his astonishment Cissy had
+remarked that she had no intention of staying late and she would be very
+much obliged if he would take her home in his brougham. ‘I want Gibson
+early to-morrow morning,’ she explained, ‘so I don’t want to take him
+out to-night, and I haven’t been in bed before three one night this
+week. We can just show ourselves, and then slope.’
+
+Once at the ball, however, she seemed to find it less dull than she had
+anticipated, for Sainty several times caught sight of her dancing, which
+she had announced that she certainly should not do, and had quite failed
+in his endeavour to get speech of her to tell her that he would walk
+home and leave the carriage for her. The night was fine and his own
+house not five minutes away. Any one but Sainty would simply have gone
+and left his wife to find it out. But this was a course which his
+invincible conscientiousness forbade his taking. As he hung forlornly
+about, hustled by the people who crowded in and out of the rooms, he
+thought that surely no sound in nature was so ugly as that of a quantity
+of human voices all talking at once and endeavouring to dominate each
+other. He came presently on Mrs. de Lissac, who always soothed his
+exasperated nerves; but after all he need not go to a ball to see _her_.
+‘We could have had a much pleasanter talk in your house or mine, without
+having to try and outshout a hundred other people,’ he said.
+
+‘I never can quite get over the strangeness of being here at all,’ Alice
+answered. ‘It always seems rather like a fairy story to me, when I think
+of my very simple bringing-up at the rectory, that I should come to rub
+shoulders with all these grandees.’
+
+‘It is a fairy story in which you have certainly been the good fairy,’
+said Sainty warmly. ‘I can’t tell you the difference it has made to me
+having you in London to come and talk to sometimes.’
+
+‘It is dear of you to say that. I like to think that to you I am not the
+rich woman and possible subscriber or hostess, but just your old govey
+that you loved when you were a little boy. Sometimes, dear,’ she added,
+with a timid look of great tenderness, ‘I fancy you are not much happier
+now than you were then.’
+
+Sainty passed the back of his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘Happy,’ he
+said; ‘is anyone happy? Think of the lives that are being led within a
+mile of us to-night; can any one be happy with the cry of those millions
+in his ears? Certainly not these people with their eternal desperate
+pursuit of amusement who are afraid of being left for five minutes in
+company with their own thoughts.’
+
+‘Poor boy! you certainly are _not_ happy or you would not be so bitter.
+It is dreadful to think of those poor people. I often wonder if we have
+a right to be so rich when there are so many starving; but my dear
+husband says this is Socialism, and if we weren’t rich we couldn’t give
+away so much, and certainly he is very generous; and he says that all
+these things that I feel as if it was wrong to spend so much on give
+employment to lots of poor people to make, who would be out of work if
+there were no rich people to buy things.’ She brought out this
+time-honoured piece of argument with such a triumphant pride in her
+spouse’s wisdom that Sainty thought of nothing less than combating it.
+
+‘There is one form of happiness that _you_ ought to enjoy in
+perfection,’ he said, ‘that of being and doing good.’
+
+Alice blushed. ‘Oh, you mustn’t call me good,’ she said; ‘but I was
+going to say, if there is a lot of misery and poverty, I’m sure there
+has never been so much done towards relieving it as nowadays.’
+
+‘The “World’s Bazaar,” for instance,’ said Sainty.
+
+‘Well--yes, dear--that and other things. And I’m sure if, as you say,
+being and doing good makes us happy, you ought to know it too.’
+
+‘I!’ cried Sainty. ‘Whom do I make happy?’
+
+‘Oh, you are always doing kind things for people, and see how happy you
+make your wife.’
+
+‘My wife’s happiness is very much independent of me; indeed, I am rather
+the principal drawback to it.’ The words slipped out almost before he
+was aware. Even to this kind old friend he had never spoken of his
+relations with his wife, and this seemed neither the time nor the place
+he would have chosen to do so. Mrs. de Lissac looked pained, but she
+took advantage of his little outbreak to say, ‘I have sometimes wanted
+to speak to you about your wife, but have not quite liked to. I think
+you and she should be more together. You leave her too much to herself.
+She is very young and pretty to be so independent, and perhaps a little
+thoughtless.’
+
+‘Talking of Cissy,’ Sainty interrupted, ‘can you tell me where she is?
+As a beginning of acting on your advice, you see we have come into the
+world together to-night, and I am actually waiting to go home till she
+is ready.’
+
+A sinuous young lady, clad in a sheath of some glittering, shimmering
+blackness, turned at the words and held out her hand. ‘How d’ye do, Lord
+Belchamber?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you remember me. Are you asking
+for Lady Belchamber? I saw her not five minutes ago with Mr. Morland.’
+
+With a start Sainty recognised Amy Winston. The unrelieved black of her
+dress, and of a long pair of gloves that were pulled up to her elbows,
+lent a baleful pallor to her face and neck, and above her brow there
+shone in her dusky tresses a single diamond star which, if real, was a
+very remarkable ornament to belong to a single woman said mainly to
+support herself by the manufacture of magazine tales and occasional
+verse. At sight of this siren good Mrs. de Lissac fell back into the
+crowd, while the young man to whom Miss Winston was talking, after a
+half glance at Sainty, made off not less hastily, so that they were left
+facing one another.
+
+‘I remember you perfectly, Miss Winston,’ Sainty said, ‘although we have
+not met very lately. You were kind enough to say you had seen Lady
+Belchamber. I wish you would tell me where I should find her; she wanted
+to go home early to-night, and I think may be looking for me.’
+
+‘She didn’t appear to be, ‘replied the young woman, with the faintest
+suspicion of insolence; ‘nor, I must say, did she seem in any particular
+hurry to get home. She was going into the garden with _le beau cousin_.
+Didn’t you know the garden was lit up? it is one of the great features
+of the Sunborough House parties. Let’s go and look for them.’
+
+Sainty couldn’t well refuse. He was thinking how much more indecent a
+very low-necked bodice was on a thin woman than on a fat one.
+
+‘Wasn’t that Ned Parsons who left you just now?’ he asked, as they made
+their way towards the staircase.
+
+‘Yes. He has become very fashionable since his book was such a success;
+he goes everywhere now. By the way,’ she added, with a little laugh, ‘I
+suppose that’s why he bolted at sight of you; he thinks you haven’t
+forgiven him for the liberty he took with your coming-of-age party.’
+
+‘I should have thought he had quite as much reason to fear my
+grandmother; yet I find him at her house.’
+
+‘Oh, well--a great ball like this is hardly being at people’s house, you
+know; it doesn’t count. But as a matter of fact he and the duchess have
+quite made it up. They met at Lady Eva’s, and the duchess prepared to
+crush him. “I hear, Mr. Parsons,” said she, in her most regal manner,
+“that you have put me in a book.” “Who can have told you such a thing?”
+Ned asked, with touching innocence. “The duchess in my book is old and
+ridiculous; how _could_ she be meant for you?”’
+
+Sainty couldn’t help laughing. As they emerged into the cooler and less
+crowded garden, his guide waited for him to come up beside her. Hitherto
+she had preceded him, worming her way through the crowd with a deftness
+bred of long habit, at which Sainty marvelled, and talking lightly to
+him over her shoulder.
+
+‘One doesn’t often see you at this sort of thing,’ she said.
+
+‘It is only the second ball of my life,’ Sainty answered. ‘You were at
+my first too.’
+
+‘Ah! the famous ball immortalised by Parsons. Is it possible that it can
+be three years ago?’
+
+‘Nearly four now.’
+
+‘Good heavens! so it is. How old we are all getting! Your wife was there
+too; it was the year she came out. How little any of us thought what was
+going to happen, except perhaps dear Lady Eccleston. I shouldn’t wonder
+if _she_ had had an inkling even then.’
+
+Sainty did not like his companion’s tone, but hardly knew how to resent
+it. He had hoped by a rather stiff silence to intimate his want of
+appreciation of her particular form of humour, but she continued to
+chatter quite unabashed by his unresponsiveness.
+
+‘Cissy is quite a success,’ she continued; ‘it is astonishing how
+quickly she has caught on. I don’t know any one who has more admirers,
+unless perhaps it’s Mrs. Jack Purse, and she’s been much longer on the
+scene of battle.’
+
+‘And who may she be?’ Sainty asked, hoping to divert the stream of Miss
+Winston’s malevolence from his own vegetable patch.
+
+‘Lord Belchamber, where _have_ you lived? I wish she could hear you;
+she’d die of it. Why, Mrs. Jack is smartest of the smart. She knows
+hardly any one but Jews and royalties. I was quite astonished to find
+her at the Suffords’ at Whitsuntide. Hylda Sufford said she couldn’t
+imagine why she came to her, but I think the Guggenheim’s party for the
+prince falling through had something to do with it.’
+
+‘My wife didn’t tell me she met you at the Suffords’.’
+
+‘Oh, I don’t know how I came to be asked, but I was.’
+
+‘And did you amuse yourself?’
+
+‘Oh, we had great fun. One night we all dressed up for dinner. Hylda was
+a harlequin and Ella Dalsany the columbine.’
+
+‘Do you mean to say that Lady Sufford came down to dinner in tights
+before the footmen?’
+
+‘Gracious, yes! And Gladys Purse was Mephistopheles and Lady Deans
+Marguerite; but we all thought Cissy had the best idea.’
+
+‘And what was that?’ asked Sainty nervously. He had neither asked nor
+received any account of the Suffords’ country-house party.
+
+‘Why, she just put on her best frock and all her diamonds, and said she
+was the Traviata.’
+
+Sainty was not sure that this inspiration of his wife’s exactly appealed
+to him. He walked in gloomy silence.
+
+‘Didn’t she tell you about it?’ asked Miss Winston. ‘She had a
+tremendous success. Mrs. Jack, with her red legs and cock’s feather, was
+nowhere. Cissy has one immense pull over Gladys Purse as far as the
+younger men are concerned. It’s terribly expensive to admire Mrs. Jack;
+whereas a charming but impecunious youth like Claude Morland gets many
+little advantages by the way from his devotion to his pretty cousin.’
+
+In spite of an effort to keep her talk on the level of impartial
+ill-nature, Miss Winston could not quite help a touch of scornful
+bitterness in her mention of Claude.
+
+Scattered images had been loosely grouping themselves in Sainty’s brain
+as she talked, half-forgotten incidents of his coming-of-age party, the
+softly opening door, his encounter with his cousin in the sleeping
+house, his examination of Claude as to his feelings for this same
+lady--it seemed to him that he began to detect a certain method in the
+apparently purposeless gossip with which she was favouring him. And
+then, blinding in its sudden illumination, there flashed across his mind
+the recollection of the anonymous letters. Here was the key to their
+authorship thrust suddenly into his mind. He felt the quick instinctive
+recoil of a man about to tread on something nasty, and then a sort of
+shuddering pity for what the creature at his side must have suffered.
+None knew better than he how they were wounded who put their trust in
+Claude Morland. He wanted to turn and hurry from her, or at least to
+find something that should stop the flicker of her evil tongue. He found
+nothing better to say in the shock of the moment than ‘Do you think you
+ought to talk to me so about my wife?’
+
+Sunborough House has, for the heart of London, a relatively large
+garden, which being cunningly illumined with Chinese lanterns and little
+coloured lamps, the next day’s papers were already reporting that the
+effect was ‘fairy-like.’ Despite these beauties and the somewhat chilly
+allurements of an English summer night, only a few of the most
+flirtatiously inclined had been persuaded to drag their expensive skirts
+over the sooty London grass, and Sainty and his companion had the
+further end of the enclosure, which they had now reached, practically to
+themselves. As he made his feeble protestation, they came, round a tree,
+upon the glass doors of a sort of little summer-house which backed up
+against the high railing that divided the garden from the Park.
+
+Miss Winston gave one glance into the lighted interior. ‘I think we are
+_de trop_ here,’ she said, turning to Sainty, and, slipping nimbly from
+his side, she vanished in the soft shadows of the shrubbery. Almost at
+the same moment the door was opened from within with such suddenness
+that Sainty, who had not the agility of the fair Aimée, could only save
+himself from being struck by throwing himself back into the angle formed
+by the tree and the railing, and in this small space he now found
+himself made a close prisoner by the open door, which was firmly held in
+position by the broad back of a man, as he could see through the glass.
+He reflected that his position was not a dignified one, that as the
+inmates of the summer-house were evidently leaving it, he had only to
+stay quiet till they were gone, and then push the door and follow them
+at his leisure; and they need never know how nearly he had been tricked
+into playing the spy upon them. Miss Winston had evidently counted on
+finding her quarry there (perhaps from personal knowledge of his
+cousin’s habits), and had hoped that she could so excite his jealousy
+that he would not be able, once there, to resist the temptation of
+looking. He had no doubt as to whom he would have seen, even before he
+recognised Claude’s voice. He was relieved to hear that there was
+nothing lover-like in it. Morland spoke in brief business-like tones
+through which pierced a scarcely disguised note of annoyance. ‘Then you
+won’t see him?’ he said, pausing against the door, evidently continuing
+some discussion they had been having.
+
+‘I daren’t,’ Cissy answered. ‘I’m sure it would kill me.’
+
+‘Then you must do the other thing; there are not two ways about it; and
+the sooner the better. If you’re right, you’ve no time to lose. But are
+you quite sure?’
+
+‘Oh yes, quite. I wasn’t at first, but I am now.’
+
+‘It’s cursedly unfortunate----’
+
+They spoke low, and as they moved off he could hear no more.
+
+Sainty pushed the door, and stepped out from his temporary prison. Of
+the fragment of dialogue that he had overheard he did not understand a
+word; indeed, he did not pay it any particular attention at the time; he
+supposed it to refer to some of the many plans the two were always
+discussing. He was accustomed to Cissy’s use of needlessly strong
+language. ‘I should simply die of it’ was a common phrase with her for
+expressing dislike of the most trivial things. It was not till months
+after they were spoken that the words came back to him with a new
+significance.
+
+He followed the retreating figures up the garden, his feeling one of
+relief at the failure of an ill-natured plot of which he had been meant
+to be the victim. Miss Winston’s motive was not difficult to guess. It
+all seemed like something in a novel or a play, curiously theatrical and
+unlike life; but at least the _dénouement_ had been essentially
+undramatic.
+
+When he reached the front hall, he found Cissy already cloaked among the
+group of people who were waiting for their carriages.
+
+‘Where _have_ you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for
+you. I told you I wanted to go home early. I thought you must have
+gone.’
+
+‘I was looking for you,’ Sainty answered. ‘I was told you had gone into
+the garden, so I went there after you; but we must just have missed.’
+
+In the brief transit to their own door neither spoke. Sainty was
+wondering if he ought to say anything to Cissy of the ill-will that was
+dogging her footsteps, to put her on her guard against evil tongues. A
+woman in her exceptional position could not be too careful to furnish no
+weapons to scandal. Yet it was not only Miss Winston’s vengeful jealousy
+that had warned him to look after his wife. Had not kind little Mrs. de
+Lissac tried to suggest that he left her dangerously unguarded? Even the
+duchess had hinted the advisability of his being more with Cissy. It was
+evident that she was being talked about. Cissy herself seemed to provide
+him with just the necessary opportunity for speech, so difficult to find
+in their divided lives. To his surprise, instead of going immediately
+upstairs on arriving at home, she followed him into his rooms on the
+ground-floor. His study, though of Spartan simplicity compared to the
+rest of the house, had the indefinable pleasant air of rooms much lived
+and worked in. Everything in it was meant for use, and daily used. Books
+seemed to accumulate round Sainty like some natural growth. The one lamp
+with its plain green shade lighted the comfortable litter on the big,
+serviceable writing-table, and on another table near it was the humble
+appliance by help of which, as in his college days, he sometimes
+refreshed himself with a midnight cup of tea if he was working late.
+
+‘How cosy you are in here,’ Cissy said, looking about her. ‘I must have
+spent five times as much on my boudoir, but with all its silk walls and
+cushions and frills and furbelows it doesn’t look as homey as this.’
+
+‘You’re never in the house for long enough to do more than scratch off a
+dozen notes,’ said Sainty, ‘unless you have people with you. Nothing
+ever looks like a home in which people don’t live.’
+
+‘I think it’s the books,’ Cissy went on. ‘They are wonderful furniture.
+I really must get some.’
+
+She lingered, wandering about the room looking at one thing and another.
+‘What’s this for?’ she asked, coming to the old kettle with its lamp.
+
+‘Sometimes I like a cup of tea if I’m working. It’s a bad habit I got
+into at Cambridge.’
+
+‘How shocking for the nerves, my dear,’ cried Cissy, with a lifelike
+imitation of old Lady Firth. ‘Well, you might have a decent-looking
+kettle and teapot. I shall have to give you one. Do you mean you could
+make a cup of tea now, this minute? What fun! Do make me one. I’m cold
+and famished. It will be lovely.’
+
+Sainty obediently set about lighting the spirit-lamp and preparing the
+demanded refreshment. He was not a little puzzled by this latest caprice
+of his wife.
+
+Cissy went to the door, and called the butler. ‘You needn’t sit up,’ she
+said. ‘Give me a candle, and then put out the lights and go to bed.’ She
+came back, and flung herself into an armchair, her summer wrap of satin
+and lace billowing foamlike round her.
+
+Sainty, as he made the tea, was wondering how he could introduce the
+subject on which he wanted to speak. It was not once in six months he
+would have such an opportunity. He must not let it slip. And yet he was
+unwilling to sermonise when for once she was in so friendly a mood. He
+brought the cup of tea to her, and stood looking down at her as she
+gulped little teaspoonfuls of the hot liquid.
+
+‘You have never told me anything about your visit to the Suffords’,’ he
+said.
+
+Cissy looked up suddenly. ‘What about it?’ she asked distrustfully.
+
+‘I mean about the dressing up for dinner and all that. Was it amusing?’
+
+‘Oh, _that_!’ said Cissy indifferently, but with an air of relief. ‘I
+didn’t suppose it would amuse you to hear about such nonsense. Who told
+you?’ she asked, with a return of suspicion.
+
+‘Miss Winston. I met her to-night. I hadn’t seen her for years.’
+
+‘That’s a nasty cat,’ Cissy remarked with conviction. ‘She hates me.’
+
+‘Oh, you know it?’
+
+‘Know it? Of course I know it. Why----’ She seemed to think better of
+what she was going to say, and checked herself. ‘What did she say about
+me?’ she asked.
+
+‘She spoke in a way I didn’t like,’ Sainty answered. ‘For some reason
+that woman is your enemy, and I wanted to tell you to be on your guard
+against her.’
+
+‘Oh, thanks, that’s all right. I’m not afraid of Aimée Winston,’ and she
+smiled a little cold smile at her own thoughts.
+
+‘Don’t you think,’ said Sainty, with some hesitation, ‘that you are a
+little imprudent sometimes? a little careless of appearances? that, in
+fact, you rather give a horrid woman like Miss Winston occasion to take
+away your character?’
+
+‘Oh, my character!’ said Cissy lightly. She had set down her tea-cup,
+and was pulling off her long gloves, and rubbing her round white arms
+softly over each other.
+
+‘I think, you know,’ Sainty went on, ‘you are beginning to be talked
+about a little. It was not only Miss Winston, but some one else, a nice
+woman, who----’
+
+‘Mrs. de Lissac, for a fiver!’ interjected Cissy. ‘There’s another woman
+who don’t love me, though not for the same reason.’
+
+‘Well, it _was_ Alice, as it happens,’ Sainty admitted; ‘but she only
+said the kindest things, that you were too young and pretty to be left
+so much to yourself. You know even the duchess implied that I ought to
+be seen with you sometimes.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Cissy imperturbably, ‘why aren’t you? It seems to me that
+it is _you_ who are failing in your duties, according to all these
+ladies, not me.’
+
+The coolness of the retort took Sainty’s breath away for the moment.
+
+‘But you know,’ he stammered, ‘that there is nothing you would like
+less. I have never pretended to any right to control your actions. You
+know you are free to amuse yourself as you like. All I ask is that you
+won’t compromise yourself, won’t get talked about, and--and all that.’
+He ended rather lamely. He half expected an outburst. To his surprise
+she leaned towards him, and laid her hand very gently on his.
+
+‘Don’t you think,’ she said, and her voice was kind, ‘that you _are_
+rather to blame perhaps? If I _am_ talked about, isn’t it partly your
+fault? Can I help it if other men admire me?’ She had unclasped her
+cloak, as the tea warmed her, and now, as she rose, it slipped from her
+and fell into the chair. She was standing very close to him, a beautiful
+woman, her beauty enhanced by everything that dress could do for it. Her
+breath was on his cheek, the faint heady fragrance of her garments
+troubled his nostrils, the dazzling fairness of her bare shoulders was
+close under his eyes. He drew back a little, bewildered. ‘I don’t
+understand,’ he murmured. ‘I have tried not to annoy you. You remember
+what you said. After that I naturally could not trouble you.’
+
+Cissy sprang suddenly away, and caught up her cloak. There was in her
+movement something of the recoil of a spring that has been forced too
+far in one direction and has suddenly escaped.
+
+‘Ah, no,’ he heard her whisper, ‘I can’t----’ and then aloud, with a
+sudden scornful flash, ‘No, _of course_ you can’t understand,’ she said.
+‘Heavens! it’s nearly three ... and I, who meant to go to bed early.
+There’s a fate against it. Give me my candle. Good night--or what’s left
+of it.’ She hurried past him, almost snatching the candle from his hand.
+The feeble flicker of it had vanished from the great well of the
+staircase, while he still stood in the doorway dumbly wondering.
+
+What had she meant? Was it possible that she repented of her cruelty,
+that she wished----For a moment it had seemed so. Yet he could not
+believe it. Vividly he recalled the night of their wedding, her agonised
+repetitions that she never could be his. And yet her following him to
+his room, her words, still more her looks. He stood there long
+irresolute, wondering if he were losing a great opportunity. Once he
+started to go and seek her. He looked up at the skylight far above,
+where the first faint coming of morning was making a pale twilight. He
+listened, but in all the silent greyness of the big house he could hear
+no sound but the innumerable ticking of clocks. A breath of chill
+discouragement seemed to steal down to him where he stood. He had a
+vision of the grotesque figure he should cut, misled by his own fatuity,
+and meeting closed doors, or the half concealed impertinence of a
+waiting-maid, and slowly he turned back into his own rooms and shut the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+From the time of their coming to London it had required no effort on
+their part for the Belchambers to be very little together, but after the
+ball at Sunborough House, Sainty was aware that they avoided each other.
+On the rare occasions when they met, he was conscious in his wife’s
+manner of a more thinly veiled contempt, while on his side he felt a
+shyness with her which was the beginning of dislike.
+
+There was something almost frightening to him in the absolute quality of
+her egotism. In the scene of which he had been a horrified witness
+between her and his mother, Lady Charmington had by no means displayed a
+conciliatory courtesy, but if she had been rude she had at least lost
+her temper in a thoroughly human manner--she had _cared_. Had Cissy
+shown heat in return, he could easily have understood it. What revolted
+him in her attitude was the complete indifference as to what her
+mother-in-law thought of her, or whether they were on good terms or ill.
+The way in which, when she wanted nothing more of them, people simply
+ceased to exist for her, seemed to him monstrous. She had summarily
+declined to make any overtures towards peace, alleging, not without
+justice, that she was the injured party. ‘Lady Charmington had insulted
+and abused her in her own house, and she had taken it with the meekness
+of a lamb. She really could not see what there was for _her_ to
+apologise about; she was quite ready to _accept_ an apology if her
+mother-in-law wished to make one’; but that lady, oddly enough, showed
+no signs of any such desire. She had departed next day without so much
+as seeing Cissy again, merely mentioning to her son before she left that
+he would probably suffer the curse of childlessness, as a punishment
+for his wife’s behaviour and his own inability to guide and chasten her.
+
+So the young couple drifted more and more apart, Sainty realising with a
+terrified fatalism the extent to which this creature, at once so hard
+and so capricious, who bore his name and spent his money, yet had never
+been his wife and had become almost a stranger to him, had it in her
+power to injure him irretrievably.
+
+After the duchess’s ball he received no more anonymous letters, which
+confirmed him in his theory of their authorship. Miss Winston, having
+played her trump card in the disclosure she thought she had made to him,
+evidently judged it useless to continue the letters which were meant to
+lead up to it. One day, however, the post brought him an envelope which,
+at first sight, he made sure was the beginning of a new series. He was
+on the point of destroying it, unopened, when he was aware of his own
+coat-of-arms and crest gorgeously emblazoned on the back, and a closer
+inspection proved that the illiterateness of the handwriting was not
+feigned but perfectly genuine. It was from Lady Arthur, and contained
+the unwelcome news that his brother had been ill, more seriously than
+she had at first imagined, and a request that he would come and see him.
+‘He won’t make the sign,’ she wrote, ‘and I expect he’d be very angry
+with me if he knew I was writing, but all the same I know it would be a
+comfort to him to see you. He’s worrying about money matters. You see,
+being so ill has made him think if he was to die what would become of me
+and the children.’ It was put rather crudely, but Sainty admitted that
+it was a legitimate cause for solicitude, and hailed this proof that
+Arthur was taking thought for others. Even if it were the others who
+were taking thought for themselves, a poor woman could not be blamed for
+wishing to secure the future of her helpless offspring. He decided that
+he must go down and see his brother. He was sorry Arthur had been so
+ill; he never remembered him ill in his life, since the measles and
+chicken-pox of early childhood.
+
+Sainty did not judge it necessary to say anything to Cissy about his
+expedition; it required no diplomacy on his part to conceal any of his
+movements; if he should be absent for a week, she would neither know nor
+care, and he found by consultation of Bradshaw that he could go and
+return in the long summer day. It was a relief to him that he need not
+spend a night in the house of kinsfolk whom he did not receive in his
+own. The situation was awkward and unpleasant, and when he thought of
+all that Arthur’s marriage had made him do and suffer, it must be
+confessed that he approached his brother’s home and wife with invincible
+repugnance.
+
+The Chamberses had taken up their abode (of course in a hunting country)
+in an old vicarage from which a victim of shrunken tithes had been glad
+to move into a smaller house. Arthur had added new and magnificent
+stables that had cost Sainty a pretty penny before they were completed.
+The house itself might have been transplanted bodily from the heart of
+Belgravia. It was of such commonplace and uncharacteristic architecture
+that even the process known to Lady Arthur as ‘Smartenin’ the old place
+up a bit’ had failed materially to disfigure it. It was approached
+through all the dignity of a lodge gate and ‘carriage sweep,’ which
+swept round a mound of damp laurels opposite the front door, and
+deposited Sainty at a small Ionic portico of stucco pillars. Having
+confided his name and business to a dingy man in a shiny dress-coat who
+opened the door to him, Belchamber was told ‘’is lordship was expecting
+of ‘im, and would ‘is lordship please to walk this way,’ and followed
+the butler upstairs to Arthur’s room. He smiled to see how exactly the
+interior of the house corresponded with his anticipations: everything
+was modern, ugly, expensive, and already shabby. A great litter of caps,
+gloves, sticks, and hunting-crops encumbered the hall, together with a
+female garden-hat ornamented with huge red bows and faded muslin
+poppies. A strong smell of cooking pervaded the staircase, and from some
+of the many open doors came the sound of women’s voices in dispute, and
+high above all else the shrill wailing of a baby.
+
+It was with a conflict of feelings that Sainty found himself once more
+face to face with Arthur, whom he had not seen since his fruitless
+attempt to detach him from the woman who was now his wife. They had
+parted as boys, they met again as married men, and with no particularly
+happy experiences behind them. Sainty noted with pained surprise how
+much of his brother’s good looks had been what the French call ‘the
+devil’s beauty.’ That boyish freshness was gone for ever, and the face
+had gained nothing of manly dignity in its place.
+
+The young man was sitting propped with pillows in a big easy-chair,
+arrayed in a gorgeous silk dressing-gown. His recent illness had given
+him a pinched bluish-white look about the nose, but the colour had set
+and hardened on the cheek bones, and the eyes had a tired shifty look.
+The beautiful curls were already worn a little thin at the temples, and
+an absurd little fair moustache seemed to be ineffectually trying with
+its waxed points to conceal the two lines that ill-temper had traced
+beside the nostrils.
+
+‘Very good of you to come,’ he said, as he held out his hand.
+
+‘I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been ill. What was it?’ Sainty asked, as he
+sat down beside him, struggling with a lump that would rise in his
+throat.
+
+‘I fancy I’ve been pretty bad,’ Arthur answered. ‘Some superior form of
+mulligrubs. I don’t believe the damn fool of a doctor knows quite what
+_was_ the matter. I think he was frightened himself. He gets into
+corners with Topsy and whispers, till I want to break his head. I’ve
+pulled through all right, but, of course, another time I mightn’t, you
+know, and that’s what I wanted to see you about.’
+
+There was no suggestion that he wanted to see him for any other reason.
+They met after two years of absence and estrangement, and after what
+seemed a very fair chance that they might never meet again. The elder
+brother was husky with emotion, the younger as unmoved by any thought
+of their common past as though it were his solicitor whom he had
+summoned to the discussion of a matter of business.
+
+His coldness reacted on Sainty, and helped him to steady his voice as he
+answered, ‘Your wife intimated in her letter that you were troubled
+about money matters.’
+
+‘That’s it. You see, as long as I live I’ve got this cursed pittance. A
+fellow can’t live like a gentleman on it, but at least we don’t starve.
+But as the missus pointed out to me, if I was to hop the twig, there’d
+be just nothing for her and the kids; so I made her write and tell you I
+was ill; I thought I owed it to her. She grumbles a good deal, and she’s
+a damn bad manager, and we have our rows, but she’s not a bad sort of an
+old girl. Last winter she went without a pony for her shay, so as I
+could keep another hunter. Now that was rather decent of her. I’m not
+very partial to the kids myself; it’s unbelievable how they yell; but I
+shouldn’t like ’em to be left in the gutter, you know.’
+
+‘Do you know me so little, Arthur, that you could suppose, if anything
+happened to you, I shouldn’t provide for your wife and children?’
+
+‘Well, you were never a particularly free parter, you know, old man, and
+then you didn’t approve of the connection. How was I to know?’
+
+‘Of course, in case of your death, I should continue the same allowance
+to your widow.’
+
+‘Would you now? Well, _that’s_ all right. But I say, suppose _you_ were
+to kick? you’re not so remarkably strong, you know, yourself.’
+
+‘In that case, your boy comes in for the whole thing, and of course the
+trustees would make a suitable provision for his mother.’
+
+‘Oh, gammon! we don’t count on that, you know. What’s to prevent your
+having children yourself? By the way, isn’t Lady Belchamber showing any
+signs yet?’
+
+‘Er--no; as a matter of fact--not----’
+
+‘Well, she’d better look sharp, or we shall begin to indulge unholy
+hopes. But, bar chaff, you couldn’t put it in writing, could you, about
+the allowance going on in case we were both to what the papers call
+“join the majority”?’
+
+‘If it will be any comfort to you I can, but I should think you could
+trust me; and in case I should ever have an heir, I promise at once to
+add a codicil to my will, providing for your children.’
+
+‘Well, let’s have that in writing too; then there can’t be any mistake
+about it, and Topsy’ll let me alone. She’s got her damned old mother
+with her (she’s an old vulgarian, I tell you), and the two of ’em have
+nagged my life out of me about this. I never will have old Mother Mug
+here, but I was going to town for a lar--on business, if I hadn’t been
+taken ill, and so I said she could have her to keep her company while I
+was away, and I’m blowed if the old devil didn’t turn up, just the
+same.’
+
+‘How do you like this place on the whole?’ Sainty asked.
+
+‘It isn’t bad in the winter; just between two packs, you know; and one
+or two of the people round have given me some shooting. But at this time
+o’ year it’s simply infernal; not one blessed thing to do. As I told
+you, if it hadn’t been for this cursed illness, I was going to town for
+a bit; if I didn’t get away now and then I should rot and burst.’
+
+‘Is there nobody you see or like in the neighbourhood?’
+
+Arthur winced. ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘most of the huntin’ lot go
+away in the summer, and the regular county sort of set ain’t
+particularly lively; and then the women jib a bit at Topsy. One or two
+of ’em have called, but not many. Our parson and his wife toady her
+freely; they ain’t particular as long as she’s my lady, and will give
+’em money for the school treat. I assure you she’s becoming quite the
+charitable religious lady; nothing else to do, poor girl. But most of
+these county women are a damned stiff-backed lot; they ain’t like
+Londoners.’
+
+At this point in the conversation the dingy butler, who looked like the
+‘heavy father’ of a not very prosperous travelling company, came to say
+that ‘lunching was served, and Lady Harthur Chambers ‘oped Lord
+Belchamber would do ’er the honour to come down.’ He also brought
+Arthur’s meal on a tray, over which the invalid let fly a volley of
+curses: ‘the napkin was dirty, the soup was cold, the bread was stale;
+he could take it back to the damn cook and tell her,---- her, if she
+couldn’t send up a decent basin of broth to a sick man,---- her, and----
+her, she’d better---- well go.’
+
+To this rolling accompaniment, Sainty got himself out of the room,
+saying he would come up again after lunch, and was conducted by the
+seedy retainer into the presence of his sister-in-law, who received him
+with much state.
+
+The three years that had elapsed since their last meeting had not
+treated Lady Arthur more kindly than her husband. They were in her case
+three years considerably nearer to the term of youth. In the days of the
+supper at the Hotel Fritz she had been a decidedly handsome young woman,
+if a little over-florid. In the interval she had grown more florid and
+less handsome, and suggested an impression of having run to seed. A
+growing tendency to corpulence was resisted by violent compression, with
+disastrous results to the complexion, imperfectly corrected by a
+plentiful application of _blanc de perle_. Her attire was gorgeous
+beyond the needs of the occasion, but left somewhat to be desired in the
+matter of tidiness, and exhaled a heavy scent of musk that made Sainty
+feel sick. She presented him to her mother, a terrible warning of what
+she was on the highroad to become. This lady was a shorter and twenty
+years’ older edition of Lady Arthur, more coarsely painted, more frankly
+vulgar, more consentingly fat, and she wore an olive green wig of Brutus
+curls.
+
+‘Do you like the country, Mrs. de Vere?’ Sainty asked, as they sat at
+meat together in heavy silence.
+
+‘Muggins,’ the lady corrected, with a giggle. ‘De Vere was Maria’s--I
+mean Cynthy’s--stage name.’
+
+‘My _Nong de Tayarter_,’ said her daughter, with a warning look at the
+dingy man, who was handing the potatoes with an air of forced
+abstraction.
+
+‘Well,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘I was connected with the profession myself
+when I was young; there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it. It’s an art,
+and nowadays very highly considered. But you was askin’, my lord, if I
+liked the country. For a little visit like this, I don’t say, but to
+live in, year in, year out--no thank you. It may be all very well for
+them that were born to it, but give me London. I like to see my
+fellow-creeturs. I should think Cynthia’d die of the mopes in this
+place. I should, I know, if I was her.’
+
+‘It isn’t very lively,’ assented her daughter.
+
+‘I can’t think whatever you find to do all day,’ said the elder lady.
+
+‘I have my children,’ said Cynthia, with the air of a Cornelia, ‘and I’m
+getting quite interested in the village and the poor people.’
+
+‘Well, it wouldn’t amuse _me_,’ said her mother. ‘I call it cruel of
+your brother, my lord, to keep her mewed up in a place like this. Such a
+winter as she’s had. It’s all very well for him, ‘untin’ five days a
+week, and shootin’ with Squire this, that, and the other, but what fun
+does _she_ get out of it, poor child? Their stuck-up wives don’t even
+come and see her, and the moment the ‘untin’ and shootin‘ ’s over, my
+lord was off to London and Newmarket, if he hadn’t been took ill. He was
+hardly here a week last summer. Does he offer to take _her_?--not him,
+not if he knows it.’
+
+‘Three weeks at the sea was all the change _I_ got last year,’ said Lady
+Arthur.
+
+‘And _that_ I had to make you insist upon, or you wouldn’t have got
+_that_,’ chimed in mamma.
+
+‘It was more for baby’s sake than my own,’ said Cynthia; ‘the child
+needed sea air.’
+
+‘Dear little Arthur was baby then,’ explained Mrs. Muggins; ‘the second
+little dear wasn’t even expected. Now there’s two of ’em they’ll want a
+change more than ever.’
+
+‘You have two children?’ Sainty said. ‘Are they both boys?’
+
+‘Both of ’em,’ assented Lady Arthur proudly. ‘Poor as we are, there’s
+many people would be glad of my two little boys, or even one of ’em,’
+and she pointed this delicate allusion by a side glance at her mother,
+as who should say ‘I had him there.’
+
+The ill-concealed hostility of these people, the way they abused his
+brother to him, his sister-in-law’s hint at the want of ease in their
+circumstances, all combined to make Sainty’s visit thoroughly
+uncomfortable.
+
+‘What’s been the matter with Arthur?’ he asked, to change the subject.
+
+‘Eating and drinking too much,’ responded Mrs. Muggins readily. ‘And so
+I told him. “Arthur, my boy,” I says to him, “you mark my words: you’re
+digging your grave with your teeth.”’
+
+Lady Arthur simpered. ‘It’s rather awkward to talk about insides to
+gentlemen,’ she said; ‘but it was of that nature. The doctor said he had
+had a narrow squeak of--what was the word?--perrynaitis, or perrytaitis
+or something. I told him he couldn’t expect ladies to remember his long
+Latin names, but it was some kind of inflammation from what he said.’
+
+‘What she don’t tell you,’ put in the irrepressible Mrs. Muggins, ‘was
+how she nursed him. Three nights she never went to bed nor had her
+clothes off her, and, as often as not, sworn at for her pains.’
+
+‘I only did my duty,’ said Cynthia nobly; ‘but I hope I shan’t often
+have to do the same again.’
+
+‘What she wants,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘after being shut up so much, and
+the anxiety and all, is a good change. Why don’t you come up and stop
+with me a bit, when I go back, and see the theatres and the shops? The
+spring fashions are very pretty: sunshades are very tasty this year, I
+must say.’
+
+‘I do want a new sunshade,’ Lady Arthur admitted, ‘and for that matter,
+lots of things; but Arthur don’t care _how_ I’m dressed, _now_,’ and
+she removed a discoloured tear with the untorn corner of an imitation
+lace handkerchief.
+
+As they were leaving the dining-room, she detained Sainty a moment to
+whisper in his ear, ‘Has Arthur spoken to you about what I wrote?’
+
+‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘we have talked about it. I assured him that
+would be all right.’
+
+Lady Arthur looked relieved. ‘What should I have?’ she asked.
+
+‘Oh!--er--the same as now,’ Sainty gasped.
+
+‘You’ll think me very mercenary, I fear,’ said his sister-in-law, with
+an attempt to climb back into the grand manner from which she had so
+swiftly descended. ‘I don’t care for myself, you know; I’ve worked for
+my living before, but a mother must think of her children; even a bear
+will fight for its cubs.’
+
+The ‘cubs’ were presently produced, of course. The baby was a mere
+bundle of lace and ribbons; but the elder child, who appeared to be
+nearly two, and had been most carefully combed and starched and
+decorated for the occasion, was set upon two chubby legs within the
+door, and stared stolidly at his uncle. Sainty tried hard to see
+something of Arthur in the little boy who would probably be his heir,
+but the younger Arthur was a most unmistakable miniature edition of Mrs.
+Muggins, with the same prominent eyes and hanging lower lip, and even
+his ‘oiled and curled Assyrian locks’ suggested a sort of childish
+imitation of the Brutus wig. His grandmother was fully aware of the
+likeness, and evidently thought it must be a cause of unmixed
+gratification to Lord Belchamber.
+
+‘He favours our side of the family,’ she said proudly, ‘and, though I
+say it that should not, a handsomer little picture of a cherub I don’t
+think you’ll easily find.’
+
+‘Give uncle a sweet kiss, dearie,’ said the proud mother; but on
+Sainty’s stooping to receive the embrace, the amiable infant set up such
+a piteous howl, in which the baby promptly joined, that both children
+had to be conducted into retirement.
+
+‘I think,’ said Sainty, ‘if you’ll let me, I’ll go up and see my
+brother again for a few minutes. I see I must be leaving in about half
+an hour, if I am to catch the afternoon train up. I told the fly to come
+back for me.’
+
+‘Well, if you _must_ go,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘there’s no good
+pressing you to stop. I’m afraid the lunch was not what you’re
+accustomed to. No doubt you have a French cook and every luxury, but
+_we_ have to cut our coats according to the cloth, you know. I may not
+see you again before you go, I’m going to take mamma for a bit of an
+airing. I hope Lady Belchamber is well. She has no children, I think.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Arthur, when Sainty returned to him, ‘what do you think of
+old Mother Mug? _She’s_ a beauty, isn’t she?’
+
+‘She seemed to think you were a little inconsiderate about your wife,
+that she needed a certain amount of change and amusement; and, indeed,
+that poor woman must have a dull life, so very different to everything
+she has been accustomed to.’
+
+‘No doubt the pair of ’em have been abusing me finely, and, of course,
+you take their part. What the devil’s she got to complain of, I should
+like to know? Haven’t I made an honest woman of her, and jolly well
+muckered my own life by doing it? I suppose she expects me to give up
+the little fun I do get, and take her to London and show her round.
+Don’t you marry your mistress, old man. You can take it from me, it
+isn’t good enough. But there!--you _are_ married, and you haven’t got a
+mistress.’
+
+Sainty did not escape without the usual demand for money, which Arthur
+irritated him by calling a loan.
+
+‘What’s the good of talking like that?’ Sainty said. ‘You know you
+haven’t the slightest intention of repaying it. As you are always
+rubbing it into me that you can’t live on what I give you, is it likely
+that next quarter, or next year, you will be able to save the amount you
+require out of the same insufficient allowance?’
+
+‘You don’t suppose I enjoy having to ask you for every dirty penny I
+want?’ retorted the invalid sullenly.
+
+‘Then why don’t you try to live within your income, and then you
+wouldn’t have to?’
+
+‘I must say you always make it as unpleasant as possible.’
+
+‘Well, don’t let’s wrangle about money; I give it just the same. I’ll
+send you a cheque. Good-bye, and I hope you’ll soon be better.’
+
+‘And these are the people who are to come after me!’ Sainty said to
+himself bitterly as the train took him back to London. He had a vision
+of Belchamber, his beloved Belchamber, overrun and ravaged by these
+barbarians; of Cynthia ‘smartenin’ the old place a bit,’ with the aid of
+Mrs. Muggins’s suggestions as to what would be ‘tastey’; of Arthur
+cutting down the trees and selling the books and pictures to buy more
+horses and lose bigger bets; of that unattractive child with its stiff
+curls and goggle eyes coming in turn to make final havoc of the ruin its
+parents had left. And it was for this end that he had given his name,
+his future, his honour, into the keeping of a beautiful parasitic
+creature without heart or conscience, who obeyed no law but her own
+imperious appetites!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Although Belchamber had become a very different place from the home of
+his childhood, it was still a relief to Sainty to get into the country.
+It must be confessed that the parties with which Cissy delighted to fill
+the house were extraordinarily unexacting in the attention they demanded
+from their host, so that he was able, as in London, to lead very much
+his own life, undisturbed by his wife or her guests. Except at dinner,
+or in occasional passage meetings, as he slunk from the library to his
+own sacred quarters in the western pavilion, he seldom met any of them.
+
+Moreover, the young couple were, for the moment, nearly alone. Most of
+the society which Lady Belchamber specially affected was either at Cowes
+and Goodwood, or devoting a fortnight to the care of its property and
+the reception of its schoolboys before the annual round of Scottish
+visits. Sainty had been passingly surprised at Cissy’s decision to
+forego a very gay house-party in Sussex, and return quietly to
+Belchamber at the beginning of August. The young woman did not seem to
+be in her accustomed health; indeed, she admitted she was quite done up,
+and needed rest; there had even been a talk of ‘waters.’ She had begun
+to be not quite herself before they left London, and then there had been
+the curious incident of her fainting at her own party.
+
+Quite early in May, before Lady Charmington’s unfortunate visit, Cissy
+had announced her intention of giving some kind of entertainment, but
+the difficulty of deciding on what form it should take, and the
+impossibility of finding an evening when it would not interfere with
+something else she wanted to do, had combined to defer the execution of
+the plan till nearly the end of the season. She found it so much easier
+to go to parties which other people had the trouble of arranging than to
+take the trouble to arrange one for herself, that Sainty had begun to
+hope the whole thing might fall through, when she suddenly fixed a date,
+called in Lady Eccleston to assist her, and telegraphed to Roumania to
+offer a fabulous sum to a celebrated violinist, who had not been heard
+in England that summer. By eking out this star with the only two
+expensive singers who had not yet left the opera, and rigorously
+excluding from her invitation-list any one to whom it could be a
+pleasure or excitement to be present, she managed to have a very
+brilliant and select little gathering indeed, which, but for the
+unfortunate _contretemps_ above mentioned, would have been an
+unqualified success. The right dowagers were slumbering in the front
+row, the right younger people were jostling and chattering in the
+doorways, the talented performer was executing his most incredible
+calisthenics, when Sainty, jammed into a far corner of one of the big
+rooms, became aware of a bustle and commotion near the door of the
+boudoir. People moved and heaved and whispered, and ceased to bestow
+even a perfunctory attention on the music, which came rather abruptly to
+an end. He saw Claude Morland elbow through the crowd with a bottle and
+a glass, and some one near him said ‘Lady Belchamber has fainted.’
+
+Among the many duties thrown unexpectedly on him by the catastrophe,
+appeasing the anxiety of the guests and soothing the susceptibilities of
+the artists, he was startled by the speech, accompanied by a meaning
+pressure of the hand, with which Alice de Lissac took leave of him. ‘I
+am _so_ glad,’ she whispered; ‘_now_, I feel sure all will come right.’
+Enlightenment as to her meaning came most unexpectedly from his
+mother-in-law next morning when he inquired of her after his wife’s
+health. Lady Eccleston, who had been the last to depart the night
+before, arrived at an amazingly early hour, and after a long visit to
+her daughter was still able to appear in Sainty’s apartments almost
+before he had finished his breakfast. She was evidently in high
+good-humour and began by embracing him tenderly.
+
+‘How did you find Cissy?’ Sainty asked. ‘I haven’t sent to ask after her
+yet for fear of disturbing her. She seemed quite worn out last night; I
+think she has been doing much too much.’
+
+‘She is not _ill_,’ said Lady Eccleston, with a world of meaning. ‘I
+will not allow that she is _ill_.’
+
+‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Sainty. ‘I thought she looked very seedy
+last night, I must say.’
+
+‘She will admit nothing,’ continued her ladyship. ‘I think I have told
+you _how_ delicate and reticent she is on certain subjects. Even to
+_me_, her mother, and you know we have always been like sisters, she
+will tell nothing. Do you know what I think? she will tell no one till
+she has told _you_. That’s it; you may be sure that’s it. She will run
+no risk of your hearing it from any one but her. For heaven’s sake don’t
+let her know I have even hinted at anything----’
+
+‘What _do_ you mean, Lady Eccleston?’ Sainty gasped, a supposition of
+which only he knew the full grotesqueness beginning to dawn on him.
+
+‘Dear, sweet, innocent Sainty!’ cried Lady Eccleston, in a transport of
+archness. ‘You and my girl are made for one another. You are like a pair
+of child-lovers in a fairy-tale. I have told nothing, remember that; I
+will tell nothing. I will not rob dear Cissy of the joy of announcing it
+herself. Besides, as I say, I can only conjecture; she has absolutely
+refused to admit it.’
+
+‘Dear Lady Eccleston,’ cried Sainty, in great perturbation, ‘I can’t
+pretend to misunderstand you; but, believe me, I think you are wrong. I
+am sure--I am _almost_ sure--it cannot be as you suspect.’
+
+Lady Eccleston shook her head and pursed her lips mysteriously. ‘A
+mother is not deceived,’ she said. ‘But recollect I have told you
+nothing. Cissy would never forgive me. I will not even congratulate you
+till _you_ tell _me_. Meanwhile I shan’t breathe a word, not a word.
+Trust me’; and she again folded her son-in-law to her heart. ‘It was
+the one thing wanting to our happiness,’ burst from her, as it were
+involuntarily, as she hurried away, leaving Sainty too much bewildered
+to protest.
+
+Two days later they went into the country. Cissy was certainly not
+feeling well. She asked Sainty if he would mind going sooner than had
+been settled; she thought rest and country air would set her up. No, she
+wouldn’t see a doctor; there was nothing wrong with her. ‘I’m just
+knocked up with being on the go, morning, noon, and night, for months.’
+
+‘Your mother suggested the weirdest explanation,’ said Sainty.
+
+Cissy flushed crimson and then grew so pale that he feared she was going
+to repeat the performance of the night before.
+
+‘Mamma really is a bigger fool than I thought,’ she said hotly. ‘I
+didn’t think she would have had the idiotcy to carry that nonsense to
+_you_. What did you say?’
+
+‘What could I say? I told her it was impossible, but she would listen to
+nothing.’
+
+‘Of course it’s impossible! no one should know that better than _you_.’
+
+On the afternoon of his first day at Belchamber Sainty ordered his
+little cart and drove as in duty bound to pay his respects to his
+mother. He had not seen Lady Charmington since she had left his house in
+wrath, and though he had written to her several times he had received
+only the briefest and coldest answers. It was not, therefore, with any
+very pleasing anticipations of the coming interview that he set out to
+visit her.
+
+It was one of those perfect, cool autumnal days which English people
+mistake for summer. The open spaces of the park were dappled with
+pleasant temperate sunlight like the flanks of the deer that fed there.
+Hundreds of rabbits squatted in the familiar glades or tilted themselves
+hastily into covert as he passed. Never had his home looked lovelier or
+more peaceful, or appealed more strongly to him. The woods and coppices
+called to him with a thousand voices, and his poor heart, starved of
+all human emotion, answered as only the lonely and despised among her
+children can answer to the great cry of Nature the universal mother.
+
+Then, as he drove along the smooth green alleys, there came to him the
+recollection of his brother and of the woman his brother had married.
+Ever since his visit to them Sainty had thought much about his
+sister-in-law, and had striven in his own mind to do her justice;
+terrible as she was to him æsthetically, he was forced to admit that she
+was a better sort than her husband. She did think of her children and do
+her duty by them according to her lights, whereas Arthur thought of no
+one but himself. After all, were Cissy’s ideals in life, except
+superficially, much less vulgar than Lady Arthur’s? He sometimes
+wondered if it were not better to have been frankly improper before
+marriage and settle down into an irreproachable wife and mother, than to
+be a frivolous little worldling, refusing to live with her husband, and
+lending numberless occasions to the tongue of scandal.
+
+Argue as he would, and rigidly impartial as he strove to make his mental
+attitude, the thought of his successors poisoned the beauty of the day
+for him and blotted out the sunshine. It was vain to tell himself that
+Cynthia’s standard of personal conduct was higher than Cecilia’s. Her
+ghastly veneer of gentility shocked his taste more than even her
+mother’s frank vulgarity or Arthur’s callous selfishness. To think of
+her and her shiny-faced babies at Belchamber was to profane his most
+sacred associations.
+
+He soon found that he need not have doubted his mother’s welcome. She
+received him with what, for her, was almost cordiality. On the rare
+occasions when Lady Charmington assumed a staid and humorless jocosity,
+she was wont to affect a Scottish accent and manner of speech, and
+Sainty noted with surprise this mark of unusual hilarity. ‘Come ben the
+house, man,’ she remarked; ‘the sight of ye is good for sair een.’
+
+‘How pretty you have made everything,’ said Sainty. ‘Your borders are
+lovely. There is no one like you for a garden, mother.’
+
+Lady Charmington looked round her with a certain pride. ‘Yes, I think
+I’ve improved the place,’ she said. ‘Do ye know these late-flowering
+delphiniums? this is the only kind that blooms as late as this. I
+thought at one time my hollyhocks were going to have the disease, but
+I’ve brought them through it.’
+
+‘They are lovely; and how beautiful these roses are.’
+
+‘That’s the pink Ayrshire; it’s not so common as the white. You know the
+big bush in the corner of the west wing, I brought it from Scotland with
+me soon after I married; these are some cuttings from it I took a few
+years ago, and last autumn I moved them here; haven’t they grown?’ Thus
+talking on safe subjects, they entered the house, where Sainty’s
+admiration was claimed and freely given for various ingenious
+arrangements and improvements.
+
+‘And how’s Cissy?’ asked Lady Charmington presently, a certain subdued
+excitement in her look and manner.
+
+‘It is very good of you, mother, to ask after her so kindly,’ Sainty
+answered. ‘She doesn’t seem to me very well; she’s a little knocked up
+with all her gaieties, I think, but she won’t admit there’s anything
+wrong with her which a little rest and country air won’t set right.’
+
+‘Wrong with her! certainly not; what should ail her?’ cried Lady
+Charmington, with the same curious air of meaning more than she said.
+
+‘I hope,’ Sainty began awkwardly, ‘that you won’t remember her rudeness
+and bad behaviour to you last May; it would be terribly painful to me to
+have you on bad terms with one another. I quite admit she behaved
+shockingly to you, but I hope you will overlook it. I feel sure if you
+will come and see her you’ll find her ready to meet you more than
+half-way.’
+
+‘I bear no malice,’ said Lady Charmington, with bewildering good-humour;
+‘and indeed I could find it in my heart to forgive her at this moment
+worse things than a little incivility to myself.’
+
+‘That’s very kind of you,’ Sainty said; ‘but why specially at this
+moment?’ He was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
+
+Lady Charmington leaned forward and looked sharply in his face.
+
+‘Is it possible you really don’t know?’ she said. ‘You are the queerest
+couple I ever came across. I made sure you had come here to announce it
+to me, and I didn’t want to take the wind out of your sails by letting
+you see that I knew it already.’
+
+‘Know what? announce what?’ cried Sainty. He was beginning to divine his
+mother’s meaning; his mind reverted to his conversation with Lady
+Eccleston. Why did all these women persist in mocking him with
+congratulations on the impossible as though it were an accomplished
+fact? ‘Have you heard from Lady Eccleston?’ he asked, with apparent
+irrelevance.
+
+Lady Charmington pounced on the implied admission.
+
+‘Oho! So you are not quite as ignorant as you pretend! But why should
+you try to keep it from _me_, when you must know it is the bit of news
+which it would give me more pleasure to hear than anything in the
+world?’
+
+‘Dear mother,’ said Sainty, ‘do you suppose if I had any such news to
+tell as you seem to imagine, that I shouldn’t have rushed to you with
+it? But it’s not so. It can’t be so.’
+
+‘But why shouldn’t it be so?’ asked Lady Charmington.
+
+‘Believe me, it’s impossible,’ Sainty was beginning, and then
+recollected that he couldn’t tell his mother _why_ it was impossible. ‘I
+don’t know what’s come to everybody,’ he said lamely.
+
+‘Why did you ask if I had heard from Lady Eccleston? It shows you
+guessed what I meant.’
+
+‘Because she too has run away with the same idea, and when I told her
+that she must be mistaken, she only became more positive.’
+
+‘You see,’ said Lady Charmington triumphantly, ‘her own mother thinks
+so, and _she_ ought to know.’
+
+‘But really, really, I feel sure you are all wrong. I don’t want you to
+build on this, mother, because I know what a disappointment it will be
+to you.’
+
+‘Do you mean to say your wife is not going to have a baby?’
+
+‘I certainly think not; she said herself her mother had been talking
+nonsense. Did she tell it to you as a fact, in so many words?’
+
+‘Lady Eccleston’s style is sometimes a little involved, but I certainly
+took her letter to mean---- Oh yes--there’s not a doubt of it; she
+_can’t_ have meant anything else.’ Lady Charmington turned over a pile
+of letters on her writing-table, and selecting one began to mumble
+through it. ‘Um, um, London emptying fast, just on the wing myself,
+cannot go till I’ve found some one to read to my dear blind ... um, um,
+um. Ah! here it is: “I cannot refrain from giving you a hint of the
+great news. I know how it will rejoice your heart. But don’t betray me
+till the dear children tell you themselves. I should not say a word
+about it, only they are both so absurdly reticent and sensitive; it is
+quite possible they may neither of them mention it. Dear Cissy was
+almost angry with me; she tried to make out I was mistaken, but a
+mother’s eye! you and I know when....” Well, we needn’t go into all
+that; but you see, her mother’s convinced.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘I can only set on the other side that Cissy denies
+it herself.’
+
+‘How about her being taken ill at the party?’ It was evident that Lady
+Eccleston had gone into details.
+
+‘People may faint without being in that condition,’ protested Sainty;
+‘no one should know that better than I. Believe me, you are all building
+too much on that momentary loss of consciousness, which may as likely as
+not have come from tight lacing.’
+
+Lady Charmington shook her head impatiently. ‘Her mother says she has
+never been known to faint before in her life; and any one can see with
+half an eye she has always laced....’
+
+After this the conversation languished perceptibly. It was obviously
+futile to go on discussing the prospects of an heir, when the parties
+principally concerned agreed in denying that there _were_ any
+prospects. Lady Charmington, ‘convinced against her will,’ was very much
+‘of the same opinion still’; but balked of the topic on which she burned
+to dilate, she resolutely declined every other which her son brought
+forward. Sainty’s well-meant efforts to extract information on local or
+farming subjects were killed by the stony indifference she opposed to
+them, so that he presently took his leave, without obtaining more than a
+very qualified and doubtful agreement to his suggestion that she should
+come and see Cissy.
+
+At first the pertinacity of their two mothers in attributing miraculous
+offspring to Cissy and himself had seemed only a peculiarly galling
+mystification. Sainty never knew at just what moment a horrible solution
+of the puzzle had begun to suggest itself to him as possible. Had he
+fought against the conviction from the first, or did it come to him
+slowly and insidiously as his mother marshalled the reasons for her
+belief against his repeated denials? He could put his finger on no point
+in time when the suspicion had flashed into his brain; but by the time
+he reached his own door again, it seemed to him that there had been no
+hour of his unhappy married life when this terror had not sat grinning
+behind every trivial incident. He determined to see his wife, to know
+the worst at once. He asked for her, but learned she was out. ‘Her
+ladyship had gone driving late, after tea, and had not come in yet.’ He
+had no chance of speech with her through the evening, but when at last
+she went to her room, he followed boldly, hardly waiting for the answer
+to his knock before entering the room.
+
+Cissy had thrown herself on the sofa, and the loose sides of the
+tea-gown she had worn at dinner had a little fallen back. At the sound
+of the opening door she started up, and drew her draperies so swiftly
+about her that Sainty could not be sure if he had noticed or only
+imagined a slight change in her figure.
+
+‘You!’ she cried.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, in as steady a voice as he could. ‘I want to speak to
+you, and I could find no other chance of seeing you alone.’
+
+Their glances crossed and he read in her eyes a confirmation of his
+worst suspicions. Still he must be sure, must hear it from herself. She
+had looked startled, almost frightened, as she faced him, then her face
+took on a dogged sulky expression.
+
+‘Well?’ she said.
+
+‘I went to see my mother this afternoon,’ Sainty began.
+
+‘Your mother,’ Cissy broke in. ‘Oh! _she’s_ been making mischief.’
+
+‘On the contrary, she was all amiability and delight, ready to make it
+up with you, to forgive everything “at this moment,” as she said.’
+
+‘That’s very kind of her; but why?’
+
+‘She was bursting with congratulations and excitement; she had had a
+letter from your mother.’
+
+Lady Belchamber muttered something very unfilial about her parent. ‘And
+what did _you_ say?’ she inquired.
+
+‘I? What _could_ I say? I said they were both mistaken. That you had
+told me it was not true; and of course it isn’t--it _can’t_ be; I don’t
+need to be told that.’
+
+He was pleading against his own certainty; from the time he came into
+the room, he knew what he should hear before he left it. Yet with his
+whole heart he was begging her still, if it were possible, to deny the
+shame that had come upon his house. He stood mute and suppliant before
+her, and she looked at him almost pityingly. Then with a little
+discouraged gesture she turned away and sat down again on the sofa.
+
+‘It _is_ true,’ she said quietly. ‘You may as well know it first as
+last. In any case I couldn’t conceal it much longer; and now that mamma
+has guessed it, she will have told it to at least fifty people already.
+She little knows what she’s doing,’ she added, with a hard laugh that
+jarred on Sainty’s overstretched nerves.
+
+He had been sure of it, had known it. Yet now that the words were
+spoken, that the fact confronted him, admitted, undeniable, irrevocable,
+he staggered with the blow.
+
+‘You are going to have a child?’ he gasped.
+
+She nodded, and for all answer threw back the covering she had pulled
+across herself.
+
+‘But it is not mine.’
+
+‘Yours!’ impatiently. ‘How should it be?’
+
+‘Good God!’
+
+There was a silence. Sainty moved restlessly about, as agitated as
+though it were he who was making the confession. Cissy was far the more
+self-possessed of the two. She sat upon her sofa watching his agonised
+motions with a faintly inquisitive distaste, as a person of imperfect
+sympathies might observe the contortions of some creature he had
+unwittingly injured.
+
+‘I suppose,’ she said presently, ‘you want to know whose it is?’
+
+‘No, no!’ cried Sainty shudderingly. ‘That least of all. For God’s sake
+don’t tell me!’ and he made a step towards her, as though he would have
+choked back the name he feared to hear.
+
+Cissy stared. ‘Queer!’ she ejaculated.
+
+There was another pause. A clock struck midnight, and was echoed loudly
+or faintly by others near or distant. Sainty counted the strokes, and
+was conscious of irritation when one began before another finished and
+embroiled his counting.
+
+It was again the woman who spoke first, and the question was
+characteristic, severely practical.
+
+‘What are you going to do about it?’
+
+‘I don’t know--I can’t think. Give me time--give me time to think.’
+
+Cissy looked at him with undisguised contempt. ‘_I_ should know what to
+do,’ she said. After a while she added, ‘Of course I can’t stay here
+now.’
+
+‘I don’t know--I don’t know,’ Sainty kept repeating. ‘We must do nothing
+in a hurry. Think of all it means, all the consequences.’
+
+Cissy shrugged her shoulders. ‘It seems rather late for that,’ she
+remarked. ‘Besides, we can’t keep it to ourselves indefinitely, you
+know.’
+
+‘At least give me to-night to get my ideas into some sort of order,’
+Sainty pleaded. ‘You can’t be surprised if this is rather a shock to me,
+can you?’ he added, almost apologetically.
+
+Cissy laughed. ‘I wonder if any man ever took this announcement in just
+the same way?’ she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+To Sainty, sitting alone in his old room in the western pavilion, it
+seemed that there was no bitterness left untasted. Far into the night he
+sat, his elbows on the table, his head buried in his hands. At first all
+seemed mere chaos and horror; he was stunned and could not think. But
+for the haunting consciousness of misery, he could almost have fancied
+that he had slept. Gradually, however, definite images began to emerge
+from the bewildered trouble of his brain.
+
+What was this thing that had come on him, through no fault of his own?
+He had done no wrong, snatched no forbidden pleasure; it was those other
+two who had sinned and enjoyed. Why must he be pilloried with them,
+share the scandal and the punishment? He, with his morbid shrinking from
+publicity, to have his private life turned inside out to the scorn and
+laughter of the vulgar! He knew well enough how little sympathy he had
+to expect; in all times and countries had not the betrayed husband been
+a butt for mirth? He wondered why. It seemed hard to him that of the
+three characters in the eternal drama of adultery, it should always be
+the one innocent person that was selected for satire. Surely it was the
+most elementary justice that punishment should fall on him who injures
+his fellow, not upon the injured. Yet of they three, who would suffer
+most? He, without a doubt, who had the greatest capacity for suffering.
+He saw, as in a dream, the dingy scene of the divorce-court, the
+headlines in the papers, his name dragged in the dirt. He pictured to
+himself the long martyrdom of cross examination, the bar pathos, the bar
+wit; he knew how he should flinch and writhe at the stake.
+
+In his case, moreover, the situation was complicated by the coming
+child. He had not only to proclaim his dishonour to the world, but must
+lay bare to every grinning idiot the grotesque story of his married
+life. If the husband whose rights had been invaded was absurd, what of
+him who had not even been able to obtain those rights. And he must stand
+up in open court and tell this thing of himself, he who felt the mere
+idea of marriage too sacred for spoken words! The cruel irony of it all!
+Was there no other issue but through that horrible sordid ordeal? What
+did men do in his position? What was the _beau rôle_ for the injured
+husband? He thought of Dumas’s ‘_Tue-la!_’ and wondered how it would
+have advanced matters if he had murdered Cissy, supposing he had the
+strength and courage to do it. It was only to shift the scene; another
+court, an added horror, but the same publicity, the same scandal, the
+same story to tell, the same agony to undergo.
+
+He almost regretted the foolish old fantastic code of honour which would
+have made it incumbent on him to challenge the seducer, and as likely as
+not be killed by him. Death _might_ have been a solution, but there was
+no such easy way out of the situation as that. The hand that had done
+him so much wrong would not render him that supremest service.
+
+Hitherto he had succeeded almost without conscious effort in keeping the
+inevitable third in this grim trio almost an abstraction. Yet he
+remembered how passionately he had refused to know, when his wife had
+offered him the name of her lover. Now the figure was beginning to take
+shape against his will; a tall figure with a false air of slenderness, a
+figure that by the languid grace of its movements counteracted the
+slight tendency to heaviness in the hips and shoulders. How well he knew
+that back, the sinuous curves of the waist, the sidelong persuasive
+droop of the head; he had seen it walking away beside Cissy on the
+afternoon of their very first meeting. It had been pressed against the
+glass door that held him an unwilling witness on the night of the ball
+at Sunborough House. How clearly the impressions came back to him, the
+dusky garden speckled leopard-wise with lanterns, the lithe, shimmering
+blackness of the figure at his side trying to instil the doubts he would
+not harbour, the swift swing back of the door, the words so clearly
+overheard, that then had held no meaning for him. Still it was only a
+back, he had not seen the face, the gentle, kindly, sly, mocking face.
+He pressed his icy fingers tight against his hard straining eyeballs as
+if he could shut it out, that face he would not see. Not _he_! not he of
+all men! Had not his mother mentioned other men with whom her imprudence
+was compromising Cissy? Oh! but that back was unmistakable. And then the
+voice! low and soft, but so distinct; he could hear it, could hear the
+words, counselling the horrible meanness of which he had so nearly been
+the dupe. He understood _now_ the secret of her mysterious behaviour in
+the library that night. Surely such baseness was unbelievable; even
+Cissy had recoiled from carrying out the scheme.
+
+For one brief moment he wished she could have done it--that he might
+have been deceived. ‘I need never have known!’ he cried, and his voice
+speaking aloud in the silence of the night startled him like the cry of
+a creature that is being killed.
+
+He raised his head and looked about him. The candle he had brought had
+burnt almost to the socket; he rose and lighted two others from it, and
+blew it out. The chill of the tireless summer night made him shiver, but
+there was that which lay so cold about his heart that he welcomed the
+physical discomfort as almost a relief. He moved about the room for a
+little, but soon tiring, went and sat down again.
+
+The same procession of black thoughts kept up their weary circle through
+his head; round and round he followed them, yet came no nearer any
+light, nor any decision of what it behoved him to do under the
+circumstances. Was this the end of all his dreams, all his sacrifices,
+all his endeavour for others, all he had hoped to accomplish? Was
+everything to go down in this whirlpool of a disgrace greater even than
+that which Arthur’s marriage had brought upon them? It was Arthur’s
+marriage that had been the origin of all his troubles. Oh yes, he saw it
+clearly enough now; however he had deceived himself at the time, he had
+married, had taken on himself the most sacred obligations, for no object
+but the mean one of excluding his brother. Perhaps this was his
+punishment.
+
+He saw what a puppet he had been in the hands of two strong-willed
+women, an instrument to satisfy the vulgar ambitions of the one, the
+angry revenge of the other. What a failure, what a dreary failure he had
+been all through! For years he had had but one thought, one object in
+life, to steer Arthur past the rocks and quicksands of youth, and anchor
+him safe in the harbour of property and responsibility, and with what
+result? What had come of all his plans, his careful tact, his delicate
+manipulation of his mother and brother? Arthur’s marriage afforded a
+comment of grimmest irony on his efforts in that direction. Since then,
+as ardently as he had once longed to renounce his birthright in favour
+of his brother, he had striven to preserve it from that contaminating
+touch, to keep that brother’s wife from sitting in their mother’s place;
+and, once more, with what result? To instal in the innermost shrine of
+all he held most sacred a woman no less wanton than her sister-in-law,
+only without her redeeming qualities and the excuses of her early
+training, one who would make his home a wilderness, his name a by-word!
+Shame, then, shame either way, and nothing accomplished!
+
+It is not to be supposed that he thought these things out for himself,
+coldly, sententiously, in order, as, for the sake of the reader, they
+have to be written down. They were the residuum of all sorts of wild and
+whirling fancies, flung up at him, as it were, out of a seething
+cauldron of black wretchedness, which was rather sensation than thought.
+Not once, moreover, but a thousand times, did each and all of them
+appear and vanish in a kind of witches’ dance to his weary brain,
+without perceptible sequence or connection. He seemed somehow to be
+outside his own consciousness, to sit and watch these images, as, one by
+one, some demon held them up for his tormenting, yet all the while every
+nerve in him tingled with the apprehension of how intimately they were
+part of himself.
+
+As he sat gazing stonily at despair, there came a soft stirring of the
+stillness, a murmur, a breath; then from without, a faint chirping.
+
+’... as in dark summer dawns,’
+
+he quoted mechanically, and was aware of a vague irritation that he
+could not remember the beginning of the line.
+
+    ‘The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
+     To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
+     The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.’
+
+He looked. The chintz curtains that veiled the windows were growing
+ghostly and transparent. It was the dawn.
+
+All through the night he had sat with his trouble, yet the morning found
+him as helpless and undecided as ever.
+
+‘To dying ears, when unto dying eyes,’ he repeated dully. ‘Ah! if it
+were but that! Death! how easy to die! What a rest, what an escape!’ It
+was life, not death, life with its hideous decisions and
+responsibilities that he had got to face.
+
+The candle flames became more spectral as the light slowly broadened,
+the light of a new day, the day in which he would have to make up his
+mind, to take a line, to _act_. There was no way out--none. Once more he
+was confronted with the inevitable, the pitiless future coming every
+moment nearer, with all it held of suffering and shame, the
+fruitlessness of all his efforts, all in vain, in vain!
+
+Then suddenly, as if some voice had spoken, came the question ‘Why?’ Why
+need it be in vain? The solution, after all, lay ready to his hand. He
+had only to hold his tongue. It was all so simple. ‘Their strength is to
+sit still,’ he thought. Why, among all that had passed through his
+wretched head, had this never struck him? He had wished for a child to
+bar his brother and his brother’s sons from the succession. Well! here
+was the child, his wife’s child, born in wedlock, legally, lawfully his.
+Who could ever say it was not? No one but they two, and of their silence
+he could be tolerably sure.
+
+At first he put the idea from him with horror. It was a cheat, a fraud.
+He, with his fastidiously high standard of conduct, to cozen his brother
+out of his inheritance by a shabby trick. Impossible! The thing was
+impossible.
+
+He got up, and put back the curtain, and stood looking out into the
+silence of the growing morning. Over opposite to him, the grey sky was
+beginning to flush with palest rose, in which the last stars were
+growing dim; but as yet the great quadrangle lay all in black shadow,
+out of which the restored statues stood vaguely up like shapes of evil
+menacing the eastern glory. No, no, no. Better the talk, the scandal,
+the publicity of the divorce court, than to stand convicted before the
+tribunal of his own conscience. Whatever else went down in the shipwreck
+of his life, let him at least keep his self-respect. ‘What did it profit
+a man to gain the world, and lose his own soul?’ Yet how often in the
+old days, in his talk with Newby, had he inveighed against the
+selfishness of the Puritan idea, which would make the saving of one’s
+soul the object of conduct. Surely the only rational motive was the
+consideration of how one’s acts affected others. In the present instance
+who would be the worse for his silence? No one would be hurt or
+disappointed. These people did not expect to succeed; they had given up
+all hopes of it when he married. Had they not told him so themselves? On
+the other hand, there was his mother, his mother who had done so much
+for him. He remembered how he had found her, when she had first learned
+the truth about Arthur, and terror mixed with his grief at the mere
+conjecture of what she might say and do with the marriages of both her
+sons thus ending in shame. Their talk that afternoon had shown him how
+much her hopes were centred in the birth of an heir to Belchamber. The
+mere prospect had blotted out the very recollection of her quarrel with
+Cissy, and Lady Charmington was not a forgiving woman. His fear of her
+had always gone hand in hand with his love of her, and both made him
+wince at the thought of her disappointment. Had he the right to bring
+this fresh blow upon her, who had suffered so much, merely to salve his
+own conscience? After all, had he any self-respect to sacrifice? Was it
+possible for him to have a meaner opinion of himself than he had always
+entertained?
+
+At that moment the sun topped the mass of the eastern wing, flooding
+with light the broad spaces of grass and gravel at his feet, and casting
+a long ray over the tall, stately _façade_ of the beautiful house. And
+at the thought of all that was symbolised by that pomp of hewn and
+fretted stone, the aristocrat that lurked so deep within him, so
+overlaid with fine theories of brotherhood and equality that he was
+unconscious of his very existence, stirred and claimed his own. ‘For the
+credit of my house,’ he murmured uneasily, as he turned away from the
+window.
+
+He did not yield at once, or without a struggle, but he knew from the
+first that it would come to that. From the moment the idea leaped
+full-grown like Athene from his brain, it was fully armed to meet every
+point that had distressed him. He feared scandal. There need be no
+scandal. He shrank from the ignominy of a divorce case. There need be
+none. Did the thought of unveiling to the public eye the bitter
+humiliation of his married life revolt him? Here was a means not only of
+secrecy, but actual disproof. Did it break his heart to think of
+inflicting such a blow upon his mother? He had only to be silent to
+crown her dearest wishes, and make her the happiest woman in England.
+Had he married, enduring all that marriage had brought him, that he
+might keep his sister-in-law and her children from the heritage of his
+name and home? Here, too, was the one thing necessary for that end. And
+to attain all these desired objects there was nothing to do, no word to
+say, no lie to tell. He had only to let things take their course. It
+was the line of least resistance, so easy, so fatally easy!
+
+To a man of his character and disposition, what a temptation, what a
+terrible temptation! He was weakened by his long vigil, the little stock
+of vitality that he could ever call to his assistance, worn almost to a
+thread with watching and misery. He knew he should give in. To all the
+arguments in favour of it, what had he to oppose but one poor little
+scruple of personal honour?
+
+He wondered if his wife had known what he would do before he had thought
+of it himself? Had she traded on her certainty of his cowardice? At such
+a suspicion, he almost grew strong again; but no--she had seemed to
+entertain no doubt that he would repudiate her. He fancied she had even
+felt a certain relief at the prospect of being rid of the semblance of a
+connection with himself, and the freedom to claim openly the protection
+of the man whom, in her way, she loved. If so, here was another argument
+in favour of silence. By it he could thwart and punish her.
+
+He wandered into his brother’s old room, next his own. Here the drawn
+blinds made still a glimmering twilight, and lent an unreality to the
+familiar objects. He went and looked at the old school photographs.
+There was one of Arthur in a group of the cricket eleven, which had
+always been his special favourite. The figure stood squarely on its
+legs, the brawny arms bare to the elbow and crossed upon the chest, a
+boyish grin lighting the handsome face, from which the cap was pushed
+back by the strong upward spring of the hair above the brow. It was the
+image of youth, and life, and happiness. Long he stood motionless before
+it, and then he bent forward and pressed his poor pale lips to the cold
+glass. ‘Arthur,’ he whispered. ‘My little Arthur, you are dead, and so
+is your miserable brother who loved you so. You are no more that brutal,
+querulous egoist that I saw the other day, than he is the wretch who can
+stoop to crime to rob you.’
+
+Distant sounds showed him that the household was beginning to be astir.
+Before his man came to wake him he must have removed the signs of his
+long vigil. He returned hurriedly to his own room, once more drew the
+curtain across the window, extinguished the lights, and, hastily
+undressing himself, crept into bed. Already the sense of having
+something to hide stung him with a terrible self-contempt. He had caught
+sight of his drawn, haggard face as he passed the mirror. It was the
+face of a coward.
+
+He did not leave the pavilion all day. He sent word he was ill. That at
+least was true enough, but late in the evening, as he was lying on the
+sofa in his study, there came a knock at the door, and Cissy entered.
+Though perhaps a shade paler than usual, nothing in her appearance
+suggested a guilty wife come to hear her sentence.
+
+‘I have come to return your visit of last night,’ she said, as she stood
+looking down on him.
+
+Sainty groaned and hid his face. At sight of her, the desire to brand
+her as what she was almost conquered, where conscience and sense of
+honour had failed--almost, but not quite.
+
+Cissy kept her indifferent pose, playing with the ornaments she wore.
+
+‘Well?’ she asked at last. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’
+
+‘Yes.’ His voice came muffled and strange.
+
+Lady Belchamber started. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded, with
+slightly quickened interest.
+
+‘Nothing.’
+
+There was a pause.
+
+‘Do you mean to say,’ she asked at last, ‘that you are going to
+acknowledge the child?’
+
+‘Yes.’
+
+She turned away from him with a half-stifled exclamation. Was it relief
+or disappointment? he could not tell. After a time she flung a word over
+her shoulder: ‘Why?’
+
+‘Because it happens to suit me,’ he said doggedly.
+
+The silence was broken by the little laugh he hated.
+
+‘I suppose I ought to be very grateful to you,’ she sneered.
+
+Sainty sprang from the couch. ‘I have ceased to expect gratitude or any
+other kindly feeling from you,’ he blazed out at her; but his wrath fell
+as quickly as it had flared.
+
+Her puny disdain was powerless to hurt him, merged in the measureless
+ocean of his self-contempt. There would be lies enough, acted, looked,
+and lived, if not spoken. At least to her there need be no pretence of
+an attitude; if not with an accomplice, with whom may one permit himself
+the luxury of being honest?
+
+‘After all, why should I scold at you?’ he said wearily. ‘You have
+nothing to thank me for. Don’t suppose, if I stoop to this incomparable
+baseness, that it is with any thought of pleasing _you_.’
+
+Cissy stared at him, cowed by the dim apprehension of a tragedy she was
+incapable of understanding; and it was not without a certain
+satisfaction that he saw in her eyes the vague terror of the
+incomprehensible beginning to permeate her habitual scorn of him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Though the birth of an heir to the house of Belchamber might naturally
+be supposed a festive occasion, it brought little satisfaction to those
+principally concerned. It is true that Lady Charmington talked broad
+lowland for weeks; nor was Lady Eccleston, who kept a supply of
+conventional sentiment always on tap, likely to be wanting at such a
+time; but in spite of every grandmotherly effort to impart a correct
+sense of rejoicing, a certain flatness attended what should have been
+such an auspicious event. Cissy, entirely preoccupied by terror of
+physical suffering, insisted that her confinement should take place in
+London, where she would be within reach of the best professional aid, to
+the extreme disgust of her mother-in-law, who had decided that
+Belchamber was the appropriate scene on which the newcomer’s eyes should
+first open. Sainty, being appealed to, expressed the most complete
+indifference on the subject; he said he didn’t suppose it mattered to
+the baby where it was born, or that it would be likely to retain the
+smallest recollection of the event. ‘It will be a great disappointment
+to everybody,’ Lady Charmington remarked. ‘Besides, it will mean your
+not being here at Christmas. How do you expect your people to rejoice in
+the birth of an heir, if you slink away and let it happen in London,
+like anybody else’s child?’
+
+‘How do you know it will _be_ an heir?’ Sainty said. ‘Why shouldn’t it
+be a girl?’
+
+His mother disdained to notice such a preposterous suggestion.
+
+‘It ought to be here,’ she kept repeating.
+
+‘_I_ wasn’t born here,’ Sainty said.
+
+‘That was quite different; Belchamber wasn’t our home in those days.
+Your father and I hardly ever came here in the old lord’s time; for that
+matter, they weren’t here much themselves. Besides, I wanted to be with
+my mother; there is nothing to prevent Cissy having _her_ mother with
+her here; things are very different for _her_ from what _I_ had to put
+up with. I should like to have seen my mother-in-law allowing me to be
+confined in her house! but your poor father felt it very much.’
+
+‘Well,’ Sainty said at last, ‘you can settle it with Cissy; if you can
+persuade _her_, you’re welcome to; _I_ never can, and in the present
+case I don’t care to.’
+
+Every allusion to the coming event was the turning of a sword in his
+heart. His mother’s restrained eagerness was not less terrible to him
+than Lady Eccleston’s loud jubilation.
+
+He never knew if Lady Charmington availed herself of his suggestion that
+she should appeal to Cissy. Certainly, if she did, it was with no
+success, for long before there was any possibility of the child making
+its appearance, Lady Belchamber removed to London, taking her parent
+with her. Cissy, as usual, when frightened or needing help, turned to
+her mother, for whom, as we know, she cherished no very profound respect
+at other times; and Lady Eccleston was not even permitted to return to
+her own house in Chester Square, but must take up her abode with her
+daughter, who considered it a great concession if she allowed her to go
+out for an hour’s shopping. It is not to be wondered at if mamma became
+a little important under the circumstances, and gave herself airs in
+writing to the other dowager, who must have hated having to stay and eat
+her heart out at Belchamber, with no hand in what touched her so nearly.
+
+Poor Lady Charmington abounded in strange recondite lore, and gave much
+advice which was a little out of date at the stage proceedings had
+reached. ‘On no account let her mother coddle your wife,’ she wrote to
+Sainty. ‘If she wants a son, make her take exercise and not be too
+luxurious or over-eat herself.’
+
+Every day the letters came, advocating a Spartan _régime_; but the
+messages never reached their destination. Sainty would have cut his
+tongue out sooner than address a word to Cissy on the subject, who, none
+the less, produced in due course an infant of the desired sex.
+
+Lady Charmington hurried up to Roehampton, and actually dragged poor old
+Lady Firth into London to visit her great-grandson. The old lady, who
+had become nearly blind, and now hardly ever left her own fireside,
+peered curiously at the baby through two pairs of spectacles.
+
+‘I don’t know who he is like,’ she said. ‘You _have_ a look of your
+father, Sainty, but you are _more_ like our family; this little lamb
+isn’t like either. No, certainly not a bit like _you_, nor yet like your
+wife, who is so fair. I don’t know, I’m sure, who he takes after.’
+
+‘Does it matter much, grandmamma,’ Sainty asked, ‘as long as he is
+strong and healthy?’
+
+His mother turned on him promptly. ‘Oh! _you_ never think anything
+matters. Can’t you even take an interest in your own first-born son?’
+
+‘Come, mother, it doesn’t follow that I take no interest because I don’t
+think it matters who he looks like,’ Sainty protested meekly.
+
+He had several occasions to curse the propensity common to the whole
+female sex, when brought into the presence of a newborn babe, to hunt
+down and fix a likeness for it to some one or other of its kinsfolk. It
+seemed as though the one important thing to do for the little Lord
+Charmington was to determine this vexed question of resemblance. The
+child was of a marked type, too, with long-lashed dark eyes, and an
+unusual quantity of very black hair, as far removed from Sainty’s sandy
+insignificance as from the delicate fairness of his wife.
+
+At last the matter was set at rest quite unexpectedly, and Sainty
+breathed more freely. The duchess, who had come to town for a little
+Christmas shopping, called to inquire after Cissy, and requested to be
+shown the baby.
+
+‘_Eh bien! vous voilà père!_’ she remarked, looking rather quizzically
+at her grandson, as he piloted her upstairs. ‘My compliments! And how is
+Monsieur Bébé? Is he pretty, at least? brown or blond, a Chambers, a
+Bigorr, or,’ with the faintest pause of indescribable insolence, ‘an
+Eccleston?’
+
+Belchamber took dexterous advantage of opening doors, giving warning of
+steps, and such small attentions, to avoid giving any direct answer, but
+he might have saved himself the trouble. The eternal topic was at once
+brought up by the monthly nurse, as she proudly displayed her charge.
+
+‘We can’t think who he is like, your grace,’ she said, folding the
+flannel back from the tiny face. ‘Just look at his beautiful great eyes,
+and did ever you see such a head of hair on a babe?’
+
+Sainty could have throttled her. ‘That’s the one thing every one seems
+to think of,’ he said rather testily.
+
+‘Like?’ said the duchess. ‘There can be no question; he’s like _me_. You
+know the miniature of me as a little girl--the child is the image of
+it.’
+
+Sainty started; he had so entirely forgotten that her grace was ever
+dark, that the resemblance had escaped him, but once pointed out it was
+salient. He felt like a criminal who discovers that the detective he has
+been dodging is on the track of some one else. After all, she was _his_
+grandmother too!
+
+‘Of course!’ he cried, ‘how stupid every one has been not to think of
+it.’ And the next time the unwelcome subject was mentioned in his
+presence (by his mother, who had been showing the precious infant to
+Alice de Lissac), he said quite naturally, ‘Oh, we’ve settled _that_
+question. He’s just like the miniature at Sunborough House of the
+duchess when she was a child.’
+
+Lady Charmington, who loved her mother-in-law no better than Cissy did
+hers, was most unwilling to admit the likeness, but could not deny it;
+and there being no doubt that baby derived his appearance from the
+member of the family she least wished him to resemble, was in future as
+averse as her son could desire to all discussion of what had occupied
+her so much.
+
+Lady Eccleston, on the contrary, who loved all great people, was
+enchanted to point out the likeness to every member of her huge
+acquaintance. ‘Isn’t he like the _dear_ duchess?’ she would cry. ‘It is
+_so_ clever of him to have picked out the most beautiful of all his
+relations to take after, bless him!’
+
+As time went on, the shortlived interest in the hope of the Chamberses
+rapidly waned. The bonfires in his honour had hardly burnt themselves
+out before this poor little scion of a noble house found himself in as
+much danger of being altogether neglected as if he had been of quite
+humble birth. Lady Charmington returned to the country, and Lady
+Eccleston, having provided a grand nurse and nursery-maid with
+unimpeachable testimonials out of one of the most aristocratic nurseries
+in the land, gradually allowed herself to be reabsorbed by her numerous
+avocations, social and philanthropic.
+
+Cissy has been most inadequately represented if it need be stated that
+the very last person to trouble her head about the poor little thing was
+its mother. She was entirely at one with the fashionable _accoucheur_
+who attended her, in his opinion that to nurse the child would be far
+too great a strain on her constitution. After the briefest period of
+seclusion which the same authority could be got to say was sufficient
+for her own restoration, and a flying visit to the seaside, she seemed
+to have but one object in life, to make up by extra assiduity for the
+weeks she had been compelled to sacrifice from the engrossing occupation
+of amusing herself. If before she had been much out of her own house,
+she was now hardly ever in it. The only limit to the number of her
+engagements was the fear lest she should be betrayed into doing
+something that was not ‘smart’; and even with this important
+restriction, they were far too numerous to admit of her having any time
+to bestow upon her son.
+
+As for Sainty, he hardly ever saw her. In so large a house, with a
+perfectly mutual desire to keep apart, it was not difficult to avoid
+meeting. He had had one necessary interview with her after the birth of
+the boy, in which he had told her some very plain truths.
+
+‘You may as well understand the situation quite clearly,’ he said. ‘In
+return for the various things you enjoy as a result of being believed to
+be my wife, I have hitherto asked nothing of you; after what has
+happened, I would not take it if you offered it on your knees. I made
+just one condition, which you have not thought fit to observe, that
+there should be no scandal; to avoid it, I have sacrificed my last shred
+of self-respect. Don’t, therefore, think that you can count on a like
+cowardice on my part in the future. I pretend to no sort of control over
+your actions. What you _do_ is of no consequence to me; but on just this
+one thing I _insist_: I must never hear you talked about, and, above
+all, there must be no repetition of this--this occurrence.’
+
+‘I see,’ said Cissy. ‘Having by hook or by crook got the heir for which
+you and your mother were so anxious, you have no further use for me, and
+will seize the next opportunity to get rid of me.’
+
+Sainty looked at her a moment, so antagonistic, so hard, so insolent in
+her youth and beauty, to which her late recovery lent a character almost
+ethereal. Bitter as her taunt was, he could not deny its substantial
+truth.
+
+‘Precisely,’ he said, and left her without another word.
+
+While Cissy immersed herself in social frivolities, Sainty was trying to
+find in work forgetfulness of the child he was ashamed to remember. He
+devoted long hours to humble toil and study, of which the only result
+would be a paragraph in the report of some learned society, read by no
+one but its own members. He attended the debates in the House of Lords
+with unparalleled assiduity, and came to be a familiar figure in the
+gallery on important nights in the other House. The scarcity of Radical
+peers gave him an extrinsic value for the leaders of his party, while
+his patience, powers of work, and known interest in all schemes of
+beneficence, marked him as specially designed by Providence to serve on
+Parliamentary Committees.
+
+There was one important point of difference between the couple. While
+Cissy’s absorption in her favourite pursuits was quite natural and
+genuine, and she found no difficulty whatever in forgetting her maternal
+duties, it was only by consistent effort that Sainty succeeded in
+shutting out the recollection of his shame. The image of the baby, with
+its tell-tale dark eyes, was perpetually between him and the page he was
+writing or the pamphlet on which he was trying to fix his attention.
+
+As we know, his rooms were on the ground-floor of the London house,
+while the nurseries were up three flights of stairs; it seemed
+impossible that any echo should penetrate from them to his study, yet he
+was always fancying that he detected faint sounds of crying from the
+upper regions of the house. Sometimes he would stop in his work and
+listen, and then, convinced that his imagination had played him a trick,
+turn again to his reading or writing, only to be haunted by this
+illusive wailing as before.
+
+One day in the early spring, the child being then some three months old,
+this impression was more than usually persistent. At last, exasperated
+by his inability to fix his mind on what he was doing, Sainty pushed
+away his papers and went out upon the back stairs to listen. This time
+there was no question of imagination. Perhaps some door usually closed
+had been left open, but whatever the explanation, there was no doubt
+that a most real and material lamentation, such as the human infant
+alone is capable of producing, was echoing through the house. He
+returned to his table and sat down again. ‘I suppose babies of that age
+always yell,’ he said to himself, and he recalled Arthur’s complaint of
+that tendency in his own offspring. Why, of all people in the world,
+need the baby’s crying make him think of his brother? The recollection
+of that stucco rectory in the shires, where the birth of the little Lord
+Charmington must have aroused anything but enthusiasm, made him start
+and tremble like a felon.
+
+For a moment he fancied the noise had ceased, but a second visit to the
+landing convinced him such was not the case. He looked at the clock. It
+was almost time for him to go down to Westminster; he would go out and
+walk a little first--sometimes he thought he did not have enough fresh
+air--it would do him good. He put away his papers, gathered together
+some loose sheets of notes that he wanted, and left the room.
+
+What made him turn to the stairs instead of the front door he never
+quite knew. Some occult power seemed to draw his feet. He couldn’t go
+out to do battle for the children of the poor with that lamentable
+wailing ringing in his ears, and make no inquiry into what ailed the
+child under his own roof.
+
+He had not mounted to these upper floors since he had conducted the
+duchess thither, but if he had been in any doubt about the room, the
+cries, which seemed to redouble in force as he drew nearer, would have
+been a quite sufficient guide. Through the wide open door Sainty could
+see the interior of the nursery before he entered. Lady Eccleston had
+given the rein to her grandmotherly fancy in the provision of all things
+needful and luxurious for the young heir. He was at least sumptuously
+lodged; the walls were gay with sanitary illustrations of juvenile
+literature from Miss Greenaway’s charming designs; buttercups and
+daisies sprinkled the window hangings; everything streamed with pale
+blue satin ribbon, and the very powder-box, of choicest ivory, had the
+mystic word ‘Baby’ slanting in turquoises across the lid. But nothing
+was ranged, or ordered, or in its proper place. The costly little
+garments so lavishly provided were tossed about with careless profusion,
+damp cloths trailed over the floor, a common enamelled saucepan for
+heating the child’s food had been set down on a lace robe, and
+half-washed-out feeding-bottles mingled on the table with the materials
+from which the nurse had evidently been manufacturing a new hat for
+herself.
+
+The room was bare of human presence save for the emitter of the howls,
+who was lying alone in his cot, roaring himself purple in the face. He
+had kicked himself free of his wrappings, and his poor little legs were
+quite cold to the touch. Without attempting to cope with the
+complication of integuments, Sainty loosely pulled the coverlet over the
+child, and then looked with horror and anxiety at the convulsed face.
+What was to be done? ‘Don’t!’ he said imploringly, in no particular
+expectation of being understood, but from a general instinct to say
+something. ‘_Please_ don’t!’
+
+Whether the sense of a human presence was of some comfort to the baby,
+or it was only startled by the sound of an unfamiliar voice, it is
+certain that it intermitted its screaming, and slowly unpuckering its
+face, allowed the hidden eyes to appear. They were all wet and shiny
+with tears, their long lashes glued into points like a series of tiny
+camel’s-hair paint brushes.
+
+Sainty wondered if he dared wipe them. ‘It can’t be comfortable to have
+one’s face all slobbered over like that,’ he thought, and taking out his
+handkerchief began, as lightly and tenderly as he could, to remove some
+of the superfluous moisture that seemed to exude from every feature. The
+baby, far from being sensible of this attention, showed unmistakable
+signs of being about to resume its lament. Sainty swiftly desisted from
+his endeavours, and once more implored its forbearance.
+
+The baby, with its face all made up for a fresh howl, paused suddenly
+when, so to speak, half-way there, and once more opened its eyes. It
+stared solemnly at Sainty and Sainty stared back at it. What dumb
+interchange of intelligence passed between them it would be hard to say,
+but presently a faint windy smile flickered across one side of the
+baby’s face leaving the other immutably grave.
+
+Sainty was transported with gratitude; he nodded and smiled repeatedly
+at the baby and tried to think of pleasant noises to make to it. One of
+the little hands had broken loose from under the coverlet and was
+beating the air--sparring at life with the aimless hostility of infancy.
+Very gingerly Sainty laid his forefinger against the palm, and
+instantly the absurd fingers closed round it and held him prisoner.
+
+Long he stood beside the cradle gently swaying the hand that held his
+own back and forth and contemplating the baby, which, soothed by the
+rhythmic movement, seemed inclined to sleep. Since it ceased crying, its
+face had become a touch pleasanter and more normal colour, and, as the
+suffusing crimson died away, Sainty could notice how the poor chin was
+chafed and red where it had rubbed on the wet unchanged bib; the tiny
+nails, too, were edged with black, and surely, he thought, a carefully
+tended baby ought not to smell as sour as this one did. It was being
+borne in upon him that the child was neglected, a thought which made him
+not less indignant that he could not feel wholly without blame in the
+matter. True, the child was not his, but by acknowledging it he had
+accepted responsibility; he knew far too well how little reason there
+was to expect that its mother would occupy herself with such matters to
+think of sheltering himself behind the plea that it was her business. It
+was monstrous that the sins of its parents should be visited on this
+helpless creature. The queer little claw still grasped his finger, and
+he was still swinging it and crooning gently, when the nurse hurried
+into the room and was visibly taken aback at sight of her master. At
+once she was voluble in explanation and excuse.
+
+‘That was the worst of these girls, you never could trust ’em; her back
+wasn’t a minute turned that that Emma wasn’t off to her own affairs. She
+hadn’t but just stepped downstairs to give the orders herself about his
+lordship’s milk, which, it was surprising, with all these lazy servants
+in the house, never _could_ be sent up at the right time, and had
+particularly told the girl not to leave the room for a second till she
+came back ...’ with much more to the same effect.
+
+Sainty grimly eyed the artificial roses she was whisking out of sight
+with clumsy dexterity, in her attempt to bring order out of chaos, with
+one hand, while with the other she made playful passes at the baby,
+crying ‘Did he?’ and ‘Was he, then?’ and ‘Nana’s here, precious.’
+
+Neither Sainty nor the baby was in the least taken in by this
+transparent comedy.
+
+‘I think this child is not properly looked after,’ the former said
+sternly.
+
+‘Not looked after!’ Nurse was outraged in her finest feelings. ‘Not
+looked after! She didn’t know what his lordship meant. She was never
+away for a minute all day and often up half the night with the little
+darling; not that she grudged it, not she; she was well aware it was but
+her duty and what she was paid for, but it _was_ hard after all to be
+told she didn’t look after the dear child, and she did think no one who
+hadn’t done it had any idea what it was to be with a young infant at
+night....’
+
+And just then the peccant underling returning from her own private
+expedition in neglect of her duty, she made a diversion by falling on
+her and smiting her figuratively hip and thigh in a frenzy of righteous
+wrath.
+
+The baby’s official guardians having for the time being returned to
+their posts, Sainty did not judge it necessary to remain and enter into
+details in which he might easily betray his ignorance. Having made his
+sweeping indictment and seen his heir restored to tranquillity by a
+bottle, he returned to his own neglected duties, feeling a little as if
+the Lord Chancellor might address to him some of the scathing reproaches
+he had just heard flung at the head of Emma.
+
+He tried to immerse himself in his usual employments, but, do what he
+would, he was haunted for the rest of the day and far into the night by
+the vision of the piteous, dirty baby left to howl by itself in the
+midst of its luxurious surroundings, and felt the cold clasp of the tiny
+fingers growing gradually warm and moist upon his own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The interview last recorded between Belchamber and his heir was to have
+momentous consequences for both of them. The principal gain was at first
+to the baby, as the immediate result was the dismissal of his neglectful
+attendants. Cissy, for her part, first delicately expressed surprise at
+Sainty’s interesting himself in the matter at all, and then adopted the
+simple plan of refusing to believe a word against the nurse, whom she
+eventually passed on to another young mother, with as strong a
+recommendation as she had received of her, adding in explanation: ‘My
+husband took a dislike to the woman, and so, of course, she had to go.’
+
+Lady Eccleston was full of concern and astonishment. ‘I _can’t_
+understand it,’ she cried. ‘Lady Quivers gave her the very _highest_
+character, and before that, she was four years in the nursery at
+Branches, first as nursery-maid and then as under-nurse, and I went to
+see dear Lady Olave myself, who couldn’t say enough about her. I _can’t_
+think she would really neglect the darling.’
+
+Sainty repeated his experience, and ‘Go and see for yourself,’ he said.
+‘The child is ill-cared for; he isn’t even kept clean.’
+
+Grandmamma went to inspect, and returned declaring the angel was as neat
+as a new pin. ‘You can’t, no matter _how_ careful you are, prevent their
+dear little chinnywinnies from getting a wee bit chapped if they dribble
+much,’ she said.
+
+‘No doubt he was clean enough after my unexpected visit,’ Sainty
+answered; ‘but I assure you _I_ didn’t find him so; his hands were dirty
+and nothing about him was fresh. I don’t know much about babies, but I’m
+sure they ought not to smell so nasty. He was hungry and cold too, poor
+little chap! and left all alone to yell himself into a fit.’
+
+‘Nurse declares she wasn’t gone five minutes; she was dreadfully
+distressed that you should have found the child alone. I feel sure one
+can trust that woman; I can always tell by people’s faces and the way
+they look at one; and Lady Quivers said she was _so_ devoted to her
+last, and I know it was a very delicate little thing.’
+
+For once, however, her son-in-law was inexorable. ‘The woman may have
+been all you say when she came,’ he said; ‘but it is not surprising if
+the best of nurses grows neglectful when the mother sets her the
+example.’
+
+This was taking the matter to very unsafe ground, where Lady Eccleston
+felt that it behoved her to walk warily. ‘I _can_ want nothing but the
+darling baby’s good,’ she said hastily. ‘I hold no brief for nurse, and
+if you are dissatisfied with her, dear Sainty, of course she had better
+go, though I don’t see what precautions we can take more than we did in
+getting this one.’
+
+It was Alice de Lissac who finally discovered a successor to Lady
+Quivers’ treasure, and imported a pet lamb from her mother’s bible-class
+at Great Charmington to act as nursery-maid.
+
+Once the treasure was gone, the other servants abounded in evidence,
+which more than justified her removal, though they would apparently have
+had no difficulty in reconciling their consciences to perpetual silence
+had she remained. It transpired that it was her frequent habit to
+administer narcotics to her unfortunate charge, in order that she might
+fulfil evening engagements of her own, from which she had sometimes not
+returned till the small hours of the morning; yet when Sainty felt it
+his duty to impart this information to her new employer, he was very
+civilly shown the door, with profuse thanks, but a polite intimation
+that his interference was not required; from which he was forced to
+conclude that Cissy was not as exceptional among fashionable mothers as
+he, in his ignorance, had imagined.
+
+He carried the child off to Belchamber, where he knew that Lady
+Charmington would keep a lynx eye on the new nurse and her acolyte, and
+where, indeed, it soon began to improve visibly in condition.
+
+Since its mother seemed to be without the common instincts of the animal
+kingdom, he imposed it on himself as a duty to see that the poor little
+creature was at least warmed and fed, and not poisoned with drugs. The
+duty was at first rather a painful one, involving as it did a constant
+recollection of what he would fain forget; but, as the months went by,
+like other things originally taken up from the sternest sense of
+responsibility, it came to have for him a decided interest.
+
+It has been somewhat cynically said that to be under an obligation to a
+man is the beginning of dislike; be that as it may, there is no doubt
+that any one to whom, in a world of frustrated effort, we have been able
+to do a tangible service, establishes thereby a distinct claim on our
+gratitude. ‘This,’ we say to ourselves with a pardonable glow, ‘is our
+work; here is something accomplished, some one better or happier for our
+existence,’ And it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling towards
+the person who has procured us such a pleasing reflection.
+
+Sainty found his mind constantly running on his small charge; he dwelt
+with pleasure on the prospect of seeing it; he even began to make
+excuses for more frequent visits to Belchamber, where it was astonishing
+how often his presence and personal supervision seemed to be required.
+
+In addition to the baby, there was now another person there, on whom he
+had the pleasure of knowing he had conferred a benefit; he had rescued
+his brother-in-law, Thomas Eccleston, from the hated thraldom of the
+broker’s office, and placed him with his agent, Mr. Danford, who was
+beginning to feel, as age stole upon him, the necessity for help in
+managing the huge property.
+
+The good Tommy, his legs permanently gaitered, his honest pink face
+burnt to a healthy brickdust colour, and his hands hardened by much
+congenial outdoor labour, was as happy as a rabbit in a vegetable
+garden. To initiate this neophyte into his duties, and at the same time
+keep things smooth between Danford and the pupil in whom his jealousy
+could not but scent a possible successor, called for many visits from
+the master. Sainty made time for them gladly, half ashamed to admit even
+to himself how much the new tenant of his old nurseries had to do with
+his alacrity. It surprised him to find how eagerly his eyes would scan
+the walks and lawns for the distant gleam of white in the perambulator.
+
+Week by week, and month by month, the little life was expanding and
+developing like an opening flower in the sunshine, and Sainty noted the
+changes, watching with reverent awe the miracle of the dawning
+intelligence. He brought wonderful toys, heads in fancy costume that
+could by a turn of the wrist be made to gyrate on a handle to a feeble
+lute-like accompaniment; wonderful parti-coloured acrobats in the
+attitude of St. Andrew on his cross, who shook their extended limbs with
+a great tinkling of bells; white furry animals that emitted strange
+squeaks when pressed in the abdominal regions.
+
+It must be confessed that the toys left the baby rather cold; sometimes
+he looked at them with solemn and contemptuous eyes, sometimes with an
+indulgent smile; more often he swept them from him with a downward
+sabre-cut action of the right arm. Whatever he did seemed to Sainty an
+indication of unusual capacity. He thought with a pang of fierce
+hatred--was it envy? was it contempt?--of the men who begot such
+marvellous beings, and grudged an occasional moment from their low toils
+or pleasures to glance impatiently at them and order them from the room.
+Of a mother who could bring forth a child and leave it to take its
+chance of life or death in the care of hirelings, he dared not trust
+himself to think at all.
+
+A hunger of paternity possessed him. How he could have adored a child of
+his own! His own! Was this child _not_ his own? To whom did it rather
+belong? the father who disowned, the mother who neglected it, or to him
+who had tended and cared for it, and was learning to love it? And the
+crowning wonder of all was that the child was learning to love _him_. It
+was not a merry baby--‘a solemn wise-like thing,’ the nurse called
+it--looking out upon the world with grave mysterious eyes, and that
+peculiarly detached, far-off expression that belongs only to babies and
+cats; but at sight of Sainty the rare smile never failed to light up the
+little white face, the legs would jump and kick against the nurse, the
+arms be held out for his embrace.
+
+A baby’s partiality has as little cause or meaning as its aversions, and
+it is as unreasonable to be flattered by the one as to be hurt by the
+other; but a man must be of a sterner temper than our poor Sainty to
+resist a certain mild elation when a little creature hurls itself into
+his arms with such confident self-surrender. To him, moreover, the
+novelty of the experience made it doubly dear. His mother had doubtless
+loved him in her own grim way, because he was her son; others, as his
+uncle, had pitied, or done their duty by him; others again might have
+paid him attention for what they hoped to obtain from him; but never in
+the course of his existence could he remember that any living thing had
+been simply attracted to him by the magnetism of his own personality;
+and no one can suspect a baby of any complexity of motive. So, when his
+coming was greeted with jubilant laughter and dancings and outstretched
+arms, a warmth crept about his heart, and he owned to himself with
+humble gratitude that out of what had seemed his greatest affliction had
+come the best happiness his life had ever known.
+
+Of course he did not arrive at this height of devotion all at once; it
+was the growth of many months, and every time he came to Belchamber, the
+little tendrils wound themselves more closely round his heart. At the
+end of the session, he established himself there with a more joyful
+sense of homecoming than he had known for years.
+
+To those who have experienced how rich in possibilities is the intimacy
+of a baby of six months, it were unnecessary to describe it; they who
+have not would hardly credit it, however cunningly set forth. There is
+something intangible about it that must necessarily evaporate in the
+mere attempt to put it on paper. Sainty fell into the habit of having
+the child almost constantly with him; often it slept on the sofa in his
+study, or in its perambulator under the great cedars while he read or
+wrote beside it, and the sense of its nearness at once soothed and
+stimulated him; even if it woke, it was so gentle and quiet that it
+hardly disturbed his work.
+
+He abandoned his little cart in favour of a larger open carriage in
+which the nurse and baby could accompany him on his drives. Not
+infrequently they would start by way of the dower-house, where Lady
+Charmington would be a willing addition to the party. Sainty and his
+mother were brought very close together by their common worship of the
+child; at no previous time, and on no other subject, had her son been in
+such constant need of the good lady’s advice. Exactly what the baby had
+suffered at the hands of the ‘treasure’ remained in doubt, but certainly
+its internal economy was none of the strongest, and many changes of diet
+had to be tried, which its two guardians discussed by the hour. Then it
+began to cut its teeth exceptionally early, with all the usual
+accompaniments of heaviness, loss of appetite, and restless nights.
+Without his mother’s rocklike commonsense to lean upon, Sainty would
+have worked himself into a fever of anxiety; her experience of the
+frailty of his own early days was of inestimable comfort to him.
+
+‘I tell you, this child is a tower of strength to what you were,’ Lady
+Charmington would say. ‘I’ve been up night after night with you when you
+were teething.’
+
+‘But was I as hot and restless as baby?’
+
+‘Hot and restless? I should think you were! twice as bad, and croupy
+into the bargain, which this child, thank God! hasn’t a symptom of.’
+
+So Sainty took heart, and when, after a time, he was made to feel with
+his finger two tiny white points in the red gum, this also seemed to
+him an almost supernatural achievement on the part of one so young.
+
+He had come to regard the precious infant as so entirely his charge,
+that he did not bestow much thought upon its recreant mother. Cissy had
+started on a round of visits at the end of the Season, hardly going
+through the form of inquiring if Sainty thought of accompanying her. It
+was a shock to him to find how completely she had gone out of his
+existence, when she presently announced that she was coming to
+Belchamber; she had spent a day or two there, before going North, to get
+some country clothes and give her maid a chance to repack, but had not
+seen the baby more than two or three times, nor appeared to take any
+particular interest in what was being done for it. It never occurred to
+Sainty as likely that she would in any way occupy herself with the child
+or its relation to him; it was therefore no small surprise to him to
+discover, before she had been many days in the house, that it was a
+distinct irritation to her to see them together.
+
+The first time she found it under the cedars with him, she inquired,
+with a perceptible shade of annoyance in her voice, where the nurse was,
+and why she hadn’t taken it out.
+
+‘Baby generally spends most of the morning with me here if it’s fine,’
+Sainty said. ‘The doctor likes him to be in the open air as much as
+possible, and it gives nurse a chance to do various little things for
+him.’
+
+‘Nonsense! it’s her place to be with him; she’ll get utterly spoilt if
+you do her work for her; she has got a girl in the nursery. If she can’t
+manage, she had better have another. There’s no earthly reason for you
+to do nursery-maid.’
+
+‘I like having baby with me, and _this_ woman doesn’t neglect her
+duties; at least she doesn’t leave the child alone, when he’s _not_ with
+me, like the one your mother got for him.’
+
+‘You were always unjust about that poor woman. Ah! here you are, nurse.
+You had better take baby and walk him about. You shouldn’t leave him
+here to worry his lordship.’
+
+‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon, my lord partick’larly _wished_ for the
+child to be left with him,’ retorted the nurse, as she wheeled the
+perambulator viciously away, quivering with suppressed indignation.
+
+‘You see the results of your spoiling that woman,’ Cissy remarked. ‘If
+she’s going to be insolent to me she’ll have to go.’
+
+‘No--by heaven! I’m hanged if she shall,’ Sainty burst out ‘She’s
+devoted to the child, and takes very good care of him, and he isn’t very
+strong. It would be monstrous, after never giving him a thought from the
+time of his birth till now, if you undertook to sack the people who _do_
+look after him, because you considered they didn’t sufficiently kowtow
+to _you_.’
+
+‘It’s precisely what you did to her predecessor.’
+
+‘On the contrary, I sent her away because she neglected him, which was,
+no doubt, what gave you a fellow-feeling for her.’
+
+‘Oh! well, don’t let me interfere between you and your _protégée_. I
+don’t even pretend to inquire what terms you are on with her; but I must
+confess I can’t see what particular pleasure you derive from the
+constant presence of another man’s child.’
+
+‘Hush!’ Sainty said, casting a swift, frightened glance around to see if
+any one was within earshot. ‘Be careful what you say. Remember the child
+is _mine_. He has got to be mine. Your remark was in your usual
+excellent taste, but on that particular subject you will have to forego
+the pleasure of wounding me. If you are so fond of reminding me that I
+am not his father, you will say something one of these days before
+others that you will regret.’
+
+It gave him a horrible sense of complicity to be obliged to entreat her
+discretion a feeling that, bound by their guilty secret, let them hate
+each other as they would, they dare not quarrel. Probably Cissy was not
+less aware of this necessity than her husband, for though her object
+remained the same, she altered her tactics. She would try to keep the
+child from him by little underhand manœuvres, sending it out when she
+thought him likely to want it, and even going so far as to take it with
+her when she drove; but she did not risk another face attack.
+
+Sainty, on his side, did nothing to provoke an encounter. He saw the
+child not less, but as it were by stealth, and this introduction of a
+slightly clandestine element into their intercourse only heightened his
+love for it. Not that it required any great exercise of tact or
+ingenuity to evade Cissy’s notice. Lord Charmington would have fared ill
+had he been dependent on the fitful attentions of his mamma for care and
+comfort. Even the amiable desire to deprive her husband of his one
+pleasure could not make a domestic character of Lady Belchamber. She was
+much away, and when at home constantly surrounded by guests who absorbed
+her attention. It was only at rare intervals that she found any leisure
+to bestow on the separation of her husband and her child.
+
+She had a trick of arriving when least expected, swooping suddenly into
+visible space like a comet, and, like a comet, followed by her train;
+though to speak of her appearances as comet-like gives a false
+impression of something periodical and calculably recurrent, whereas no
+one could foretell when Cissy might take it into her head to entertain a
+party, which seemed to be her only idea of the uses of a home.
+
+Once, when he thought she was safely launched on a round of
+country-houses, Sainty had asked his old friend Gerald Newby, for whom
+she entertained no great regard, to pay him a visit. They were at tea on
+the lawn, when, preceded at a short interval by a heralding telegram,
+her ladyship descended on them with a few friends, and the announcement
+of a further contingent for the morrow.
+
+Lady Charmington had come over from the dower-house, and Tommy had
+dropped in for tea and to play with his nephew, about whom he was almost
+as weak as Sainty.
+
+No one looking at the group under the cedars would have guessed that he
+was witness of anything but the most delightful scene of domestic
+felicity. The stately ancestral home, the superb trees, the great
+stretches of smoothly mown turf, the young married couple with their
+baby between them, surrounded by all that wealth and great possession
+could give, the adoring grandmother, the loving uncle, the admiring
+friends, the glow of flowers, the cheerful, intimate little meal, all
+combined to make the picture complete. It appealed strongly to Newby,
+who beamed indulgently on the party.
+
+‘Our dear Sainty appears in a new and most amiable light,’ he said; ‘I
+am not accustomed to see him as Kourotrophos. It is the epithet applied
+to Hermes in his character of the child-tender,’ he added explanatorily
+to Cissy, who looked rather blank.
+
+‘I can’t think why nurse doesn’t fetch baby,’ that lady remarked; ‘or,
+for that matter, why she brought him down at all. I’ve always told her
+not to when any one was here. Whatever one may think of one’s own
+children, one has no right to bore other people with them.’
+
+‘_I_ asked to see the child,’ said Lady Charmington, the light of battle
+waking in her eye.
+
+‘Mother had settled to come over before I knew you were coming,’ Sainty
+said quietly. ‘When I got your telegram it was too late to stop her, and
+as she had come on purpose to see baby, I couldn’t refuse to send for
+him. No one need bother about him; he will be quite good with me.’
+
+‘Dear little man!’ said one of the ladies who had come with the fond
+mother. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t stop him, Lord Belchamber. I love
+babies. I’ve been trying to think who he reminds me of. He’s not a bit
+like you or Cissy.’
+
+‘We think him like my grandmother--’ Sainty began.
+
+‘I never could see that he was so like the duchess,’ Lady Charmington
+cut in.
+
+‘To _me_ he’s the image of Claude Morland,’ remarked the luckless Tommy.
+
+There was a sudden hush that may have lasted some five seconds ere it
+was broken by Newby inquiring, ‘What has become of your charming cousin?
+I liked him so much, and hoped I might meet him here.’
+
+‘We see very little of Claude now,’ Lady Charmington responded. ‘He
+never seems to come here. I suppose he finds other places more amusing.
+He was glad enough to come in old days.’
+
+‘I fancy,’ said Sainty, ‘as the duke gets older that he is more
+dependent on him. He very seldom gets away.’
+
+He had, in fact, for some time been conscious that Claude came much less
+to the house than formerly, and was acutely aware of a like
+consciousness in Cissy, though each was careful to say nothing about it
+to the other.
+
+‘By the way, that reminds me,’ said Lady Charmington to Sainty. ‘I had
+almost forgotten. Alice de Lissac writes she is coming to her father for
+a little, and she is very anxious to see baby. May I bring her over some
+day?’
+
+‘Why should Claude remind you of Mrs. de Lissac?’ Cissy asked, with a
+little laugh, her desire to score off her mother-in-law getting the
+better of her prudence. ‘I never knew they had much in common.’
+
+‘Only because Alice says in her letter they have seen a good deal of him
+lately. He seems to have been several times to Roehampton; and mother
+mentioned his coming in to see her one day with one of the girls.’
+
+‘Morland’s a deep ‘un,’ ejaculated Tommy. ‘Shouldn’t wonder if he was
+after one of the heiresses. Those girls’ll have a devil of a lot of
+money. The mater was always egging me on to be civil to ’em. Do you
+remember the World’s Bazaar, Cissy? Oh my!’
+
+‘I wonder if he can be thinking of Gemma,’ said Lady Charmington
+thoughtfully. ‘Alice doesn’t _say_ so, but----’
+
+‘It’s not true,’ Cissy burst out; then, seeing awakened curiosity in
+several surrounding pairs of eyes, she added more indifferently, ‘I know
+Claude well enough to feel sure he would never be attracted by that
+black Jewess.’
+
+‘He might be by her blond sovereigns,’ suggested Tommy.
+
+Cissy became suddenly solicitous for the comfort of her guests. ‘I am
+sure you want to see your rooms,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like a bath
+after that dirty journey?’ and swept them into the house.
+
+‘Cissy don’t seem to fancy the idea of Morland being sweet on the dark
+lady,’ Tommy giggled. ‘She used to flirt with him herself once. I
+remember mater----’
+
+‘Tommy,’ said Sainty, ‘do, like a good soul, ask nurse to fetch baby.’
+
+He felt sick and frightened. The contrast between the appearances of
+life and the ghastly things that were so thinly overlaid by them
+suddenly appalled his spirit. Almost unconsciously he picked up the
+baby, and clasped it closely to him. It was on that same spot, and on
+much such an afternoon, that he had first seen Cissy five years before.
+With the clearness of a picture thrown on a screen, he saw her standing
+as she had stood that day with Claude beside her, her girlish beauty
+bathed in soft golden light, and recalled the prophetic pang with which
+he had watched them turn away together under the baleful gaze of Aimée
+Winston. As he sat holding their child to his heart, the permanent
+dweller in his cupboard seemed to grin out at him with a more than
+usually fiendish malignity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+One morning early in October, Thomas Eccleston appeared in his
+brother-in-law’s study with a shade of distress deepening the habitual
+ruddiness of his open countenance.
+
+It has already been intimated that Sainty cherished a very real
+affection for this young man, holding a character so manly and direct to
+be little short of miraculous in a child of Lady Eccleston.
+
+‘What’s the matter, Tommy?’ he asked. ‘You look perturbed. Have you and
+Danford been coming to blows?’
+
+‘Oh no, Danny’s all right; it so happens I’m rather in his good books
+just now. But the fact is, I’ve had rather a queer letter, and I didn’t
+quite know what to do about it, so I thought the simplest thing was to
+bring it to you, though it’s not by any means what he intended me to
+do.’
+
+‘Who’s “he”? Danford?’
+
+‘No; I tell you it’s nothing to do with him,’
+
+‘To begin with, then, who’s your correspondent?’
+
+‘Well, if you want to know, it’s your brother.’
+
+Sainty started. ‘Arthur? What _can_ he want of you?’
+
+‘I think the best way would be for you to read it,’ Tommy said, holding
+out the letter.
+
+Sainty hesitated a moment, then took it and read:
+
+‘DEAR ECCLESTON--I expect you’ll be rather astonished at hearing from
+me, and still more at what it’s about. The fact of the matter is, I want
+you to do me a good turn. I was awfully glad to hear my brother had got
+you at Belchamber, and it suddenly occurred to me you would be just the
+chap to do what I want. To cut a long story short, I want to come to
+Belchamber. I suppose it’s very undignified of me, but I’m badly in
+want of a little amusement, and I thought if they were going to have a
+shoot, and it wasn’t a very big party, you might suggest to your sister
+to pop me in as one of the guns. You may think it funny that I don’t
+write straight to my brother, but I know he’d be infernally sniffy, and
+say I had no proper pride; and Cissy always seemed a good sort, and so
+did you, and I thought between you, you could work it for me. I know
+they won’t ask Lady Arthur, and I don’t ask it of ’em. At first I was
+afraid she mightn’t take it kindly, but she’s been all right about it;
+she says she don’t want to go where she isn’t wanted, but don’t mind my
+going without her. Do you think you can work it through your sister? Do,
+if you can, and oblige yours ever.--A. W. CHAMBERS.’
+
+‘Oh! _how_ like Arthur!’ Sainty murmured, as he refolded this
+characteristic letter.
+
+‘I thought,’ said Tommy, who had been watching him uneasily as he read,
+and fiddling with the things on the writing-table, ‘that it was better
+to come straight to you than to go to Cissy about it.’
+
+‘So it is, and I’m very grateful to you, dear boy, for all your
+loyalty’; and Sainty laid a thin claw in Thomas’s large red hand. The
+sub-agent pressed it fervently.
+
+‘What had I better say?’ he asked. ‘It puts me in such a deucedly
+awkward posish, don’t yer know.’
+
+‘Of course he had no business to write to any one but me,’ Sainty said.
+‘Well--you needn’t answer; I’ll write to him myself.’
+
+Tommy looked much relieved. ‘Hope I didn’t do wrong,’ he said
+doubtfully.
+
+‘On the contrary, you did more than right,’ Sainty said warmly.
+
+‘Shall you ask him?’ Tommy ventured, after a pause.
+
+‘I can’t say straight off; I must talk to Cissy about it, and’ (with an
+ill-concealed tremor) ‘to my mother,’
+
+Cissy made no objections. Arthur was a pleasant, good-looking fellow,
+and a man you could ask without his wife was as good as a bachelor.
+Rather to Sainty’s surprise, Lady Charmington was not less willing. She
+hardly ever mentioned Arthur. Since the day when, livid and furious, she
+had solemnly cursed her younger son, Sainty could almost count on the
+fingers of one hand the times when she had spoken his name; but when,
+with some trepidation and much uncertainty, he approached her on the
+subject, he was met quite half-way.
+
+‘Unto seventy times seven,’ she remarked, ‘the Scripture tells us we
+must forgive. That woman I will _never_ receive, but as long as he is
+willing to come without her, I see no reason you shouldn’t have him at
+Belchamber; and--and--you may tell him I am willing to see him too, if
+he likes.’ And Sainty read in the sudden suffusion of the hard eyes, the
+tale of the poor woman’s long silent yearning for a sight of her
+favourite son.
+
+So Arthur had his wish, and came once more to Belchamber. There was, no
+doubt, a certain awkwardness in the situation, and Sainty was surprised
+and touched to find that, though he certainly felt it much the most,
+Arthur was not without a perception of it, too. He was decidedly subdued
+during the first days of his visit, and Sainty’s ready sympathy went
+out, as usual, to any one who was ill at ease. Had Arthur been in his
+accustomed mood of complete self-satisfaction, he would have felt less
+tenderly towards him, but seeing him so humbled and brought low, on the
+footing, as it were, of a guest and poor relation in the home of their
+common childhood, was almost more than he could bear.
+
+Perhaps Arthur intentionally rather accentuated this note, conscious of
+the effect it would have on his brother. He would pointedly ask leave to
+do the most obvious things. ‘There’s a spare gun in the gun-room,’ he
+would say; ‘the keeper says he doesn’t know whose it is. Should you mind
+if I took it, old chap? I’ve only one here, and it got so hot yesterday
+I could hardly shoot with it.’ Or it would be, ‘Tommy and I are going to
+practise a bit; may I use this old bat? I fancy it must once have been
+mine, but I’m not sure.’ Or, ‘Would it be convenient for me to have a
+horse this morning? I was thinking of riding over to see the mater.’
+Formerly, whatever the house afforded was as freely his as Sainty’s. If
+he was not the owner, he was something more than an ordinary heir, and
+guns, bats, and horses were so emphatically his natural property, that
+it was unthinkable his asking permission to use them.
+
+On the first morning of his visit, the brothers had wandered out
+together, and Arthur had commented on the new arrangement of the
+forecourt.
+
+‘You’ve fetched all the old statues out of the shrubbery, I see,’ he
+said. ‘What did you do that for?’
+
+Sainty explained, almost apologetically, that it was an attempt to
+return to Perrault’s original plan.
+
+‘Is it so long since you were here?’ he said. ‘I had forgotten----’
+Then, as the other remained silent, gloomily sucking at his pipe, ‘I’m
+afraid you don’t like it,’ he suggested meekly.
+
+‘Oh! well, of course, it’s none of _my_ business. I must say I think
+they looked better where they were, but I’m not much of a judge.
+Naturally, don’tcherknow, I liked ’em where I’ve always seen ’em. I
+can’t bear changes in the place.’
+
+‘I’m sometimes half sorry I did it, myself,’ Sainty admitted. As he
+spoke he was aware that the moment had come which he had been dreading
+ever since his brother’s arrival, the first appearance on the scene of
+the baby, who was being taken out for his morning’s airing.
+
+‘And so this is the son and heir, is it?’ said Arthur. ‘Hulloa! little
+‘un, how do you do? I’m your uncle. You look very solemn, but it would
+be more natural if I did. You don’t know the difference your small
+existence makes to me and mine.’
+
+The baby, as usual, at sight of Sainty, began making demonstrations of
+welcome, doubling himself forward over his restraining strap, and giving
+vent to a note like that of the nightingale, which is conventionally
+represented in print as ‘Jug-jug-jug,’ and a cry of ‘A-da, A-da-da,
+A-da,’ which was a sort of sound of all work with him for the
+expression of his varying emotions.
+
+‘He wants his dada,’ said the nurse, eager to display her charge’s
+precocity, and, at the same time, gratify her master. ‘He says “Dada”
+quite plain, my lord, and it’s the first word he’s said.’
+
+‘It’s a wise child that knows his own father,’ said Arthur jocosely.
+
+Sainty could not restrain a hasty glance at him, but he was evidently
+innocent of any special or personal application of the often-quoted
+adage.
+
+They walked on for a little beside the child, Sainty resting one hand
+lovingly on the edge of the little carriage, the baby squirming round
+and looking up into his face, wrinkling its nose and gurgling to attract
+his attention. When their ways divided, the parting was not effected
+without a burst of protest from the infant, which Sainty soothed and
+diverted as skilfully as the professional attendant.
+
+‘The little beggar seems to like you,’ Arthur remarked. ‘I don’t
+remember either of mine ever yelling for _me_.’
+
+‘You have probably never taken as much notice of them as I do of baby.’
+
+‘You were always a kind of old granny; you’ll probably spoil that brat.
+Have you done anything to the stables since I was here?’
+
+Once received, the prodigal brother came several times to Belchamber in
+the course of the winter. He liked the luxury, the magnificence, the
+good food, the gentlemanly licence of the conversation, the fine horses
+to ride (he soon ceased to ask if he might take one), better than the
+shabby gentility of the stucco rectory, the half-trained grooms, the
+half-lame hunters, the half-refined wife of his own home. It sometimes
+seemed to Sainty that he almost forgot he was a husband and father at
+all, and there were not wanting among the ladies of Cissy’s surrounding
+some who were quite willing to help him to this pleasing oblivion.
+
+‘I like Lady Deans,’ he would say confidentially; ‘she’s rare sport,
+and there’s no nonsense about her; she don’t care what she says, and you
+haven’t got to think twice about what you say to _her_. Now if I were to
+say half the things to Topsy I do to her, she’d bridle and shy and look
+as sour as if she’d been brought up by a bishop. And when you think--oh
+my!’ and the sentence would end in a long puff of cigar smoke, or the
+burial of the speaker’s nose in a tall whisky and soda.
+
+Arthur was a decided success with the members of the softer sex. The
+story of his romance cast quite a halo about him, and the very few
+mothers of grown-up girls who were tolerated in that gay company felt
+almost tenderly towards a detrimental who had put it out of his own
+power to marry their daughters.
+
+As for Cissy, she and her brother-in-law got on capitally. She pressed
+him to come whenever he liked, partly, no doubt, because she divined
+that his presence was a constant unhappiness to her husband. The sight
+of him in juxtaposition with the baby kept a keen edge on all Sainty’s
+feelings of remorse; nor was Arthur likely to be restrained by a
+fastidious delicacy from all allusion to the change which the birth of
+an heir had made in his own position. His remarks on the subject were
+not always in the best possible taste; he affected jokes about the Babes
+in the Wood, referred to himself as the ‘wicked uncle,’ and ‘wondered
+Sainty was willing to trust him in the house with the precious infant.’
+Such pleasantries, of a slightly sub-acid jocularity, went through and
+through Sainty in a way that the speaker could neither have guessed nor
+intended; he probably thought, on the contrary, that he was taking his
+blighted prospects with an easy amiability which did him infinite
+credit. He was not indeed without certain touches of kindliness towards
+his nephew. ‘When he gets a big boy, you must let his poor old uncle
+teach him to ride and shoot,’ he would say. ‘We must make a good
+sportsman of him, and you know _you_ won’t do much in that line for him,
+old man.’ Sainty wondered if he wanted the boy to be a sportsman. His
+personal hatred of taking life extended itself to this nurseling of his
+affections. Must those tiny fingers be taught to curl round a trigger,
+that innocent heart learn to find its pleasure in slaughter and
+destruction? Yet he desired all forms of perfection for his darling; he
+hated to think of him at the same disadvantage among those with whom he
+would have to live as he himself had always been. He would have him
+strong and brave and daring, trained in all arts and exercises that
+became a gentleman; for instance, there could be no doubt that a certain
+proficiency in horsemanship was desirable for the ideal youth, but he
+recalled with horror his own early efforts to attain it, and shuddered
+to think how he should tremble, when, in course of time, the child came
+to an age to face these dangers.
+
+He began to see how ill-fitted he was to be the trainer of a young man.
+Hitherto he had imagined himself only as a nurse of callow infancy,
+shielding the little one with his greater insight and sympathy from the
+misunderstandings that had made his own childhood unhappy. Somehow he
+had fancied the child would be like him, timid and shrinking, needing
+protection; but now it struck him that there was no reason why it should
+resemble him at all, and he recoiled with sudden terror from the thought
+of what unlovely qualities the offspring of two such parents might have
+inherited. How would he be able to bear seeing the treachery of the one,
+or the hard egotism of the other, reproducing itself in the being he
+loved best in the world? Had he the firmness needed for correcting such
+tendencies? Could he ever steel himself to the necessity of punishment?
+
+On the other hand, it was hardly to be desired that the little boy
+should grow up on his pattern. He was not so conspicuous a success in
+his position that it was an object to educate a successor on the same
+lines. He began to understand the kind of problems his own bringing up
+had presented for solution to his mother and uncle; he remembered how
+futile had been the efforts of these two strong natures, with all the
+advantages of example, to instil into his feeble soul a more virile
+attitude towards life, and the sum in proportion of what difficulties he
+would have to encounter in a like endeavour was not a hard one to work
+out. If Lady Charmington, absolutely sure of what she wanted, and with
+her bull-dog tenacity of purpose, had failed so lamentably of her
+object, what kind of a creature would he turn out, assailed by a hundred
+doubts, fears, and indecisions, and desiring simultaneously quite
+irreconcilable ideals?
+
+He recognised that the child had become the chief preoccupation of his
+life, its health, its food, its education--for he already tormented
+himself with questions that, by their very nature, could not have to be
+faced for years to come; and the more he troubled himself about the
+little thing, the more he loved it, the greater his love grew, the
+greater grew the desire to do his duty by his charge, the greater the
+anxiety as to what that duty might be.
+
+So far, however, his troubles were only those common to all parents and
+guardians who took their responsibilities somewhat morbidly; his special
+self-torture began where theirs left off. When all was said and done,
+the thousand dangers that dog the steps of youth safely passed, the
+pitfalls on either hand successfully avoided, the boy trained to all
+perfection of manly virtue and delight--what then? To what purpose, and
+for what end, should he have fashioned this splendid creature? To be the
+means by which he was to rob his nearest kinsfolk of their birthright!
+If his remorse was constantly awakened by Arthur’s presence, and the
+things that he said, it yet addressed itself less to Arthur than to the
+child. It was not so much the injury to his brother and his brother’s
+children that was becoming an hourly torment to his conscience, as the
+injury to this innocent accomplice in making him the instrument of
+wrong. Was that, then, the best that he could do for the son of his
+heart, the being who was daily becoming more and more the centre of his
+existence, dearer than are the children of their loins to ordinary
+fathers, to use him as the unconscious weapon of his own fraud? There
+was no way out, no turning back; he could not now disavow him if he
+would. The crime was committed, irremediable, to go on breeding
+injustice, perpetuating wrong to the last chapters of the history of his
+race.
+
+He saw in imagination the little boy passing from childhood to youth,
+from youth to manhood, growing tall and strong and beautiful, in his
+turn marrying, and begetting children to become links in the long chain
+of falsehood and carry on the consequences of his lie. And he would have
+to live and watch this happening, always alone, always in silence, with
+no one to whom he could unburthen his heart. There would only be two who
+shared his knowledge, and to neither of them could he say a word on the
+subject, though hideously, eternally aware that they knew, and were
+watching with himself. And then a new terror assailed him. When a secret
+was already the property of three people, could he be certain that no
+breath of it would ever reach the person principally concerned? He had
+plenty of experience of how recklessly Cissy could talk on occasion,
+what rash and terrible things the desire to wound could make her say,
+and he trembled lest in some fit of sudden anger with her son, some
+momentary loss of self-control, she might turn and crush him with the
+story of his birth. The word once spoken could never be recalled; he saw
+the poor boy coming, white and stern, to ask him if this thing were
+true, and felt by anticipation the agony of his own inability to deny
+it. A dozen times a day he lived through the misery of that confession,
+and watched the love and respect die out of those dear eyes, as his
+unwilling hand dealt the final blow. Perhaps it would be some fair
+growth of young romance, the prospect of an innocent, happy marriage
+with a good girl, that he would have to blast with that terrible avowal.
+He heard himself condemning the boy to sterile loneliness or the devious
+byways of illicit love, to make a tardy reparation, and restore the
+stolen heritage to its rightful owners.
+
+These thoughts were with him day and night; they went to bed with him,
+and got up with him; they followed him about the place; they sat with
+him beside the sleeping baby, and looked at him out of its great solemn
+eyes when it woke. Truly ‘the Lord his God was a jealous God,’ that
+fastidiously high standard of conduct and personal honour, his one sin
+against which was to be ‘visited upon the children, unto the third and
+fourth generation.’
+
+And then on a sudden the end came, and he learned the futility of his
+crime and his remorse alike. The poor little life that had been to him a
+source of such happiness and such self-torture came to an end as
+independently of any act of his as it had come to its beginning. It may
+have contained from the first the germs of some mortal disease, or
+perhaps the practices of its former nurse had left behind more fatal
+results than any one suspected. It is probable that too rapid teething
+had something to do with it. A baby’s life is at best but such a newly
+kindled flame, feeble and unsteady, that a puff of wind will make it
+flicker and go out. The whole thing did not take a week. The child was
+flushed, heavy, restless, as it had so often been before. ‘He is cutting
+another big tooth,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s no wonder he’s a little
+fractious, poor lamb! It’s the third in a fortnight.’ Lady Charmington
+was appealed to, and repeated, for the twentieth time, her comfortable
+assertions of how much more Sainty himself had suffered during the same
+anxious period; by constantly reassuring her son with them, she had
+finally almost persuaded herself that the baby was as strong as she
+wished it. She declared it was ridiculous to send for the doctor. ‘Have
+him, if you like,’ she said; ‘but I know just what he’ll say. Baby has
+been exactly like this so often, and each time you always think it is
+something dreadful. Nurse knows exactly what to do for him, don’t you,
+nurse?’
+
+On the third day Sainty grew restive, and sent for him all the same. The
+doctor, if not as well satisfied as Lady Charmington, yet seemed to
+think there was no particular cause for anxiety. He detected a little
+sound in the bronchial pipes, and asked if the child could have got a
+chill in any way. ‘It might all very well come from the teeth,’ he said.
+‘The little fellow is feverish; you had better keep him in for a day or
+two.’
+
+He came once or twice more, a little uncertain, very non-committal; and
+then, one day, there was a swift unexplained rise of temperature, a
+convulsion or two, and, before even Sainty, with his genius for
+prophesying disaster, had fully realised the danger, all was over in
+this world as far as the baby was concerned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+‘My little boy, my poor little boy! You were conceived in sin, and your
+birth was a lie. Your father never owned you, your mother never loved
+you. It was left to me, who should have hated you, to tend and cherish
+you. It was little enough that I could do for _you_, but God only knows
+what you have been to _me_. It was no fault of yours, my baby, but my
+misdoing, that would have made your innocent existence an injury to
+others. I might have known that you could do no harm, that you would go
+away before your life could wrong them.’
+
+Sainty was murmuring broken phrases, his face bowed upon the face of the
+dead child. The tiny coffin, almost like a toy, was supported on two
+chairs facing each other, and on a third chair beside it he had sat
+almost continuously since the room had been put in order and the people
+turned out of it. His mother had said it was bad for him, but, with that
+single exception, there was luckily no one who cared enough to try and
+take him away, and so he had remained, hour after hour, steeped in the
+great quiet that surrounded that little figure.
+
+The pale diffused daylight came sifted through the lowered blinds,
+giving an unreal look to common objects, turned suddenly useless, and
+ranged against the walls. Sainty himself had helped to order the room,
+and to deck it with flowers. He would allow no heavy fragrance of white
+funereal blossoms, but all the greenhouses of Belchamber had been
+ransacked for the unseasonable roses of winter, and to this day the
+smell of roses brings back to him the little white waxen face, barred
+with its black-fringed lids, at which he gazed so long in those sacred
+hours of communing with the dead.
+
+It was his first experience of death. His father had died when he was a
+mere baby, and both his grandfathers in his early childhood; since he
+had been able to reflect or remember, he had never lost a friend. It
+struck him as strange that he, who had tasted so many sorrows, should
+have had no experience of this the supremest and commonest that man is
+called upon to bear. It was different from any other trouble he had ever
+known, deeper, more awful, more hopeless, yet somehow for that very
+reason more bearable too. There was no element of meanness in it,
+nothing petty or small. Such grief was large, calm, august, and above
+all very still; in presence of this perfect peace he could not strive
+nor cry. Shelley’s words about the Niobe came back to him as he sat
+there, and he kept repeating them to himself, ‘Her tender and serene
+despair.’ Despair, then, was ‘tender and serene’; how true it was! He
+was not even very unhappy. The consciousness of the aching void in his
+life would come later; but, for the moment, the bitterness of parting
+was lost in the relief of seeing his darling free from the suffering it
+had been torture to watch and know himself powerless to allay. He
+understood why David had arisen and washed his face and taken food, when
+they told him that his child was dead.
+
+The baby hands were folded, and held a bunch of violets; and as he bent
+over them, laying his parched lips upon their marble coldness, the
+comforting promise seemed to steal down to the sources of his being,
+that at last, far off, after all the fever and the pain, this rest on
+which he looked was waiting for him, as for every one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A discreet tap on the door jarred the silence like a drumbeat, and
+Sainty went across and opened it. A servant stood there wearing the
+decorous expression of those officially connected with mourning which is
+not a personal grief to them.
+
+‘Her ladyship has been inquiring for you, m’lord,’ the man said, ‘and
+the post has come. I have put your lordship’s letters on your
+writing-table.’
+
+Sainty came out into the passage, and locked the door behind him,
+slipping the key into his pocket. ‘You can tell her ladyship she will
+find me in my study,’ he said; ‘or if she prefers, and will let me know,
+I will come to her.’
+
+He wondered what Cissy could have to say to him; he felt a sure
+foreboding that it would be nothing he should care to hear. What more
+was there for her to say to him henceforth, for ever?
+
+He went to his study in the old western pavilion and sat down at his
+writing-table; it was heaped with a great pile of letters; the morning’s
+mail had been added to those which, yesterday, he had had no heart to
+open. They would have to be gone through some time, he supposed; it was
+a task he could not well leave to his secretary. Why not attack them at
+once while he was feeling calmed and strengthened? He drew a few towards
+him and nerved himself for the ordeal of reading them. He thought he
+knew so well what they would contain, yet in the very first that he took
+up he found matter quite unexpected, which even at that moment arrested
+his attention.
+
+‘DEAR OLD SAINTY,’ he read: ‘I don’t at all like the idea of intruding
+my happiness on your grief; but I equally don’t want you to hear of it
+from any one but me, which you would be sure to do if I didn’t write at
+once. And first let me just stop and tell you how awfully sorry I am for
+you and Cissy losing your little boy. I can’t bear to think of you with
+your sensitive nature. The only thing to be said is that it was better
+than if he had been older, when you would have missed him so much more;
+you can’t personally have seen very much of him at that age. But to come
+back to myself. I hope I am the first to tell you (as you are almost the
+first that I have told) of my engagement to Gemma de Lissac. You who
+know my Gemma, and the admirable woman to whom she owes so much, will
+realise without any words of mine what a lucky fellow I am. I need not
+say I am tremendously in love, and absurdly happy. Mr. de Lissac has
+been most awfully good about it, and very generous. Of course, a
+wretched pauper like me could never have married a girl who hadn’t got
+something. For myself, as you know, my wants are few, but I couldn’t
+have asked Gemma, who has always had every luxury since she was a baby,
+to give up all she has been accustomed to, especially her thousand and
+one good deeds. Mr. de Lissac wants me to chuck my P. S.-ship and go in
+for parliament, and the duke has been very kind in promising his help.
+Forgive such a long letter about myself when you are in trouble, but
+happiness is always egotistical, and I can’t help hoping that mine won’t
+be indifferent to you. As I have written you such a yarn, and have so
+many letters to write, will you please tell Cissy, with my love, and ask
+her to forgive my not writing to her separately. I haven’t written to
+Aunt Sarah either, as I think Mrs. de Lissac is writing to her. Wish me
+joy, old man. There is no one whose good wishes I shall value more. Your
+affectionate cousin, CLAUDE MORLAND.
+
+‘_P.S._--I don’t offer to come to the funeral. I know you’ll feel just
+as I should about it, and want to keep it all as quiet as possible.’
+
+Sainty read the letter through twice. He had hardly finished his second
+perusal of it, when the door opened, and Cissy stood before him. She was
+dressed in hastily improvised mourning of incongruous showiness. The
+black clothes enhanced her fairness, and accentuated the slim
+girlishness of her figure, but her face had no youth in it, and her eyes
+glittered with an unnatural brightness.
+
+‘You wanted to see me?’ Sainty asked.
+
+‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have got something to say to you, and I may as well
+say it first as last.’ Then, as he stood waiting in silence to hear her,
+‘You and I have got to have an explanation,’ she added.
+
+‘Is it the moment, with the child lying dead in the house?’ Sainty
+asked, with a gesture of protest.
+
+‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘it is just that I wanted to speak about. As
+long as he lived, I have stayed for my child’s sake.’
+
+Sainty gave a convulsive laugh. ‘You have done a great deal for the
+child’s sake!’ he said.
+
+‘Now,’ she went on, ‘I have no reason for remaining. I have come to tell
+you that after the funeral I am going away. I can’t keep it up any
+longer. We hate each other, you know we do. Life together has become
+intolerable.’
+
+‘Life together!’ Sainty repeated. ‘Do you call it life together? To me
+it seems that we could hardly be more apart. In Kamchatka I should not
+be further from you.’ And indeed she seemed so far away, that he felt as
+if his voice could hardly reach her; he wondered how she could ever have
+affected him for pain or pleasure. He looked at her across a chasm in
+which lay the dead child.
+
+‘And where do you propose to go?’ he asked indifferently.
+
+‘I shall go to the only man I have ever really loved,’ Cissy said
+dramatically.
+
+‘I thought we were coming to that.’ It all seemed no business of his,
+not to affect him in any way; he even felt a little sorry for her under
+the blow he was going to deal her. He found himself casting about in his
+mind for the best way of telling her. How strange that that letter
+should just have come (or was it, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence?),
+that he should have selected that hour for opening it, that it should
+have been the first one that he had read! He still held it in his hand,
+and without saying anything he moved it so that the writing might
+attract her attention.
+
+‘What have you got there?’ she cried, turning suddenly very white. ‘Let
+me see it. Is it from Claude?’ She sprang upon it, and snatched it from
+him before he could give it to her, and he heard the two sheets rattle
+against each other with the shaking of her hands.
+
+‘There is a message for you in it,’ he said, as he turned away. He did
+not want to pry into her misery. He felt no exultation, only a sick
+contemptuous pity, pity in which there was no love.
+
+Presently, hearing her give a sort of hoarse cry, he looked round. She
+had sunk into a chair, with one arm laid along the table, her other
+hand, clenched, rested on her knee. The letter had fallen on the floor.
+She sat looking straight in front of her, and her mouth moved as if she
+were speaking, but no sound came. She had evidently forgotten his
+presence altogether. She was frightening like this, her lips drawn back
+a little from her teeth, her face set in a grimace that made her almost
+monkey-like, ugly as strong emotion always is. After a time she began to
+beat on the edge of the table with her hand. ‘Blackguard! Blackguard!’
+she kept repeating under her breath.
+
+Sainty was longing for her to go and leave him alone with his grief. The
+presence of this other misery which, by the nature of the case, he could
+do nothing to soothe only aggravated his own; it seemed to bring him
+down to earth, to drag him back to the sordid and base, from the regions
+to which he had risen in the chamber of death. What had he to do with
+this woman’s fierce resentment, balked of her earthly passion, he who
+had been so near the borders of eternal peace?
+
+He went over to her and spoke very gently. ‘I think we should be better
+apart,’ he said, ‘each with his own sorrow. We can do nothing to help
+each other.’
+
+She seemed hardly to understand what he said, but she nodded dully and
+rose, and he held the door open for her to pass.
+
+It was nothing to him, he reflected, whether she went or stayed, whether
+she played out the dreary farce of their married life to the end, or
+broke away to follow her own devices. The shame, which had seemed so
+unendurable that he had bartered his personal honour to avoid it,
+appeared to him now as a thing of no importance. He wondered how he had
+ever cared about it. Let her go, in heaven’s name, if she had a mind to!
+He almost wished that she would, but he knew in his heart that Claude’s
+letter had done its work; there would be no more talk of her going. He
+stooped and picked up the crumpled papers, smoothing them out and
+looking at the beautiful neat little handwriting, not an erasure, not a
+correction. Whatever the writer might say of haste and want of time and
+pressure of correspondence, that letter had not been written in a hurry.
+
+‘It’s so complete,’ he said to himself; ‘the last touch. Nothing was
+wanting but this.’ He found himself almost admiring the absolute quality
+of his cousin’s villainy, so rounded and finished, with no loose ends.
+
+In a few seconds his mind flew back over all the stages of his
+connection with Claude, the first coming to Belchamber of the large pale
+boy, with his dreamy eyes and curious fascination, the old Eton days,
+his baleful influence on Arthur, the story of his connection with Aimée
+Winston, the double treachery of his behaviour about Cynthia.... But
+when he came to the part Morland had played in his own married life, his
+imagination shuddered and winced, he could not, dare not, think of it.
+‘And now, to crown all, this----’ And his hand struck the pages with
+their rippling conventional expressions of happiness and affection,
+their bland pretence of sympathy offered and demanded. For a moment the
+room swam round him, and he had to clutch the table for support. Could
+he let this thing be? Ought he to allow this girl to be sacrificed, and
+not make an effort to save her? But almost simultaneously he recognised
+the futility of any such attempt. He thought of Gemma, conceited,
+headstrong, self-confident, and at the same time superlatively
+sentimental, and imagined the reception he should meet with if he were
+to tell her the man into whose hands she had just surrendered her
+existence, was--what? The lover of his wife, the father of his child.
+How could he tell this thing, and that he had known it and accepted it
+in silence? No wonder Claude had dared to write as he did; he knew well
+enough that from Sainty at least he was safe from all attack.
+
+Should he have to answer, to thank, to congratulate, to ‘hope they
+would be happy,’ to send gifts? At least he would not have to go to the
+wedding; his mourning would save him from that--his mourning for the
+child of the bridegroom! He felt a wild longing to get back to that
+upper chamber where all these mad thoughts were stilled. What had he to
+do? The letters. Why should these people steal the little time he had
+left to be with his lost darling? With a sigh of ineffable weariness he
+sat down once more, and hastily tore open two or three. The same little
+phrases recurred in all. ‘Sincere condolences,’ ‘heartfelt sympathy,’
+‘God’s will,’ ‘Consolation where alone it may be found.’ He remembered
+employing some of them himself on like occasions. Why make these
+attempts to plumb the unfathomable? As well smear ointment on a door
+behind which a man lay wounded.
+
+As he turned over the heaps of still unbroken covers in search of a
+handwriting that promised at least the relief of tears, his eye was
+caught by one unfamiliar, yet not unknown. He took the letter from the
+rest and held it poised upon his palm, trying to fix the memory it
+recalled. The anonymous denunciations of his wife? Ah! no, that was
+impossible. Yet as he broke the seal he realised why his only other
+sight of this writing was associated with that time. It was from his
+sister-in-law.
+
+‘DEAR LORD BELCHAMBER,--I know you have never liked me, and did not
+approve of your brother marrying me; but though it is little kindness or
+notice I’ve ever received from you or yours, I am a mother myself, and I
+know what it would be to me to lose either of my little darlings; and so
+I feel I must write a few lines of condolence with you and Lady
+Belchamber in your great sorrow, for I really do sympathise with you in
+the death of your dear little boy. I know you think me a common,
+grasping woman, but I don’t give a thought to any difference it may make
+to us, and, as Arthur says, what is to prevent your having others? I
+have a _heart_ (indeed it was me made Arthur write and offer to come to
+Belchamber without me, and he’ll come to the funeral too). I’m not
+really a bad sort, and can feel for your loss. With sincere condolences
+to you and Lady Belchamber, I should like to sign, Your affectionate
+sister-in-law,
+
+                                             CYNTHIA CHAMBERS.
+
+‘_P.S._--I have ventured to order a wreath sent, which please accept.’
+
+                          THE END
+
+   Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
+         at the Edinburgh University Press
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77826 ***
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+<link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
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+<meta charset="utf-8">
+<title>
+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of Belchamber, by Howard Overing Sturgis.
+</title>
+<style>
+
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77826 ***</div>
+<hr class="full">
+
+<div class="c">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="351" height="550" alt="">
+</div>
+
+<p class="toc">
+
+<a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II"> II</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III"> III</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV"> IV</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V"> V</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI"> VI</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII"> VII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"> VIII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX"> IX</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X"> X</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI"> XI</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII"> XII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"> XIII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"> XIV</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XV"> XV</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"> XVI</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"> XVII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"> XVIII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"> XIX</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XX"> XX</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"> XXI</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"> XXII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"> XXIII</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"> XXIV</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXV"> XXV</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI"> XXVI</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII"> XXVII.</a>
+</p>
+
+<h1>
+BELCHAMBER</h1>
+
+<p class="c">BY<br>
+HOWARD OVERING STURGIS<br>
+<br><small>
+AUTHOR OF<br>
+‘TIM,’ ‘ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE’</small><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Westminster<br>
+ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE<br>
+AND COMPANY, LTD.<br>
+1904<br>
+<br><br><br>
+Edinburgh: T. and A. <span class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty
+<br><br><br>
+
+TO<br><br>
+WILLIAM HAYNES SMITH<br>
+</p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Belchamber</span> is one of the most beautiful places in England. The name, if
+not the house, dates from days when Norman-French was the polite
+language of our kings; the reigning monarch, some early Henry or Edward,
+alighting for the night, as was the habit of reigning monarchs, at the
+house of his vassal, and having been especially pleased with something
+about the apartment prepared for his use, is said to have remarked in
+high good humour, ‘<i>Pardie! tu as là une belle chambre</i>.’ Something of
+old-world scandal hung about the legend (which in its authorised form is
+just a little bare and dull for the nucleus round which gathered the
+fortunes of a noble family), tales of frail beauty not insensible to a
+royal lover, of feudal complaisance, not to be more overtly acknowledged
+than by this gracious allusion to the <i>belle chambre</i>, from which the
+domain was to take its name.</p>
+
+<p>The house, as the humblest tourist may see for himself on certain days
+of the week, is an exquisite Jacobean structure borrowing largely from
+the Renaissance palaces of Italy, yet with a certain solid British
+homeliness about it, that specially fits it for its surroundings, the
+green undulations of an English park. The view from the front is
+sufficiently extended, and behind it, the various Dutch and Italian
+gardens are interspersed with water-works and statues like a miniature
+Versailles. Great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts stand in the
+park, and four large avenues of elms draw their straight lines across it
+to the four points of the compass. The little river, which in the woods
+and meadows is a natural shallow trout-stream with loosestrife and
+ragged robin fringing <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_1">{1}</a><br><a id="page_2">{2}</a></span>its banks, is pressed in the gardens into many
+curious uses&mdash;fountains and cascades, and oblong rectangular fish-ponds,
+where old carp and goldfish circle in and out among the stalks of
+foreign water-lilies sunk in hampers. The huge lawn behind the house is
+shaded by cedars of Lebanon, that are such a characteristic feature of
+Restoration places, and there is one that disputes with the famous tree
+at Addington, and I dare say with half a dozen others, the doubtful
+glory of being the oldest cedar in England.</p>
+
+<p>Of the thousands of acres of which the property consists, the farms and
+manorial rights, the livings in the gift of the owner, it is not
+necessary that I should give a catalogue; it is not the business of the
+novelist to value for probate, but if possible to convey a vague but
+imposing impression of wealth and position. Suffice it that the Lord of
+Belchamber is ground-landlord of the greater part of three large
+parishes, and that in the county of his residence alone no less than
+three beneficed clergymen sit in their comfortable rectories by the
+grace of a sickly young man of no very definite religious beliefs,
+without counting his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who ministers to the
+spiritual needs of a small army of in-and out-door servants and their
+families in the little tame church that is, so to speak, tethered on the
+lawn.</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber has suffered but little at the hands of restorers; the family
+have always taken a sort of lazy pride in the beautiful house, which
+luckily seldom rose to the point of desiring to improve it. The third
+marquis, to be sure, had some formidable projects for remodelling the
+building, of which the plans remain in a great Italian cabinet in the
+hall; but his two favourite pursuits combined to save his home, for he
+lost so much money at cards that even he drew back before the large
+expense involved, and while he still hesitated, a bad fall out hunting
+cut short his building projects with his life. That was more than a
+hundred years ago, when gambling and unpaid debts were indispensable
+parts of the ideal of a gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>If Charles James, third Marquis and eighth Earl of Belchamber, lost
+large sums at the club gaming-tables when he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_3">{3}</a></span> came up to the House of
+Lords, and died as he had lived, in the hunting-field, his successor,
+George Frederick Augustus, the fourth marquis, in no way fell short of
+his respected parent’s example. He played as high, drank as deep, and
+rode as hard as his father, while he imported into his excesses just
+that flavour of vulgarity which the bucks of the Regency copied so
+successfully from their master and pattern. He kept two packs of hounds,
+and several establishments in addition to his acknowledged and
+legitimate residence; and if he did not break his own neck, he at least
+broke his wife’s heart, not to mention such unconsidered trifles as his
+word, and a large quantity of beautiful old china, when in liquor.
+Belchamber saw him but little; he preferred London and Brighton, and one
+of his smaller places which was in a better hunting-country; and here
+once more the very vices of its owners seemed to conduce to the
+preservation of the beautiful house and its treasures. The books, the
+celebrated Vandykes, and the painted ceilings suffered somewhat from
+want of fires; but neglect has never been so fatal to works of art as
+attention, and if the pictures cracked and faded a little, at least they
+were not burnt, or repainted, or buried under a deposit of
+coachbuilder’s varnish.</p>
+
+<p>To the poor lady, who was occasionally brought from the seclusion of her
+lord’s hunting-quarters to be exhibited at a drawing-room in the family
+emeralds and diamonds, a son and heir was born, who received in common
+with so many of the children of that date the names of Arthur Wellesley.
+This was the fifth marquis and tenth earl, and the grandfather of the
+hero of this book. Marquis Arthur differed from his father and
+grandfather only in his mode of getting rid of money. If he played less,
+he made up for it by losing large sums on the turf, and by a generally
+luxurious and extravagant style of living. He was a notorious beauty,
+and had a straight nose, and an immense bushy pair of whiskers, which
+were fatal to the peace of mind of great numbers of the fair sex; he was
+inordinately vain, and a woman had only to tell him she was in love with
+him, and that she had never seen a man with such small feet, to get
+anything she wanted out of him. He frittered away more money over
+bouquets and scent and ugly jewellery than his father and grandfather
+had lost in their longest nights at Crockford’s. His triumphs over
+female virtue were so numerous and notorious that many thought he would
+never give a hostage to fortune in the shape of a wife of his own. But
+when the nets of the fowler had been spread for many years in the sight
+of this volatile bird of gay plumage, he surprised every one by bringing
+home a bride from across the Channel.</p>
+
+<p>If report said true, this beautiful young woman revenged the wrongs of
+her sex, and of many husbands, most thoroughly on her whiskered lord,
+who was not her master. At first it was impossible to Lord Charmington
+(as he then was) to believe that any woman he honoured with his
+affection could fail to be madly in love with him; then as the
+conviction grew upon him (and ideas came to him slowly), there were
+furious scenes of recrimination, anger, and jealousy on his side, and
+cold contempt and indifference on hers. More than once they were within
+a short distance of the divorce court; but his vanity never could be
+reconciled to the thought of appearing <i>coram populo</i> in the character
+which to him seemed always the most ludicrous and humiliating possible.
+His wife soon discovered this weakness, and traded on it freely. If she
+was not a very clever woman, he was a more than ordinarily stupid man,
+so that he learned to dread her tongue almost as much as the ridicule
+that must attach to him in case of a scandal. He also began to take a
+certain pride in her position both in London and Paris. She was
+certainly for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the
+society of both capitals; and if the more particular and old-fashioned
+ladies held up their hands in horror at the stories told of her, she had
+a large share in introducing a different standard of morals for the
+younger set, in which she was always a leader. When no longer in her
+first youth, she was one of the galaxy of beautiful women who adorned
+the Second Empire, and though at the severer Court of St. James she was
+less smiled<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_4">{4}</a></span> upon, there were not wanting circles in the land of her
+adoption hardly less august, and infinitely more congenial, where she
+was not only received, but highly popular.</p>
+
+<p>Through long years which converted her contemporaries into invalids or
+grandmothers, in which her husband grew fat and coarse, and took to
+drink and low company, in which children were born to her, two of whom
+died in infancy, in which her eldest son and one daughter grew up and
+married, in which her grandsons were born, and her son died, she
+remained always ‘the beautiful Lady Belchamber,’ always in the world,
+and of the world, immutably ‘gay,’ and fast, and frivolous, following
+the same dreary round of fashionable existence year in and year out,
+bedizened in jewels not always virtuously come by, dressed and
+head-dressed in the latest mode, and absorbed in the newest craze or
+pastime with women who might have been her daughters, and men who were
+sometimes the sons of her early lovers. As her natural charms faded,
+they were of course replaced by art; the raven locks that had been
+admired by Louis Philippe at first only took on an inkier black, then
+grew a little brown, and passed through dull burnished copper to a rich
+golden red, while the cream-white skin grew more and more rosy in
+sympathy. Gradually, as fashion artfully disarranged the hair of its
+votaries, and the wig-makers’ art developed and improved, so much of her
+ladyship’s elaborate coiffure came to be false, that it could be almost
+any colour she chose without inconvenience, and was even known to vary
+with her gowns.</p>
+
+<p>As for her husband, the flattery of women being as the breath of his
+nostrils, it was only natural that the older and less attractive he
+became, the lower he went in the social scale in search of it. The poor
+little feet that had stepped so nimbly on the hearts of many frail ones,
+began to spread in the vain attempt to support the Silenus-like body,
+and, cramped in tight boots, carried their tottering owner into very
+queer byways indeed. The beautiful nose swelled and grew purple, the
+Hyperean curls, much thinned at the temples, were still carefully oiled
+and arranged, and with the famous<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_5">{5}</a></span> whiskers became more hyacinthine in
+hue with each advancing year. When I was a young man, this poor,
+foolish, wicked old marquis was still strutting about Pall Mall, and
+ogling the women, with a few other bucks of his own generation, padded,
+laced, and dyed. I dare say there are bad old men still, but they are
+bald, and have grey beards, and are somehow not so ridiculous as Lord
+Belchamber and his peers were. He and his wife met but seldom, and
+though he sometimes grew quite eloquent over the way she treated him, he
+was not really unhappy; after all, he was leading just the same life he
+always had, and if his companions were coarser and commoner, his taste
+had coarsened too, and the dull, bloodshot eyes had lost their keenness
+of vision and grown less critical. He outlived his son, and did not die
+till after the Franco-Prussian war. Almost the only remark of a purely
+sentimental nature he was ever known to make was on the subject of the
+siege of Paris and the fall of the Empire. ‘Poor old Paris!’ he said.
+‘I’ve had many a good time in Paris, though I did meet my wife there,
+damn her! but I shouldn’t care to go there again, hanged if I should,
+with everything so changed, and all that&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>We shall have nothing more to do with him in this work, except to bury
+him, which, by and by, we will do with befitting pomp. Of direct
+influence he never had the smallest on any living creature, but who
+shall say what mysterious legacy of evil tendencies he may have
+bequeathed to his descendants? The question of heredity is very
+fashionable just now, but remains not a little obscure; and perhaps it
+is safer in the interests of morality that we should not know too
+exactly how little responsibility we have for our bad actions, and how
+much we can shuffle off on to our grandfathers and grandmothers. Whether
+it was the result of heredity or education, or a mixture of the two, the
+children of such a couple did not start in life with the best chance of
+being quiet, reputable people, and the two who survived the disorders of
+infancy were left to bring themselves up very much as fortune willed.
+Lady Eva was a very pretty<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_6">{6}</a></span> girl who seldom saw her mother, left
+entirely to French maids and governesses, and mainly educated on the
+novels of that country, which she abstracted from her mother’s boudoir
+and read on the sly, generally with the connivance of her instructress,
+on condition that she passed them on to her. Lady Belchamber used
+sometimes to see this official, when she thought of it, for five minutes
+while her hair was being done.</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eva se comporte bien?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Parfaitement, ma’m la marquise.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle apprend? voyons.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eva étudie, en ce moment, comme géographie, l’Asie orientale, la
+Chine, le Japon; comme histoire, le dix-septième siècle, les guerres de
+Louis XIV., la guerre civile en Angleterre, la restauration de Charles
+II.; comme langues, Italien, <i>I Promessi Sposi</i>, Allemand, la <i>Maria
+Stuart</i> de Schiller, Français, <i>Le Cid</i> de Corneille; comme
+mathématique&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Assez, assez! ne faites pas trop étudier cette p’tite, vous en ferez un
+bas bleu. Elle va bien?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Parfaitement, milady. Désirez-vous voir Lady Eva?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Pas ce soir; je n’ai pas le temps.’</p>
+
+<p>Once, some one asked the little girl to give her mother a message. ‘I
+will write to her,’ the child said, ‘it will be quicker.’ They were
+living in the same house.</p>
+
+<p>When in due course she was presented and made her appearance in the
+world, she was very much admired. At nineteen she was engaged to two men
+simultaneously, and got out of the difficulty by running away with a
+third, a rather shady hanger-on of her father, called Captain Morland,
+who not long afterwards had to disappear from society, owing to an
+unfortunate difficulty that he experienced in confining himself to the
+strict laws of the game, at cards. Thenceforth they lived mostly abroad,
+and little was heard of them. Lady Belchamber, who was not an unkind
+woman, used to write to her daughter sometimes, and send her old dresses
+and hats; and the old lord, when on the continent, would have the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_7">{7}</a></span>
+couple to live with him, and give them money. He had a sneaking kindness
+for Morland, which he never quite got over, finding him a congenial
+companion; and his son-in-law was very patient in listening to his
+tender confidences. Lord Charmington, who was two years older than his
+sister, had the better chance that comes to boys of being sent away to
+school. Unfortunately for him, the one thing he did not inherit from his
+parents was the naturally strong constitution that was common to them
+both. Lady Belchamber, though herself a marvel of strength and vitality,
+came of an extremely old family, of which the blood, enfeebled by much
+marrying of cousins, had had time to run very thin indeed; and though
+the Chambers stock was originally strong and healthy, the excesses of
+the last three bearers of the title had not tended to the transmission
+of a fine physique to their descendants.</p>
+
+<p>From his childhood poor Charmington was a rickety, feeble lad, and more
+than once came within a tittle of sharing the fate of his younger
+brothers, instead of surviving to be the father of our hero, in which
+case this book would never have been written. If he could have stayed
+out his time at Eton, it might have done much for him, for he was not
+without some naturally kindly qualities, though he was as stupid as an
+owl, and never could learn to spell the simplest words. In those days
+there existed no ruthless law of superannuation, and he might have
+remained contentedly in fourth form till he was nineteen, had it not
+been for his unfortunate health: he was always ill, and always having to
+be taken away and sent to the seaside, or abroad, in the care of any one
+who could be got to go and look after him. This employment fell as often
+as not to his future brother-in-law, Captain Morland, than whom a worse
+companion for a growing lad could hardly be found, and where he could
+be, Morland found him, and introduced him to his charge. By the time he
+was twenty, the lad was an accomplished little rip, gambler, and
+spendthrift, and had materially impaired his already feeble
+constitution. He was bought a commission in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_8">{8}</a></span> household cavalry, but
+at the end of a few years, having come to the end of everything&mdash;health,
+money, credit, and the limits of his father’s patience&mdash;he was
+thenceforward lost to the service of his country.</p>
+
+<p>After a severe hæmorrhage of the lungs, he was ordered to winter abroad,
+and by way of retrenching and building up his strength, he selected Nice
+as a quiet inexpensive winter resort, with the chance of a little
+congenial amusement, in the nearness of the tables at Monte Carlo. Here
+he found his sister and her husband (whose little trouble at the club
+had befallen the year before) hanging on to the fringe of society. But
+here, too, he encountered that veteran statesman, the Earl of Firth, who
+with his wife and two daughters was recruiting his strength after his
+retirement from public life at a villa in the neighbourhood. The
+Morlands were established at Monaco, where the Firth party never set
+foot, so Charmington had no difficulty in keeping his disreputable
+brother-in-law out of sight of his new acquaintances. He began to
+frequent the villa of the old Scottish peer with quite surprising
+assiduity. Just what there was in either Lady Sarah Pagley or her
+surroundings to attract a man like Charmington will always remain a
+mystery. Perhaps the jaded, invalid young man found something of the
+home atmosphere he had never known among these prosy folk; perhaps the
+blameless dulness of their lives was rather restful to him; or it may be
+that he took refuge with them from Morland’s incessant appeals for the
+money of which he himself was so sorely in need. It has been suggested
+that he paid court to Lady Sarah from mercenary motives, but to a man of
+his tastes and traditions her modest £15,000 would have seemed a very
+trifling price to receive for the surrender of his liberty; and if a
+rich marriage had been his object, there were wealthier maidens
+scattered along the Mediterranean shore, who would not have despised the
+suit of a marquis’s only son. He himself explained his choice to a
+wondering friend by saying that she was the woman most unlike his mother
+that he had ever met.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_9">{9}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With mere carnal charms the Ladies Pagley were somewhat scantily
+equipped. They were both fairly well-grown young women, healthy and
+vigorous; Lady Sarah, as she was the elder, was also slightly the taller
+of the two. Both wore their smooth brown hair divided in the centre and
+brushed plainly down behind their ears, a fashion from which Sarah has
+never departed to this day. Both were badly dressed, and either, in
+whatever part of the world she was met, would unhesitatingly be
+pronounced to hail from the British Isles, by people who had never seen
+an Englishwoman before. Sarah was religious, Susan political, each
+following the bent of one parent, for Lord Firth had been a member of
+several Cabinets, and divided his time between nursing his gout and
+studying blue-books, whereas Lady Firth dosed her body with quack
+medicines and her soul with evangelical theology. But the old lord had
+the ingratitude to prefer the daughter who reflected her mother’s
+tastes. ‘They are both dour women to tackle, my daughters,’ he would
+say; ‘but Sally’s not unkindly in matters where religion is not in
+question, whereas Susie has no bowels, none at all.’ Lady Susan was a
+great talker, and loved argument for its own sake; but Lady Sarah was
+reserved, silent, and really very shy for all the grimness of her
+aspect. If it did not seem profane to think of beauty in connection with
+either of them, who considered it so little, I should say that Susan was
+the prettier of the two, having a better complexion than her sister, and
+hair of a brighter, redder shade of brown.</p>
+
+<p>There never were two girls more predestined by nature for old maids, or
+better fitted to meet the cold world single-handed; and yet they both
+married, and married what is called ‘well,’ while many of their fairer
+and more eager sisters were left ungathered on the stem. Susan was led
+to the altar by a West Country baronet and M.P., Sir Charles Trafford,
+while Sarah, to every one’s surprise, became in due time Lady
+Charmington. If it will remain a puzzle what drew her husband to her, it
+is still more insoluble what attraction she found in him. Old Lady
+Firth, for all her piety and her<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_10">{10}</a></span> sermons, was not above a little
+worldly gratification that her plain elder daughter at seven-and-twenty
+should marry the heir to a marquisate and a historic house; but I
+honestly think Lady Sarah was little swayed by these considerations. She
+may have felt a thrill at the thought of the power her position would
+one day put into her hands, but for its own sake she valued that
+position very lightly. Perhaps poor Char’s weakness appealed to her
+strength, and his wretched state of health stirred that pity that was so
+carefully concealed in her proud heart. Perhaps her missionary zeal
+awoke at the thought of plucking from the fire a brand that was already
+little more than an ember. No doubt both these feelings worked for him,
+but I am inclined to think that his most potent advocate was the fact
+that he was the first man who had ever made love to her. No woman hears
+those magic accents for the first time unmoved, and if she has reached
+Lady Sarah’s age without the faintest breath from the wing of Romance,
+the effect of them is not thereby lessened. Be that as it may, this sick
+dissipated boy, who was three years her junior, and whose past life had
+been made up of everything of which she most disapproved, succeeded
+where a better man might have been very likely to fail, and they were
+married with great splendour during the ensuing season in London, the
+occasion being one of the few on which her husband’s parents were ever
+seen together in public. Lord Firth and his son, Lord Corstorphine,
+looked very sulky at the wedding, but Lady Firth was all tears and
+benedictions, and old Belchamber, after much champagne at the breakfast,
+became quite maudlin over the consideration of his son’s respectable
+connections. ‘It’ll be the making of Char,’ he hiccoughed into the ear
+of the sympathetic Lady Firth. ‘Ah, if I’d had such a chance, now! if
+I’d married a different kind of woman, she might have done anything with
+me&mdash;&mdash;’ The lady with whom he had just been celebrating his silver
+wedding was radiant in sky-blue silk and white lace flounces and a Paris
+bonnet all Marabout feathers and humming-birds. ‘I don’t envy Char,’ she
+wrote to her daughter, who did not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_11">{11}</a></span> come over for the wedding. ‘<i>Dieu!</i>
+what people those Firths! <i>Heureusement</i>, they won’t want to see much of
+<i>me</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>Very likely Lord Belchamber was right, and Sarah might have made
+something out of the unlikely material she had taken-in hand. Her
+influence over Charmington was enormous, and he both loved and feared
+her. She nursed him, ruled him, and generally watched over him,
+protecting him alike from the scorn of her kinsfolk and the bad
+influence of his own; she rigorously kept both wine and money from him,
+doling them out in infinitesimal doses. If she allowed no questioning of
+her authority, she accomplished the miracle of awakening some
+glimmerings of self-respect in him, and she bolstered up his shattered
+constitution so that he lived four years with her, during which she bore
+him two sons; but his lungs were too seriously affected for the
+imperfect science of the sixties to heal, and in spite of all her care
+he did not live to be thirty, dying, as has already been said, while
+that elderly Adonis, his father, was still figuratively wearing the
+family coronet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_12">{12}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> world is like a huge theatrical company in which half the actors and
+actresses have been cast for the wrong parts. There are heavy fathers
+who ought to be playing the lover, and young men on whose downy chins
+one seems to see the spectre of the grey beard that would be suitable to
+their natures. Perhaps the hardest case is theirs who by their sex are
+called upon to ‘have a swaggering and martial outside,’ ‘a gallant
+curtle-axe upon their thigh,’ and yet, like Rosalind in her boy’s dress,
+start and turn faint at the sight of blood. The right to be a coward is
+one of the dearest prerogatives of woman. No man may be one with
+impunity, and it is precisely the women who are the first to despise him
+if he be. Those who are born with the gift of personal courage (and they
+are happily the greater number) have no adequate idea of their blessing.
+To be in harmony with one’s environment, to like the things one ought to
+like&mdash;that surely is the supreme good. If that be so, then few people
+have come into the arena of life less suitably equipped for the part
+they had to play than the subject of this history.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber,
+Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, for all his
+imposing list of names and titles started in life without that crowning
+gift&mdash;wanting which all effort is paralysed&mdash;a good conceit of himself.
+And in fact, except for the gewgaw of his rank, which sat on him as
+uneasily as a suit of his ancestral armour, he had not much that would
+win him consideration from the people among whom his lot was cast. From
+his father he inherited his feeble constitution, his irresolution and
+want of moral courage,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_13">{13}</a></span> from his mother her sallow complexion and lack
+of charm, her reserve and shyness, and the rigid conscience which a long
+line of Covenanting ancestors had passed down to her, and which in him,
+who had none of their counterbalancing force of character, tended always
+to become morbid. In his babyhood he had been called Lord St. Edmunds,
+as was the custom in the family for the eldest son’s eldest son; his
+father in half derisive affection had abbreviated the title into
+‘Sainty,’ and Sainty he always continued to be to all who were intimate
+enough and to many who were not. He was only three when his father died,
+and his baby brother, Arthur, was not yet two. Even in those early days
+the contrast was strongly marked between the brothers. Sainty was a pale
+nervous child who cried if spoken to suddenly, while Arthur was as fine
+a pink and white fat baby as you could see in a picture-book, who crowed
+and gurgled and clapped his hands and liked his bath and took kindly to
+his food, so that the nurses adored him. When he had a stomach-ache or
+was thwarted in his wishes he roared lustily for a minute or two and
+then returned to his usual placidity, whereas poor Sainty if anything
+‘put him out,’ as his nurse would say, whined and fretted, and kept up a
+little sad bleating cry for hours.</p>
+
+<p>He could not remember his father, but with the help of the large
+coloured portrait in uniform that stood on a gilt easel in the corner of
+his mother’s room he had built up for himself a shadowy heroic figure,
+strangely unlike poor Charmington, which in his imagination did duty for
+this departed parent. He never spoke of him to any one but Arthur, but
+to him he talked with such conviction of ‘Papa,’ that the child, not
+very attentive and perhaps not greatly interested, gathered an
+impression that the elder boy was drawing on his memory for his facts,
+and indeed he almost thought so himself, until one day Lady Charmington,
+hearing some such talk between the two, sharply rebuked poor Sainty for
+telling falsehoods to his little brother. His earliest impression of his
+mother was in her black dress with the gleaming white on head and throat
+and wrists, a dress that lent a dignity to Lady Charmingto<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_14">{14}</a></span>n’s somewhat
+commonplace figure. When she left off her cap, it was of the nature of a
+blow to him. Though he could not have described his sensations, she
+seemed somehow discrowned with her sleek, bare head.</p>
+
+<p>Grandpapa’s funeral was a different matter from these early fleeting
+impressions. That he remembered clearly, for he was seven when it
+happened, and had a little black suit of knickerbockers and black
+stockings and gloves, and led Arthur by the hand similarly attired.
+Every incident of that frightening, gloomy, yet strangely fascinating
+and exciting day, remained engraved in his recollection. He remembered
+the crowd in the churchyard, the murmur that greeted his own appearance,
+the staggering of the bearers under that long heavy burthen, the gloom
+of the church full of people in black, and the great yawning hole in the
+chancel pavement. What he did not grasp until very long afterwards, and
+then only most imperfectly and by degrees, was the difference the event
+of that day made in his own position; but his mother realised it fully,
+and indeed it made much more difference to her than to the meek little
+boy accustomed from earliest infancy to swallow distasteful puddings and
+nauseous drugs at her command, and anxiously to examine his conscience,
+if some remnant of the old Adam ever led him to question her decrees.
+Henceforth Lady Charmington entered into her kingdom, and it must be
+confessed that on the whole she ruled it well and wisely, and entirely
+in the interests of her children. Almost the only sensible thing the old
+lord had ever done was to appoint her and her brother the guardians of
+his grandchildren, and under the careful management of his
+daughter-in-law, aided by the wise advice of Lord Corstorphine, the
+property was nursed through his grandson’s long minority back to a
+tolerably healthy condition.</p>
+
+<p>As to Lady Belchamber, nothing would have bored her more than being
+cumbered in any way with the guardianship of her grandchildren. She
+carried off what her daughter-in-law declared to be a most ridiculously
+disproportionate<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_15">{15}</a></span> jointure, and the furniture of her private apartments,
+in which some valuable china and cabinets, that she had certainly not
+brought into the family, somehow found themselves included at the time
+of the move. She even showed a decided inclination to keep the famous
+emeralds which, as Lady Charmington said, everybody knew were heirlooms;
+but these she was made to send back, by her second husband, the Duke of
+Sunborough, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, whom
+she married just a year after her lord’s death. On the other hand, she
+generously abandoned all claim to a damp and mouldy dower-house in which
+she had a right to reside for life, which, considering that the duke had
+a palace in London and five country seats, was very handsome of her.
+Three generations of gambling and extravagance leave their mark on the
+most imposing fortunes, and if the Belchamber estates did not come to
+the hammer, it was due to the action of the last person who might have
+been expected to save them, in marrying a hardheaded Scotswoman and
+dying before his father. To get the estate into order was Lady
+Charmington’s prime object in life. To this end she inaugurated a rigid
+system of economy, and made a clean sweep of the heads of almost every
+department under the old <i>régime</i>, toiling early and late to make
+herself mistress of many details of which she was ignorant; for this,
+she endured the dislike of the poor, whom she benefited in her own
+autocratic manner, and much hostile comment from her equals. She was
+rigidly just, and generous too in her own way; only prodigality and
+waste she would not tolerate, nor look with a lenient eye on the small
+peculations which those who serve the great come to regard as quite
+within the pale of honesty.</p>
+
+<p>If the mother spared neither time nor labour that she might be able to
+hand over his property to her son free of encumbrances when he came of
+age, she was not less eager and indefatigable in her efforts to fit him
+for the position she was making for him; and this task she found
+incomparably the harder of the two. It was not that he was naughty or<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_16">{16}</a></span>
+insubordinate. A meeker, more obedient child did not live. The
+difficulty was far more intangible; it is easier to drive a slightly
+pulling horse in crowded thoroughfares than one with so light a mouth
+that he never will go properly up to his bit; and Lady Charmington had
+not the blessed gift of light hands in conducting the education of a
+child, whatever she might have on horseback. As a girl she had ridden a
+good deal, and even hunted; and though she gave that up after her
+marriage, she still found it possible to keep a more effectual eye on
+all corners of the huge estate from her square seat on the back of a
+substantial cob than from any other coign of vantage. No farmer ever
+rode more diligently and thoroughly about his fields; and on these
+excursions it was her pleasure that the boys, and especially Sainty,
+should accompany her. Arthur had a natural seat, took to horses from the
+first, and wanted to gallop his pony and make him jump before the family
+coachman had thought fit to abandon the leading-rein. With poor Sainty
+it was far otherwise. He rode, as he ate rice pudding, because he was
+told to; but he was cold for an hour beforehand, and he sat his pony, as
+his mother remarked, like a sack of potatoes. The smallest thing
+unseated him; he was always rolling ignominiously off.</p>
+
+<p>On this and similar shortcomings, he received many admonitions from his
+mother and uncle, from which the chief impression he derived was a
+rooted belief in the immense superiority of his younger brother. ‘At the
+worst there will always be Arthur.’ When and under what circumstances
+had he overheard that remark? He never was quite sure that he had not
+formulated it for himself. Be that as it might, it early became the
+burthen to which his life set itself. Far from resenting the point of
+view, he drew from it a certain consolation under his abiding sense of
+his many imperfections. He was still quite a small boy when he decided
+that his <i>rôle</i> in life would be to die young, and make way for the
+younger brother who was so eminently fitted for the position that suited
+himself so ill; and he found a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_17">{17}</a></span> certain gloomy satisfaction in settling
+the details of pathetic deathbed scenes. I fear an element in these
+imaginings which was not without attraction for him, was the thought of
+exhorting Arthur with his latest breath on matters in which his
+brother’s conduct did not always square with his own more evangelical
+standard, such as a certain looseness of statement, and somewhat lax
+ideas of property. If Arthur could not find his own cap, or bat, or
+riding-whip (and his things were generally tossed about the great house,
+wherever he happened to be when he last used them), it was always less
+trouble to take Sainty’s, which were sure to be in the right place, than
+to go and look for his own. He also on occasion carried the juvenile
+habit of untruth rather further than mere thoughtlessness warranted; but
+he told his stories with so open a countenance, and such a fearless
+gaze, that he was invariably believed, as against poor Sainty, whose
+knitted brow and downcast eyes, while he sought in his mind for the
+exact truth, had all the appearance of an effort after invention.
+‘Arthur is very thoughtless and tiresome,’ Lady Charmington would say,
+‘but there’s one comfort about him, I can always depend on his telling
+me the truth if I ask him. I wish I could say the same for Sainty; I am
+sometimes afraid he is rather sly. I try not to be hard on him, for he
+is timid, and I don’t want to frighten him into telling untruths; but I
+do wish he was a little more straightforward, and would look one in the
+face when he talks.’</p>
+
+<p>Many such hints, all showing a like perspicacious insight into the
+characters of her sons, were given by this conscientious lady to the
+governess she had engaged to assist her in moulding their dispositions.
+Alice Meakins was the daughter of the rector of Great Charmington, and
+had the prime recommendation in her employer’s eyes of being her humble
+slave and completely under her orders. Had she been a little less in awe
+of Lady Charmington, and less impressed with the enormity of differing
+from her, she might perhaps have enlightened her on many matters
+concerning the little boys. Her mild rule, while it galled his more<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_18">{18}</a></span>
+spirited brother, sat very lightly on Sainty, who worshipped the
+governess as the most talented and accomplished of mortals. ‘But I like
+her, I’m fond of her; I don’t <i>want</i> to do what she tells me not,’ he
+pleaded to the indignant Arthur, as usual incensed by his brother’s want
+of pluck, in refusing to join in some plot against the authority of
+their instructress. ‘Ho, ho, Miss Moddlecoddle, you can’t ride, you’ve
+got no seat and no hands; Bell said so. You’re jolly bad at games, and
+you like to sit and suck up to an old governess, and do needlework with
+her, like a beastly girl. I’m a man, and I shan’t do what she tells me.
+What business has she to order me about? she is only a servant like the
+others.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was shocked. ‘O Arthur! you do say <i>horrid</i> things,’ he said. It
+was true that he did like sitting with the gentle Meakins, and acquiring
+the modest arts of which she was the mistress. She had many little
+manual dexterities such as governesses impart to children, whereby the
+world is filled with innocent horrors, kettleholders in cross-stitch,
+penwipers faintly resembling old women with cloth cloaks and petticoats,
+and little black seeds for faces, and book-markers in the shape of
+crosses with many steps, plaited of strips of gilt and coloured paper.
+In all these manufactures Sainty soon became proficient. He also
+illuminated texts, ‘Be thou faithful unto death,’ and ‘The greatest of
+these is Charity,’ which were presented to Lady Charmington on her
+birthday. On the subject of the texts and the little plaited crosses
+Lady Charmington had a word to say to Miss Meakins in private, as being
+rather too papistical in tendency; but she was not displeased with the
+simple presents, on the whole, until her anxious maternal eye was led to
+detect the danger that might lurk in cross-stitch by some petulant
+remarks of Arthur’s, who wanted Sainty to come out and play Red Indians
+in the long shrubbery. ‘Muvver,’ he cried, bursting into the boudoir,
+where his mother was busy with some farm accounts, ‘isn’t Sainty howid?
+He won’t come out, though he’s done his lessons, ‘cos he will stick in
+and do beastly woolwork.’ One of Arthur’s many charms was a babyish
+imperfection of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_19">{19}</a></span> speech. He never could pronounce ‘th’ or ‘r,’ even when
+quite grown up.</p>
+
+<p>‘What is it he’s doing?’ asked Lady Charmington.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, beastly woolwork; he’s got two-fwee fings he’s makin’, and he likes
+to sit like a girl, instead of coming out and playing.’</p>
+
+<p>A shade of annoyance crossed the mother’s face. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use
+such words as “beastly,” Arthur,’ she said severely, but the severity
+was really addressed to the absent first-born and the effeminacy of his
+tastes; and the schoolroom was presently visited by the mistress of the
+house, and Sainty duly turned out to distasteful recreation. When he had
+gone forth to be scalped by the fraternal savage, his mother turned to
+the instructress. ‘I think, Alice,’ she said, holding up the offending
+kettleholder, ‘that it is a pity, on the whole, to teach Sainty to work;
+he’s quite sufficiently effeminate by nature, without having that side
+of him encouraged. I will speak to him about it. I shall tell him I
+don’t approve of his working; it’s not manly.’ She was surprised, when
+she carried out this intention, by meeting with passionate tears and
+protestations.</p>
+
+<p>‘O mother, I love my work; it’s the only thing I do enjoy, except
+botany, and reading, and some lessons (not ‘rithmetic or spelling); and
+I have to do so many things I <i>don’t</i> like, cricket and riding,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;all the dreadful things that men and gentlemen have to do,’
+the little boy concluded, quoting a formula frequently used for his
+encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>Though not habitually distrustful of her own judgment, nothing so
+confirmed Lady Charmington in a view she adopted as any opposition to
+it; and the kettleholders became taboo from that day forward. Poor
+Sainty’s confession of dislike for the manlier sports that, as he said,
+were considered a necessary part of the education of a gentleman, was
+perhaps the most unfortunate argument he could have chosen, for it
+naturally convinced his mother that the mischief lay deeper than she
+supposed, and suggested to her the advisability of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_20">{20}</a></span> transferring the
+boys from petticoat government altogether; that is, of course, as far as
+the subordinate powers were concerned. The particular petticoat that
+typified her own sway remained in undisturbed possession of the throne
+in all her plans for the future.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think the boys are getting too much for poor Miss Meakins,’ she said
+to her brother, on his next visit. ‘She is an excellent girl, though a
+little inclined to be high church; but they ought to be under a man, I
+feel sure.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t tell me that Sainty is becoming insubordinate?’ said Lord
+Corstorphine.</p>
+
+<p>‘No; but Arthur hasn’t the smallest respect for her. With Sainty the
+danger is of a different kind; he is perhaps <i>too</i> fond of women’s
+society.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Not a precocious passion for the governess! I can’t believe that.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington looked resigned. ‘I don’t deny, Corstorphine,’ she
+said, ‘that you have been a great help to me in the management of my
+fatherless boys; that is why I am consulting you on the present
+occasion. But it is no help to be flippant and funny. What I mean is
+that Sainty is quite sufficiently inclined by nature to be a milksop,
+without living perpetually with women, and adopting their ways. He likes
+better than any game to sit indoors with Miss Meakins on fine days, and
+do woolwork.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Have him out, Sarah, by all means,’ returned her brother. ‘I can’t help
+being a little pleased at his liking reading. A Chambers who
+occasionally opens a book, and is tolerably well behaved, will be an
+agreeable variation of the type. But it’s bad his not wanting to be out,
+and playing games; it isn’t natural.’</p>
+
+<p>Lord Corstorphine felt that he was as near normal as it was possible to
+be, without becoming commonplace, and that those whose tastes differed
+widely from his own must always be more or less blamably eccentric.
+Still his greater commerce with the world had given him a wider
+toleration than either of his sisters, who had been known to call him a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_21">{21}</a></span>
+Laodicean, and Sarah once went so far as to draw a parallel between her
+brother and Gallio. But though she affected to be shocked at the
+looseness of his views, his known moderation made her lean the more
+confidently on his judgment. The knowledge that her opinion was backed
+by one whom the world praised for common-sense, gave a pleasing security
+that her own noble zeal was not hurrying her into extremes. It was
+invariably she who initiated every change in the education of her sons.
+But, though it may be doubted how she would have borne opposition from
+her fellow-guardian, his agreement was always a comfort to her.</p>
+
+<p>So Alice Meakins, with her little crosses and penwipers, returned to the
+paternal rectory, with the highest testimonials from her dear Lady
+Charmington, to look out for another situation.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Sainty could not be comforted. To be sure, no one tried much to
+comfort him. For the first time he felt a rebellious bitterness towards
+his mother. Though he could imagine nothing so dashing as active
+disobedience, he cherished a dark determination to be very cold and
+reserved towards the new tutor, with the natural result that Miss
+Meakins’s successor, a youth fresh from Oxford, and also of the children
+of the clergy, conceived a great liking for Arthur, and favoured him
+prodigiously.</p>
+
+<p>This young man, who had been selected mainly for his reputation as a
+cricketer, left Lady Charmington nothing to desire in the matter of
+sport, and was quite ready to ride any horse in her limited stable; nor
+need she feel anxiety as to his holding extreme views in religious
+matters. It is true he attended family prayers with exemplary
+punctuality, and accompanied his charges to service twice on Sundays;
+but she could detect no sign of the interest in matters ecclesiastical
+which she looked for in a son of the Church, and his waistcoats and
+riding-boots had a decidedly worldly air.</p>
+
+<p>Under Mr. Kirkpatrick, Sainty early proved the cynical dictum that life
+were endurable but for its pleasures, the hated pastimes, in which his
+sex and position in life inexorably<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_22">{22}</a></span> demanded that he should find
+enjoyment. He stood like a martyr at the stake, to be bowled at with the
+Englishman’s fetish, that terrible disc of solid leather which he knew
+he should not hit, but which not infrequently hit him; and he would
+unhesitatingly have indorsed Mr. Pinchbold’s remark that ‘the horse was
+a fearful animal.’ He was so painstaking, however, and anxious to do
+what was expected of him, that he might possibly have attained in time
+to some sort of proficiency in these alien arts, had his efforts been
+greeted with a little more encouragement, and a little less ridicule;
+but the race is not yet extinct of those who hold that the best way to
+teach a child to swim is to throw him into the water.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile a new terror arose on Sainty’s horizon. When Mr. Kirkpatrick
+had been at Belchamber eighteen months, he one day intimated to Lady
+Charmington that he had been offered a mastership in a public school,
+and could not afford to remain much longer with his pupils. It was
+therefore suggested that, as they were both presently to go to Eton, a
+few years at a private school would not be undesirable as a preparation.
+Even Arthur was a little daunted at the prospect, while rather
+fascinated by it; but to Sainty it loomed black as the final end of all
+brightness, closing in the vista of his life and blotting out the sun.
+It seemed to him that each step in the <i>via dolorosa</i> of his existence
+was fated to be more awful than the last. When his beloved Miss Meakins
+had been replaced by the hated Kirkpatrick, he thought to have tasted
+the dregs of bitterness; but now a new prospect had come to make life in
+the familiar places that he loved with a catlike fidelity appear the one
+thing desirable, even shadowed by the tutor and his cricket-ball. I
+suppose it seemed a hard thing to our first parents when the Serpent was
+introduced into Eden; but life in Paradise, even with a snake in the
+garden, was a very different thing from the flaming sword that drove
+them out into an unknown world of work and briars. Sainty said little to
+earthly ears, but he prayed nightly with intense fervour that he might
+die before the day<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_23">{23}</a></span> came to go to school, which seemed the only escape
+to his poor little hunted mind.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another way, which, if he could have foreseen it, would
+have taxed his courage with a far more genuine fright than that vague
+abstraction, death, for which we all cry aloud so readily in our youth
+when things do not go as we wish. Arthur went to school alone when the
+time arrived, and this was how it came about.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful day at the end of March. Mr. Kirkpatrick was to leave
+at Easter, and the dreaded exodus was only a month away. It was a late
+spring, and the snow still lay on the north side of the hedgerows. But
+it had rained in the night, and there was that indefinable sense of
+spring in the air that sometimes comes quite suddenly. The primroses
+were beginning to gem the coppices, the birds to sing late in the long
+twilights. Daffodils waved in the fields where the young lambs were
+bleating.</p>
+
+<p>‘What are you and the boys going to do this afternoon, Mr. Kirkpatrick?’
+asked Lady Charmington at lunch.</p>
+
+<p>The tutor looked inquiringly at the boys. ‘I’ll do whatever they wish,
+Lady Charmington. What should you like?’ he asked of Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘I should like to go to One-tree Wood, and get primroses,’ Sainty
+answered, after the usual slight struggle that it always cost him to
+express a wish or an opinion.</p>
+
+<p>‘Get Gwanmuvvers!’ burst in Arthur. ‘Bovver pwimwoses; you don’t care
+about ’em, do you, Mr. Kirkpatrick? I want to wide; Bell says the
+gwound’s in quite good order to-day, after the wain. We’ve hardly widden
+at all lately, ‘cos it’s been so hard.’</p>
+
+<p>As usual, Arthur had his way, and poor Sainty was condemned to ride.
+Generally he gained confidence when he had been out a little while, but
+to-day somehow everything went wrong. He began by rolling off at the
+hall door, because his stirrups were too long, and the pony moved on
+unexpectedly while they were being taken up. He was much<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_24">{24}</a></span> chaffed for
+this misadventure by his companions, and he did not like chaff. Then the
+pony was fresh and inclined to shy, after the inaction of the long
+frost, so that he had a bad time of it altogether; but he managed to
+stick on somehow until they were on their way home.</p>
+
+<p>They had been round by Little Charmington, and their way lay through one
+of the high woods. When they came to the gate that led into the park,
+they found it locked.</p>
+
+<p>‘I never knew this gate locked before,’ said Kirkpatrick, pulling feebly
+at it with his whip. ‘I don’t suppose either of you have got the key by
+any chance?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Jaggins must have locked it. He’s got some young pheasants further up
+the wood,’ said Arthur; ‘he told me so.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose we must go back,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘but it’s an awful long
+way round. We shall be late for tea, which your mother doesn’t like, and
+you’ve got some more work to do afterwards. There’s a gap in the hedge a
+little way along here,’ he added more hopefully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t
+jump the ditch? It would save us a good two miles, and it’s really
+nothing of a jump.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course we can jump the ditch. Hurray! what fun!’ cried Arthur, and
+without more words he wheeled his pony, put him at the gap, and the next
+moment was careering about on the turf beyond, in a great state of
+excitement and jubilation.</p>
+
+<p>‘You see, it’s quite easy,’ the tutor said, turning to Sainty, whose
+pony was already beginning to fidget, excited by the trampling about on
+snapping twigs and the rush past of the other. Sainty was very white.</p>
+
+<p>‘You know I can’t jump, Mr. Kirkpatrick,’ he said, gulping tears. ‘I’m
+sure to fall off if I try; I always do.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Not you,’ the young man replied encouragingly. ‘You see your little
+brother has done it. I should be ashamed to have him ride so much better
+than me, if I were you.’ The poor man was rather in a fix, with one
+pupil already across the obstacle and the other resolutely declining to
+follow.</p>
+
+<p>‘See,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lead. It’s as easy as easy;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_25">{25}</a></span> you’ve
+only to sit well back, and give him his head,’ And so saying, he put his
+horse at the gap, and followed Arthur into the park. ‘Come on,’ he
+called.</p>
+
+<p>‘Jump, Sainty, jump,’ piped Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be such a funk.’</p>
+
+<p>Whether Sainty would ever have found the courage to attempt the jump is
+doubtful, if the pony at this stage of the proceedings had not decided
+matters by bolting at the gap. But bothered and bewildered by the
+tugging of his rider’s despairing hands, he swerved just at the jump,
+and, slipping on the trodden earth where Kirkpatrick’s horse had taken
+off, he came to the ground; then struggling to his feet, galloped off
+through the wood by the road they had come.</p>
+
+<p>The young man was horror-stricken when he saw the accident; he was off
+his horse, and by the side of the fallen boy in a second. Sainty was
+unconscious, that was all he could tell.</p>
+
+<p>‘Now, Arthur,’ he cried to the younger boy, who was beginning to tremble
+and cry, ‘this is the moment to show the stuff you’re made of. I must
+stay here with Sainty, but you must get home across the park as hard as
+you can go, so as to tell your mother what’s happened, and save her the
+shock of seeing Donald come home without his rider. And then send people
+here to carry Sainty in; he may be more hurt than we think.’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur waited for no more, but galloped off in the direction of the
+house, glad to have something definite to do, instead of staring at poor
+Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington had come home sooner than she expected, and was taking
+off her hat, when she saw Arthur come galloping across the park alone.
+She looked with pride at the boy, thinking how well he sat his pony; and
+she gave a little sigh at the half-formed thought that just crossed her
+mind, ‘What a pity he wasn’t the elder!’ The next minute her heart stood
+still; she had caught sight in the far distance of a speck, which as it
+drew nearer she recognised with sickening terror as Sainty’s pony,
+riderless, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_26">{26}</a></span> with his saddle turned under his belly. ‘Not <i>that</i> way,
+my God! I did not mean <i>that</i>.’ Was it possible that God was punishing
+her for her rebellious thought? could He have thought that she desired
+the death of her first-born? And she prayed with all the intensity of
+her soul that whatever had happened her boy might not die. ‘Maimed,
+crippled, or an idiot, if so it must be; only let him live.’ This was
+the cry of her heart, again and again repeated, as guided by the child,
+she stumbled across the park with the men who were to bring him home.
+Arthur could tell her little, except that Sainty had had a fall and was
+hurt. Perhaps even then her child was lying dead, while she was wishing
+in her sinful heart that his brother had his heritage.</p>
+
+<p>But Sainty was not dead, and did not die. The pony had kicked him in its
+struggles to rise, and he had fainted. There were long nights and days
+of pain to be borne, and he bore it as nervous people often do, who can
+stand anything but anticipation.</p>
+
+<p>At first he made sure that the death he had asked for had come to him,
+and even, one day, when he was a little better, attempted to bring off
+one of the beautiful scenes with Arthur, which he had so often
+rehearsed. But somehow it was not a great success. Arthur did not do his
+part at all nicely. He only said, ‘Oh! bower, dear old Sainty. You ain’t
+going to die; what’s ve good of jawing?’ and went off to more congenial
+pursuits.</p>
+
+<p>Though his life was not in danger, Sainty’s injury was a grave one; the
+hip was broken, and the great London surgeon who was called down, did
+not conceal from Lady Charmington that the boy would probably always be
+more or less lame.</p>
+
+<p>On one of his visits, Sainty astonished the great man not a little.</p>
+
+<p>‘Sir John,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell me something. Shall I ever be
+able to walk and run again?’</p>
+
+<p>The famous surgeon had boys of his own, and his heart smote him at the
+pathetic question. ‘Yes, my boy, yes,’ he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_27">{27}</a></span> said; ‘certainly to walk. As
+to running, oh! well, you won’t be very good at running, not for some
+time; we mustn’t go too fast, not too fast, you know. Walking comes
+first; we must get you on your legs first.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But I shan’t ever be able to play games, shall I? not like other boys,
+I mean.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! well, never’s a long word. I can’t say, I’m sure. Not for a long
+while, I fear. But we never know, we never know&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, at any rate, I shan’t be able to ride, shall I?’ persisted the
+patient.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Sir John hated to extinguish hope; but thus pushed into a corner,
+he admitted, ‘Oh! well, ride, you know&mdash;I don’t know. I doubt if
+<i>riding</i> would be advisable. My poor little man, if you must know, I’m
+afraid you mustn’t count on riding again.’</p>
+
+<p>To his surprise, the boy heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. ‘Ah!
+well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_28">{28}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Probably</span> nothing is less calculated to make a man feel at home in
+another’s society than the knowledge that he owes him a debt which he
+cannot pay. Custom enables a number of people to support this
+awkwardness with tolerable equanimity, but I suspect that even the
+habitual debtor feels a certain nameless uneasiness under his equable
+shirt-front; while to a person whose boast has always been that
+directness of gaze celebrated in the Village Blacksmith, to have to look
+shiftily before the eye of a creditor must be peculiarly galling.</p>
+
+<p>Something of this consciousness had become the daily burthen of poor
+Lady Charmington with regard to her first-born son. Certainly nothing
+was further from claiming damages than Sainty’s attitude, for it never
+entered his head to hold his mother in any way responsible for his
+accident. But in the long weeks in which he lay so uncomplainingly
+bearing pain, and the inaction which to young creatures is worse than
+pain, she could not look at him without a very distinct twinge of
+remorse. She was even glad to see the once forbidden needlework cheating
+the weary hours of some of their dulness. Once when he thanked her for
+the withdrawal of the interdict on this pastime, her breath caught in
+her throat like a sob.</p>
+
+<p>‘You must find the time very heavy,’ she said, smoothing back the boy’s
+hair with an unusually tender touch.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no!’ Sainty said, ‘I don’t. I can’t help thinking what a good thing
+it was it happened to me and not to Arthur. Think how <i>he</i> would have
+hated it. I’ve never minded keeping quiet. And then it’ll always be such
+a good<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_29">{29}</a></span> excuse for not doing things. Before, when people said “Why can’t
+he be like other boys?” there wasn’t anything to say. Now you can say
+“Well, you see, poor boy, he’s lame; he met with an accident.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>He delivered this piece of consolation quite seriously, and with no
+ironic intention, but it may be doubted if it cheered his mother as much
+as he intended.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Kirkpatrick, overwhelmed with remorse, had wished to give up his
+public school mastership and devote himself to Sainty’s education, but
+the sacrifice had not been accepted. Lady Charmington, who, in spite of
+her hard head, was not without some very feminine weaknesses, could not
+bear the sight of the young man who was incurably associated with the
+most awful hour of her life.</p>
+
+<p>In her compunction, she made an attempt at regaining the services of
+Miss Meakins, but the governess had without difficulty obtained a
+situation in the household of one of those gorgeously dressed little
+dark women who drive about the north side of Hyde Park in such
+well-appointed carriages. They are of Lancaster Gate to-day, but who
+knows if to-morrow they may not be giving laws to fashion from a palace
+in Park Lane? Miss Meakins, with the stamp of the aristocracy upon her,
+was quite an important person in this opulent Tyburnian mansion and the
+beautiful villa at Roehampton, with its velvet lawns and blazing
+parterres.</p>
+
+<p>‘Tell us about the little marquis and his brother, and the big park at
+Belchamber, and the deer,’ her little charges would ask of her, as they
+walked on Wimbledon Common. They had large eyes, and beautiful gentle
+manners, and that look of ineffable world-weariness that is common to
+the children of their race. Sainty would have been astonished to know
+what an object of interest he was to these other children.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been her uneasy desire for compensation that made Lady
+Charmington give to a suggestion of her sister-in-law that she and her
+‘fatherless boy’ should pay Belchamber a visit, a very different
+reception from that which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_30">{30}</a></span> she would otherwise have accorded to it. Lady
+Eva had lost the embarrassing Morland, and was inclined to return to her
+native land and see what she could get out of her kinsfolk. She went
+first to her mother, who received her very graciously, and was really
+pleased to see her. Her daughter brought the duchess a whiff of her
+beloved Paris, and entertained her immensely with anecdotes of a world
+quite unlike that in which she herself had formerly figured. The younger
+lady, finding her noble relatives in the Faubourg rather inclined to
+cold-shoulder her, had gone in for being a sort of Muse, and surrounded
+herself with all the youngest and most modern of the new school of poets
+and painters. She wore indecent clothes, with a rope of turquoises round
+her waist, and lay on a white bearskin, smoking a narghilé, while they
+recited their verses to her. They spoke of her as ‘la petite Morland’
+and ‘la belle Eve.’ Her portrait by a young American of genius had been
+the great <i>clou</i> of the salon, she told her astonished step-father. ‘It
+really was <i>épatant</i>; he painted me at full length on the sofa in
+straight perspective, my feet away from you, and my head hanging over
+the end, so that my face looks out at you upside down. I have my
+turquoises in my teeth, and the whole is lit by Chinese lanterns. It is
+amazing <i>de vérité</i>, and will make his reputation.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what about yours?’ asked the duke, who thought he was rather a wit.</p>
+
+<p>The duchess was much amused with this talk, and all went well, until she
+and her daughter happened unfortunately to fix their affections on the
+same young man, who was a good deal the junior of either, when a violent
+quarrel ensued, and Sunborough House having become much too hot to hold
+her, Lady Eva was seized with a sentimental desire to ‘show the home of
+her childhood to her boy,’ and wrote intimating this wish to her
+sister-in-law. Lady Charmington knew very little of the lady, beyond the
+fact that she had made an unfortunate marriage and was now a widow with
+an only son. The early surroundings of this boy must have been
+deplor<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_31">{31}</a></span>able; but while she trembled for the effect he might have upon
+her sons, she licked her lips at the thought of the influence she might
+be privileged to acquire over him. Lady Eva’s cleverly insinuated hint
+that she did not find the atmosphere of her mother’s house congenial,
+did much to open the doors of Belchamber to her; but perhaps her best
+ally was the thought that his cousin might be a companion to Sainty
+during Arthur’s absence. Sainty at least was not likely to get any harm
+from unfortunate lads who had been brought up in an atmosphere of
+papistry or atheism&mdash;the two words meant much the same to Lady
+Charmington&mdash;and then who could tell what they might be able to do for
+<i>him</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Claude Morland was between two and three years older than Sainty and
+extraordinarily grown up for his age. He was a handsome boy, but of
+quite a different type of beauty from Arthur, who had the fair curls and
+florid complexion of the Chambers family, whereas Claude had inherited
+his colourless white skin, thick, straight black hair, and large dreamy
+eyes from his French ancestors. He was not unlike what his grandmother
+had been as a girl, but with a certain heaviness of make and feature
+that came from his lamented father, and might easily become coarseness
+as he grew older. He seemed to Sainty like some strongly scented
+hothouse flower, white with a whiteness in which there was no purity,
+and sweet with a strong sweetness that already suggested some subtle
+hint of decay. As the flowers which his cousin recalled to him were
+among the things he did not like, his first feeling towards him had been
+one of vague repulsion; but to a naturally shy and silent person, any
+one with Claude’s ready flow of talk and perfect self-possession must
+prove attractive in the long-run. Then Claude had charming manners when
+he chose. To Sainty, accustomed to Arthur’s scornful affection and
+undisguised contempt, the little attentions and deferential politeness
+of this older boy were bewildering, but strangely pleasant. Claude’s
+smile was a caress, the grasp of his hand an embrace; in later years a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_32">{32}</a></span>
+lady once said of him that she always felt as if he had said something
+she ought to resent when he asked her how she did. But at thirteen this
+latent sensuality only made him like some charming feline creature that
+liked to be stroked and well fed, to lie in the sun and purr. A boy who
+spoke French as easily as English, and German and Italian a little, and
+read mysterious foreign books for pleasure, could not fail to be
+impressive to a small home-grown cousin; while the discovery that this
+gifted creature had never played cricket in his life, and, though an
+excellent rider, had not the smallest wish to hunt, made him at once
+sympathetic and puzzling.</p>
+
+<p>‘Uncle Cor hunts,’ Sainty said, ‘and Arthur is dying to, as soon as ever
+he is allowed. <i>I</i> can’t, of course; but then I shall never ride any
+more. But all the men I know hunt&mdash;our neighbours Mr. Hawley at Hawley
+Park and Sir Watkin Potkin at the Grange, and everybody, even the
+farmers, when they can afford to. I thought all men who rode wanted to
+hunt as a matter of course.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, <i>I</i> don’t want to,’ Claude answered. ‘I like riding, and the
+<i>manége</i>, and all that; a gentleman should of course be a good horseman.
+But to get up early, and gallop all day across country after a wretched
+little vermin, <i>merci cela ne me dit rien</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! you’re sorry for the poor fox; I’m glad of that,’ said Sainty. ‘I
+can’t help feeling it’s cruel. I think of all it must feel when it hears
+the dogs getting nearer, and knows it is out of breath and can’t run
+much farther. And yet very good men hunt, even clergymen. None of our
+own clergy, because mother doesn’t approve of it; but some of those from
+the other side of the county, who, I believe, are quite good men. I
+asked Uncle Cor, who is very kind to animals, about it, but he said if
+it were not for hunting, the foxes would all have been exterminated long
+ago, and he didn’t suppose they’d have liked that any better.’</p>
+
+<p>‘There is certainly something in that,’ replied his cousin gravely; ‘but
+I’m afraid I wasn’t considering the matter from the fox’s point of view.
+I hate getting tired, and wet, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_33">{33}</a></span> muddy, and to kill a wretched little
+yellow animal doesn’t seem worth so much fuss and trouble. <i>Voilà tout.</i>
+In France, if the foxes eat the poultry, they shoot them; it is much
+more simple.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then what do you like to do in the way of exercise and games and that?’
+asked Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘I like the lawn tennis fairly well,’ said Claude. ‘It is not such a
+good game as the real tennis, the <i>jeu de paume</i>. I have played that a
+little, but not much; it was too expensive; but lawn tennis is very
+well. That, and riding, and fencing have been my principal amusements.
+But we have moved about so much; my mother is very restless. We have
+never stayed anywhere long enough for me to settle down and really take
+to anything seriously.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And cricket?’ asked Sainty, almost under his breath; ‘have you never
+played cricket?’</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>Mon Dieu!</i> no. A game that takes three days to play! Those stupid
+stepsons of grandmamma took me to see a match at&mdash;what do you call
+it?&mdash;“Lord’s,” when I was in London. It went on all day, and nothing
+happened. I yawned myself hoarse. I can never do anything for more than
+two hours at a time.’</p>
+
+<p>Here was some one who was not apologetic or ashamed that he could not
+play cricket, who spoke of it even with contempt, as of a pastime for
+fools. Sainty was dumbfoundered. He wondered what Arthur would say to
+such heresy. What Arthur did say when presently he came home, was that
+his cousin was a ‘bounder,’ and ‘like a beastly foreigner.’ It was a
+curious fact that though Claude acquired a considerable influence for
+harm over Arthur, the latter always continued to speak slightingly of
+him, and never really liked him; whereas Sainty, who was not influenced
+by him in the least, and after the first discoveries of superficial
+agreement, found that they differed essentially in their views on almost
+every subject, cherished a sneaking regard for his cousin, which died
+hard even when Claude had done his best to kill it. Arthur’s mind could
+accept nothing that was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_34">{34}</a></span> traditional; and this surprising outcome of
+shady foreign watering-places and Parisian <i>ateliers</i> lay altogether
+outside of his traditions.</p>
+
+<p>Their aunt was as much of a surprise to the boys as their cousin. Lady
+Eva modified herself considerably, with a view to conciliating her pious
+sister-in-law; but in spite of extra tuckers, the first sight of her
+when dressed for dinner was a severe shock to Sainty, accustomed to the
+modest <i>décolletages</i> of the neighbouring clergywomen who dined from
+time to time with Lady Charmington, and the little square of his
+mother’s neck, which barely accommodated the large oblong locket of
+black enamel, like a baby’s coffin, with which she decorated herself for
+these festive occasions.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily for Lady Eva, Lady Charmington was not of the intimate order of
+women, and never invaded a guest’s bedroom, or she might have been a
+little scandalised by the tone of some of the literature she found
+there; but she would probably have been still more bewildered, as she
+had kept up scarcely a bowing acquaintance with even ordinary French. ‘I
+have read Madame Craven’s <i>Récit d’une Sœur</i>,’ she said, ‘but I read few
+novels in any language; it does not seem to me very profitable. I was
+once recommended Feuillet’s <i>Histoire de Sibylle</i> as quite
+unobjectionable, but I found it very papistical. It did <i>me</i> no harm,
+but I shouldn’t have given it to any young person to read in whom I was
+interested.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t remember to have read either of the <i>romans</i> you mention,’ said
+her sister-in-law wearily.</p>
+
+<p>The two women found it increasingly difficult to talk to each other;
+neither of them seemed to take the faintest interest in anything which
+occupied the other. Lady Eva dwelt much on the disadvantages of her
+bringing-up, finding that a subject on which her hostess was much
+inclined to be sympathetic, and also on her maternal anxieties about her
+boy’s future. She and Claude laughed a great deal at the good lady
+behind her back, and smoked a great many cigarettes together in the long
+shrubbery, when Sainty was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_35">{35}</a></span> having his daily drive, and Lady Charmington
+was busy about her farms. Arthur caught them at it one day, but was
+bribed to silence by being lured into participation in the crime.</p>
+
+<p>‘Tell me, Eva,’ said Lady Charmington, when the ladies were sitting
+alone together, ‘you are not, I trust, a Catholic, are you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No; oh no!’ answered her sister-in-law, with perfect truth; though she
+might have added that she had at one time been a very devout one, and
+had since tried several other <i>cultes</i>, of which the last had been some
+queer Parisian form of esoteric Buddhism. ‘Oh no! I have seen too much
+of Romanism; I have lived abroad too much.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington was delighted. ‘I have no doubt they tried to pervert
+you,’ she said, fairly beaming on this martyr to the faith.</p>
+
+<p>‘Tried!’ repeated Lady Eva with an eloquent gesture.</p>
+
+<p>‘And your boy?’ continued Lady Charmington. ‘He must have been much
+exposed in those countries. I trust you have managed to keep his faith
+untouched?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I have done my best,’ said Lady Eva meekly. ‘Poor boy! he has had to
+knock about the world very young, and to see and hear much that he
+should not. I have felt that he had only his poor weak mother to stand
+between him and&mdash;and&mdash;well&mdash;all sorts of things. He has not had the
+advantages of your dear boys, Sarah&mdash;a good home, and peaceful, virtuous
+surroundings, nor such a good mother, I’m afraid.’ And Lady Eva cast
+down her fine eyes, on the lids of which she had not been able to deny
+herself a faint tinge of blue, on learning that Lord Corstorphine was
+expected, though she had been trying not to paint at Belchamber. ‘You
+know how my own youth was neglected,’ she added presently. ‘But I had
+rather not talk of that. After all, the duchess is my mother, and in her
+own way has meant to be kind to me, I think. Only, I have dreamt of
+something very different for my Claude. Such influences as he finds here
+are exactly what I have wished for him, and what I have all too seldom
+been able to give him.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_36">{36}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Well, now we have got him here, we must try and keep him, and see what
+we can do for him,’ said Lady Charmington, much gratified. ‘Have you
+thought at all what you are going to do with him? You are not going back
+to France?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no! I want to stay in England&mdash;<i>at home</i>’; and Lady Eva gazed
+tenderly at her surroundings in a manner which hinted plainly that an
+invitation to consider Belchamber in that light might not be unwelcome.
+Lady Charmington, however, was in no hurry to give it, but she debated
+in her own mind many plans for the benefit of her nephew. She got but
+little encouragement from her brother, who by no means seemed inclined
+to take a friendly view of these interlopers.</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s a horrible woman,’ he remarked, with brutal frankness of the
+‘belle Morland’; ‘and just the sort I should have thought you would have
+hated, Sarah.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t honestly say I exactly like her, Cor,’ his sister answered;
+‘but I’m sorry for her and for the boy. Think of her deplorable
+bringing-up; think what a mother she has had, and what a husband! The
+poor body seems to have some glimmerings of a desire for better things,
+if she had any one to take her by the hand; and I must say it’s to her
+credit to have kept by her faith, exposed as she has been to the darts
+of the enemy. But what touches me most about her is that she evidently
+wants to do well by her boy. She’s not a bad mother, whatever else she
+may be; and, after all, she’s poor Char’s sister, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington very seldom delivered herself of so long a speech, and
+still more rarely made any allusion to her dead husband. Corstorphine
+was surprised and touched. Perhaps some likeness to her brother in Lady
+Eva, some trick of speech, or expression that recalled him, had gone to
+the not very accessible heart of her sister-in-law, and reinforced the
+adroit flattery which had been offered to her pet prejudices. Perhaps
+mother’s heart really spoke to mother’s heart in some language he did
+not understand; the woman, with all her faults, might have a genuine
+wish to do the best<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_37">{37}</a></span> for her brat. He could have checked his sister’s
+nascent inclination to befriend her husband’s kinsfolk with a word, but
+it seemed an ungracious task. After all, Sarah was not too often in a
+melting mood, and if she could do something for this wretched lad, whose
+best chance was that he was fatherless, why should he seek to restrain
+her?</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t like the boy either,’ he couldn’t help saying; ‘he’s a deal too
+smooth and civil spoken. He’s no business to have such finished manners
+at thirteen, and be such an accomplished little man of the world. But if
+you think you can do anything to prevent his turning out such a
+blackguard as his deceased parent, pray do; it’s a Christian act. All I
+say is, consider whether he is likely to harm your own boys in any way.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ve thought very much of that. Do you suppose it wasn’t my first
+thought?’ his sister answered. ‘But one mustn’t let anxiety for one’s
+own stand in the way of snatching a brand from the burning. Something
+tells me this boy has not been sent here for nothing.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Corstorphine, ‘and what particular form of charity do you
+think he was sent for?’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington ignored the scoff. ‘I was thinking whether I mightn’t
+offer to send him to Eton, if he could be got in,’ she said; ‘he won’t
+be fourteen till November. I know his mother can’t afford it. Then he is
+very gentle with Sainty, and the child seems to like him; and I thought
+if later on Sir John thought Sainty could go to Eton, it might be a help
+to him to have a cousin who had been there a year or two, and could look
+after him a little. He can never be quite like other boys, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>Corstorphine smiled grimly. It tickled his not unkindly cynicism to find
+his pious sister had so human a thought for her own offspring nestled
+under her zeal for her nephew’s soul.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I agree,’ he said, ‘that the best chance the youth can have is to
+see as little as possible of his mother and grandmother. Perhaps if he
+gets well kicked at Eton, and you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_38">{38}</a></span> have him here mostly for his
+holidays, he may not turn out so ill. It would take an 18-horse power
+profligate to corrupt Sainty, it is true; but how about Arthur?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Arthur doesn’t like Claude; he makes no secret of it; so I don’t think
+he can do <i>him</i> any harm. Besides, when the boys are at home I have them
+so constantly under my own eye, I should know in a minute; and by the
+time Arthur goes to Eton, Claude will be almost leaving.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Or if he turns out badly, he may even have left,’ said Lord
+Corstorphine.</p>
+
+<p>So the matter was broached to Lady Eva, who, you may be sure, was
+profuse in a mother’s blessings and tears. She was fond of her son in a
+way, and honestly wanted the best that was to be had for him in life.
+She had been ruefully reflecting that she would never be able to send
+him to a good school, except at the cost of decided privations to
+herself; and there was no doubt he would be dreadfully in her way in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Corstorphine proposed himself for a Sunday to a great friend among
+the Eton masters, and found that his host, having an unexpected vacancy
+for the next half, was delighted to do a good turn to any one in whom he
+was interested. The duchess, when she heard what was on foot, suddenly
+insisted on helping, and promised to pay half of her grandson’s
+expenses; and though her contribution was frequently several terms in
+arrear, she generally paid up in the end, unless she had been unusually
+unlucky at cards.</p>
+
+<p>So, though Lady Eva had failed to extract from her sister-in-law that
+general invitation to regard Belchamber as her country-home, which she
+had hoped for, she left for town with a comfortable feeling that her
+visit had not been wasted. Claude was practically off her hands; he
+would go to Eton at no expense to her, and spend most of his holidays at
+Belchamber. ‘Dear Belchamber, where poor Char and I spent our happy
+childhood, and of which I have always carried the picture in my heart,
+through all my wanderings,’ she said to Lady Charmington the day before
+her departure.</p>
+
+<p>‘Indeed,’ said Sarah, with a little dry cough, ‘I always<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_39">{39}</a></span> understood
+from poor Char that he had hardly ever been here as a child. He said,
+when we first came here in the old lord’s time, that he hoped his son
+wouldn’t feel such a stranger here as he did, when he grew up.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah well,’ said Lady Eva hurriedly, ‘my happiest times, almost the
+<i>only</i> happy ones of my neglected childhood were here, so I suppose they
+bulk large in my memory. I have so little reason to remember most of my
+youth with pleasure.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You said, Aunt Eva,’ Arthur burst in, ‘vat you wemembered every corner
+of ve place, blindfold, but you soon lost your way even in ve shrubbery,
+and you thought One-tree Wood was the other side of the village.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah, traitor!’ cried his aunt, playfully embracing him, ‘have you so
+little gallantry as to try to convict a lady of making mistakes?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You were a little rash, dear mamma,’ Claude said to her afterwards, ‘in
+remembering your happy childhood at Belchamber so well, unless you took
+a little more trouble to get up the subject.’ Claude for his part was
+quite willing to go to Eton and try how he liked it. Almost the only
+principle that had been early instilled into him was that it was always
+worth while to accept anything expensive that could be enjoyed at
+another person’s expense. It was rather absurd, no doubt, for so
+finished a gentleman to go to school; but experience had taught him that
+it was always quite easy to get sent away from educational
+establishments, if one did not happen to like them; and what was the use
+of his precocious knowledge of the world if it did not insure him an
+easy victory over such simple people as schoolmasters and schoolboys? As
+a matter of fact his astuteness did save him from paying the extreme
+penalty for many peccadilloes that would have cut short the career of
+less sophisticated youths under ‘Henry’s holy shade.’ His tutor’s
+attitude towards him was a curious alternation of attraction and
+distrust. But though never cordially liked by either boys or masters, he
+was still there, as an overgrown youth in ‘lower division,’ when Sainty
+hobbled into the school, a pale, gloomy little boy with an iron<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_40">{40}</a></span> boot
+and a stick, and was even keeping a precarious footing when Arthur
+appeared a year later, and of course took the place by storm with his
+frank and friendly manners, hatred of books, love of games, and
+perfectly obvious and understandable type of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Claude really did much for his cousins on their arrival at Eton
+may be doubted, but he certainly managed to impress Sainty with the
+belief that he had been of incalculable service to him. To Claude,
+Sainty meant Belchamber with all its comforts, horses to ride, pheasants
+to shoot, good food, luxurious quarters, and presents at Christmas;
+things his shelterless childhood had taught him to consider in a way
+that boys to whom they had always been matters of course could not
+understand. It never occurred to Sainty that his cousin’s attentions
+proceeded from anything but a naturally kind heart compassionating the
+limitations of a cripple and an invalid. He soon learned to disapprove
+of Claude, and to dread his influence over Arthur, and on several
+occasions screwed himself up almost with torture to the point of
+speaking very plainly to his senior, a thing especially difficult among
+boys; and the indulgent good nature with which his strictures were
+received, where they might easily have been resented, gave him an
+uncomfortable sense of obligation towards one to whom his conscience
+forced him to say such disagreeable things in return for uniform
+kindness and affection.</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear Sainty,’ Claude would say, ‘you do look so sweet when you’re angry
+and solemn, for all the world like an old hen with all her feathers up
+in defence of her chick. Of course I’m a wicked unprincipled hawk, but I
+promise not to devour your bantling.’ He generally managed to refer
+again to these conversations when Arthur was present, knowing that
+nothing enraged the younger brother so much as the idea that Sainty, for
+whom he always entertained the sublimest contempt, had dared to give
+himself the airs of looking after him.</p>
+
+<p>It early dawned on Sainty that a loving heart was not an unmixed
+blessing, unless one had the gift of imposing on<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_41">{41}</a></span>e’s views on the object
+of one’s affection. Had he not been fond of Claude, it would be nothing
+to him that he disapproved of him; if he did not love Arthur, it would
+not have been a daily grief to him to see so clearly what his brother
+ought and ought not to do, while he was destitute of the smallest shred
+of influence over his actions.</p>
+
+<p>‘You know, dear,’ Claude said to him once, ‘there is nothing so easy as
+to get rid of me. I am horribly <i>mal vu</i> by the authorities. If tutor
+hadn’t stuck up for me like a brick, I should have been sacked long ago;
+he has told me pretty plainly that if there are any more rows he shall
+say he thinks they had better take me away. A hint to him that I am
+corrupting his pet lamb, and a word to your mother, and neither Eton nor
+Belchamber will be troubled with me much longer.’</p>
+
+<p>Such a speech hurt Sainty like a lash. ‘Don’t you see,’ he cried, ‘that
+it is just the knowledge of what you say that makes it impossible for me
+to do anything? I am helpless.’</p>
+
+<p>See? Of course Claude saw; no one better. ‘Dear generous old boy!’ he
+said, with one of his sudden pretty changes of manner, throwing an arm
+lightly round his cousin’s shoulder; ‘who should know what an angel you
+are, so well as your poor scamp of a cousin, who owes everything to
+you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t,’ Sainty said, wincing; ‘you do things you know I hate, and teach
+Arthur to do them, and then you manage to make me feel a brute, and put
+me in the wrong.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude shrugged his shoulders, almost the last of his little foreign
+tricks of manner that he had not lost at Eton. ‘You are impossible, dear
+Saint,’ he said, and went his way, quite secure that what he had let
+fall of the ease with which his cousin could get rid of him would
+effectually tie his hands.</p>
+
+<p>The day came, however, when without any intervention of a schoolfellow,
+the measure of Claude Morland’s ill-fame overflowed, and the College of
+the Blessed Mary numbered him no longer among her children.</p>
+
+<p>That summer half was ‘long remembered’ at Eton (almost<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_42">{42}</a></span> eighteen months)
+for what Claude called a ‘great massacre of the innocents.’ We are not
+concerned at this distance of time to inquire into the nature of this
+old story. As usual, it was not the most guilty who were sent away;
+there were angry mothers in many counties of England who declared their
+darlings had been most unjustly used, and that ‘there was a boy called
+Morland who was much worse than poor Tom, Dick, or Harry, who had only
+had to leave at the end of the half, and with no blame attached to him.’
+‘Claude was more or less mixed up in rather a painful affair,’ his tutor
+wrote to Lord Corstorphine. ‘He did not know how much he was to blame,
+but it would be best for the boy himself if his friends were to remove
+him. Personally he liked him, but ...’; and Sainty tried hard not to
+feel a certain relief at his cousin’s departure. He atoned for this
+unchristian want of sympathy by making the best of the matter to his
+mother and guardian, and begging that it should make no difference in
+the culprit’s footing at Belchamber. What he never mentioned at home was
+that Arthur had come very near being implicated, and that he, Sainty,
+had strained his conscience to the utmost, in solemnly pledging his word
+to his tutor for his brother’s innocence. Arthur accepted this as he did
+everything else from Sainty. ‘What is vere to make a fuss about?’ he
+said. ‘I’d have done as much for you, or for vat matter, for any over
+chap who wasn’t my bwover. You jaw about your conscience, and not being
+sure, and tell me to see what I’ve made you do. I don’t call that lying.
+Of course, if a fellow’s asked point-blank if anover fellow’s done a
+fing, he’s <i>got</i> to say he hasn’t. Don’t be such a pwig.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not stay very long at Eton himself. In spite of constant
+staying out, and much sick-leave, he really was not strong enough for
+the life there; nor was it a great grief to him to go. He did not make
+friends easily; his shy reserved manner, his studious habits, and
+inability for athletics, not less than his austerely high standard of
+ethics which his minor found so unnecessary, were not calculated to make
+him popular with his schoolfellows; and he resented their<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_43">{43}</a></span> familiar
+abbreviation of his title into ‘Belcher.’ He stayed long enough to see
+Arthur launched on a course of prosperity, and in a fair way to become a
+‘swell,’ and then sang his <i>Nunc dimittis</i>. Arthur remained, alone of
+the three, and flourished like a green bay-tree. He did just enough work
+to get through his various examinations with a little cribbing, and
+found plenty of people ready to do all the rest for him. He was quite
+selfish, self-indulgent, easy-going, good-natured, and happy, and was as
+popular with the masters as with the boys. The elastic code of schoolboy
+honour fitted him like a glove, and he had the makings in him of a
+first-rate cricketer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_44">{44}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Lord Corstorphine</span> had been an Oxford man, but some curious lingering
+dread of Puseyism made Lady Charmington send Sainty to Cambridge. She
+gave a moment’s anxious thought to the vicinity of Newmarket, but, as
+she truly said, that hardly seemed a danger to Sainty; and as Arthur was
+to read for the army when he left Eton, there was no question of the
+University for him.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty went to college, as he did most things, from the habit of
+obedience, but with no great hope of personal enjoyment. Anticipation to
+him was rarely pleasurable; he had not the sanguine temperament. He
+looked on Cambridge as a larger Eton, a new field for unpopularity and
+isolation in the midst of a crowd, but he soon began to be aware of an
+atmosphere of wider toleration than he had known at school.</p>
+
+<p>It is true he was a dreary failure among his peers, the gilded youth who
+went to Newmarket, kept hunters, and spent their evenings at the
+card-table; and he was ignominiously blackballed for a certain
+fashionable dining-club for which some one was so ill-advised as to put
+him up. His college, however, was large enough to contain men of all
+sorts, and among some of the more thoughtful he found congenial society
+and kindly appreciation, especially in the little knot of undergraduates
+who gathered round a young don called Gerald Newby.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was just ripe for some one to worship, and Newby supplied the
+object beautifully. In all his reserved, unhappy boyhood, he had never
+known the joy of that falling in friendship, so to speak, which is one
+of youth’s happiest<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_45">{45}</a></span> prerogatives. The only two companions for whom he
+had felt much affection, his cousin and his brother, had certainly given
+him more pain than pleasure. The generous delights of an enthusiastic
+admiration had hitherto been withheld from him. This young man,
+sufficiently his senior to speak to his troubled soul with a certain
+authority, yet near enough to his own age for discussion on equal terms,
+excited such a feeling in the highest degree.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult for older people not to smile at very young men’s
+estimates of themselves or of one another. Newby had opinions, splendid
+opinions, on all sorts of subjects, which his disciple imbibed with
+rapture. Sainty took his young mentor quite seriously, and Gerald, it
+need hardly be said, took himself quite seriously; and between them they
+were sublimely earnest and high-toned, and perhaps, if the truth must be
+told, just a trifle priggish.</p>
+
+<p>For one thing, of course, Sainty had ‘doubts.’ It is not to be supposed
+that a youth with a morbid conscience, a tender heart, a keen mind and
+delicate health, reared in Lady Charmington’s school of extreme
+Calvinistic theology, should have reached the age of eighteen without
+many searchings of heart.</p>
+
+<p>Little as this profane page may seem the place for the discussion of
+such subjects, it would be impossible to give an adequate notion of
+Sainty’s life at Cambridge or his relations with Gerald Newby, without a
+passing reference to the topics that kept them from their beds far into
+the small hours of many a chilly morning.</p>
+
+<p>Young men of Gerald Newby’s stamp can conceive of nothing that is not
+the better for being ‘threshed out,’ as he would have called it. He held
+that if the old creeds were ‘outworn,’ it was no reason for abandoning
+faith&mdash;that there was to be evolution in belief as in other things; and
+he had dreams of an universal Church freed from strangling dogmas, in
+which all sincere seekers after truth should meet in a common
+brotherhood. Perhaps he was a little vague as to what was to be left as
+the object of belief, when every<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_46">{46}</a></span>thing had been eliminated in which the
+controversially inclined could find matter for discussion, but that did
+not trouble him in the least.</p>
+
+<p>‘What we want,’ he said to Sainty, ‘is more light. All churches in all
+ages have been alike in the mistake of endeavouring to stifle discussion
+of their doctrines. Discussion is the breath of life; unquestioning
+acceptance is death.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But once one begins questioning things, one is so apt to find one
+doesn’t believe them&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then let them go. Depend upon it, what won’t bear the investigation of
+reason cannot be worth keeping. The truth, and the truth only, must
+emerge clearer and purer from every test to which it is submitted; and
+it is the truth we want. Why, when in all other departments of knowledge
+our understanding becomes truer and stronger every year, should we seek
+to stultify ourselves and shrink from all growth in the highest science
+of all, that which deals with the fount of all knowledge, and the spring
+of all conduct?’</p>
+
+<p>‘But suppose,’ Sainty asked, ‘one should find in the end that one
+believes nothing?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then believe nothing,’ said Newby grandly. ‘But I won’t, I can’t,
+suppose any such thing; it is belief that comes of inquiry, not the
+negation of belief.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was very much impressed. He had never before had any one to whom
+he could unburthen himself on these subjects. His mother, he knew well,
+would have revolted in horror from any questioning of the doctrines she
+herself accepted, and his uncle would not have approached the discussion
+in that serious spirit which alone he thought befitting. But the lads
+who assembled evening after evening in Newby’s rooms had no angelic fear
+of treading on anything, and talked everlastingly on all subjects,
+religious doubt or belief among the rest. If they found the world out of
+joint they by no means shared Hamlet’s distress at being ‘born to set it
+right,’ or doubted for a moment their perfect ability to do so. These
+boys who so confidently settled the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_47">{47}</a></span> affairs of the nation, the world,
+the universe, are getting middle-aged men now, hard-working public
+officials, clergymen, schoolmasters, and would probably smile at their
+own youthful enthusiasms. Many of them are married and fathers of
+families. Newby himself is senior dean of the college, and a very
+different person from the ardent apostle of universal belief and
+brotherhood to whom Sainty brought so many of his perplexities.</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber spent an immense amount of time in the young don’s
+comfortable rooms. A kind of sensual austerity marked the place,
+something cloistral and monastic, yet with a touch of art and luxury.
+Pale autumnal sunlight, or the soft glow of shaded lamps, lingered
+lovingly on the backs of well-bound books, some large framed photographs
+of early Italian Madonnas, and a reproduction of a Neapolitan bronze. A
+great many teacups reflected the fire, while a permanent faint smell of
+tobacco just gave a masculine character to the mellow warmth of the
+atmosphere. Several armchairs and a huge sofa seemed always trying, by
+the sad colour and severe pattern of their coverings, to conceal the
+fact of their depth and softness, just as their owner, who had a
+handsome refined face and a well-knit frame, affected a slouch and wore
+shabby clothes to show he was not vain.</p>
+
+<p>If Sainty poured himself out to Gerald when they were alone, he took but
+little share in the general discussions, when other people were present.
+To express himself was always a difficulty to him; he lay, as it were,
+on the margin of the pool of talk, into which one eager speaker after
+another dashed past him while he was still trying to summon courage for
+the plunge. It would sometimes happen that at the end of a long evening
+he had not opened his mouth, and he was taken to task more than once on
+the subject by his friend. ‘You really should try and talk more; men
+take your silence for ungraciousness. It looks as if you didn’t think
+them even worth disagreeing with, you know. Locke asked me to-day if you
+weren’t very proud; he said you sat all the time he was talking about
+the essential Christianity of Shelley’s point of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_48">{48}</a></span> view, the other night,
+with a little supercilious expression which said plainer than words that
+you thought him a fool.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh dear! and I was so much interested,’ Sainty cried. ‘I had nothing
+particular to say about it; to tell the truth, I had never thought of
+Shelley exactly from that point of view, but I liked it all so much.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you should have told him so; you see, you didn’t convey that
+impression to Locke.’</p>
+
+<p>Gerald was by no means always tender with his proselyte. He had great
+belief in his own powers of sympathy&mdash;(‘I understand,’ he used to say in
+a meaning way to those who laid bare their difficulties to him)&mdash;but he
+was quite capable of ‘smiting friendly and reproving’ when the occasion
+seemed to demand it. ‘I shouldn’t be your friend, if I didn’t say ...’
+was a favourite formula with him, and he constantly invited an equal
+frankness in others, though it is doubtful how he would have liked the
+invitation to be accepted.</p>
+
+<p>‘I have been thinking a good deal,’ he said, pausing in the act of
+making tea, and turning to Sainty with the kettle in one hand, ‘about
+what you said the other day of shunning uncongenial society. Of course
+there is a great deal of truth in it, and nothing obliges one to live
+habitually with people with whom one has nothing in common, but one has
+a duty to the outside world as well as to oneself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can no more be myself with certain people,’ Sainty objected, ‘than I
+can write my own handwriting on paper I don’t like.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course we all feel that,’ responded Gerald rather brutally, ‘but
+there are two things to consider: in the first place, there’s the danger
+to one’s own character of getting narrow and cliquey; and in the second,
+unless you have something to do with men who are your inferiors in aim
+or culture, how are you to influence them for better things?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t say they are my inferiors,’ said Sainty humbly; ‘I only say
+they are so unlike me in their habits and point of view that I can’t
+talk to them. They may be quite as good<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_49">{49}</a></span> fellows as I am; probably they
+think themselves much better&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, but <i>you</i> don’t think so; you know you don’t,’ insisted his mentor
+sternly. ‘Ah! you are looking at that Giotto; it’s from the Arena Chapel
+at Padua; it’s a jolly thing, isn’t it? The meekness of the Virgin’s
+expression is so wonderful. Those fellows lost so much of the religious
+feeling when they ceased to be archaic. Probably you don’t cordially
+like or approve even of all the fellows you meet here. I don’t
+altogether myself. But it is one of my principles to welcome all sorts
+of men. It is not only that I think they may get good from us, but they
+teach us too. We must try to be broad, to keep our sympathies open on
+all sides, to be in touch with every kind of person, if we hope to do
+any good.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You are like St. Paul,’ said Sainty quite seriously; ‘it is very
+wonderful of you. I wish I was more adaptable, but people shut me up
+so.’</p>
+
+<p>Newby smilingly deprecated the likeness to St. Paul, but in his heart he
+thought it quite true. ‘Take Parsons, for instance,’ he said; ‘do you
+suppose I am not often shocked by things he says? Yet I think he keeps
+us fresh, as it were; he is bracing, stimulating, useful, if only as
+keeping alive in us the wholesome reprobation of some of the views he
+thinks it necessary to advocate. And look at the matter from his point
+of view. It is far better he should come here, and find his own level,
+and meet with wholesome disagreement, than be driven into thinking
+himself a social pariah persecuted for his opinions, or surround himself
+with a little set of duller men, who would take what he says for gospel,
+and on whom his influence would be wholly bad.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t like Ned Parsons,’ said Sainty simply. ‘I know he’s clever and
+amusing and all that, but I think he’s rather a beast.’</p>
+
+<p>They were interrupted by the arrival of several undergraduates,
+including the subject of their discussion, the pursuit of which had
+therefore to be postponed to a more fitting opportunity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_50">{50}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, Newby,’ said Parsons, settling himself luxuriously in the deepest
+armchair, ‘I will take a cup of tea, though I should prefer a whisky and
+soda. And what might we be going to improve ourselves with to-night? the
+religious opinions of Swinburne, or the relation of the Ego to the
+non-Ego?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You are incurably flippant, Ned,’ said Gerald, with an indulgent smile.</p>
+
+<p>‘Here we all are, burning to be enlightened,’ continued Parsons. ‘Pray
+don’t deny us the tonic of stimulating conversation.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ve been wondering,’ innocently struck in a large rowing man, whom Ned
+described as having ‘aspirations after higher things,’ ‘what it is that
+keeps us all together, when we’ve so little in common, and I’ve come to
+the conclusion it must be our sense of humour.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Quite right, Og; no doubt it is,’ said Parsons approvingly. ‘And you
+and Newby are specially rich in it; and so is Sainty over there in the
+corner, though he is funny by stealth and blushes to find it fame.’</p>
+
+<p>The room was growing full of smoke and of the buzz of voices; Newby was
+holding forth to a small knot of admirers. ‘The Radicalism of Mill,’ he
+was saying, ‘is as dead as the dodo; all the things that were vital to
+his generation have been attained&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘How about female suffrage?’ Parsons asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘But there is a newer Radicalism,’ Gerald went on, without paying any
+attention, ‘which is not incompatible with Imperialism in its best
+forms&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘All Radicalism,’ said the rowing man sententiously, with the air of
+making a valuable contribution to contemporary thought, ‘tends to
+Socialism&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, yes, in a way you may say it does,’ assented Newby politely; ‘but
+that in my mind is not altogether an objection. The word Socialism used
+to be a bugbear to frighten children with; but there is a new Socialism
+as there is a new Radicalism. If you come to think of it, all
+interference by<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_51">{51}</a></span> the State is a form of Socialism; it is the community
+at work for the good of the community, instead of the individual making
+weak and isolated effort for his own good&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Poor dear Mill!’ interjected Ringwood, a young man who in those days
+would have been called ‘æsthetic,’ ‘it is a pity he is so <i>vieux jeu</i>;
+he had such a nice refined face, and learned Greek as a baby, and it was
+so nice and unconventional of him to want women in parliament. Perhaps
+in time parliament may come to be all women, and men be free to look
+after things that really matter.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Such as old china,’ said Parsons.</p>
+
+<p>‘Women,’ said the rowing man, ‘should stick to woman’s province; her
+home and children should be enough for any woman.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And suppose she hasn’t got any?’ asked Ned.</p>
+
+<p>‘But I see what Ringwood means,’ said the rowing man. ‘Of course
+politics are very important and all that; far be it from me to deny it.
+For my part I’m a Conservative, and I don’t care who knows it. But the
+thing that really matters is no doubt the intellectual life.’</p>
+
+<p>Even Newby smiled discreetly.</p>
+
+<p>‘No doubt, no doubt,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal in what you say;
+but it is essential that politics should not be left to inferior men, or
+what becomes of the nation? Look at America with her venal professional
+politicians, and see what it has brought her to. Depend upon it, it is
+the intellectual element in parliament that leavens the lump. Our
+thinkers must not shut themselves up from public life; we must go down
+into the arena and put the result of our thought into action, if we hope
+to do any good in our generation.’</p>
+
+<p>This magnificent sentiment was applauded as it deserved to be, but Newby
+had not nearly had his innings. He had much more to say about the new
+Radicalism and the new Socialism, and he talked so beautifully of the
+wickedness of being a hermit that Sainty resolved to widen his horizon
+by asking Ned Parsons to lunch next day, and proceeded at once to ‘put
+the result of his thought into action.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_52">{52}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was not often that he indulged in the luxury of entertaining. He had
+none of that genial desire for presiding which to many a man makes the
+top of his own table such an exciting position; moreover, he had been
+trained in the practice of the most careful economy, and had been
+accustomed to hear his mother condemn unnecessary profusion as hardly
+less sinful than irreligion.</p>
+
+<p>The question of his allowance had been carefully discussed between his
+guardians, and the sum eventually decided on, although it would have
+been treated as quite inadequate by most young men of his position,
+seemed to him so ridiculously large that he was always endeavouring to
+conceal the amount of it from his poorer companions. He did so entirely
+from a feeling of delicacy; but it need hardly be said that his motives
+were frequently misconstrued, and he was firmly believed by many to be
+of a penurious and miserly disposition. As a matter of fact, if little
+of it went in ostentatious hospitality, he spent still less upon
+himself. Arthur early discovered that his brother was ‘a safer draw for
+cash than the mater,’ and Claude, if he asked for help less often and
+with more circumlocution, also found Sainty a convenient banker. Lady
+Eva’s son was studying with a well-known coach for diplomacy, and though
+he lived with his mamma, ‘found life in London,’ as he wrote to his
+cousin, ‘horribly expensive.’ ‘I wear my gloves till people look
+sympathetic when they shake hands with me, thinking I am in mourning,
+and should as soon think of taking a hansom as a coach and four. But
+cigarettes I must have; they are literally the breath of my nostrils,
+and no matter how skilfully I hide them, mamma will find them and smoke
+them when I’m out. If it were not for Sunborough House, I believe I
+should starve. How, when, and where my revered parent feeds I am wholly
+unable to discover; but there is never anything to eat at home. Luckily,
+I am in high favour with grandmamma. I tell her she is the most
+beautiful woman in London, and that if I wasn’t her grandson I should be
+frantically in love with her, and she swallows it all. We are the best
+of friends, but I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_53">{53}</a></span> don’t get much out of her, except food and an
+occasional back seat in her opera-box; and of course I have to make her
+little presents <i>de temps en temps</i>. I ask myself, my dear Saint, how on
+earth all the young men I see about, smiling and spruce, contrive to
+live in this wicked costly place. They can’t <i>all</i> be millionaires.’
+This was the burthen of many letters. Belchamber smiled indulgently; he
+couldn’t help being amused by them; they were certainly better reading
+than the ill-spelt scrawls in which Arthur announced he was ‘infernal
+hard-up.’ ‘What with subscriptions, and one thing and another, a fellow
+had such lots of expenses at Eton, it was perfectly beastly, and the
+mater kept him so precious tight, and always seemed to think because you
+were at school you were a kid, and had no need of money.’ Unlike as were
+their styles, the upshot of all the letters was the same: the youthful
+writer was in pressing need of funds, and would ‘dear old Sainty’ kindly
+supply the deficiency? And ‘dear old Sainty’ usually did.</p>
+
+<p>It is no doubt a very bad thing to be in want of money, but it is almost
+worse to be the quarry at which the impecunious let fly all their
+shafts; to know when you see a beloved handwriting on an envelope, that
+it is hunger and not love that has set the pen travelling, and dictated
+the letter that lies within. It is an experience that only comes to most
+of us later in life; boys of Sainty’s age are not often called upon to
+taste that half humorous bitterness. This was one of the few troubles
+about which Sainty did not consult Gerald Newby. He knew instinctively
+that his virtuous friend would have little sympathy with his supplying
+the funds of luxury and extravagance. The double drain, of which neither
+the amount nor the recurrence could ever be accurately foretold, kept
+the boy perpetually anxious about money matters. Perhaps it really did
+tend to make him, as people thought, unduly careful in his daily
+expenditure; and, though he took infinite pains to conceal the fact, he
+liked to be able to help humbler unfortunates than his brother or
+cousin.</p>
+
+<p>Another eccentricity which showed his unfitness for the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_54">{54}</a></span> state of life
+to which he had the misfortune to be born, was his exaggerated
+propensity for work; he had a real aptitude for scholarship, a love of
+erudition for its own sake. No pains seemed too great to him, no
+research too profound, for the illustration of a curious expression or
+the elucidation of an obscure passage. There was a danger that his
+health, never robust, might suffer from such close application. ‘If you
+were a poor student,’ Newby said to him, ‘with your way to make in the
+world, having come up from Glasgow with a bag of oatmeal, I should think
+it most meritorious of you to peg away as you do, but for <i>you</i> to go
+injuring your health by overwork is worse than unnecessary&mdash;it’s wrong.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My health does not seem to me such an unusually fine specimen that all
+risk of injury to it must be avoided at any cost,’ Sainty answered.
+‘Besides, what am I to do, if I don’t work? I know few people, and the
+men I do know are all busy. I can’t play games or ride; when I am not
+working I loaf, and you are always inveighing against loafing as the
+root of all evil.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You should come out more, have more air,’ persisted Gerald.</p>
+
+<p>‘In the summer I am out a good deal, as you know,’ Sainty answered, ‘but
+at this time of year I can’t sit out, and I can only do a very moderate
+amount of walking without getting tired.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why don’t you start a cart and pony?’ his friend asked.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty looked scared. ‘It costs such a lot to keep a cart and pony,’ he
+said. ‘I do hire one sometimes,’</p>
+
+<p>‘What nonsense!’ Newby protested. ‘In your position it’s absurd to talk
+as if you couldn’t afford a trifling thing like that. That’s the sort of
+thing that makes fellows say you are screwy&mdash;&mdash;’ He stopped rather
+abruptly, having said more than he intended.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty froze instantly. ‘Oh! they say that, do they?’ he said, with an
+expression which would have recalled Lady Charmington to Newby, had he
+enjoyed the privilege of her<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_55">{55}</a></span> acquaintance. ‘Perhaps I am the best judge
+of what I can afford.’</p>
+
+<p>Like many people who are theoretically in favour of independence, Gerald
+resented it in his disciples. ‘For all your false air of humility,’ he
+said, ‘one has only to scratch you to find the aristocrat.’</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Sainty one more proof of the irony of fate that even such
+qualities as his application to study and careful ordering of life’s
+economy, which would have been held as highest virtues in many of his
+fellow-students, by a curious process of inversion became almost faults
+in him, faults too for which he must be rebuked by the mouth of Gerald
+Newby, the great apostle of industry and frugality, and the one person
+in the University whose praise would have been sweet and valuable to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>‘The things you reproach me with are hardly aristocratic vices,’ he
+said, with a sad little smile; ‘but are you quite consistent? You
+lecture Parsons on his laziness, and Ringwood on his extravagance, and
+then you come and try to drive me into being an idler and a spendthrift,
+who have no gifts in those directions.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course, if you resent advice,’ Newby said, ‘I’m sorry; I have no
+business to <i>lecture</i> you at all.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah Gerald!’ said Sainty, stretching a protesting hand; but Mentor was
+nettled and would not immediately be mollified. It was on the tip of
+Sainty’s tongue to explain his need of economy, but the story of his
+mother’s long struggle to restore its solvency to their house seemed too
+sacred and intimate to be told even to his dearest friend. The unveiling
+of his own soul was only a personal immodesty, but his mother’s thrift
+and Arthur’s premature dissipation could not be touched upon without a
+sense of disloyalty to them from which he shrank.</p>
+
+<p>‘Let us go and get a trap and have a drive,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘Thanks; I’m busy; I’m afraid I haven’t time,’ Newby said stiffly. ‘Did
+you think I was hinting that I wanted to be taken out driving?’ and the
+offended sage strode across<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_56">{56}</a></span> the court to his own rooms. Sainty heard
+the man in the rooms below him, to whom a scholarship was a dire
+necessity, being dragged forth to football by clamorous companions who
+would take no denial. ‘Well, I won’t go and drive in an east wind and
+get neuralgia all alone,’ he concluded, as he turned again to his table
+piled up with learned commentaries.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_57">{57}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">In</span> spite of his untoward mania for study, or rather because of it, the
+years spent at Cambridge were the happiest of Sainty’s life. He allowed
+himself to be dissuaded from going in for a scholarship, which he had
+much wished to do, on the ground that, as he would certainly have got
+it, it was grossly unfair to men to whom it was of real importance.
+Balked in this ambition, he concentrated his efforts on his degree, but
+here he encountered a new difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>It happened that his second year at the University was also the
+twenty-first of his life, a coincidence which to most of his
+fellow-students would have been productive of no derangement; but it
+became apparent that in the very middle of the long vacation, just when
+he hoped to go up to Cambridge and do his most valuable and undisturbed
+work for the tripos, he had got to be present at a horrible function
+known as ‘coming of age.’</p>
+
+<p>Nothing like serious hospitality on a large scale had been attempted at
+Belchamber during the two-thirds of his life in which he had been the
+nominal head of his family, but Lady Charmington was conscientiously
+anxious that this event should lack no befitting pomp and ceremony.
+Unfortunately, fourteen years of ceaseless watchfulness and economy are
+not a good training for lavish display when the time demands it; so the
+poor lady found herself much exercised in mind over many details, and
+not a little perturbed at the thought of what it was all going to cost.
+By no means a diffuse or prolific correspondent at ordinary times, she
+began early in the May term to rain letters upon her son about the
+selection of the house party for the great occasion. ‘Your Uncle<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_58">{58}</a></span> Cor,’
+she would write one week, ‘says that we must ask your grandmother and
+the duke. Of course I am only anxious to do what is right, and I suppose
+we must have them, though the duchess has never shown any particular
+interest in you or Arthur. Tell me what <i>you</i> think about it.’ The next
+it would be, ‘I am told there must be a ball, that there has always been
+a coming-of-age ball; the county will expect it. Such things are not
+much in my line, as you know, but I shouldn’t like anything to be
+wanting that ought to be done, or that people expect.’</p>
+
+<p>To Sainty the whole thing loomed an unmitigated horror. What pleasing
+anticipations, for instance, could the prospect of a ball awaken in a
+young man, one of whose legs was shorter than the other, and to whom a
+highly polished floor was nothing but a danger? He came to dread these
+letters of his mother, each one of which contained some new detail of
+the approaching martyrdom; such alarming obligations as the necessity of
+a speech at the tenants’ dinner sprang suddenly on him at the turn of a
+page, and left him gasping.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have rather a cold nature,’ his mother wrote, ‘not very
+imaginative, so I don’t feel I need fear your being carried off your
+balance by all this fuss. If you were excitable and emotional like
+Arthur, I should feel more anxious. In your case the danger is more that
+you will take the whole thing as a matter of course, and not realise
+fully the importance of this epoch in your life, and all the new
+responsibilities it entails on you.’ Characteristic passages like the
+above, scattered up and down the letters, seemed to give Sainty the
+measure of his exact knowledge of his mother, and cast a flickering
+light into the depths of her abysmal ignorance of him. The sense of a
+somewhat unfair advantage bred in him by these revelations of his
+superior insight brought into his love for her an element of almost
+pitying tenderness which alone was wanting to rivet the chains of his
+early acquired habit of obedience to her will.</p>
+
+<p>‘Are you afraid of your mother?’ Gerald Newby asked<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_59">{59}</a></span> him once, with some
+scorn, in reply to his repeated assertion of the impossibility of going
+counter to her wishes.</p>
+
+<p>‘I am very fond of her,’ Sainty answered, with gentle dignity. He had an
+almost painful intuition of her sacrifices, her hopes, her frustrate
+ambitions for him, and of the disappointment he must inevitably be to
+her; he probably read into her not very complex emotions, fine shades of
+sensibility from his own consciousness, after the manner of
+tender-hearted ladies with their dogs, which made his sympathy for her a
+little exaggerated. It was this habit of deference to her lightest wish
+that sent him forth sorely against his will to make a solemn call on a
+youth whom Lady Charmington had indicated for this attention. ‘My friend
+Lady Eccleston has been staying here,’ she wrote, ‘with her daughter,
+and I have asked them to come in August for your coming of age. She
+tells me her son Thomas is at Cambridge. I didn’t know he had left
+Harrow, but it seems he has been at the University two terms. She said
+it would be very kind of you to call on him, and I hope you will, as his
+mother is a friend of mine. If you find the young man agreeable, you
+might ask him to come with his mother and sister in the vacation. <i>A
+propos</i>, of course you will ask any of your own friends you would like;
+we shall want some young men; there will be Cissy Eccleston and the two
+de Lissac girls&mdash;only let me know in good time how many you ask.’</p>
+
+<p>On his way to show a grudging civility to Tommy Eccleston, Belchamber
+revolved in his mind his mother’s parting injunction to provide a band
+of youths for the feast. Luckily, here lay one ready indicated to his
+hand, but as he ran over the restricted roll-call of his intimates, they
+did not strike him as ornamental. Young Lord Springald and Sir Vaux
+Hunter and their friends would have been the very people for the
+occasion. They would have been voted ‘nice, gentlemanly young fellows,’
+or ‘fine, high-spirited lads,’ according as they were shy and dull, or
+noisy and rowdy; but then, unfortunately, he did not know them. He could
+not ask men whom he had spent two years in avoiding, and who had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_60">{60}</a></span>
+blackballed him for their club, but his terrible habit of appreciating
+other people’s points of view showed him how unsuitable his own friends
+would seem in the eyes of the duke and duchess. Gerald of course he
+wanted, and Gerald would be at home and imposing anywhere. His uncle
+Corstorphine at least, who had many friends among the intelligent
+obscure, could be trusted to appreciate Gerald; but he inwardly hoped
+that his friend might not select Lady Charmington as the recipient of
+his views on revealed religion. Apart from Newby, his progress towards
+the compilation of a list had been purely one of elimination up to the
+time of his arrival at Mr. Eccleston’s lodgings. In response to his
+knock, the voice of some one who evidently spoke with a jersey over his
+head made muffled answer from an inner apartment.</p>
+
+<p>‘All right, damn you, wait a sec., there’s no hurry. I’m changing,’ and
+a moment after the owner of the rooms appeared, a pleasant commonplace
+pink youth struggling into a college blazer, with one shoe on and the
+other dangling by its strings from his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>‘Hulloa! beg pardon,’ he remarked; ‘I thought you were Johnson, who was
+coming to go down to the river with me. I thought as he was so quiet he
+was probably smashing something,’ and he held out a blistered palm of
+welcome.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! er&mdash;how d’ye do,’ said Sainty, laying his own in it with no
+unnecessary cordiality. ‘My name’s Belchamber. My mother asked me to
+call on you; she knows your mother, don’t you know. I should have come
+sooner, but I didn’t know you were up.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; awfully good of you,’ answered Tommy. ‘Sit down,
+won’t you; have some lunch?’ A piece of cold pressed beef and a boxed
+tongue, with a pot of marmalade, showed that the host had himself
+recently partaken of that meal.</p>
+
+<p>‘No thanks, I’ve had lunch,’ said Sainty. ‘But I oughtn’t to keep you;
+you are just going out.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no, not at all; there’s no hurry; I haven’t got to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_61">{61}</a></span> be at the river
+for half an hour. Besides, I’m waiting for Johnson; he said he’d come
+and go down with me.’</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a moment of uneasy silence, broken with an effort by
+Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Your mother and sister have been staying with my mother,’ he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>‘No, really?’ said Tommy, with the faintest possible show of interest.
+‘My mother stays about a lot; she’s awfully popular.’</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause, during which he finished putting on his shoes.</p>
+
+<p>‘I say, are you <i>sure</i> you won’t have some lunch?’ he cried suddenly,
+with quite a show of eagerness. ‘Do. I’m afraid I haven’t got any cake
+or anything, ‘cos I’m in training. Have a whisky and soda, won’t you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No thanks, really not; I’ve just lunched. But I’m sure I’m keeping you
+in.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tommy responded genially, and added, not very
+consistently, ‘I can’t think where that ass can be?’</p>
+
+<p>The conversation seemed in danger of collapsing altogether, when the
+long-looked-for appearance of Johnson came as a welcome relief to both.</p>
+
+<p>‘Tommy, you brute, why ain’t you ready?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I like that, when I’ve been waiting half an hour for you.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty got up.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I mustn’t keep you,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘Beg pardon; didn’t know you’d got any one here,’ said Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! Lord Belchamber&mdash;Mr. Johnson,’ said Eccleston, getting very red
+over the fearful embarrassment of an introduction. Then to Sainty, who
+remained standing, ‘Must you go? Awfully good of you to come; wish you’d
+have had some lunch.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good-bye,’ Sainty said. ‘I hope you’ll come and see me&mdash;D, Old Court.
+Come to lunch or tea or something; or look me up in the evening if it
+suits you better.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_62">{62}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty reported this conversation verbatim to Newby.</p>
+
+<p>‘You see,’ he said, ‘how hopeless it is for me to try and be gracious to
+people with whom I have nothing in common. If you could have seen how
+hard that poor boy struggled to look pleased to see me, and the grimness
+with which I sat and scowled upon him, you would have felt sorry for us
+both; you couldn’t have helped it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course, if your idea of being gracious is to sit and scowl at
+people&mdash;&mdash;’ Newby said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I didn’t mean to; I wanted to wreathe my unfortunate features in
+smiles, but it was not a success. I am sure I feel as kindly towards my
+fellow-creatures as most people do; but I approach them with invincible
+terror; and there is no such sure way of making a dog bite you, as to
+think he is going to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then don’t think so,’ Newby said. ‘Have you <i>no</i> control over your
+apprehensions? Strengthen yourself in any way you like. If you can do it
+in no other way, say to yourself that you are a great personage and that
+most men will be only too glad of your attentions.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! but <i>that</i> is a way that I should <i>not</i> like,’ Sainty cried in
+horror; ‘the one thing that finishes me completely is any idea that
+people may think <i>I</i> think they could want to know me for such a
+reason.’</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="lftspc">“</span>The idea that people may think that you think,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> Gerald repeated. ‘My
+dear Belchamber, this is very morbid. Do try and be simple.’ Like all
+elaborately synthetical people, Newby was always preaching simplicity
+and a return to nature.</p>
+
+<p>‘And the sad part of this individual failure,’ Sainty continued, ‘is
+that I particularly wanted it to be a success. I had a purpose in
+calling.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what dark designs had you on this innocent fresher?’</p>
+
+<p>‘My mother told me to ask him to the horrible business in August; his
+people are coming. By the way, she suggests that I should provide other
+victims, and I can’t think of any one who would not be hopelessly
+inappropriate and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_63">{63}</a></span> bored to death. None of our friends <i>could</i> take the
+thing seriously, except, perhaps, Og.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, he’s no use to you, as Providence having unkindly made him nearly
+your twin, he has got, in a small way, the same business on, at home,
+and <i>he</i> takes it seriously enough, I promise you. I happen to know,
+because he has done me the honour to ask me to stay for it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty gave the cry of a thing in pain. ‘You haven’t accepted?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I didn’t commit myself; I’m really not quite sure yet where I
+shall be this Long. I rather want to go abroad, and perhaps do some
+climbing. Holmes and Collinson want me to coach them part of the time,
+and I thought we might combine the reading and the exercise, and drop
+down to the Italian lakes in the autumn.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And I had so counted on your being there, Gerald,’ Sainty said. ‘You
+are just the one person I did want. I felt there would be something
+human about it all if I had you with me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You never said so, you know,’ Newby interjected.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty felt the hot pricking sensation at the back of his eyes which was
+the nearest he ever got to tears. He had so intensely desired that
+Gerald should be at Belchamber in August, that it had not occurred to
+him to put his desire into words; they had talked the subject over so
+often that he took it for granted his friend would know that he looked
+for his help on the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought&mdash;’ he began, ‘I hoped&mdash;I suppose you would feel&mdash;&mdash;’ He
+couldn’t express just what he meant at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>‘You see, you didn’t ask me,’ Newby persisted, ‘whereas Og did.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! go to Og, or Switzerland, or Hell, as far as I’m concerned,’ Sainty
+broke out.</p>
+
+<p>Gerald laid a kind restraining hand upon his shoulder. ‘My dear boy, you
+needn’t lose your temper and swear at me,’ he said; ‘I haven’t said I
+wouldn’t come. I only said<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_64">{64}</a></span> you hadn’t asked me, and I couldn’t be
+expected to assume that I was invited to your coming of age, unless you
+said something about it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was trembling all over; his little gust of passion had passed and
+left him humbled and ashamed. How could he have spoken so to his friend?</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! forgive me,’ he cried. ‘I suppose I felt in my heart such a need of
+you, that I couldn’t but fancy you would know it.’</p>
+
+<p>Newby coughed uneasily. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t let us be
+sentimental,’ he said, in his little, prim, dry manner.</p>
+
+<p>‘My mother says I am cold and unimaginative,’ Sainty answered sadly,
+‘and you accuse me of hysteria. You can’t both be right; but anyway, I
+suppose <i>I’m</i> wrong. After all, why should I assume that just because I
+wanted you I was certain to get you? I haven’t so often got what I
+wanted in life. I should have remembered that though you are nearly
+everything to me, I am to you only one of a hundred men your kindness
+has helped.’</p>
+
+<p>Gerald smiled. Like all Englishmen he had been frightened by the
+indecency of a glimpse of naked emotion, but he was always prepared to
+accept any amount of solid adulation soberly offered.</p>
+
+<p>‘You make too much of anything I may have been able to do for you,’ he
+said graciously. ‘And affection is a great gift; I’m sure I’m very proud
+that you like me and feel I have been of some use to you. I have no
+doubt I can manage to make it fit in.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was profusely grateful; he really felt that Gerald had conferred
+a tremendous favour on him, which is probably what Newby meant he should
+feel.</p>
+
+<p>His other invitations were less successful. Even Ringwood, whom at last
+he decided to ask, though he knew his mother and Arthur would say he was
+an affected ass, had pledged himself to the rival celebration.</p>
+
+<p>Tommy Eccleston, to be sure, accepted. ‘Oh, thanks!’ he said, ‘very good
+of you; I shall like it awfully.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So Sainty wrote and announced this meagre harvest to Lady Charmington,
+who forthwith responded: ‘Do you mean to say that out of all the young
+men you must know at Cambridge, you can only get two? Try and find two
+more, or we shall be more women than men. Johnny Trafford is coming, and
+I have asked Algy Montgomery, and of course there will be Claude, but
+none of the other Trafford boys can come, and I know so few young men.
+You see, we are such a lot of women. There is grandmamma (my mother, I
+mean), and your Aunt Susie, and Lady Eccleston and her daughter, and
+Alice de Lissac writes that her husband, she is sure, won’t come, so
+there are three more women. And now the duchess insists on my asking
+Lady Deans, whom I don’t know, and your Aunt Eva wants to bring a friend
+of hers. I counted on your having lots of friends you would want asked,
+or I should not have agreed.’</p>
+
+<p>At last, in despair, Sainty had recourse to Tommy Eccleston again, who
+seemed sociable and friendly, and was the only person who had accepted
+with anything like cordiality. ‘You haven’t got any friend you’d like to
+bring, have you?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think Johnson would come, if he was asked,’ said Tommy thoughtfully.
+‘You see, between you and me, he’s rather sweet on my sister.’</p>
+
+<p>It only wanted two days to the end of the term, when the list was
+finally completed in the most unexpected manner.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was hobbling disconsolately across the court one evening, when he
+almost ran into Parsons. Since he had invited this gentleman to lunch as
+an attempt at greater catholicity, they had frequently met, and
+something like friendship might by a little stretch of imagination be
+said to exist between them. Sainty, feeling how very little strain their
+intercourse would bear, was always careful not to tighten it unduly.</p>
+
+<p>‘I hear you are coming of age,’ Ned remarked, ‘and have got a regular
+corroboree in honour of the event at the family fried-fish shop. I can’t
+think why you haven’t asked me.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_66">{66}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The intention was evidently humorous, but Sainty was a little taken
+aback. The fact was that Parsons was the only man of whom he saw
+anything like as much, whom he had not tried as the possible fourth
+demanded by the necessity for sexual symmetry.</p>
+
+<p>‘Should you care about it?’ he asked, a little doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear fellow,’ Ned answered candidly, ‘don’t ask a poor devil like me
+to a place like Belchamber; I should be ludicrously out of place.
+Besides, you know, you don’t really like me. Of course I was only
+joking.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was touched. Perhaps he had done Ned injustice. He certainly had
+never been very civil to him, and Parsons had borne no malice.</p>
+
+<p>‘Will you come?’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean it?’ said Ned. ‘Of course I will.’</p>
+
+<p>As Sainty wrote to announce this last recruit to Lady Charmington, he
+could not help smiling at the thought of three out of the four who were
+to represent his chosen intimates and cronies on the great occasion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_67">{67}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">During</span> the long years of Sainty’s minority there had been but a moderate
+establishment kept at Belchamber. Lady Charmington had been anxious the
+boys should be brought up there, and have the early associations which
+alone make a place a home, though it would have been simpler and much
+more comfortable to have lived in the dower-house, and some of her
+relations had blamed her for not doing so.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had hardly ever been into the great central body of the house,
+where what were called the State Apartments seemed only to exist to be
+shown to tourists by the housekeeper. A whole wing of guests’ and
+servants’ rooms had been permanently closed, and was only occasionally
+aired and inspected. Sometimes, when the boys were little, they had
+played at hide-and-seek in the long vista of empty chambers; but for the
+most part the family lived entirely in the west wing, much like royal
+pensioners to whom a set of apartments had been granted in some unused
+palace. Sainty had exactly the intense love for the place, not unmixed
+with awe, which might have been felt by the child of a custodian. His
+mother’s long habit of unquestioned and unquestioning authority, not
+less than her constant inculcation of a sense of stewardship and
+responsibility to a certain abstraction known as ‘the estate,’ had
+combined with his natural modesty and self-effacement to eliminate all
+sensation of personal ownership.</p>
+
+<p>In the stable one pair of carriage horses, Lady Charmington’s cobs and
+favourite hack, the boys’ old ponies, and a riding horse or two, had
+sufficed for all their needs; and old Bell the coachman had never wanted
+more than the groom<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_68">{68}</a></span> and a couple of stable-lads under him, cheerfully
+doing much of the work himself. The butler, who had been with them
+fourteen years, was perhaps rather practical than ornamental, but could
+turn his hand to anything, and the two footmen were lads from Lady
+Charmington’s own bible-class in the village, released by their
+proficiency in the scriptures from the necessity of following the
+plough, to wear the badge of servitude upon their shining buttons. The
+housekeeper and her ladyship’s maid held sound evangelical views, and
+the morals and health of the under-servants were looked after with equal
+care and sternness. Lady Charmington was thoroughly versed in the
+spiritual state of the odd man, and could have told without a moment’s
+hesitation the date of the third housemaid’s confirmation, or when the
+scullery-maid last had a quinsy.</p>
+
+<p>Now, however, all was to be changed. Sainty came home to an atmosphere
+of expansion and innovation. He found his uncle, Lord Corstorphine&mdash;whom
+in future we must remember to call Lord Firth, the old earl having been
+dead some years at the date of his grandson’s majority&mdash;in constant
+consultation with his mother, consultations in which, to his extreme
+embarrassment, he was expected to take part. He discovered that he had
+absolutely no views as to the proper functions of a groom of the
+chambers, or the relative undesirability of keeping a lot of young men
+unemployed when you were alone, or having extra liveries into which, on
+the occasion of a large party, temporary hirelings could be hastily
+inducted; about whom, as Lady Charmington truly remarked, you could know
+nothing, and who might steal the spoons and flirt with the maids. Old
+carriages that had not seen the light of day for years were dragged from
+their retirement and unveiled before him, while all the horse-dealers in
+the county brought animals for his inspection of every shade of
+unfitness for the duty of drawing them. Lord Firth’s political
+engagements made his presence necessarily intermittent; he could but
+seldom be there; and in his absence Lady Charmington would look
+anxiously at her son, hoping for some expression of opinion from him,
+but Sainty’s ignorance was only equalled<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_69">{69}</a></span> by his indifference. He tried
+in vain to care whether, supposing the carriages were worth doing up at
+all, they should be sent to London or confided to a provincial
+renovator.</p>
+
+<p>As to the horses, as Bell scornfully told him, he ‘had never knowed one
+end of a ‘oss from the other.’ On general principles he was on the side
+of the least expenditure. If he had said what he really felt, it would
+have been ‘Why need we live any differently because I shall be
+twenty-one next month than we did when I was twenty? We have always had
+all we wanted; why spend all this money on things that are not going to
+give me the smallest pleasure&mdash;rather the reverse?’ But these are the
+things one must not say. He looked at his mother’s wistful face and
+strove manfully to show the interest in all these questions which was
+expected of him.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur, when presently he came home, having just left Eton for good,
+flung himself into the whole business with very different gusto. The
+spending of money, either his own or other people’s, was always a
+genuine pleasure to this young man, and the horse-coping afforded
+opportunities for displaying to an admiring audience a knowingness quite
+amazing in one so young, and a pair of irreproachable riding-breeches.
+Once when Sainty was walking in the shrubbery that masked the
+stable-yard he overheard the dealer from Great Charmington expressing
+himself to Bell with a freedom in which he would not have indulged had
+he known who was behind the wall.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’d a deal rather have to do with Lord Arthur,’ he was saying, ‘than
+with either my lord or my lady. His lordship, he don’t want no horse at
+all; Lady Charmington, she knows a good horse when she sees ‘im, but she
+don’t want to pay for ‘im; but Lord Arthur, he wants a good article, and
+he’s willing to pay a good price. He’s a gentleman, he is.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah!’ answered Bell, ‘it’s a pity ’e wasn’t the eldest; ’e’d ’ave made
+something like a markis, ’e would.’</p>
+
+<p>It was the old old story; the one thing poor Sainty seemed able to do
+was to stand between his younger brother and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_70">{70}</a></span> the position for which the
+very stablemen saw his superior fitness.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur had been allowed to stay at Eton over his nineteenth birthday
+that he might once more represent his school at Lord’s. A finer-looking
+young fellow it would have been hard to find at this time, tall and fair
+and ruddy, of athletic proportions and agreeable manners, a most
+attractive personality, and as Sainty felt sadly, admiringly, but
+without a touch of envy, a most complete contrast to his elder brother.
+No one but Sainty, and he only imperfectly, knew the selfishness, the
+carnal appetites, the imperious need of enjoyment, the lack of moral
+sense, that lay beneath that smiling surface, or suspected the rock of
+primitive obstinacy above which the floating growth of apparent
+pliability waved so prettily in the tides of circumstance. Arthur had
+not been at home a week before the usual demand for money made its
+appearance. There is no doubt the younger brother had been extremely
+useful to the elder just then; his happy presence had eased the strain
+between Lady Charmington’s strenuous eagerness and Sainty’s
+incompetence, and lent quite a spice of amusement to the fearful
+upheaval in house and stable. The boys were together in what had been
+their common sitting-room ever since it had been their schoolroom.
+Sainty had had thoughts of asking for a study of his own, having much
+need of somewhere to work undisturbed; but it seemed ungracious to ask
+for the one thing that would have added to his comfort, when so much was
+being done for him that gave him no pleasure whatever.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur, arrayed in a new pair of yellow boots, spotless white
+‘flannels,’ and a lovely pink shirt, was whistling the airs from the
+latest musical farce while oiling his favourite bat and sadly shaking
+the table at which Sainty was trying to write a treatise on Epictetus.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t suppose, dear old boy,’ he said suavely, ‘that you could oblige
+your little bwuvver with a small sum of money?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty looked up quickly. ‘Why, Arthur,’ he said, rather sternly, ‘I
+heard you tell mother you didn’t owe a penny<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_71">{71}</a></span> now. You know she offered
+to pay any debts you had at Eton when you left, and you said you had
+given her a complete list.’</p>
+
+<p>‘So I did, poor dear, and it made her hair curl. I even took my bill and
+sat down quickly and wrote fifty,’ which was a hint I had got from the
+passage of scripture she had read to us at prayers, so as to have a
+little to go on with; but the fact is, dear boy, I’ve been cursedly
+unlucky&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Arthur! you haven’t been betting?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes; you see that’s just what I have been doing. Damn it all, Sainty,
+don’t look as if I’d been robbing a church. Every fellow has a little
+something on his favourite horse: it’s not a crime.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty stared aghast. He had often wondered how Arthur managed to get
+rid of so much money at Eton, where, as he knew, though the boys were
+absurdly extravagant, the opportunities for spending were not unlimited.
+Now he understood, and a bottomless gulf seemed to open at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course it’s only a temporary thing,’ Arthur went on. ‘I made a good
+thing over Ascot, but I’ve been unlucky with the Eclipse; one can’t
+always win, you know. Unfortunately these things have to be paid up,
+don’t yer know. My bookie’s a very good sort of chap, but he’s got to
+pay his losses, and he naturally wants his money. You can call it a
+loan, if you like. I’ve got a splendid tip for the Leger&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty looked down at his paper. Epictetus seemed to have gone a long
+way off and become suddenly very unimportant since he had looked up from
+it. He knew how useless it would be to expostulate; but he wanted time
+to adjust his mind to this new terror.</p>
+
+<p>‘How did you come to know <i>how</i> to bet?’ he asked; ‘I mean the machinery
+of the thing. Who introduced you to a bookmaker?’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur laughed aloud. ‘Upon my word I don’t remember,’ he said; ‘but I
+assure you it’s not difficult. Half the fellows I know have a book on
+all the meetings. I rather think it was Claude told me of this chap;
+he’s a very good sort. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_72">{72}</a></span> man I went to before when I won a pony over
+the Derby wrote and said my telegram had come too late. I wasn’t going
+to stand that kind of thing, so I cut him, naturally&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>Of course Arthur got what he wanted; it wasn’t, as it happened, a very
+large sum. But Sainty was left with an abiding dread. He wondered
+sometimes how it was that he saw so clearly the dangers that menaced his
+brother, while Arthur himself remained so sublimely unconscious and
+untroubled. The mention of Claude’s name in the matter, too, had
+reawakened an old anxiety. He had supposed that after his cousin left
+Eton Arthur would not be likely to have much to do with him except at
+Belchamber, and under his own eye. Claude’s was an influence he
+particularly dreaded for his brother, and it was evident that they had
+at least been corresponding. He wondered if he ought to say anything to
+his cousin about it, but he remembered the small effect such
+interference on his part had always produced.</p>
+
+<p>The Morlands were among the first to arrive for the coming-of-age
+festivities. Lady Eva had said, when she proposed it, that there must be
+heaps of things to attend to, and she should love to be of use. It need
+hardly be said that she was not. Her notion of offering assistance was
+to look in when Lady Charmington was busy, and say, ‘Dear Sarah, I see I
+should be dreadfully in the way just now; you will do much better
+without poor silly me. I will take a book out under the trees.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude, on the other hand, was extraordinarily helpful. He was capable,
+when it suited him, of taking immense pains, and he had a genius for
+order and detail which was of incalculable service to his aunt and
+cousin. He helped Lady Charmington and the housekeeper to arrange the
+long disused rooms, he settled who should occupy each, and wrote out
+lists of every kind of thing and person, in a beautiful, neat, clear
+little handwriting. He was gay, tactful, amusing, good-humoured. Sainty
+was overcome with gratitude, and felt it more than ever impossible to
+take this smiling, affectionate person to task for such a little thing
+as introducing<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_73">{73}</a></span> Arthur to a bookmaker. After all, it was not his <i>first</i>
+introduction to a gentleman of that profession, and apparently all his
+cousin had done was to substitute an honest for a dishonest member of
+the ring.</p>
+
+<p>Claude’s attentions to his grandmother had not proved fruitless, for
+when he failed, no one quite knew why, to pass his examinations for
+diplomacy, she had persuaded the duke to take him as his private
+secretary; and his experiences in that capacity made him now of
+incalculable use in coping with the new groom of the chambers, a young
+man of Olympian beauty, with a sepulchral voice and manner, who had been
+the duchess’s footman, and in keeping the peace between him and the
+butler, who regarded this recent acquisition with unconcealed distrust
+and aversion. The establishment was now more or less on its new footing,
+the unwieldy machine beginning to act, with much creaking and groaning
+and a need of all the oil that Claude and Sainty could supply between
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Old Lady Firth had been for some time installed in the warmest spare
+bedroom in the family wing, with her maid next door to her, and her son
+came down as soon as the session was over, giving up the ‘Twelfth’ with
+a sad heart, but promising himself to fly to the golf-links and moors of
+his native land as soon as he had done this last duty for his ward.
+Sainty appreciated the sacrifice his uncle was making for him, and much
+wanted to thank him for it, but only succeeded in feeling and looking
+embarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m sure it’s very good-natured of you coming here for this boring
+business, Uncle Cor,’ he said suddenly one evening. ‘I feel sure you’d
+rather be in the north.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know, my dear boy,’ answered his uncle patronisingly, ‘why you
+should not give me credit for a natural interest in being present on
+what is really rather a big occasion in your life.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is so ungracious of Sainty,’ said Lady Charmington, ‘to persist on
+looking on the whole thing merely as a bore, when we are all doing our
+utmost to mark our sense of the event.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_74">{74}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My dear mother,’ Sainty cried, ‘don’t think I don’t appreciate&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I don’t want to be thanked,’ his mother made haste to interrupt;
+‘nor, I’m sure, does your uncle. We are only doing what we feel is our
+duty; but it would be pleasant to know you took a little interest. I
+believe no one takes so little interest in your coming of age as you do
+yourself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It does sometimes seem about the worst thing I could have done,’ Sainty
+said bitterly, a remark not calculated to soothe his mother’s
+susceptibilities. He wondered why, whenever he tried to express any
+kindly feeling, it always appeared that he had said something
+disagreeable, with the result that by the end of the conversation he
+generally had actually done so.</p>
+
+<p>‘Who comes to-morrow, Aunt Sarah?’ inquired Claude tactfully. ‘I declare
+I’ve forgotten, though we went through them only this morning.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Let me see,’ said Lady Charmington, swiftly reabsorbed in her duties as
+mistress of the house; ‘Ecclestons, three; de Lissacs, three; my sister
+Susan and Johnny, two; and a young man Firth has asked, Mr. Pryor. Algy
+Montgomery has written that he can’t come till Monday; he will come with
+his father and the duchess and the Rugbies. When do your Cambridge
+friends come, Sainty?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Johnson comes to-morrow with the Ecclestons, mother: he’s Tommy
+Eccleston’s friend more than mine; Parsons on Monday; Gerald Newby, I’m
+afraid not till Tuesday.’</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that a tolerably large party was being gathered
+together. The actual festivities were to occupy two days&mdash;Wednesday,
+which was Sainty’s birthday, and the following day; and not only was
+Belchamber being once more filled with guests, but Hawley and the
+Grange, and even some bigger houses further afield were preparing to
+bring over large contingents for the garden party and ball.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you think we had better dine in the big dining-room to-morrow
+night?’ Lady Charmington asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, not till Monday,’ Sainty pleaded; ‘surely that’ll be<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_75">{75}</a></span> time enough,
+mother. This room is quite big enough for to-morrow’s dinner.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Firth, who was dreading the draughts in the great banqueting-hall,
+and secretly wondering if she would not dine upstairs the first night it
+was used, and let the rest of the party air it for her, was strongly of
+Sainty’s opinion.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do let’s stay a family party as long as we can,’ said Lady Eva. ‘With
+mamma’s advent on Monday we shall inevitably become very <i>mondain</i>. Who
+are all these smart people she has insisted on adding to the party?’</p>
+
+<p>‘The Nonsuches are cousins and old friends,’ Lady Charmington answered
+grimly; ‘but your mother wished Lord and Lady Dalsany asked, and Lady
+Deans; I confess I don’t quite see why. I suppose she thought she would
+be bored here unless she provided her own company.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eva laughed as if her sister-in-law had said something witty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! is Vere Deans coming? That will be nice!’ exclaimed a young lady
+who had come with Lady Eva. Amy Winston dabbled in literature, and spelt
+her name Aimée. She always wore black, white, or yellow, and still
+looked remarkably handsome in the evening. ‘She is a dear, and so
+clever,’ Lady Eva had said of her; ‘writes, you know, and dresses so
+well on simply nothing. You would love her.’</p>
+
+<p>If Lady Charmington did love Miss Winston, she disguised the feeling
+with perfect success. ‘Is Lady Deans a friend of yours?’ she asked
+coldly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no!’ said Miss Winston; but I’m simply dying to know her. She’s so
+handsome, and has such splendid jewels, and they say she’s so wicked.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I hope not,’ Lady Charmington returned, with an increase of severity;
+‘but if she were, it seems a strange reason for wishing to know her.’</p>
+
+<p>Every day now some of the renovated carriages rolled up from the
+station, bringing recruits to the house party, in one of whom the reader
+will be pleased to recognise an old friend. The Mrs. de Lissac, of whom
+mention has several times been<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_76">{76}</a></span> made, was no other than Sainty’s former
+governess, Miss Meakins. Outwardly in rustle of silks and flash of
+diamonds, and the deference with which the world treated her, Alice de
+Lissac was a very different person from Alice Meakins, but inwardly she
+was just the same kindly, tender, sentimental creature as ever. Riches,
+which have such a corroding effect on some people, had left that shy
+gentle heart quite untouched; they represented to her only delightful
+means of doing good to her less fortunate brethren, and she was still
+wondering why all the great ones of the earth were so kind to a poor
+humble little creature like herself. It has been related in a former
+chapter how this kind lady had entered the service of a Jewish family,
+when she left Belchamber, as governess to two little girls.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Isaacs, her new employer, was a little, fiery, black-eyed woman of
+immense social ambition, which grew with the steady growth of her
+husband’s carefully accumulated wealth. She would have been the Napoleon
+of London society, had she only lived, so instinctively did she grasp
+the market value of her possessions in the exchange to which she brought
+them. She had already effected the removal of the family from Lancaster
+Gate to Grosvenor Square, and the metamorphosis of Isaacs into de
+Lissac, when Death, who, alas! is no respecter of even the largest
+fortunes, put a term to all her hopes. It seemed as though the very
+energy that spurred her to ever fresh exertions was a fever burning in
+her blood, and sapping while it stimulated her vital forces. Poor Madame
+de Lissac!&mdash;as she insisted on being called&mdash;she died within sight of
+the goal. To the end she fought her illness, and would stand with
+trembling limbs and head aching under the weight of a huge tiara, while
+the names of half the peerage shouted in her staircase gave her strength
+to bear the pain that was killing her. Her widower remarked truly,
+between his sobs, that it ‘would have been a comfort to Rachel’ to have
+seen the cards that snowed on the hall table for days after the funeral.</p>
+
+<p>He, poor man, cared little for all this. He had been glad Rachel should
+have it, just as he liked to give her superb<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_77">{77}</a></span> presents on her birthday,
+and anything else his money could buy for her. Personally, his interest
+was in his work; he did not like the great people who had eaten his food
+and been rude to him. After a hard day in the city, he wanted his carpet
+slippers, a big strong cigar, and a volume of Schiller by the fire, or
+perhaps a sonata by Mozart or Beethoven.</p>
+
+<p>Alice Meakins was an angel in the bereaved household; the little girls
+adored her, and gradually Mr. de Lissac found that he could not do
+without her. The girls were just coming to an age when most of all they
+needed the care of a mother; if she, of whom they were all so fond,
+abandoned them, what would become of them? Poor Alice had a terrible
+struggle. She was sincerely attached to the good man who had been the
+most generous and considerate of employers, and she loved her charges
+with all her heart. The great luxurious easy house had been the kindest
+home to her. How could she turn away from all this warmth and affection?
+‘You know&mdash;you know how I respect, how I love you, if I may say so,’
+cried the poor girl, with tears in her eyes; ‘and I’d lay down my life
+for the children. But oh! Mr. de Lissac, feeling as I do about things, I
+couldn’t marry any one who wasn’t a Christian.’</p>
+
+<p>And now the most wonderful thing came to pass. Her principles inspired
+this shyest and humblest of human beings, who blushed if she had to
+correct a pupil’s mistake, and to whom a difference of opinion was
+almost a physical pain, with something of the spirit of the early
+martyrs. She herself always considered that she had been miraculously
+aided; perhaps a certain pagan divinity, whose assistance she would have
+made haste to repudiate, counted for something in the matter. But
+certain it is, that she was the means of leading a whole family after
+her into the fold, and it may be imagined the excitement she was to Lady
+Charmington under the circumstances. Mr. de Lissac had not been a very
+fervent Jew, and he made a most unenthusiastic Christian; but he was
+nominally converted. Instead of not attending the synagogue, he now
+stayed away from church, and that satisfied his not very exacting
+helpmate, to whom the permission to bring up<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_78">{78}</a></span> her stepdaughters in her
+own faith gave the last brimming happiness in her cup of blessing. They
+at least supplied all the warmth and devotion she demanded. An eminent
+co-religionist of her husband’s, in the city, remarked to a friend:
+‘Isaacs can shanshe his name, and shanshe his religion, but he cannot
+shanshe his nose.’ Neither could he change his habits. He accompanied
+his wife once to the rectory, and once to Belchamber, where the
+rejoicing of the angels embarrassed him to the point of regretting that
+he had not stayed in the wilderness; but his wife mostly made her
+excursions to the scenes of her youth without him, and the present
+occasion was no exception to the rule.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. de Lissac was always fluttered and excited when she came to
+Belchamber, and Sainty’s coming of age was just the sort of occasion to
+appeal to her imagination. The young ladies were fine-looking girls: the
+eldest, Gemma, whose biblical name Jemima had been thus abbreviated
+about the time of the removal to Mayfair, was tall and slight, with a
+clear olive paleness and almond eyes. Nora was more like her father,
+shorter, and with more pronounced features, but with her mother’s
+brilliant colour and black burning orbs. They were both a marked
+contrast to Cissy Eccleston, who was the fairest, pinkest, and whitest
+creature imaginable, with a little button of a nose, a more refined
+etherealised edition of her brother Thomas. Lady Eccleston, too, had
+been fair, but had grown a little red and wrinkled with time. She had an
+astonishingly slight and youthful figure, with rather an elderly face.
+Her hair, having a choice in the matter, had very naturally elected to
+stay young with her waist rather than grow old with her countenance;
+indeed, its adherence to the party of youth seemed to become more marked
+with each succeeding year.</p>
+
+<p>This lady was slightly known to Sainty as a rather unlikely friend of
+his mother; she was, in point of fact, of the nature of a favourite sin
+to Lady Charmington. Her late husband, Sir Thomas Eccleston, K.C.B., had
+been a permanent official in one of the Government offices, and had left
+her with a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_79">{79}</a></span> moderate competence, and a colossal visiting-list. She was
+essentially in and of London, a Belgravian to the marrow of her bones.
+Nothing but insufficiency of income could have prevented her living in
+Eaton Square. As it was, she worshipped at its temple, the church of St.
+Peter, and lived as immediately round the corner as her means permitted.
+She shopped in Sloane Street, she had her books from Westerton’s, she
+visited a ward in St. George’s Hospital; she also took a fashionable
+interest in a poor East-end parish. In short, she mingled religion and
+philanthropy with the punctual performance of her immense social duties
+in exactly the proportion demanded by the society of which she was a
+living, breathing, integral part. Much in so mundane a personage was at
+first rather alarming to Lady Charmington; but they met in the committee
+rooms of charity, who, among the multitude of sins she covers, could
+surely spare a corner of her mantle for the few venial transgressions of
+such a respectable devotee as Lady Eccleston. The very worldliness of
+her relations made her a powerful factor for good works. She might
+always be confidently relied upon for a duchess or minor royalty to head
+a list of patronesses, or a rich friend ready to lend a big house for
+drawing-room meetings; and even her deplorable habit of asking
+theatrical people to dinner on Sundays had been proved to have its good
+side, the professional gentlemen and ladies being very useful in giving
+their services in aid of many deserving funds. No one was a more
+practical hand at organising bazaars, concerts, tableaux, the various
+conduits which brought to the objects of her own interest the
+fertilising stream of other people’s money. She and Mrs. de Lissac and
+their families had travelled from town together. Alice was made for Lady
+Eccleston, who feasted at her expense, used her carriage, copied her
+bonnets, directed her charities, and revised her visiting-list. They
+were allies in many good works. The girls adored Cissy as only dark
+girls can adore a creature composed of rose-leaves and sunlight, though
+they were a little shocked at the triviality of her ideals, and the way
+she occasionally spoke of her mother.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_80">{80}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The visitors arrived about tea-time. Five o’clock tea had never been the
+institution at Belchamber that it is in most country-houses, the
+domestic altar where the high priestess makes her little daily sacrifice
+of blue spirit flame and fragrant herb. Lady Charmington did not drink
+tea as an everyday thing; being a rigid abstainer, she kept it for a
+stimulant when she was tired, which was not often. When there was
+company, a tray of half-cold cups ready poured out used to be handed
+round by one of the footmen, the other following with cream and sugar,
+and the butler bringing up the rear with a plate of bread and butter and
+some spongecakes in a silver basket.</p>
+
+<p>For the present party, the wonderful Claude had brought about a charming
+revolution. A pleasant table with its white cloth and gleaming silver
+was spread under the cedars, at which he and Arthur and Aimée Winston
+dispensed good things to the tired and dusty travellers.</p>
+
+<p>‘How good tea is after a journey,’ Lady Eccleston remarked, beaming on
+the company.</p>
+
+<p>‘I never touch it,’ said Lady Firth, with a shudder; ‘it is destruction
+to the nerves. This habit of five o’clock tea is having the most
+deplorable effect on the younger generation. My maid, who has been with
+me five-and-twenty years, always brings me a glass of taraxacum and hops
+at half-past four; it is wonderfully strengthening.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh dear! it is very dreadful of me to like tea so much,’ cried poor
+Lady Eccleston. ‘And I so agree with you, dear Lady Firth; we do all
+live on our nerves so much, too much, nowadays. I declare now you put it
+like that, I shall be quite afraid to drink it; but taraxacum&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Let me send for some for you,’ said Lady Firth earnestly; ‘you can’t
+think the good it does you. I gave some to the dear bishop of
+Griqualand, after that drawing-room meeting at my house, when he spoke
+for two hours and a half, and was quite exhausted.’</p>
+
+<p>Hardly was Lady Eccleston able to escape the proffered<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_81">{81}</a></span> refreshment by
+tender and well-timed inquiries after the dear bishop and his mission.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, by reason of his lameness, was not expected to hand about
+eatables. He sat, as he usually did, a little drawn back from the circle
+about the table, talking little, noticing everything&mdash;Lady Eccleston’s
+striving after cheap popularity, Mrs. de Lissac’s parted lips as she
+listened to his mother, for whom she had retained all her old
+reverential admiration, his uncle Firth’s bored expression as his Aunt
+Susan Trafford held forth on some small bill that had been too hastily
+passed at the end of the session, and the easy grace with which Claude
+moved about among the groups, dispensing sugar or fruit, and saying
+little laughing nothings to every one. ‘Really, he is marvellous,’
+Sainty thought; ‘it is impossible not to love him.’ Claude was solemn,
+brief, and official with Sir John Trafford, the young M.P., knowing and
+mysterious with Austin Pryor of the Stock Exchange, playful with Arthur,
+<i>empressé</i> with the young ladies, and kindly civil to Tommy Eccleston
+and Johnson, who were very shy, while always ready to fill the teapot
+for Miss Winston, or hand a third cup to Lady Susan, who, like all great
+talkers, was a thirsty soul.</p>
+
+<p>But something else seemed vaguely perceptible to Sainty, watching from
+his low chair under the cedars, a sense of some secret bond or
+understanding between his cousin and the tea-maker. What gives these
+sudden intuitions? What silent, mysterious voice speaks to what inner
+sense, when with all our outward senses we are receiving quite different
+impressions? Claude failed in no shade of pretty deferential politeness
+to Miss Winston; his manner had just that touch of insolence which it
+had to all women, and which many of them take as a compliment. They were
+the centre of a large party, and bathed in the clear golden light of a
+summer afternoon. Sainty intercepted no meaning glance between them, no
+contact of monitory fingers, yet he felt as if a curtain had been
+momentarily withdrawn from some secret thing that he should not have
+seen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_82">{82}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He roused himself with a start that was almost guilty, to find that Miss
+Eccleston, who was sitting near him, had addressed a remark to him which
+he had not heard.</p>
+
+<p>‘I beg your pardon,’ he said; ‘I didn’t know you were speaking to me.’
+Cissy laughed a little, clear, bubbling laugh.</p>
+
+<p>‘You were a thousand miles away,’ she said. ‘I wonder what you were
+thinking of; but I am not so indiscreet as to ask; it was evidently none
+of the present company. I hope I haven’t broken into some important
+thing you were thinking out. I’m told you’re awfully clever and deep,
+and read a lot.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You mustn’t believe all the harm you hear of people,’ Sainty said, with
+a weak attempt at persiflage. He was thinking how pretty this fresh
+young creature was, the childish face shaded by a great hat, the small
+head rising flower-like from among the laces at her throat. No young
+monk in his cloister had had less to do with girls than Sainty; it was a
+curious fact that in his generation there were none in the family. Lady
+Susan Trafford, like her sister and Lady Macbeth, had ‘brought forth men
+children only.’ No early intimacy with sisters or girl cousins had
+taught him any of their ways.</p>
+
+<p>‘You must have had a hot journey down,’ he remarked politely.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! it was unbearable,’ cried Cissy; ‘the carriage was like a furnace.
+You can’t think how fresh and sweet it all seems here, after London.’</p>
+
+<p>‘We were on the Montagues’ yacht for Cowes, and did Goodwood from it;
+you can’t think how delightful it was,’ said Lady Eccleston in a
+slightly raised voice to Lady Eva. ‘They wanted us to go on a cruise
+with them afterwards, but there were so many things I had to see to, I
+was obliged to go back to town for a day or two before coming here, and
+I wouldn’t have missed <i>this</i> visit for anything.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy drew her chair a little nearer to Sainty, and dropped<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_83">{83}</a></span> her voice
+to a confidential whisper. ‘Isn’t that like mamma? She heard me say we
+had come from London, and all that was put in for fear you should think
+we had stayed in town after the season was over.’</p>
+
+<p>‘For fear <i>I</i> should think?’ Sainty repeated, slightly bewildered.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! you or any one else,’ said Cissy. ‘Mamma would die if any one
+thought she hadn’t more invitations than she could accept. I do wish she
+wouldn’t listen to me when I’m talking to men; it makes me furious.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m sure you never say anything you would mind her hearing,’ said
+Sainty rather priggishly.</p>
+
+<p>‘I wouldn’t answer for that, you know,’ rejoined Cissy, with an arch
+expression of something not unlike contempt.</p>
+
+<p>If Sainty had been old Lady Firth, he could not have felt himself more
+outside the sphere of the ordinary attraction of man to maid. When his
+eye rested with admiration on Cissy Eccleston, his first thought had
+been what a charming couple she and Arthur would make. He thought it
+very kind of this pretty young lady to take pity on his disabilities,
+but he felt that it was hard on her to be left to talk to him; he didn’t
+want to monopolise her, and he looked round to see if some more suitable
+companion were not within reach. As if in answer to his thought, Claude
+came towards them at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is cooler now, Miss Eccleston,’ he said. ‘Some of us are going to
+the kitchen-garden in search of gooseberries; do you care to come, or do
+you despise gooseberries?’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy rose with alacrity. ‘I love ’em,’ she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was quite inconsistently annoyed at the sight of the two standing
+there before him. Had Arthur or one of the other boys come for her, he
+would have been glad, but he felt on a sudden that in the light of what
+he had half surprised between his cousin and Miss Winston, Claude had no
+right to come making eyes at this fair young creature. An impulse
+stirred in him to snatch her away, to save her from he did not quite
+know what. He rose too.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_84">{84}</a></span> ‘I am sure Miss Eccleston is tired,’ he said;
+‘it’s a long way to the kitchen-garden; she had much better come in and
+rest.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I’m never tired, except when I’m bored,’ said Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘I know who <i>is</i> tired,’ said Claude, with affectionate solicitude. ‘You
+look quite done up, old chap; you ought to lie down before dinner.
+Remember you’ve a lot before you.’ Sainty saw in a second how silly and
+unreasonable he was being.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said; ‘I am tired. I’ll go in.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude and Cissy moved off in the rear of the little procession of young
+people that was beginning to stream across the lawn, and Sainty stood a
+moment watching them. As he turned towards the house, he saw Miss
+Winston, who had not gone with the others, also looking after the
+retreating couple.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_85">{85}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> Duchess of Sunborough had not revisited her former home since she
+left it after the death of her first husband. Sainty had paid one or two
+duty visits to his grandmother on the rare occasions of his being in
+London, sometimes with his mother, sometimes alone. He had always found
+the duchess smiling and debonair, very civil and entirely indifferent, a
+most mysterious personality, both in her strange spurious youthfulness
+and her entire detachment from family ties. She returned on the present
+occasion as cheerful, as amiable, and as unembarrassed as though she
+were paying a first visit to some distant acquaintances, in a place that
+was entirely new to her. She was accompanied by her husband, his eldest
+son and daughter-in-law, Lord and Lady Rugby, and one of his younger
+sons, Algernon Montgomery, a young officer in the Life Guards. The duke
+was a well-preserved, clean-shaven, spick-and-span old gentleman, whom
+people were fond of citing as a typical nobleman, and indeed among the
+dukes he made a very creditable appearance. Had he been the senior
+partner of some large commercial house he would have passed unobserved
+in a crowd of equally respectable-looking contemporaries on any suburban
+railway. In his youth he had been a gambler and a rake, and had made his
+first wife (the mother of his children) thoroughly unhappy by his
+devotion to many ladies, chief among whom had been his present duchess;
+but having at seventy outgrown his taste for youthful pleasures, he was
+spoken of as a pillar of the State and a model of all the virtues. In
+the year of Belchamber’s majority, a Tory government, of which his grace
+was an inconspicuous<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_86">{86}</a></span> ornament, was busy making Great Britain what she
+is among the nations. The Chamberses, as far as they had a political
+creed, belonged, it is needless to say, to the same party. Lord Firth’s
+family, on the other hand, had always been Whigs, and the old lord, as
+well as the present one, had been a member of more than one Liberal
+cabinet. It was Lady Susan in her younger days who had given vent to the
+sentiment that she would as soon have married the footman as a
+Conservative; but a recent cataclysm among the Liberals had driven this
+ardent lady as well as her cooler brother into antagonism to their own
+party, though they had not as yet been absorbed into the other. There
+was a political flirtation going on between the duke and Lord Firth, who
+found themselves in novel agreement as to the line their young relative
+ought to take in politics. ‘When the Union is threatened, all minor
+differences must be sunk,’ the duke said graciously; ‘when the ship has
+sprung a leak, no matter what are our views of the way she should be
+sailed, we must all take a hand at the pumps’; which made Claude call
+his revered chief the ‘Pompier.’</p>
+
+<p>The guests were assembled before dinner in the great saloon, which even
+in August had a chilly suggestion of not being habitually used.</p>
+
+<p>‘I hope,’ Lord Firth said, with an inviting side glance at his nephew,
+‘that Belchamber will be able to help Hawley’s election. I don’t know
+exactly what his views are&mdash;&mdash;’ and here he paused long enough to give
+Sainty an opportunity of making a profession of faith if he were so
+minded. Nothing, however, was further from Sainty’s intention.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think Mr. Hawley’s election quite safe,’ he said; ‘it is fifty years
+since the county returned anything but a Conservative,’ and he moved
+away to take Ned Parsons, who had arrived since the other guests had
+gone to dress, and present him to Lady Charmington.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had been a little apprehensive how Ned would fit into the
+picture. Parsons had grafted on to the slovenliness that was either
+natural or affected at Cambridge a rather<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_87">{87}</a></span> aggressive splendour; though
+a rebel tuft waved defiance on his crown, and his shirt-front was a
+little crumpled, his collar and tie were of the moment, his pumps were
+new and glossy, and he wore a gardenia in his buttonhole. Lady
+Charmington was talking to Lord and Lady Rugby. Lord Rugby was
+explaining with tactful grace that it was lucky Sainty had been born in
+the summer, otherwise he, as a M.F.H., could not possibly have been
+present on the occasion. From Easter to the beginning of the cub-hunting
+he was, so to speak, at leisure, and had nothing to do but talk of last
+winter’s hunting. Lady Rugby, though also a keen sportswoman, was
+capable of other forms of amusement, and said for her part she liked a
+‘bit of season,’ but ‘poor Rug was so bored in London it was a terror to
+see him.’ She was dressed with the uncompromising neatness affected by
+hunting-ladies; her complexion had that bricky tint that results from
+much exposure to the weather at the covert side, and fashion decreeing
+undulation, her naturally straight brown hair was crimped into a series
+of little ridges and furrows, whose hardness of outline and mathematical
+regularity suggested corrugated iron. Somewhat to Sainty’s surprise, Ned
+fell into easy conversation with this horsey person, rather suggesting,
+though he did not actually say it, that he spent his life in the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>But now the duchess appeared in all her glory, and dinner being
+announced, Sainty offered his arm to his grandmother and headed the long
+procession to the dining-hall.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, my dear boy,’ she began, when they were seated, ‘and how have you
+been lately? You don’t look strong; you must take care of yourself. What
+do you drink? you look as if you wanted red wine. My doctor has put me
+upon whisky. I hate it, but he says I am <i>goutteuse</i>. They call
+everything gout nowadays; too silly, isn’t it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I am sorry you haven’t been well, gr&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty paused, and ‘grandmother’ died in his throat. It seemed so
+ludicrously inappropriate to this festive apparition at his side. He
+glanced with quite a new tenderness to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_88">{88}</a></span> where old Lady Firth sat huddled
+in shawls and then back to the lady on his right. Above the thick
+frizzle of sherry-coloured chestnut that descended to the carefully
+pencilled brows shone one of the duchess’s smaller tiaras&mdash;the great
+Sunborough family crown was being kept for the ball on Thursday&mdash;the
+little nose gleamed unnaturally white between the tired eyes heavily
+rimmed with paint and the puffy cushions beneath them that merged into
+the vivid carmine of the cheeks. The wrinkles under the chin were
+gathered tightly into a great collar of diamonds and pearls sewn on a
+broad black velvet. Below it the shoulders sloped away in their still
+beautiful curves, displaying to the world with the indifference of long
+habit their great expanse of lustreless pallor. The little of her
+grace’s dress that was visible above the line of the table-cloth was of
+a delicate peach colour embroidered in silver, and a huge bunch of
+purple orchids cut with an almost brutal contrast against the excessive
+whiteness of the flesh. She sat erect, placid, exhaling a faint
+sweetness, not unlike the idol of some monstrous worship.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you like the smell of my <i>verveine</i>?’ she asked. ‘I think every
+woman should have her own <i>parfum</i>. I have it sewn into all my
+<i>corsages</i>. I never could bear strong coarse scents. My daughter has
+rather brutalised herself, and is quite capable of using patchouli.
+Horror!’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m afraid I don’t like scent at all,’ Sainty avowed penitently; ‘it
+makes me feel rather sick always.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And now, tell me who every one is,’ continued the duchess affably. ‘Who
+is the champagne blonde with the iridescent perlage trimming next your
+brother?’</p>
+
+<p>‘That is Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! of course, she has been at Sunborough House at parties; one sees
+her everywhere. I ought to have remembered her’; and the duchess sent a
+gracious smile towards Lady Eccleston. ‘And the pretty girl that Claude
+is flirting with is her daughter&mdash;one can see the likeness. <i>Elle est
+très bien, la jeune fille</i>; charming. Madame de Lissac I know:<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_89">{89}</a></span> she is
+<i>richissime</i> and very generous; and your mother tells me she was your
+governess once; that is very romantic. The black girls are not her
+daughters, <i>n’est-ce pas</i>?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Her step-daughters.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah yes. And the men? Pryor I know; they say he is making money and will
+get on. The pink boy is <i>encore</i> a (what did you say?) Eccleston. They
+resemble each other like peas, that family. And the untidy young man who
+is amusing Aimée Winston so much? By the way, how came <i>she</i> here? With
+your Aunt Eva, of course. She is not a nice girl.’</p>
+
+<p>The duchess delivered this condemnation with a most majestic air of
+virtue. ‘I do not like a girl to be talked about,’ she continued;
+‘afterwards, <i>je ne dis pas</i>; but before marriage a girl cannot be too
+careful. She always succeeds with men, however. The duke declares she is
+very clever; and one can see she is pleasing Mr.&mdash;&mdash; Who did you say he
+was?’</p>
+
+<p>‘He is a Cambridge friend of mine; his name is Parsons.’</p>
+
+<p>‘He seems a nice fellow,’ Lady Rugby cut in from the other side of
+Sainty. ‘I wonder if he is anything to do with the Leicestershire
+Parsonses. My old uncle, Sir Tom Whittaker, who hunted the Scratchley
+for years, married a widow, and one of her daughters married a Parsons.
+I know it used to be a great joke in the family because he was a Parson,
+don’t yer know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ Sainty answered; ‘you will have to ask him.’
+Really, Ned was fitting in beautifully, and if only his relationship to
+Lady Whittaker could be established, he felt he need trouble no more
+about him.</p>
+
+<p>The duchess yawned. ‘They are all charming, no doubt,’ she said; ‘but,
+my dear boy, none of these people give much <i>éclat</i> to your coming of
+age. I felt you must have a few people whose names people would know,
+just to put into the <i>Morning Post</i>. And your mother has lived so long
+out of the world she knows no one&mdash;but no one. I believe she is angry
+with me for insisting on the Dalsanies and Vere Deans;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_90">{90}</a></span> but I am used to
+that; she has always been angry with me.’ This was getting on dangerous
+ground.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is very good of you to take an interest,’ Sainty said in his
+stiffest manner; but the duchess did not in the least wish to be treated
+as family; she thought it <i>was</i> good of her.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! <i>du tout</i>,’ she said suavely. ‘Besides, it was not all unselfish.
+Ella Dalsany plays piquet with me, and Dalsany takes a very good hand in
+the duke’s whist. I suppose,’ she added tentatively, ‘your mother would
+not allow a baccarat?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good gracious!’ cried Sainty, much alarmed, ‘I don’t suppose there is a
+card in the house.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I always travel with my little box,’ said his grandmother. ‘But we
+must respect the prejudices of the <i>châtelaine</i>; we will only play
+whist.’ This was before the days of the tyranny of bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The duchess glanced at Sir John Trafford, who was sitting at her right,
+and seeing his attention engaged by the lady whom he had taken in, she
+leaned a little towards her grandson, and sinking her voice
+confidentially she murmured, ‘When I knew that your cousin here was
+coming, I felt it was only kind to ask the Dalsanies; and if Ella had
+her cavalier, then poor Dalsany must have <i>la belle comtesse</i> to amuse
+him; he couldn’t be left out in the cold, poor dear.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Scandal, Hélo,’ Lady Rugby called out&mdash;(the duchess liked the younger
+members of her family to call her by her Christian name). ‘When you have
+on that expression, and I can’t hear what you say, I always know you are
+taking away some one’s character.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Whose character is the duchess taking away?’ asked Sir John; ‘not mine,
+I hope’; and this struck her grace as so humorous that she almost
+choked.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty sat bewildered and vaguely pained. In the mouth of an old woman,
+and that old woman his dead father’s mother, the playful innuendoes,
+which to the duchess seemed only the ordinary small change of
+dinner-table talk, struck him as signs of a monstrous depravity. He
+glanced round the great room with its ceiling by La Guerre, and heavy
+gilt<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_91">{91}</a></span> decorations, and the rows of portraits by Vandyke and Lely, down
+the long table with its lights and flowers and massive plate, at the two
+rows of flushed, eagerly talking people stretching away on either hand,
+and his heart failed him. He wondered sadly why Ned Parsons, who was one
+of six children in a little shabby rectory, and the de Lissac girls,
+whose grandfather was said to have been a rag and bone merchant, should
+seem perfectly at home among all these splendours, while he, the founder
+of the feast, the owner of the house, who had been born and bred in it,
+felt so curiously ill at ease at the head of his own table. Arthur, just
+fresh from school, was chattering away to Lady Eccleston and Nora de
+Lissac, between whom he sat, with the ease and assurance of an old
+London diner-out. It was neither birth, breeding, nor custom, then,
+which made people feel at home in society. Whence came this horrible
+sensation of being out of place? After all, these people, who together
+produced such a dazzling effect of glittering festivity, were
+individually nothing but relations, old friends, undergraduates,
+schoolboys. His mother, his grandmother, his uncle Cor, his aunts, his
+former governess, his cousins, his brother; he had sat down with each
+and all of them to a score of meals without feeling like the lady in
+<i>Comus</i>. He feared it was very snobbish of him to be so disagreeably
+affected by dining in an unaccustomed room and with an unusual number of
+guests. Perhaps it was the duchess, with her shocking old shoulders and
+naughty hints, and the little scent bags sewn into her bodice, who
+brought such a disturbing atmosphere of the great world into his life.
+If so, how much worse was it going to be next day, when she would be
+reinforced by these threatened strangers of her own undoubted fashion
+and loose morality? The thought of all these guilty married people,
+cynically invited ‘for’ each other, filled him with horror. No doubt he
+exaggerated, and took the whole matter more tragically than the
+circumstances warranted, but he was very young and very unsophisticated,
+and things that were not right appeared to him terribly and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_92">{92}</a></span>
+portentously wrong. He felt as though the home of his mother, of his own
+innocent childhood, were being turned into a house of ill fame.</p>
+
+<p>But Tuesday, if it brought this last brimming influx of unwelcome
+strangers, brought with them one supreme compensation in the person of
+Gerald Newby. Gerald, who was making a cross-country journey, was
+arriving at a different station from the other guests, several miles in
+an opposite direction, and Sainty decided to drive his own confidential
+pony to meet his friend. His mother looked grave when she heard of it,
+and asked if he did not think it would be more civil for him to be there
+to receive the Dalsanies and Lady Deans. ‘Oh no, mother; the last person
+they would care to see is their host,’ Sainty said. ‘You will be here,
+and Uncle Cor has promised to be about; he knows them all. I shan’t be
+missed.’</p>
+
+<p>For once Sainty had his way, and drove off rejoicing in his escape. He
+was generally nervous of driving alone, his lameness making him so
+helpless in case of an accident; but to-day, that his conversation with
+his friend might be quite free, he would not even take a groom with him.
+He had so much to say to Gerald, so much which he could say to no one
+else, that he wanted to pour it all out unchecked by fear of listening
+ears. As he drove to the little roadside station in the shimmering heat
+of the August afternoon, by great fields of waving corn, and under the
+thick sleepy woods knee-deep in fern where he could hear the pheasants
+scuttling and clucking, he felt a weight lifted off his heart; now at
+last he would have some one to talk to, some one who understood. The
+train was late, and the flies bothered the pony dreadfully, but at last
+the long wait came to an end, and Newby, bronzed by foreign suns and
+very cindery and dusty, emerged smiling from the station, and climbed
+into the cart beside him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! you have come yourself,’ he said; ‘that was very kind. Where’s your
+man?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I came alone,’ Sainty answered; ‘I wanted to talk. I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_93">{93}</a></span> wanted you all to
+myself, and your portmanteau must sit behind; there was no room for the
+groom.’ Something in Gerald’s face made him add playfully, ‘Did you
+expect a coach and four? Am I not receiving you with sufficient
+ceremony?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, <i>me</i>!’ said Newby, with a little deprecating gesture of quite false
+humility.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty wanted to hear all that his friend had been doing, of the
+countries he had visited, the walks he had taken, the peaks he had
+climbed; but for once Newby did not seem to be inclined to talk about
+himself. He leaned back, beaming lazily on the passing landscape.</p>
+
+<p>‘After all,’ he said, ‘one may go where one will, to the grandest of
+Swiss peaks, or the sunlight and flowers of Italy, but there is nothing
+like this English country in the summer; it is so prosperous, so
+established, at once homelike and ineffably high-bred, like the best of
+our old landed aristocracy.’</p>
+
+<p>‘O Lord!’ Sainty cried. ‘That same landed aristocracy is smothering
+<i>me</i>. Wait till you see the awful specimens who have come together to
+rejoice in a new recruit to their ranks.’ And he launched out into a
+tirade, as enthusiastic young people will, on the barbarism of the
+English upper classes, their want of education and refinement, their
+inability to appreciate intellectual pleasures, their low standard of
+morality, and, above all, their entire self-satisfaction and conviction
+of their own perfect rightness.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Look at the duke,’ he said; ‘there’s a man who owns the finest private
+library in England. I don’t believe he knows even its chief treasures by
+name. If it was sold to-morrow, and the shelves fronted with sham
+book-backs, like the doors in the library at Belchamber, it wouldn’t
+make the smallest difference to him. Rugby could keep his collection of
+riding and driving-whips in them; I am told it is unique. He is a kind
+of centaur; he can, and will, recount to you every run of last winter,
+without omitting a fence or a ditch; but if you ask him the simplest
+question about the history or archæology of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_94">{94}</a></span> country he hunts over,
+he will stare at you as if you were a madman. What have I in common with
+such people? By what curious freak of nature have I been born among
+them?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lord Rugby is the Duke of Sunborough’s eldest son, isn’t he?’ asked
+Newby. ‘And the present duchess, if I’m not mistaken, is your
+grandmother. I like to know who the people are that I’m going to meet.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My grandmother!’ said Sainty tragically. ‘Well, she’s my father’s
+mother, and I mustn’t say how she affects me; but oh! heavens, Gerald,
+wait till you see her! And she has asked some other people, whom I don’t
+even know, but who all seem to be in love with each other’s wives, and
+to have to be asked to meet each other as you would engaged couples. It
+sickens me, I tell you. It’s an atmosphere I can’t breathe.’</p>
+
+<p>Somehow Newby, whom he had often heard give vent to sentiments of a
+lofty and republican purity, and in whose mouth a favourite phrase was
+‘the aristocracy of intellect,’ did not seem to enter as sympathetically
+into his feelings as he had hoped. He continued smiling peacefully on
+the prospect around him.</p>
+
+<p>‘And where do you begin?’ he asked presently, a little inconsequently.</p>
+
+<p>‘Where do I begin? How do you mean?’ Sainty stammered.</p>
+
+<p>‘I mean your property, your land. When do we come to your boundary?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! the property,’ Sainty answered. ‘It’s pretty well all Belchamber
+all the way, except just for a bit on the left of the road soon after we
+started, where the Hawley woods cut in, in a sort of wedge.’</p>
+
+<p>Gerald nodded placidly, as if the thought gave him pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>‘I expect you’re tired after your journey, this hot weather,’ Sainty
+said, finding his friend so languid. ‘Shall we shirk all the crowd, and
+go and have some tea in the schoolroom when we get in?’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_95">{95}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Whatever you say, my dear boy,’ Newby agreed. ‘I am entirely in your
+hands.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was aware of the slightest, most impalpable change in his
+friend’s manner towards himself, just the faintest tinge of something
+that might almost be called deferential in a person so naturally
+authoritative as Newby; and this seemed to accentuate itself with every
+acre of Chambers land across which they drove. It made him vaguely
+uncomfortable; his denunciation of his peers seemed somehow to dwindle
+and lose force in such an unfostering atmosphere. He had still a great
+deal on his heart of which he longed to unburthen himself, but Gerald
+was perversely interested in the size of the park and the number of
+deer, and paid but a polite and perfunctory attention to his host’s
+exposition of the sins of the British aristocracy. Later on, when they
+joined the rest of the party, and Sainty, having been himself presented
+to the newcomers, proceeded to perform the same office for Newby, he
+noted with terror something that in any one else he would almost have
+called obsequious in his friend’s attitude. He resolutely shut his eyes
+to it; it was of course out of the question that a person of Newby’s
+commanding intellect and noble independence of character could be in any
+way affected by the mere baubles of wealth or rank in the people with
+whom he came in contact. He wondered he could be so snobbish as to think
+of such a thing, even to deny it; but he couldn’t help seeing that
+Gerald’s manner to the duke and even his uncle Firth and Lord Dalsany
+was not absolutely frank and unembarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>‘He is trying to make himself agreeable for my sake,’ Sainty thought. ‘A
+man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble
+thought cannot feel <i>at home</i> in the exhausted receiver that is called
+“society”; but if he only knew how much better he appears with his own
+natural manner, though it <i>is</i> a little dictatorial, he would not try
+and soften it even for the sake of being civil to my guests.’ What with
+trying not to observe that Newby smiled and bowed too much, and not to
+watch for indications of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_96">{96}</a></span> good understanding at which his
+grandmother had hinted as existing between certain members of the party,
+Sainty spent an even more miserable evening than he had done the night
+before.</p>
+
+<p>When the duke and Lord Nonsuch had smoked their elderly cigars and gone
+to bed, he succeeded in persuading Newby that he was tired, and leaving
+the rest of the party listening to Lord Dalsany’s Irish stories, he
+accompanied his friend to his room, bent on having out the rest of the
+talk of which he had been defrauded in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is awful, simply awful!’ he burst out, as he shut the door, ‘all
+this horrible display and waste of money! I feel like Nero, sitting
+through these long steamy dinners with too much to eat and too much to
+drink, and thinking of the thousands of starving people who could be fed
+for months on the money we waste on a meal.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That is very good of you, my dear lad,’ Newby answered, stretching
+himself luxuriously in the armchair which he wheeled up to the open
+window, ‘but not at all what Nero would have felt.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t laugh at me, Gerald,’ Sainty said piteously. ‘I know it’s absurd
+to rant and be highflown; but it nauseated me to hear Lady Deans talking
+about these new clubs and restaurants and saying what a mercy it was to
+have some place where one could get decent food. I thought of that woman
+never spending less than a pound on her dinner, and thinking it was a
+merit, while people were starving a few streets off. My bookseller told
+me he wanted her to buy a six-shilling book the other day, and she said
+she couldn’t afford it, she should get it from the library.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That tall lady on your left with the black pearls was the Countess
+Deans then, whom one hears so much about,’ said Newby. ‘I didn’t catch
+her name when you introduced me, but I thought it was she from her
+photographs, though they don’t do her justice.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Grandmamma says she and Lord Dalsany are <i>au mieux</i>. Good God! what
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_97">{97}</a></span>does she mean? And that Lady Dalsany&mdash;&mdash;Faugh! I can’t stir about this
+dirt. Is this just their silly way of talking, or are they all really
+people whom decent folk oughtn’t to ask into their houses?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, you exaggerate,’ said Gerald, waving his hand gently. ‘You have
+lived the life of an anchorite. These Londoners have their shibboleths,
+and understand each other; the badinage of a great city is not meant to
+be taken literally,’</p>
+
+<p>‘What <i>you</i> must think of it all!’ cried Sainty affectionately. He had
+an uneasy feeling that Newby was not as much horrified as he ought to
+be. ‘I hoped,’ he went on, ‘that you might have found some congenial
+companionship in my uncle; but Uncle Cor disappoints me. When he gets
+with all these smart people, he seems to sink to their level. I can’t
+make him out. Seeing him to-night you would never guess what real
+convictions he has. I have looked up to him all my life, but this
+evening he appeared frivolous and cynical; I could hardly believe it was
+he talking.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought Lord Firth charming,’ Gerald replied, with real conviction.
+‘His talk seemed to me in just the right tone of easy playfulness for
+light social intercourse, with ladies present. He was not in his place
+in the House of Lords; nothing called for a profession of faith.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And I hate all this Unionist business,’ Sainty continued. ‘I never
+thought I should live to see Uncle Cor, who has always been a Liberal,
+and from whom I imbibed all my own politics till I met you, making up to
+that old Tory duke. They tried to get some expression of agreement out
+of me last night, but I wouldn’t say what was expected of me. You know
+I’m a Radical, and a Home Ruler.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That is all very well for <i>me</i>,’ Gerald answered, ‘but, my dear child,
+doesn’t it seem a little absurd in <i>your</i> position? Oh, don’t mistake
+me. I don’t want you to deny your convictions, but there are so many
+things one believes without flourishing them in the face of the public.
+You wouldn’t, for instance, care to tell your mother just how you feel
+about the doctrines of revealed religion&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty drooped with discouragement. ‘It is true; it is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_98">{98}</a></span> hideously true,’
+he said. ‘One is tied and bound with the chain of a hundred shams. Shall
+I never be able to say what I really think? To-morrow, for instance,
+nothing would content my mother but that the performances should begin
+with a sort of thanksgiving service at Great Charmington. It is meant as
+a solemn dedication of me. If I were really brave and honest, I should
+refuse, but I think it would break my mother’s heart.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You are quite right, quite right; and why <i>should</i> you refuse? I am
+sure you <i>do</i> dedicate yourself to the principle of good which rules the
+universe. What more do you mean, what more need you mean?’</p>
+
+<p>‘My mother will take it as meaning much more, and I know that she does,
+and so will Mrs. de Lissac and her dear old father; they will look on it
+as giving in a solemn adherence to all their doctrines.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You take things too seriously, my Sainty,’ said Gerald, with an
+indulgent smile.</p>
+
+<p>‘But it is you who have always exhorted me to take things seriously; I
+have heard you inveigh a hundred times against the careless flippancy
+that is the curse of our generation.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens!’ said Newby, suppressing a yawn; ‘have I invented a
+Frankenstein monster, who is going to turn and devour me?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know you to-night, Gerald,’ Sainty said reproachfully. ‘You are
+like my uncle; you seem changed somehow. Surely if there is ever a time
+for serious thought and serious talk, it is the vigil of one’s
+twenty-first birthday.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah yes,’ said Newby solemnly. ‘Don’t think I minimise the importance of
+all to-morrow means to you. You are coming into your kingdom, and must
+rule it wisely and well; but I don’t want you to make your first
+appearance in arms tilting at windmills, my dear fellow, and alienating
+all the people who are your natural allies.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I wanted to consult you,’ Sainty said, ‘about my speech to the tenants,
+but you are tired and sleepy; it is a shame to keep you up.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_99">{99}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Newby politely, with the most transparent
+effort at interest.</p>
+
+<p>‘I was going to show you some heads I had put together, but I think I
+won’t bother you; there is only just one thing I want to ask you. Ought
+I to tell them what I really think and feel about things, about Home
+Rule, for instance? Some sort of utterance will be expected of me about
+politics, I feel sure.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Your uncle was talking most sensibly to me after dinner about that very
+thing. “My family,” he said, “have always been Liberals, but this is a
+Conservative county, and the agricultural population is always
+Conservative. I have had, as you know, to differ from the chiefs of my
+own party. It is a painful position. Luckily for Belchamber, he has not
+been required to make the choice that I have found so hard; he inherits
+his politics as he inherits his estate, both, I flatter myself, the
+better for a little enlightened handling by his mother and myself. He
+will not be a worse statesman for having come under some Liberal
+influences in his youth.” It struck me as admirable.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then you would have me be merely colourless, indulge in a few
+platitudes, instead of saying what I think?’</p>
+
+<p>‘What good could you effect by starting in to preach Radicalism to a
+tentful of Conservative farmers merry with beef and ale, supported on
+one side by a duke who is a member of a Tory government, and on the
+other by a Unionist earl?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty sighed. ‘You know it is always fatally easy to me to hold my
+tongue and let people think that I agree with them,’ he said bitterly;
+‘courage has never been my strong point.’ He had looked to his friend
+for counsel, for support, for the strength to tell the truth in the face
+of all the world, the strength in which he felt himself so sadly
+lacking. He left him baffled and discouraged, and all at sea as to what
+he would do and say on the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed down the long corridor of bedrooms, he saw the last door
+before the staircase open noiselessly a very little<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_100">{100}</a></span> way, as if some one
+were looking out. When he came quite near to it, it was swiftly, but
+still silently, closed again. The hinted scandals that had oppressed him
+came crowding to his mind, thoughts of shameful, illicit things being
+done in the great silent, dark house. He could not resist the curiosity
+that made him lift his candle and read the name on the little ticket on
+the door: it was Miss Winston’s.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty and Arthur still kept the rooms they had occupied as boys, which,
+with the old schoolroom and another that had once been the tutor’s and
+was now Claude’s, formed a small pavilion adjoining the west wing, and
+consequently at the opposite extremity of the house from the guest
+chambers. To regain his own room he had to cross the whole great central
+part, now black and quiet as the grave. Just as he reached the door that
+shut off the family wing, he heard some one behind it. No doubt the
+tapping of his stick had warned whoever it was of his approach, for as
+he opened it he saw a figure swiftly vanish into the room on the right.
+His first impulse was to pass on and take no notice; then it struck him
+that it might be a thief, and with the sudden courage of nervous people
+he went into the room holding his light high, and cried ‘Who’s there?’
+He found himself face to face with his cousin. The stable clock struck
+two at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens! Sainty,’ said Claude, with an uneasy laugh, ‘who expected
+to find <i>you</i> prowling about the house at this unearthly hour?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I have been sitting up talking to Newby,’ Sainty said rather sternly.
+‘What are <i>you</i> doing dodging into rooms in the dark?’</p>
+
+<p>‘We have only just left the smoking-room. I came in here to get a book
+to take up to your friend Parsons; he said he should like to see it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Your candle is out; shall I give you a light?’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘So it is,’ said Claude; ‘the draught from the door, no doubt. How lucky
+I met you. Good-night, dear old man.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good-night,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_101">{101}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Whether</span> or not there was truth in what Lady Charmington had said, that
+no one took so little interest in the festivities of his coming of age
+as Sainty himself, it certainly came about that hardly any one took so
+little part in them.</p>
+
+<p>The memory of his birthday remained with him as a shifting
+phantasmagoria of painful images that partook of the nature of a
+nightmare. To be the principal figure in any pageant must always have a
+charm for the imagination of youth, if combined with the ability to play
+the part becomingly; but it is a very different matter for one conscious
+in every nerve of his own inadequacy to be set up a butt for
+disappointment, and a peep-show for ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>The day had begun with a message from his mother that she would like to
+see him before prayers. He found her in her private sitting-room, where
+the picture of his father which he had worshipped as a child was
+enthroned on its gilt easel in the corner. Lady Charmington was clean
+and cool from her morning toilet, her hair even smoother and tighter
+than usual. She was dressed in her Sunday black silk, and seated in a
+high-backed chair beside a little table, with the air of a priestess at
+the altar. Her large serviceable hands were crossed on the Bible on her
+lap. They had big knuckles and many rings, some of which, having been
+her late husband’s, were more massive than is usual in a woman’s.
+Sainty’s quick eye noticed that a signet she habitually wore was not
+among them. He also saw that on the table beside her was an imposing
+pile of ledgers, a small morocco box, and a book which, from its being
+bound in black with depressing-looking soft flaps folding over the edges
+of the leaves, he rightly conjectured to be a work of devotion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_102">{102}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington was not a demonstrative woman, and she was a very shy
+one. She drew her son towards her, and gravely kissed him on the brow,
+by no means a daily occurrence or matter of course between them; then
+she plunged rather nervously into a little speech she had prepared for
+the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>‘This is a solemn day for both you and me, Belchamber’ (he noticed that
+she did not call him by the familiar nickname), ‘and one to which I have
+long looked forward. I have worked hard,’ and she glanced at the pile of
+account-books beside her, ‘in your interests. God forgive me if it is
+wrong, but I fear it is not without pride that I come to you to-day to
+give an account of my stewardship.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty gently pressed his mother’s hand, which he still held. ‘Dearest
+mother,’ he said, ‘I know well how hard you have worked, and all you
+have done for me. I assure you I appreciate&mdash;&mdash;’ But Lady Charmington
+withdrew her hand, and held it up in deprecation.</p>
+
+<p>‘I do not wish to boast or to be thanked,’ she said, ‘but I think I may
+truly say I have spared neither time nor labour. It has been my object
+to be able to hand over the estate to you free of debt and unencumbered,
+and I can do so. To-day my stewardship ends.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But oh, mother!’ Sainty broke in, ‘it mustn’t end to-day, nor, I hope,
+for many days to come. You know how utterly inexperienced I am, and then
+I have got to go back to Cambridge till I have taken my degree. You
+won’t refuse to go on looking after everything just as you have always
+done, will you?’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington had lost the thread of her discourse; she looked rather
+anxiously at her son.</p>
+
+<p>‘We have no time to-day to go into accounts,’ she said; ‘but some day,
+when all these people have gone, you must give me an hour or two, and we
+will go through everything.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Very well,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Before we go down,’ his mother went on, ‘I must wish you many happy
+returns, which I haven’t done yet, and give<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_103">{103}</a></span> you my little presents. The
+new set of harness for your cart is with the other things; you saw that:
+Arthur says your old one is a disgrace; but, besides that, here is your
+father’s signet-ring, which I want you to wear,’ and she produced from
+the morocco case the ring he had missed from her finger. ‘And this is a
+little book I want you to use every morning and evening; you will find
+it very helpful.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty just touched the ring with his lips before he slipped it on his
+finger, and glanced with passionate tenderness at the simpering image in
+the corner. Then he began turning over the leaves of the little book
+with its limp cover that reminded him of French plums. He was wondering
+if honesty obliged him to say that he did not use such aids to devotion,
+did not, in fact, very often pray at all. Finally, he decided that he
+had not the courage to say anything of the sort, so he accepted the
+volume without much enthusiasm, and put it in his pocket. Then,
+detaining his mother as she was preparing to leave the room, ‘I want to
+tell you, mother,’ he said, ‘that, though I don’t <i>say</i> much, I do
+really value all you have done for me, and been to me, and Uncle Cor
+too. Between you, you have almost done away with the disadvantage that
+every boy must be under who has no father.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington was faintly stirred&mdash;probably she was pleased.</p>
+
+<p>‘There are many things, my son, that I should like different about you,’
+she said, ‘and especially I wish you stronger. But no one can say you
+have ever been anything but a good boy.’ They went downstairs, both a
+little moved by having performed the operation so difficult to the
+British race, of displaying feeling.</p>
+
+<p>At breakfast the question had arisen of which of the party would attend
+the service at Great Charmington parish church. This part of the
+proceedings did not seem to find favour among most of the company, and
+Lady Charmington’s brow grew dark as one after another excused himself.
+The duchess was of course out of the question, as she seldom appeared
+before lunch, her elaborate construction being a thing of time<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_104">{104}</a></span> and
+caution. To Lord Nonsuch, communion after breakfast was nothing short of
+sacrilege; he was a leading light in the High Church party, and this was
+his first appearance at Belchamber since a memorable occasion many years
+before, when he had said Lady Charmington was an Erastian, and she had
+called him a Jesuit.</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>I</i> should <i>love</i> it, dear Sarah,’ said Lady Eva, ‘but a poor literary
+hack’s time is not her own. I <i>must</i> work this morning, to be free this
+afternoon.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What has your mother got to do?’ asked Cissy of Claude. ‘Is she writing
+a book?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Didn’t you know mamma was “Maidie,” who does “the girls’ tea-table” in
+the <i>Looking-glass</i>? She has very nearly got the sack because she never
+gets her article ready in time; but she takes herself very seriously as
+a journalist, I assure you.’</p>
+
+<p>The Dalsanies were Roman Catholics, and Lady Deans nothing in
+particular; and Gerald Newby, when he found that the people of higher
+rank were shirking, discovered that he had letters to write which could
+not be put off; but the climax of Lady Charmington’s displeasure was
+reached when Arthur announced he would rather stay at home and play
+lawn-tennis with Parsons. Lord Firth had not intended to go, but he
+sacrificed himself to mollify his sister. His religion was of that
+comfortable, rational kind in which there is more state than church, and
+which is first cousin to agnosticism, but infinitely more respectable.
+He took a great interest in the distribution of bishoprics and the
+proper conduct of the service, which, however, he rarely felt called on
+to attend, except in such cathedrals and college chapels as gratified
+his fastidious taste and fondness for sacred music.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, a dozen people had been got together, and made a sufficiently
+imposing appearance. Old Lady Firth, Mrs. de Lissac and the girls, and
+Lady Eccleston went as a matter of course. Claude went to please his
+aunt, Cissy because Claude did, Johnson because Cissy did, and Tommy
+because his mother told him to. ‘I never have <i>any</i> trouble about church
+with my boys,’ Lady Eccleston said. ‘I never have<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_105">{105}</a></span> <i>made</i> them go, even
+when they were little. I let them play tennis or do whatever they like,
+till the time comes; if I’ve time I play with them. Then I just
+cheerfully say “Now, boys, who’s for church?” and they nearly always
+say, “All right, mother, we’ll go,” unless they’re ill.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington, sore over Arthur’s defection, was in no mood to admire
+the success of this plan. ‘Do you mean to say you play lawn-tennis on
+Sunday?’ she asked frigidly; and Lady Eccleston discovered she ‘must fly
+and put her bonnet on, or she’d be late.’</p>
+
+<p>Through the service in the church, and the subsequent ceremony of
+presenting him with a silver salver and an address from the tradesmen of
+Great Charmington, the headache with which Sainty had most inopportunely
+begun the day grew steadily worse. The thought of all these poor men
+putting their hard-earned pounds together to give a great ugly useless
+thing to him, who had already so much more than he wanted, unmanned him;
+the tears were in his eyes as he tried to thank them. Nor was he less
+cruelly embarrassed by the discovery that the guests in the house had
+all thought it necessary to come laden with gifts. In his life no one
+but his mother and uncle had ever given him anything; he was not
+accustomed to presents, and received them with an awkward sense of
+obligation.</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber being peculiarly rich in beautiful old plate, Arthur
+presented him with a huge heraldic claret-jug of monumental hideousness,
+for which long afterwards he paid the bill, when settling his brother’s
+debts. The duchess gave him a cabinet inlaid after the manner of
+Sheraton, in which a whole army of tumblers and sodawater-bottles,
+lemon-squeezers, spirit-cases, and cigar-boxes rose and sank and
+manœuvred with incredible ingenuity on innumerable springs. Down to Lady
+Eccleston, who brought the latest fashionable invention for tearing the
+leaves of his beloved books, no one was missing from the list; even Lady
+Deans and the Dalsanies contributed their tale of paper-knives and
+cigarette-cases.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_106">{106}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The only person whose gift showed any care or knowledge of Sainty’s
+tastes and wants was Claude, who had taken the trouble to get from Paris
+a really beautiful cane, a true Malacca, strong enough to be a support,
+with tortoiseshell crutch encrusted with little gold stars, and an
+indiarubber shoe to prevent its slipping on the floors of the house.
+Sainty flushed with pleasure at sight of the charming thing, which
+seemed to adorn his lameness with a certain elegance. He wondered why
+his cousin, who was full of such pretty little cares and tendernesses,
+should be so wanting in moral sense. His heart yearned over him. ‘Ah
+Claude,’ he said, and could say no more.</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear old boy,’ said Claude, pressing his hand, ‘what do I not owe you?
+There is nothing that a pauper like me can give to <i>you</i>; but such as it
+is my little present brings real affection and heartfelt wishes for your
+happiness.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty’s head was by this time aching cruelly, his temples throbbing
+like sledge-hammers; he was feeling worn out mentally and physically,
+ravaged by conflicting emotions. Having what was very rare with him, a
+slight flush, he looked less ill than usual, and nobody thought of his
+being tired; but it was at the tenants’ dinner that he set the seal on
+the ignominy of his failure.</p>
+
+<p>In consideration of the fact that this was a long and crowded day for
+one who was not robust, it had been settled that he should not preside
+at the meal, but merely come in and take the chair, for the healths and
+speeches, when the solid business of feeding had been satisfactorily
+disposed of. It was between three and four o’clock, the hottest part of
+the afternoon; and though the sides of the tent had been opened here and
+there, the atmosphere was stifling, heavy with the odours of meat and
+drink and the acrid exhalations of humanity. Sainty almost reeled on
+entering, and had to steady himself by Arthur’s arm. There were some
+seventy or eighty men present of all ages and degrees of stoutness, all
+very hot, and mostly somewhat red in the face. Many of them were
+intimately known to Arthur, who stopped several<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_107">{107}</a></span> times in the progress
+up the tables to shake hands right and left. He met them at the covert
+side, he shot over their farms, he played in cricket matches with them.
+Sainty would have given anything for a touch of that happy graciousness,
+that power of being hail-fellow-well-met. Circumstances had combined to
+make him almost a stranger to the men who were on such friendly terms
+with his younger brother. He knew that in his heart he had far more real
+brotherhood with these sons of the soil, a much more jealous respect for
+their manhood and independence; but his very sense of equality made him
+feel the falseness of his position, whereas Arthur’s easy familiarity
+sprang from a firm conviction of his own unquestionable superiority.
+Sainty was only too well aware, as he took his seat in gloomy silence,
+that his grave bow in answer to their friendly greetings, would be set
+down to pride by most of the people present. When, after loyally
+drinking the Queen’s health, the guests were once more seated and their
+glasses filled, the oldest tenant rose to propose the toast of the
+occasion. He began by complimenting the young man on attaining his
+majority, spoke shortly of his attachment to the place and the family,
+and at great length on the badness of times and the difficulties of the
+agriculturist, which he seemed in some mysterious way to attribute to
+Mr. Gladstone. The voice went droning on, monotonous by reason of its
+very emphasis, until Sainty felt almost hypnotised by it and by the
+buzzing of the numberless wasps and flies that were hovering over the
+remnants of food and drops of beer on the table-cloths. Sainty had quite
+ceased to attach any meaning to the sounds, when suddenly the voice
+stopped; the old man was sitting down; the audience, which had been
+dozing, shook itself and sat up alert, and all eyes were turned on the
+hero of the occasion. For weeks past Sainty had given anxious thought to
+what he should say to his tenants. He had never before had to make a
+speech, and he had rehearsed many alternative utterances in the privacy
+of his chamber. He had felt somehow that this was going to be his
+opportunity, the electrical moment when he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_108">{108}</a></span> was to make himself known to
+those for whom it was of such importance what manner of man he was. He
+would let them see that he was not an indifferent invalid, still less a
+selfish pleasure-seeker, a careless eater of the produce and neglecter
+of the producer; he would tell them how much he had their welfare at
+heart. In carefully prepared sentences he would allude to his great
+obligations (which incidentally were theirs also) to his mother’s long
+laborious stewardship, his uncle’s enlightened economic teaching. He had
+devoted hours to the consideration of just how much it would be well to
+hint at his political convictions; sometimes he had been pleased to
+fancy himself electrifying his hearers by a militant profession of
+faith, but in calmer moments more moderate counsels prevailed.</p>
+
+<p>Now the time so anxiously anticipated had actually arrived. With a great
+shuffling of feet the company got to its legs; some one started ‘For
+he’s a jolly good fellow’ rather shakily, which was promptly taken up
+and cheerfully shouted in a great variety of keys, and then all settled
+down to await the answering speech.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty rose unsteadily and passed his hand across his forehead; for a
+second he stood silent, while the guests greeted his rising by drumming
+on the tables with their knife-handles. Then it seemed as though a
+crushing weight descended through the top of his head to his brain, the
+hum of the insects swelled to an organ roar in his ears, the hundred
+faces before him seemed to float and swim in a mist, and with a kind of
+gasping cry he sank back unconscious in Lord Firth’s arms.</p>
+
+<p>After this there could be no question of his appearing at the monster
+fête and garden-party which had been organised for the afternoon. The
+distant braying of a band, the sounds of many voices and laughter, and
+the scrunching of innumerable wheels upon the gravel were borne to him
+on the summer breeze, as he lay prostrate upon his bed. He had not yet
+come back to any sense of shame or distress; for the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_109">{109}</a></span>moment, pure
+physical pain was almost a relief, a restful half-consciousness that,
+with no effort of his, a solution had been found, a way out of all
+difficulties and disagreeables.</p>
+
+<p>Not till late next day did he crawl downstairs, feeling very weak and
+battered, to receive the hollow sympathy and polite inquiries of his
+guests, and apologise with what grace he might for having failed so
+lamentably in his duties as a host.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur had got up a cricket match. ‘You needn’t worry, old man,’ he said
+cheerfully, as he carried out his bat and found Sainty among the group
+of spectators. ‘You weren’t missed a bit. The duke made a speech after
+dinner, and proposed your health, and I returned thanks for you, and
+said all sorts of nice things about you, which you never could have said
+for yourself. I did it much better than you could have done, because I
+was rather drunk, which you would never have been.’</p>
+
+<p>‘O Lord Arthur! how <i>can</i> you say Lord Belchamber wasn’t missed?’ cried
+Lady Eccleston. ‘We all missed you dreadfully, didn’t we, Cissy? But
+your brother did do his best to supply your place, and really made a
+delightful speech; and I do hope your head is better; it was too bad
+your breaking down, and we were all quite miserable about you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I wanted to send you some really wonderful nerve tonic Dr. Haslam gave
+me,’ said Lady Firth. ‘I’m sure it would have done you good, but your
+mother said you had everything you wanted.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty insisted on showing himself at the ‘treat’ for the children and
+the labourers; this was the one part of the ‘rejoicings’ in which he
+took a personal interest; but after a very brief appearance he was
+forced to go and lie down again till dinner, if he hoped to receive the
+guests at the great ball which was to wind up the proceedings of the
+second day.</p>
+
+<p>The ball was a very grand affair indeed; there must have been over five
+hundred people present. Every woman there had put on her most gorgeous
+raiment, and the best of her jewellery. The duchess positively shone in
+white and gold brocade, hung in ropes of pearls, and with a great crown
+upon her head. Even Lady Charmington had had what she con<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_110">{110}</a></span>sidered a
+low-necked dress made for the occasion, and had withdrawn the Belchamber
+emeralds from their twenty years’ seclusion at the bank for the pleasure
+of wearing them before her mother-in-law. Sainty’s share in the
+entertainment was strictly limited to standing by his mother, under the
+portrait of his great-great-grandfather, leaning with his left hand on
+the crutch stick which his cousin had given him, while his right was
+shaken by a long procession of people, who all one after the other said:
+‘I must&mdash;er&mdash;congratulate you, Lord Belchamber, on this auspicious
+occasion. Sorry to hear you weren’t well yesterday; hope you’re all
+right again.’ To which he had to reply, ‘Thanks awfully, very good of
+you; so glad you could come; you’ll find the dancing through that next
+room, straight on.’</p>
+
+<p>By the time he had repeated this phrase between three and four hundred
+times, and the guests had all defiled before him, he felt so sick and
+giddy that he had to be helped to bed by his valet, where he lay awake
+hour after hour, listening to the distant strains of the dance music,
+and picturing the scene in the great saloon to himself. He thought how
+nice it would be to be an ordinary normal, healthy, courageous young
+man. He did not desire to be exceptionally gifted, strong, or beautiful,
+only just like any one of a hundred youths who were at that moment
+whirling in his ballroom, or eating his supper. Surely, he thought, no
+one had ever got so little fun out of his own coming-of-age ball before.
+He thought how pretty Cissy Eccleston had looked, all in delicate pale
+green, with a sort of white butterfly of some shimmering stuff just
+poised on her bright curls for only ornament&mdash;not a jewel on her
+beautiful neck or arms. He fancied her, aglow with dancing, sitting to
+rest under the great palms and banana-trees of the winter-garden, and
+perhaps Claude ensconced beside her in one of those nooks that he had
+watched his cousin arranging, ‘for flirtations,’ as he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was in these sleepless hours of the early morning that he decided to
+say something to Claude Morland which he had had on his mind for two
+days, and the first time he got him<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_111">{111}</a></span> alone, he put his head down, dug
+his nails into his palms, and said, ‘Claude, may I ask you something?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course; what is it?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty gulped and was silent. He had made up his mind to speak the first
+time he got an opportunity, but he had been genuinely relieved by every
+interruption, and was conscious that he had even purposely avoided being
+alone with his cousin.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is rather a queer question,’ he said, ‘and one which you may
+resent.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude was lolling in a deep chair with a book; his hat tilted over his
+eyes left little of his face visible but his moustache and the soft
+curve of his chin.</p>
+
+<p>‘How could I resent anything from you, old chap?’ he said sweetly, but
+without looking up. ‘For which of my many sins am I to be taken to task?
+Fire away.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I know I’ve no right to ask such a question, but I wish you would tell
+me if there is anything between you and Miss Winston.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude gave an almost imperceptible start, and sank lower into the deep
+chair. Sainty was conscious that under his air of supreme nonchalance he
+was suddenly tensely on his guard. ‘Between us?’ he murmured
+interrogatively.</p>
+
+<p>If Sainty were going to be indiscreet, his cousin obviously did not
+intend to make it easy for him.</p>
+
+<p>‘I mean, are you in love with each other, or engaged, or anything?’
+Sainty persisted. Claude gave a little laugh; he was evidently trying to
+keep a certain relief out of his voice as he answered in his usual soft
+tones, ‘I would not be so rude to our dear Aimée as to say I was not in
+love with her; I have been in love with her any time these two years; as
+to being <i>engaged</i>, you really do ask the most simple-minded questions.
+Will you tell me just what you think I have to marry on? Am I in a
+position to think of marrying, especially another pauper like myself?’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s just what I was coming to,’ said Sainty eagerly. ‘I didn’t ask
+from mere idle curiosity. But if you are in love<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_112">{112}</a></span> with Miss Winston, of
+course you <i>want</i> to marry her, and you think you ought not to propose,
+because you are not in a position to support a wife&mdash;isn’t that so?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well&mdash;no, dear boy,’ answered Claude slowly; ‘to be honest, I don’t
+exactly know that it is. Aimée and I understand one another perfectly,’
+he added, after a little pause.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you think she <i>does</i> understand? Don’t you think you may have given
+her the impression that you mean more than you do?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I am not the first man Miss Winston has met,’ said Claude, turning
+rather an ugly grin upon his cousin; ‘the dear creature was having her
+little flirtations before I went to Eton.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course, if you don’t want to, and you are sure she doesn’t want to,
+there is no more to be said. I only wanted to say that if you were being
+held back by want of money, perhaps I&mdash;perhaps we&mdash;you know&mdash;I mean,
+that part might be arranged, don’t you know,’ and Sainty blushed hotly.</p>
+
+<p>Claude reached out a long white hand, and very gently pressed Sainty’s
+knee. ‘You really are more kinds of an angel than any one I know,’ he
+said, laughing softly, ‘but you need not worry about Aimée Winston; she
+has no vocation for matrimony; if she ever makes up her mind to marry it
+will be some one who can give her a far larger share of this world’s
+goods than even you could spare for my dot. And as for me, if I should
+ever find myself, either through your kindness or in any other way, in a
+position to take to myself a wife, she would be a very different person
+from <i>la belle Aimée; elle n’est pas de celles que l’on épouse’</i>; and
+Claude turned again to his book in such a way as to intimate that the
+subject was closed.</p>
+
+<p>By the time that the opportunity for this singularly abortive
+conversation presented itself the house-party had dwindled sensibly.
+Those who came to please the duchess, to meet each other, and to lend
+the support of names well known to the chronicles of fashion, had fled
+the day after the ball. They had come for an ‘occasion,’ and the moment
+existence<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_113">{113}</a></span> at Belchamber threatened to resume a course remotely
+resembling home life, they departed to other ‘occasions,’ with all their
+baggage and camp-followers. Lord Nonsuch could not spend a Sunday where
+the services were conducted according to the ideas of Lady Charmington;
+and by the Monday all had gone except old Lady Firth, the Morlands, the
+Traffords, and the Ecclestons, who somehow or other contrived to stay on
+till they should be due at another country-house.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Firth, ere he departed for Scotland, had a talk with his nephew.
+‘It has all gone off very well, my boy, on the whole,’ he said,
+‘considering how new you and your mother were to anything of the sort.
+Your breakdown was unfortunate, of course, but it couldn’t be helped.
+You had better come up to Fours for a bit next month; it’ll do you good;
+and in November you ought to have another party here, for the covert
+shooting. You will have to live suitably in the place in future; all
+these new servants will get lazy and demoralised unless you give them
+something to do.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But I shan’t be here in November,’ said Sainty, ‘I shall be back at
+Cambridge, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Your mother and I were thinking that perhaps you wouldn’t want to go
+back to Cambridge now you are of age,’ said his uncle.</p>
+
+<p>‘Not go back to Cambridge!’ Sainty interrupted, with unfeigned horror;
+‘not take my degree!’</p>
+
+<p>‘Many people don’t, you know; and in your case, though it was no doubt
+right for you to have a little taste of university life, there seem to
+be claims which call for you more urgently elsewhere.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t ask this of me, Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said earnestly. ‘You and I
+have both been workers; in my way I have worked as hard as you. You can
+understand what it must be to be told when one is in sight of one’s goal
+that one must give it up and not try for it. I gave up the scholarship
+because I saw that it was a shame to take it from men who needed it; but
+this is different. I stand no chance with Cook; he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_114">{114}</a></span> deserves to be
+senior classic, and is safe to be; he has nothing to fear from me, or
+any one; and if I beat any of the men who come next, well, it won’t hurt
+them; they will have their first class all the same, and it makes no
+difference to a man if he is second, third, or fourth.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you care as much as all that?’ asked Lord Firth.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, I do,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>His uncle appeared to consider. ‘Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘I don’t
+see, if you want to go back and take your degree, why you shouldn’t; but
+couldn’t you come down for a week, say, for the pheasants?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Uncle Cor,’ said Sainty, ‘why <i>should</i> I come down, just in the middle
+of my work, and idle away a whole week, in order that other people
+should shoot pheasants? I don’t shoot, myself; I hate the sound and
+sight of shooting.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t you think you could get to like it? Of course it’s out of the
+question for you to hunt, but you could quite well shoot, with a quiet
+pony and little cart, or even from a campstool, if you couldn’t walk.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t <i>want</i> to shoot; I should hate it. And in my case, the one
+excuse, the tramping, the manly exercise, would be wanting. I should
+seem to myself a kind of monster, dragged out to the work of slaughter
+in some form of machine; sitting down to butchery, like Charles <small>IX.</small>
+firing on Huguenots out of a window.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I only thought it would give you something more in common with
+your fellow-men, make you more like other people.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes, I know; it’s the old story, my unlikeness to other people, my
+hopeless incurable unfitness for my position in life. I do so hate my
+position in life.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Many people would be glad to change with you, my boy,’ said his uncle
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>‘I wish they could, with all my heart,’ said Sainty. ‘Oh, I fully
+realise, no one more, what an anomaly I am. If only some one of the
+hundreds of nice impecunious young men with a public school education
+and no taste for work could<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_115">{115}</a></span> have it all instead of me! Arthur, for
+instance, would be ideal. He would hunt, shoot, play cricket, captain
+the Yeomanry, be popular, successful, suitable, and enjoy the whole
+thing immensely into the bargain.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear boy,’ said Lord Firth, taking refuge behind Providence with a
+simple piety worthy of his sister, ‘does it never occur to you that if
+it had been intended that Arthur should have your birthright, he would
+have had it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, if you come to what was “intended,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> Sainty answered, ‘I give up. I
+don’t pretend to understand.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It comes down to the simple old rule that you learned in your
+catechism,’ said Firth, in a more natural manner; ‘<span class="lftspc">“</span>to do my duty in
+that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.” (I quote
+from memory.) You can surely understand <i>that</i>?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘I can understand <i>that</i> right enough, as a
+principle; but it is when you come to the question of just what <i>is</i>
+one’s duty that the difficulty comes in. For instance, I don’t believe
+that it is a duty incumbent on me from any religious point of view to
+sit in a chair and shoot tame pheasants, nor to waste money in
+expensively feeding a whole tribe of people with whom I have no sympathy
+whatever.’</p>
+
+<p>‘We must “use hospitality,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> quoted Lord Firth a little half-heartedly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, if you quote Scripture on that matter,’ said Sainty, not without
+malice, ‘I think you would find I was enjoined to entertain a very
+different class of person from the duke, or Lady Deans, or the
+Dalsanies. Indeed, I am not without the highest authority for selling
+all I have and giving to the poor; I sometimes think it would be the
+best solution, as it would certainly be the simplest.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And how about the entail?’ asked his uncle.</p>
+
+<p>The wholesale disposal of his property being thus declared out of the
+question, Belchamber had to try and find some other answer to the riddle
+of life. For the present he was contented to have carried his point
+about going back to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_116">{116}</a></span> Cambridge; the terrible coming of age was safely
+past, and the danger of his university career being cut short averted.
+As he had not gone up till he was nineteen, he had still a year of happy
+college life before him, a year of peaceful study, of stimulating
+discussions, of congenial society, a year of hard work for a definite
+object. With a sigh of relief he found himself once more in his old
+rooms, surrounded by the dear familiar shabbinesses, his accommodation a
+bedroom, sitting-room, and Gyp-closet bounded by a battered ‘oak’; his
+establishment the tenth part of an old woman in a sat-upon black bonnet,
+and a twenty-fifth share in the services of a Gyp, but lord of his own
+soul, and free to follow his own bent, an undergraduate among
+undergraduates, and not the slave of a cumbrous estate and an unwieldy
+palace.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_117">{117}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Sainty</span> did not think it necessary to go home for the covert shooting,
+and it is doubtful if he was much missed. Young Traffords and
+Montgomeries came as usual, Lord Firth brought an older man or two, and
+Arthur acted as host, not without a few skirmishes with his uncle, who
+had been accustomed to appear in that capacity on such occasions. Arthur
+was now at a crammer’s preparing for the army, but he had none of
+Sainty’s objection to breaking in on his studies for a little sport, and
+every one thought it quite right and natural that he should do so. It
+might be all very necessary that he should help to slaughter his
+fellow-men by and by, but the immediate duty was the destruction of
+pheasants; and whatever might be the shortcomings of the absent lord of
+the mansion, Arthur and the guests assembled at Belchamber had a proper
+sense of their responsibilities in this respect.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty only wished that his brother would take his other duties in life
+as seriously; there was permanently at the back of his mind an anxiety
+about Arthur, which, like some latent poison in the blood, might lie
+dormant for months, but was liable to stir up and give pain at any
+moment. A certain sense that his own existence, unreasonably prolonged,
+was, as it were, keeping his brother out of his inheritance, added
+poignancy to all Sainty’s feelings about him. But for the unfortunate
+accident of his own eighteen months’ seniority, Arthur would have
+stepped naturally into his appropriate position, and found congenial
+occupations, duties, pleasures ready to his hand. He felt that anything
+that might go wrong with his brother before his own death<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_118">{118}</a></span> made tardy
+restitution, would be almost his fault. It did not occur to his morbid
+apprehension that with superior means at his command all Arthur’s
+vicious tendencies would have increased a hundredfold; he only saw the
+boy who had no aptitude for study obliged by circumstances to work that
+he might pass examinations, and driven from healthy and innocent
+recreations at Belchamber into a world of dangerous companions and
+temptations which he lacked self-control to resist. Sainty appeared to
+himself as an unwilling Jacob, who by no act or fraud of his own stood
+possessed of the birthright which was only a burthen to him, and who yet
+had no appetite for the pottage for which a younger Esau’s full red
+mouth watered so hungrily. As in the nursery days when he had decided to
+die young that his brother might succeed him, he still cherished an
+undefined feeling that he was only occupying for a time. He would never
+marry; all must eventually go to Arthur and to Arthur’s children; but he
+was possessed of an ever-growing terror lest meanwhile, before this
+desirable end should be reached, his brother might steer the frail bark
+of his good behaviour to some irreparable shipwreck, commit himself
+irrevocably in some way that should disqualify him for the position ere
+it should come to him.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty mused much on abdications, on men who had cast aside rank and
+wealth for the peace and seclusion of the cloister; the monastic calm of
+his beloved courts drew him like a spell; had he been born in the
+turbulent times of his fighting ancestors he would probably have been
+violently dispossessed and immured in some convent of holy monks. He
+began to wonder whether in spite of all the boasted progress of the
+centuries they had not managed things in a simpler and more effectual
+manner in the middle ages. He even went so far as secretly to consult a
+solicitor as to whether a peer could legally renounce his title and
+estates in favour of the next heir entail, with the discouraging result
+that he learned that while he lived no act of his, short of high
+treason, could make him other than Marquis of Belchamber<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_119">{119}</a></span> in the eye of
+the law, or bestow that title on any other human being.</p>
+
+<p>‘It seems hard,’ he said to Newby one day, ‘that a man can be born into
+a position with no act or consent of his own and bound in it for life;
+struggle as he will he cannot free himself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Are we not all alike in that respect?’ asked Gerald. ‘Are not
+circumstances, as they are called, the fetters that each man wears? We
+delude ourselves with a phantom of free-will, but I suspect that men are
+really born as irrevocably parsons, doctors, politicians, as you are a
+peer. Who shall free himself from the bonds of fate?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You are strangely inconsistent, Gerald. I can fancy no one less of a
+fatalist than yourself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘The doctor varies his medicines according to the disease of the
+patient,’ said Newby sententiously. ‘When men come prating to me of
+fatality as an excuse from all effort and responsibility, I have a very
+different word to say to them; but in your case, when you complain of
+being fettered by your position, I wonder whether some of those who
+perhaps think they would like their path thus plainly marked for them,
+may not really, by inherited tendencies and a hundred other intangible
+threads, be as truly constrained in their life choice as yourself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="lftspc">“</span>All men are born free,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> quoted Sainty. ‘There never was a more
+deplorable fallacy; for my part, I feel like the ghost in Dickens’s
+story, who had to drag that chain of cash-boxes and keys and
+deposit-safes wherever he went. Perhaps it is my lameness which
+accentuates this sense of being hobbled. I can’t take a step without
+feeling the pull of the whole Belchamber estate; it is hung round my
+neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You certainly have a most deplorable trick of mixing your metaphors,’
+said Newby. ‘But,’ he added, with the mild awe of which Sainty had been
+so disagreeably sensible at Belchamber, ‘yours is certainly a great
+position, a grave responsibility.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_120">{120}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘If I might have gone in for a scholarship, like you, and stayed and got
+work in the college till I could try for a fellowship!’ Sainty sighed.
+‘The life would have suited me down to the ground.’</p>
+
+<p>‘There are many leading that life who would be glad to change with you,’
+Gerald answered with conviction.</p>
+
+<p>‘That is just what my uncle says, “many people would be glad to change
+with you.” It is the old saying of our nursery days&mdash;“Many a poor man in
+the street would be glad of that nice pudding.” Do you think it makes
+unpalatable food more savoury to feel that one is keeping what one does
+not like from some one to whom it would perhaps be an escape from
+starvation? It is the strangest doctrine.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nevertheless Lord Firth is a very sensible man,’ said Newby; ‘and I
+don’t feel disposed to pity you overmuch.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t think I want pity,’ said Sainty, ‘I want help. It seems too
+deplorable that there should be no way out of an undesirable position. I
+think it is this sense of being shut in that drives men to suicide far
+more than great grief. Is any situation really hopeless, unalterable by
+human effort? If any one were once persuaded of that, he <i>must</i> go mad.
+I suppose the pistol or the overdose of chloral is the last supreme
+refusal to accept such a belief. “What!” you say, “no way out of this
+<i>impasse</i>? Well, there is always this.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>‘How theatrical!’ said Newby. ‘You are talking claptrap. Who ever heard
+of a man committing suicide to avoid a marquisate and £50,000 a year?’
+and he resolutely led the talk into other channels.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur hadn’t been a month at his crammer’s before he began to justify
+his brother’s anxiety. Of course he broke all the rules of the
+establishment, came and went as he pleased, drove tandem, and hunted
+several days a week. Then there were complications about dogs, of which
+he kept a perfect kennel of all sorts and sizes, which raided the
+reverend gentleman’s poultry-yard, killed his cat and his children’s pet
+rabbits, and harried his wife’s old pug. Sainty<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_121">{121}</a></span> had always wanted a
+dog, but had never been able to have one because Arthur’s perpetually
+changing menagerie had kept Lady Charmington’s powers of endurance
+stretched to their easily reached limit.</p>
+
+<p>In the Christmas vacation Arthur had already stigmatised the
+establishment to his brother as a ‘damned hole,’ where a gentleman
+couldn’t live, and obliged him with graphic accounts of his many
+differences of opinion with its principle.</p>
+
+<p>‘But doesn’t he <i>mind</i> your setting your dogs on his pig?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mind? of course he minds; it makes him wild. But you should see the old
+woman; she gets twice as mad as he does. She’s always telling us we are
+“no gentlemen,” and that we shouldn’t do the things at home, and why
+don’t we treat her as we would any other lady.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And why don’t you?’ asked Sainty, with delicate irony.</p>
+
+<p>‘What, <i>her</i>!’ with fine contempt; ‘the fellows say she was the old
+man’s cook, and that he <i>had</i> to marry her, ‘cos he’d got her into
+trouble. You should see her in the evening in a greasy old black satin
+and a sham diamond locket; she’s awfully particular about our dressing
+for dinner, so Wood came in the other evening in muddy shooting-boots.
+She asked if he wanted to insult her, but he said he was awfully sorry
+but he couldn’t find his pumps, and glanced significantly at her toes
+that were sticking out of her gown: she has enormous beetle-crushers,
+and had sported a brand-new pair of patent-leather shoes. She fairly
+cried with rage.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty saw the futility of trying to suggest the poor lady’s side of the
+question; Arthur was never very quick at seeing other people’s point of
+view.</p>
+
+<p>‘I just don’t pay ’em any attention,’ he said; ‘the old ‘un is always at
+me about not working. Says I shall never pass my prelim., and objects to
+my hunting. I tell him it’s necessary for my health.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And how often <i>do</i> you hunt?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, well, not more than two days a week mostly, never more than three.
+You see, I’ve only got two hunters there;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_122">{122}</a></span> it’s so infernally expensive
+keeping ’em at livery, and I have to pay for the man’s keep too. It runs
+into a devil of a lot of money.’</p>
+
+<p>After several such conversations, Sainty was not altogether surprised to
+hear from his mother that a three days’ absence without leave to attend
+a race meeting had brought matters to a crisis, and that the care of his
+brother’s education had been transferred from the church to the army.
+Arthur went to this new place with only a pony cart and a bicycle,
+promising great things; the hunters had been suppressed and the kennel
+cut down to two fox-terriers and a bob-tailed sheep-dog. Sainty was
+rather surprised at hearing nothing from him for several weeks&mdash;not even
+the familiar demand for money had broken the silence between them&mdash;and
+the day he came home for the Easter vacation he made haste to ask for
+news.</p>
+
+<p>He was sitting in Lady Charmington’s sitting-room, where she had
+conceded a cup of tea to his fatigue after a journey, but was rigorously
+abstaining from refreshment herself. Sainty was drinking his tea and
+eating cake, while his mother hastily ran through some farm accounts she
+was going to submit to him.</p>
+
+<p>‘How does Arthur get on at Colonel Humby’s?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington looked up from her ledger with an abstracted air and
+her mouth full of figures. ‘Thirty-seven, forty-two, fifty, fifty-six,
+fifty-six pounds, seven and fourpence halfpenny,’ she murmured. ‘Didn’t
+I tell you he’d moved?’ and she noted the sum at the bottom of the page
+and turned over.</p>
+
+<p>‘What! again?’ cried Sainty in dismay.</p>
+
+<p>‘He said he couldn’t get on there; he felt he wasn’t making any
+progress, and he didn’t seem to like the men there; apparently they
+weren’t a very nice set.’</p>
+
+<p>‘He’ll never pass his exams. if he keeps chopping about like this, a
+month in one place, a month in another. I’m afraid as long as he’s
+expected to do any work, he’ll never<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_123">{123}</a></span> find a coach who quite suits his
+views. Where has he gone now?’</p>
+
+<p>‘His friend, young Hunter, who was with him at Oxbourne, had gone to
+that man in London they say is so wonderful&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Mother! you <i>haven’t</i> let him go to London?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why not? The boy seemed to think he should do better at Monkton’s; it
+is such a new thing, as you say yourself, for Arthur to want to work,
+that it seemed a pity to balk his good intentions.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But surely you must see&mdash;London! Dear mother, won’t there be many more
+distractions there for a boy of Arthur’s temperament than at a dull
+place like Hog’s Hill?’</p>
+
+<p>‘He said that was one trouble with Colonel Humby’s place, that it <i>was</i>
+so dull; there was never anything to do there. If he wanted any
+amusement, he always had to go away for it, and this broke into his
+work, interfered terribly with it, in fact.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And so you think he’ll be likely to do more work when the things that
+break into it are under his hand? Oh! why didn’t you ask me before
+agreeing to this?’ cried Sainty in genuine distress.</p>
+
+<p>This being his first day at home, Lady Charmington only smiled
+indulgently at the suggestion. She was not in the habit of consulting
+other people before making up her mind, and least of all Sainty. ‘My
+dear boy,’ she said, ‘you are scarcely older than your brother, and in
+some ways have really seen less of the world. Why should you think you
+can settle things for him so much better than he can for himself? or,
+for that matter, than I, who have been accustomed for years to arrange
+your lives for both of you?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty felt despairingly that there was nothing to be done with his
+mother in that direction. He had come to know the signals, and to
+recognise Lady Charmington’s ‘no thoroughfare expression’ as though it
+were written on a notice-board. He wondered sometimes if she were really
+as much at ease about her younger son as she seemed, but<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_124">{124}</a></span> he never dared
+try to find out, for fear of awakening in her heart the uneasiness that
+oppressed his own. It was incredible that a woman so shrewd and
+far-seeing in most of the relations of life as his mother, should really
+feel a restful confidence about Arthur. To be sure, she was ignorant of
+many things that he knew only too well, such as the younger boy’s habit
+of betting and constant appeals to his elder for money; on the other
+hand, Arthur took but little pains to conceal his views of life, and
+occasionally delivered himself in his mother’s presence of remarks
+which, it seemed to Sainty, could not fail to enlighten a much more
+obtuse intelligence than Lady Charmington’s.</p>
+
+<p>When he came to breakfast next morning he found her entrenched behind
+the zareba of teapots and kettles, under the shelter of which she
+habitually partook of that meal. She looked up from her letters with a
+certain air of triumph to say, ‘I have a letter from Arthur; he is
+working so hard that he will not even come home for Easter; he says he
+might run down just for the Sunday and Monday, but he thinks it would
+only break into his work, and that on the whole it is best for him not
+to come away at all.’ That was all the voice said, but the eyes said
+quite plainly, ‘You see!’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty said nothing. He went and peeped into the dishes on the
+sideboard, and picked himself out a poached egg with no great appetite.
+This habit of his of saying nothing when he had nothing to say was
+called ‘rudeness’ by some people, by others ‘pride’ or ‘indifference.’
+If he had spoken out his real thought to his mother she would have told
+him he was suspicious and could never believe any good of his brother,
+and would probably have exhorted him to watch against such an unamiable
+disposition.</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast, the day, the weeks passed in this silence between the
+two, a silence eloquent of disagreement, yet broken only by a few words
+on indifferent subjects, except when the presence of guests made
+necessary some form of conversational rattling of peas in a bladder.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_125">{125}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Whether it was duty or pleasure that kept Arthur away, the house seemed
+strangely empty and silent without him, even when some of the inevitable
+family party were gathered together in it&mdash;perhaps most so then, for
+though Arthur put himself out for no man, the mere fact that his
+pursuits were those of the normal young Englishman made him an important
+help in the entertainment of cousins. Sainty took endless trouble, but
+sent the men after rabbits who were secretly pining for the last meet of
+the season, and mounted the only Trafford who hated horses and had come
+down burning to throw the first fly of spring. Claude made things easier
+when he arrived a little later, but now that he was the duke’s private
+secretary, his presence was generally required at one of his grace’s
+numerous country-houses on the festivals of the Church, so that he was
+much less at Belchamber than formerly.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m worried about Arthur,’ Sainty said to him the first time they were
+alone. ‘You know he’s left the second place he went to, and my mother
+has let him go to London to read at Monkton’s. They don’t even board
+there, you know; he has rooms somewhere near.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude’s eyebrows arched themselves, and he gave vent to a low but
+expressive whistle.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ said Sainty, ‘that’s what <i>I</i> think; I feel sure he must be in
+mischief, he’s keeping so quiet. He wouldn’t even come home for Easter;
+it’s incredible that a woman of mother’s cleverness should really
+believe that it springs from excessive devotion to work.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you told your mother what you think?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ve tried, but there’s the difficulty. She thinks it is only my base
+jealousy and suspicion. I wonder why she so readily believes all good of
+him, and never gives me credit for even decent feelings. I’ve tried all
+my life to please her, studied her, thought what she’d like, and I don’t
+believe Arthur has ever done or given up one single thing for her sake;
+yet she cares more for his little finger than for my whole body.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_126">{126}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, the secret of Arthur’s favour is not hard to guess. In the first
+place, he’s got nothing, and you’ve got everything. On the face of it,
+that seems like an injustice to him; so, with true woman’s logic, she
+takes it out by being thoroughly unjust to you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Got everything! Heavens! Do you suppose I wouldn’t rather be tall and
+strong and straight like Arthur, be liked by men and admired by women,
+than own half England and be fifty Lord Belchambers?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Very likely; though a woman of my aunt Sarah’s respect for “plenishing”
+is not likely to appreciate that point of view. But the real reason of
+her partiality is that Arthur is just the one person in the world who
+isn’t afraid of her. Oh yes, you are afraid of her; it’s not the least
+use your saying you’re not, and so am I, and so’s every one about the
+place. Whereas Arthur doesn’t care a damn <i>what</i> she thinks; he does
+jolly well what he pleases, and, <i>maîtresse-femme</i> as she is, she can’t
+help admiring him for it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, never mind about that; I didn’t mean to complain; that any one
+should prefer Arthur to me is not a phenomenon that needs explanation. I
+only deplore this particular result of her devotion to him for <i>his</i>
+sake. What am I to do about it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s a good thing you mentioned it to me; I must see what I can do.
+Perhaps I shall be able to keep an eye on Master Arthur to a certain
+extent.’</p>
+
+<p>It is true that his cousin’s influence had hitherto been unmixedly bad,
+yet he seemed so sympathetic, so anxious to help, so entirely at one
+with him in his desire to keep Arthur from making an ass of himself,
+that Sainty went back to Cambridge vaguely consoled, and with a feeling
+that Claude, being on the spot, might really perhaps be able to exercise
+some kind of check on the object of their common solicitude.</p>
+
+<p>This was his ninth and last term, the term of his tripos exam. and his
+degree, and he was so busy that he had but little time for thinking of
+his brother. Lady Charmington<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_127">{127}</a></span> mentioned him but rarely in her letters,
+beyond a casual observation that Arthur was as hard at work as ever.
+Arthur himself wrote even less than usual, but he did vouchsafe a few
+brief notes, saying he was ‘all right,’ and ‘sapping like the devil,’
+and ending with the usual demands. In spite of his close attention to
+business, London seemed by no means an economical place of residence.
+‘His landlady robbed him shamefully; he was told they all did; and
+though he was sure of the fact, he knew too little about such things to
+be able to spot her.’</p>
+
+<p>One day Sainty showed one of these epistles to Newby, and hinted at his
+uneasiness. ‘You remember my brother Arthur?’ he added, seeing Gerald
+look a little vague.</p>
+
+<p>‘Remember him? of course I do. A nice lad, a very jolly lad; an awfully
+charming type of healthy English boyhood.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes, he’s all that,’ Sainty assented; ‘but I wish he wasn’t knocking
+about in lodgings in London by himself. He’s very young, and awfully
+fond of pleasure, and hasn’t a great deal of self-control.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Let him alone, my dear boy,’ returned Newby airily. ‘He must sow his
+wild oats, like another; but he won’t go far astray. <i>Bon sang ne peut
+mentir.</i>’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, can’t it?’ groaned Sainty; but his friend wouldn’t hear of any
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>‘That kind of healthy well-bred English lad always comes out all right
+in the end,’ he said. ‘You can’t ride a thoroughbred with a curb.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear me, how sporting you’ve become; you’re as horsey as Ned Parsons
+when he talked to Lady Rugby.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Talking of Ned, have you heard about his book?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No&mdash;what book?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why, he’s written a book which they say is going to be the success of
+the year; it ought to be out by now. I saw some of the proofs, and
+thought it deplorably flippant and vulgar, as anything by him was sure
+to be, but undeniably clever in a way.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_128">{128}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Is it a novel?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, a novel of society&mdash;as if Ned knew anything about society!’</p>
+
+<p>‘How came you to see the proofs? Did he show them to you?’</p>
+
+<p>Newby’s pale cheek took on a faint flush. ‘Well, some one told me he had
+put <i>me</i> into it; there is a young don in the story, and of course some
+one who wanted to be clever immediately decided it was meant for me, so
+I just taxed Parsons with it the first time I met him. “I hear you’ve
+been putting me into your book,” I said.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what did he say?’</p>
+
+<p>‘At first I thought he looked a little queer, then he laughed one of
+those irritating insolent laughs of his and said he’d send me the
+proof-sheets of the chapter where his young don was described, and I
+could judge for myself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, of course, as soon as he offered to show it to me I knew it must be
+all right, and directly I saw it I found as I expected the character
+wasn’t the least like me. The fellow was a most egregious prig, and not
+only that, but a snob; and whatever my faults, <i>that’s</i> a thing my worst
+enemy couldn’t say I was, could he?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m glad it was all right,’ said Sainty. ‘It would have been too
+caddish of him to return all your kindness in that way, and somehow I
+don’t think Ned’s a bad sort at bottom.’</p>
+
+<p>As the tripos drew nearer Sainty had less and less time for anything
+outside his work. It may be said at once that he took a very good
+degree. In country rectories and cheerful middle-class households from
+which the clever son of the family had been sent to college at the cost
+of some privation and not a little grumbling, a place among the first
+six in the Classical Tripos would have been acclaimed with grateful
+pride and rejoicing. In Sainty it was accounted an innocent eccentricity
+to care what degree he took, or whether he took one at all. Lord Firth,
+who was the most understanding among his kinsfolk, wrote a kind little
+note of congratulation.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_129">{129}</a></span> Lady Charmington was mildly gratified to find
+that her boy had brains and the grit to work for a desired end, but she
+frankly acknowledged that she could see no use his first class would be
+to him in after life, nor how it would help him to manage his estates.
+Arthur said ‘his brother was the rummest devil he ever came across, he
+was hanged if he could understand him.’ They would all have been
+infinitely better pleased had Sainty taken his uncle’s advice, bought a
+gun and gone shooting in some form of movable go-cart. It was the more
+remarkable that he should do so well, as he was always more and more
+preoccupied about Arthur. Once the examination was over, and his mind at
+ease on that score, the old anxieties came crowding back upon him, and
+he decided to go to London and try and find out for himself what his
+brother was about. He would come up again for his degree. Meanwhile, his
+work was done and he had kept his term, so there was no difficulty about
+getting an exeat for a day or two, and he wrote to his uncle to ask if
+he could put him up.</p>
+
+<p>After old Lord Firth’s death his widow had given up the house in
+Bryanston Square and retired to Roehampton with an elderly companion, an
+elderly maid, and an elderly Blenheim spaniel; and the present peer had
+bachelor quarters somewhere near Whitehall, close to the House of Lords,
+and with a sidelong squint at the river if you got very close to the
+windows.</p>
+
+<p>Having arrived and ascertained that his uncle would probably not be in
+till dinner-time, Sainty went westwards in search of his brother. The
+educational establishment, familiarly known to candidates for the army
+as ‘Monkton’s,’ was situated in the wilds of South Kensington, and in
+order to be handy for his place of study Arthur had taken rooms in the
+same respectable region. But neither at the crammer’s nor his lodgings
+did Sainty find trace of him. At the former he heard that his brother
+had been there in the morning, but had not returned since lunch, and his
+rooms seemed an even more unlikely place to obtain tidings of the
+studious youth.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_130">{130}</a></span> ‘Oh yes!’ the maid said who opened the door, ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>is
+lordship ‘as rooms ’ere right enough, but ’e isn’t often in ’em; ’e
+generally either calls or sends for ‘is letters most days, and once in a
+way ’e’ll sleep ’ere, but it isn’t often. Sometimes I don’t clap eyes on
+‘im for days together.’</p>
+
+<p>Neither this information nor the fact that his brother’s ideas of
+‘sapping like the devil’ were consistent with taking the whole
+afternoon, from lunch on, for amusement, struck Sainty as very
+reassuring. However, there was nothing to be done except to write on a
+card a request that Arthur would come and see him at his club on the
+morrow, and trust that it might be one of the days when ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>is lordship
+called or sent for ‘is letters.’</p>
+
+<p>As his hansom bore him eastwards again, he could not help having his
+mind diverted from his anxieties by the rush of London life at five
+o’clock of a day in the season unrolled before him like a picture-book.
+The streams of vehicles of all sorts flowing in either direction made
+progress necessarily slow, and gave ample time for studying their
+occupants. He was not yet twenty-two, and had hardly ever been in
+London; the whole pageant was absolutely new to him, and it is small
+wonder if he found much to interest and amuse him. The great toppling
+vans and omnibuses were interspersed with equipages beside which the
+renovated carriages of Belchamber seemed suddenly rustic and
+old-fashioned. Little victorias slid past, bearing beings in shining
+raiment and crowned with improbable headgear. Family landaus containing
+no less gorgeous matrons, and perhaps a brace of pink-cheeked
+sulky-looking daughters in clouds of blue and white feathers, or small
+parterres of roses nodding in the summer breeze, made stately progress
+towards the park, or to fetch papa from his club. One of the prettiest
+of the passing girls leaned forward in sudden recognition and touched
+her companion’s arm, and Sainty found himself responding to a volley of
+smiles and bows from Cissy Eccleston and her mother, which at a touch
+made him part of the great glittering show, and no longer a mere
+onlooker and outsider. It occurred to him<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_131">{131}</a></span> with a little thrill that it
+only rested with himself to come in and take his place among all these
+people, the place that was his by right of birth. Already invitations
+had poured in, more or less unheeded, on such an eligible young man.
+Unversed as he was in the ways of the world, he knew enough to be aware
+that a fatherless peer with a long minority behind him, an unencumbered
+rent-roll, and one of the show places of England, would not be forced to
+take the lowest room at the various feasts to which all these votaries
+of fashion were so eagerly pressing.</p>
+
+<p>But this unusual uplifting of his horn was of brief duration. One glance
+at the little mirrors on either side of the cab in which he rode, and he
+would have bartered all his advantages for the health and good looks of
+the poorest of the well-groomed, broad-shouldered youths in shiny boots
+who trod the pavement of Piccadilly with floating coat-tails and such a
+happy insolence. At one point where the throng was thickest, Sainty’s
+attention was arrested by a tall and very showy-looking young person in
+a smart private hansom going in the opposite direction from his own. She
+was much dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, and wore what
+is called a ‘picture hat’ adorned with a great number of nodding plumes.
+Her charms, deftly enhanced by art, were of the more obvious order, and
+she scattered smiles broadcast among the throng of young men, where
+dogskin-covered hands flew up to many a burnished hat as she passed,
+enjoying a sort of triumphal progress with the western sun shining full
+on her flashing gems and dazzling complexion. As the two cabs came
+almost abreast of one another she leaned back to say something to the
+man beside her, and with a clutch of the heart Sainty recognised in the
+slim youth leaning lazily back with his hat tipped over his eyes, who
+looked so distressingly boyish beside all this full-blown beauty, his
+brother Arthur.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_132">{132}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Belchamber’s</span> first feeling was that it was a judgment on him for having
+allowed his mind to wander to worldly frivolities and thoughts of
+personal amusement. Certainly he had been brought up with a round turn.
+His next was one of bewilderment as to what it behoved him to do under
+the circumstances. Ought he to let his mother or Lord Firth know what he
+had seen? He recoiled with all the force of schoolboy traditions from
+the idea of telling tales. Had Arthur recognised him? he wondered, and
+would he come to the rendezvous at the club next day, even supposing
+that he got his message? He had been on his way to call on his
+grandmother, and, as he omitted to give the driver any fresh
+instructions, he presently found himself at Sunborough House. Having
+ascertained from the porter that the duchess was out, he was turning
+away when he saw some one signalling to him from one of the ground-floor
+windows, and Claude came running bareheaded down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear old boy! this <i>is</i> nice,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea you were in
+town. I saw you from the window of my room. Come in and have some tea,
+and I’ll tell them to let us know when grandmamma comes in.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was drawn affectionately into a large room near the front-door,
+which Claude explained was his peculiar sanctum. ‘It used just to be a
+sort of waiting-room, and was much wasted, so I got the Pompier to let
+me have it for mine. That bell rings from his study, so he can get at me
+whenever he wants me.’</p>
+
+<p>It was a pleasant room, with two high windows draped with some sombre,
+respectable, woollen fabric. Its original furni<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_133">{133}</a></span>ture consisted of a
+large writing-table with a gallery, and a set of green leather chairs,
+two high-backed mahogany bookcases with brass lattice-work in their
+doors, and several good old engravings on the walls, the duke’s father,
+mother, and grandfather, after Lawrence, Mesdames Taglioni, and Fanny
+Ellsler, Count d’Orsay, the Queen on horseback, and the Duke of
+Wellington. On this severe ground Claude had, so to speak, embroidered a
+fantasia of more modern objects&mdash;little tables, low easy-chairs,
+cigarette-cases, a vase or two of flowers, several books, reviews, and
+paper-knives, and a vast quantity of signed and framed photographs of
+all shapes and sizes. With the exception of an eminent man or two, and a
+few sleek young peers, they all represented beautiful ladies&mdash;ladies
+looking over their shoulders, with their hands behind their backs,
+ladies with sheaves of lilies and baskets of flowers, ladies looking out
+of paper-mullioned windows wreathed in sham ivy, ladies with children in
+lace frocks, ladies in ball dress, court dress, fancy dress, or simply
+what may be called photographic dress, consisting of the sitter’s best
+low-necked gown and a hat, a combination which no one could be expected
+to believe was ever worn outside the studio. Three large official
+dispatch-boxes with paper tags hanging out of their ends stood on the
+writing-table, and a receptacle like a good-sized dog-basket bulged with
+letters for the post.</p>
+
+<p>His cousin was so cordial and affectionate, did the honours of his
+official residence with such charming grace, that Sainty felt impelled
+rather against his will to tell him of his late encounter. Perhaps if
+circumstances had not thrown him so immediately in his way, he might not
+have selected Claude as his confidant; but he desperately needed help
+and counsel, and here was some one ready with both, some one whom to
+tell would have none of the grave, official importance of a report to
+Lady Charmington or his uncle. Warmed by tea and his cousin’s
+enthusiastic welcome, he had not been ten minutes in the room before he
+had confided to its occupant all his uneasiness and its latest cause.</p>
+
+<p>‘Really! Arthur <i>is</i> an ass!’ was Claude’s comment.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_134">{134}</a></span> ‘What strikes me
+first of all is the infernal imprudence of the whole thing. Why can’t he
+go and see the lady quietly, instead of flourishing about Piccadilly in
+a hansom with her at five o’clock in the afternoon? He’s just as likely
+as not to meet grandmamma or your uncle as any one else, and then all
+the fat will be in the fire.’</p>
+
+<p>There was a ring of very genuine annoyance in Claude’s voice; and
+Sainty, though he smiled at the aspect of the matter that so
+characteristically presented itself to Morland as the important one,
+felt that he had not brought his troubles to an indifferent or
+unsympathetic person.</p>
+
+<p>‘But who do you suppose it is?’ he asked, ‘and where can Arthur have
+made her acquaintance? Perhaps it may not be&mdash;what I fear; but she
+looked rather&mdash;well, rather&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ said Claude, laughing; ‘I should say it was ten to one she <i>was</i>
+“rather.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>‘It’s no laughing matter,’ cried Sainty. ‘It was bad enough when I
+thought he was only neglecting his work, and just idling and amusing
+himself; but this makes it all much more serious. But Claude, can’t you
+help? Can you not guess who it might be?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, it might be any one of a dozen people,’ said Claude indifferently.
+‘It doesn’t so much matter <i>who</i> it is,’ he added; ‘the great thing is
+to try and get him not to make a fool of himself. You know, dear Saint,
+it is useless to expect the high moral view from <i>me</i>. What you want is
+that Arthur shan’t go and do anything idiotic, isn’t it? Well, I’m much
+more likely to prevent his giving the whole show away than you are,
+ain’t I? You leave it to me; I’ll see what can be done.’</p>
+
+<p>It was on the tip of Sainty’s tongue to say that the eye which Claude
+had promised him at Belchamber to keep on Arthur, could not have been
+peculiarly vigilant; but he did not wish to alienate the one person who
+might perhaps help him, so he expressed gratitude and a confidence he
+did not wholly feel; and just then a footman came in to say that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_135">{135}</a></span> ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>Er
+grace had come in, but was dining out, and must rest before dressing,
+and she ‘oped Lord Belchamber would come to luncheon next day.’</p>
+
+<p>‘By the way, yes,’ said Claude, when the man had left them. ‘To-night is
+the dinner at the French Embassy, and then there is the ball at
+What’s-their-names, and grandmamma must shed her day-skin and give the
+new one time to harden.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What do you <i>call</i> her, Claude?’ asked Sainty. ‘I never feel as if I
+<i>could</i> call her “grandmamma.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I never call her that to her face, <i>bien entendu</i>. It was a
+dreadful question at first. I couldn’t call her Hélo as her stepsons do;
+but I’ve hit on a lovely plan. I call her ‘Grace,’ suggesting
+facetiously ‘Your grace,’ do you see? and it sounds like a cross between
+a Christian name and a sort of compliment, grace personified, that kind
+of business. Well, good-night, old chap, if you must go. Don’t worry
+about the little blessing; you had much better let me see what I can do.
+Right you are. And for the Lord’s sake, don’t say a word to your uncle
+or any of ’em.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t worry,’ that was still the burthen of such very various
+counsellors, as Gerald Newby and Claude Morland, and more or less the
+line his mother took, who was again so unlike either of them; and
+meanwhile he was expected to stand by and see Arthur drifting to ruin
+under his eyes. However, he so far obeyed Claude’s injunctions as to say
+nothing to Lord Firth on the subject, when they presently dined
+together, though his principal object in coming to town had been to ask
+his advice.</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you seen Arthur?’ his uncle asked in the course of dinner, and
+Sainty only said, ‘I called at Monkton’s and at his lodgings, but I
+didn’t find him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It was a rum idea of your mother’s, letting him come to London, but it
+seems to be working, and so does he. I’ve asked him once or twice to
+come and dine, but he hardly ever comes. He says the evening is one of
+the best times he has for work.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_136">{136}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty had but little chance of private talk with Claude the next day,
+when he lunched at Sunborough House. His cousin drew him gently to a
+window when he arrived, while the numerous chance guests were awaiting
+the appearance of their hostess.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ve thought of who it very likely was,’ he said, with engaging
+frankness. ‘If it’s the person I think, she’s a good girl, and won’t do
+him any harm. You know you can’t expect to keep Arthur away from women;
+the important thing is that he shouldn’t get into bad hands, and I’ll
+drop him a hint to be more careful and not to go and <i>afficher</i> himself.
+Hush! here’s our respectable ancestress. Well, Grace, here’s your <i>good</i>
+boy come to see you, to make a change from your bad one.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty never knew whether it was circumstances or design that made it
+impossible for him to get another word alone with Claude. He did not
+feel that Morland’s help would be exactly of the kind or in the
+direction that he wanted, and he was more than ever anxious to see his
+brother himself, and try and find out just how much was wrong. He went
+early in the afternoon to a club in St. James’s Street, of which he had
+lately become a member, so as to be sure not to miss Arthur if he should
+come there. To his surprise, the porter handed him a letter as he went
+in, which proved to be a note from Lady Eccleston asking him to dine the
+same evening. He thought it would be pleasant to accept, but decided to
+keep it till he had found out if Arthur had any plans for the evening;
+so he put it into his pocket, and turned into a room on the ground
+floor, where some of the latest publications were displayed on a long
+table.</p>
+
+<p>A group of young men who were laughing uproariously over a book desisted
+rather suddenly on his entrance, as one of them, in whom he recognised
+the young stockbroker Pryor, looked towards him and whispered something
+to the rest. They faced round and stared at him much as sheep look at a
+dog, while Austin Pryor came forward holding out his right hand, with
+the book still in his left.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_137">{137}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I say,’ he said, ‘how odd you should come in just this minute! Have you
+seen this book of your friend Parsons’? It’s only out to-day, and they
+say you can’t get a copy for love or money. Wasn’t he that untidy chap
+with a fishy eye who was at your coming of age last year? I’m blowed if
+he hasn’t gone and stuck the whole show into his book, only he’s made
+your brother the hero instead of you, he’s turned you into a girl, a
+great heiress with rather jimmy health and a cork leg, who’s in love
+with the villain. But the rest of us are there, even down to poor little
+me. Your mother, your uncle&mdash;oh! and the duchess&mdash;he’s touched the old
+duchess off to the life, even to the colour of the gowns she wore at
+dinner. Well&mdash;he’s made his fortune. They say he’s been offered ten
+thousand for his next book, if he’ll only guarantee two well-known
+people bein’ in it. It’s better biz than the House; here am I come away
+at three-thirty; absolutely nothing doing, I give you my word. I haven’t
+made a fiver this account. Here&mdash;would you like the book? I’ve got to go
+out, and some one’ll grab it like a shot if you don’t lay hold of it.’</p>
+
+<p>The other youths seemed to have melted away during this speech, so that
+when Mr. Pryor, convinced that he had made himself most agreeable,
+handed him the fortunate novel of the season, and hurried away to gossip
+about it in as many drawing-rooms as he could work in before
+dressing-time, Sainty found himself alone with the book in his hand. He
+sat down to wait for Arthur, and began turning over the pages.</p>
+
+<p>So it was for this that Parsons had wanted to come to Belchamber. Now he
+understood. As Pryor had said, they were all drawn to the life. ‘Well,
+it doesn’t demand much imagination to write a book in that way,’ he
+thought. Presently he came to the passage about the young don, and found
+he was smiling in spite of himself at Newby’s happy confidence that the
+character could by no possibility have been drawn from him. The portrait
+was one-sided and most malevolent, but quite unmistakable. A year ago he
+would have been beyond words indignant at this ill-natured cari<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_138">{138}</a></span>cature
+of his friend and hero. Now he could not repress a faint feeling of
+amusement. What had happened to him in the meanwhile, he wondered; he
+felt ashamed of his want of loyalty. ‘Lord Arthur Chambers askin’ for
+you, m’lud,’ a discreet club waiter murmured in his ear; and he
+remembered with a start that in life as in Ned Parsons’ story, the
+protagonist of the moment was not himself but his younger brother.</p>
+
+<p>‘Infernally thirsty weather,’ Arthur remarked, as he dropped gracefully
+into a chair. ‘May I have a whisky and soda?&mdash;thanks.’ Then to the
+waiter, without allowing Sainty time to answer, ‘A large whisky and
+soda, please, with some ice and a slice of lemon. Well, old chap,’ he
+continued, turning again to his brother as the man departed, ‘and what’s
+brought you to town?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You,’ answered Sainty severely.</p>
+
+<p>‘O God! old man, not a jaw,’ Arthur pleaded wearily; ‘it’s too hot’</p>
+
+<p>‘Did you see me yesterday?’ Sainty asked suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>‘No, old boy&mdash;where?’ said Arthur, with slightly awakened interest.</p>
+
+<p>‘About five o’clock, in Piccadilly. You were in a hansom.’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur flushed crimson all over his handsome face. ‘The devil!’ he said
+simply, in a manner which told more plainly than words that he had <i>not</i>
+seen his brother.</p>
+
+<p>‘Think of the imprudence of it,’ Sainty remonstrated (quoting Claude,
+rather to his own surprise; it was not in the least what he had meant to
+say). ‘You might just as likely have met Uncle Cor as me, or some one
+who knew you, and might have written to mother.’ He did not like to name
+Lady Eccleston, who was the person he had in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>‘I wasn’t doing anything I was ashamed of,’ Arthur answered doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a little pause, during which the waiter reappeared with a
+long clanking tumbler, and the brothers sat and looked at one another
+gloomily.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_139">{139}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Well?’ asked the younger, as he sipped his refreshment.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you often drink between meals?’ Sainty asked. ‘Are there none of the
+stereotyped bad habits that you haven’t contracted yet?’</p>
+
+<p>‘An occasional whisky and soda when one’s thirsty doesn’t make a man an
+habitual drunkard&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>After a second pause, ‘I suppose you want to know who it was?’ Arthur
+suggested, with another blush.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know that I do,’ Sainty answered. ‘It was evident enough the
+sort of person&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>But Arthur cut him short. ‘I won’t hear a word against her,’ he said
+hotly. ‘Of course she’s an actress, and that’s enough to make people say
+deuced ill-natured things; but she’s as good a girl&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean to say&mdash;&mdash;’ Sainty was beginning, when Arthur suddenly
+melted, leaned forward, and laid an affectionate hand on his.</p>
+
+<p>‘Look here, old man,’ he said, ‘of course I don’t mean that she’s
+immaculate; but she’s told me a lot about herself, and I’m sure she’s
+more sinned against than sinning, you know, and all that. And I’m
+awfully in love with her; you may as well know it first as last. And I
+can’t stand hearing her talked about as if she was just a common woman.
+What are you doing to-night? I’ve persuaded her to come to supper with
+me, and asked some of her pals; will you come to the theatre with me and
+see her act, and come and meet her at supper? You’ll see for yourself
+how awfully respectable and jolly and all that she is.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty’s mind flew to the little note in his pocket; he would much
+rather have dined with the Ecclestons, but perhaps it was his duty to go
+and inspect the syren who had captured his brother, and he was not
+without curiosity as to a side of life with regard to which he was as
+ignorant as a girl. ‘How can I help him,’ he thought, ‘if I know no more
+of his life and temptations than mother does?’ And he shuddered to think
+of the light in which Lady Charmington would view his acceptance of the
+proffered supper-party.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_140">{140}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘You had better dine here with me first,’ he said resignedly; ‘Uncle Cor
+is dining out.’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur was so delighted at the ease with which he had brought his
+brother into line with his plans, and so excited by the anticipation of
+the evening’s amusement, that Sainty found it impossible to get anything
+out of him as to the extent to which he had been neglecting his work.
+All mere prosaic questions of that sort seemed to the enamoured swain so
+entirely trivial that Sainty himself began to wonder why he attached
+such undue importance to them. Under the influence of what seemed almost
+like an unselfish passion, Arthur appeared so much more amiable than
+usual, that he, who had come to lecture, came perilously near remaining
+to sympathise. He learned that the lady of the hansom was Miss Cynthia
+de Vere, who was performing in a piece called ‘<i>Africa Limited, or the
+Day of All Jeers</i>,’ a really rattling piece, in which she was perfectly
+ripping, that she had a not very important <i>rôle</i>, as far as words went,
+which was of course due to professional jealousies, but she was on the
+stage nearly all the time, and wore some ‘clinking’ costumes.</p>
+
+<p>‘By the way,’ Sainty inquired, just as Arthur was about to leave him,
+‘how did you come to meet Miss de Vere?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, Claude introduced me to her, one of the few good things I owe him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Claude!’ Sainty bounded. He could only gasp, as the full measure of his
+cousin’s duplicity forced itself upon him.</p>
+
+<p>‘You needn’t think the worse of her on that account,’ Arthur said. ‘She
+doesn’t like our slimy cousin; she told me so. She says he’s a bad lot,
+and so he is. Between you and me, I think he’s behaved badly to her in
+some way. She said she’d no cause to love him, but of course I couldn’t
+<i>ask</i> her anything about it. Tata, old chap; see you later. I must go
+and tell a certain person you’re coming; she’ll be awfully pleased.’</p>
+
+<p><i>Africa Limited</i> was one of the first of those musical farces which have
+revolutionised the English stage; it had a great quantity of characters,
+and no particular plot. The first act<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_141">{141}</a></span> took place in England, the second
+in what was supposed to be Algeria, and was represented by a mixture of
+the tropics and a pantomime transformation scene. There were any number
+of songs and dances, that could be introduced or omitted at will, and
+the time of day was morning, sunset, limelight, or back to high noon,
+with bewildering rapidity, and a total disregard of the ordinary
+sequence of the hours. There were a pair of serious and lyrical lovers,
+who discoursed sentimental ballads and duets; a pair of secondary
+lovers, more facetious and less sentimental; an excruciatingly funny
+comic man from the halls, who assumed every kind of disguise for no
+particular reason; a barbarous potentate, who turned out to be Irish,
+and the comic man’s long lost grandfather; several dancers of
+<i>pas-seuls</i>, and last, but not least, a number of extremely handsome
+young ladies, who did not seem to have much connection with the story,
+but who turned up in the most unlikely places, always gorgeously
+dressed, and had each three sentences to say in the course of the
+evening. It was one of this frolic band whom Arthur shyly indicated to
+his brother as Miss Cynthia de Vere, and in whom Sainty without much
+difficulty recognised the damsel he had seen in Piccadilly. Across the
+footlights and out of the pitiless sunshine of a summer day, she made a
+striking and picturesque appearance enough. She smiled affably at the
+brothers, and at several other acquaintances in the stalls and boxes,
+and took a most perfunctory interest in what was going on upon the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>A rather <i>recherché</i> dandyism was at that moment the correct style for
+young men about town, and Arthur was got up to kill, with a vast expanse
+of shirt-front illuminated by a single jewel, white kid gloves, and a
+cane, his fair curls cropped, flattened, and darkened as near to the
+accepted model as nature would allow, and his face very pink and solemn
+over his high collar. He went out between the acts ‘to smoke a
+cigarette,’ and returned with a new buttonhole and a peculiarly fatuous
+smile never produced by tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>As they drove to the restaurant where they were to sup, he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_142">{142}</a></span> obliged
+Sainty with a catalogue <i>raisonné</i> of the guests. ‘Charley Hunter’s
+coming, and Agnes Baines, the girl next but two to Cynthia, because
+Charley’s awfully mashed on her; Mabel Hodgson, that handsome girl at
+the other corner from Cynthia; and I had to ask that little cad Harry
+Atides, because he won’t let her go anywhere without him; they say he
+beats her. Cynthia has such an awfully good heart; she asked me to ask
+her, because she has such a dull life. I don’t see why she stays with
+that little beast. Then there is Elise Balbullier, the French
+girl&mdash;she’s awfully amusing and clever; Clara Bingham, one of the chorus
+girls&mdash;she’s a pal of Cynthia’s; and Colonel Hoby&mdash;he knows all the
+girls, and they like him, and he chaffs ’em, don’t you know.’</p>
+
+<p>Some of us not yet in our dotage can remember when it was by no means an
+easy thing to find a place in London whereat to sup; but about the time
+that pieces of the type of <i>Africa Limited</i> came into fashion, the
+play-going public discovered that it was unequal to the intellectual
+effort of witnessing them without the support of two dinners, and the
+first house of entertainment to cater for this new need was the Hotel
+and Restaurant Fritz, so called after its enterprising manager.
+Everything was on a scale of hitherto unprecedented luxury and
+proportionate expense; the waiters, of every conceivable nationality,
+wore short jackets and white aprons like those in a French café. A real
+chef directed an army of myrmidons in the adjoining kitchen. There were
+shaded electric lights, and little vases of flowers on the tables, among
+which dignified head-waiters walked like dethroned potentates in
+irreproachable evening dress, while a string-band made conversation
+appear a superfluity. A negro in a fez made Turkish coffee at a sort of
+altar in the midst, and the decorations suggested the saloon of the most
+expensive Atlantic liner.</p>
+
+<p>The brothers had to struggle to the cloak-room through a crowd of all
+ages and sexes, the women with fresh powder on their noses pulling out
+their crushed laces, the men settling their ties and stroking their back
+hair. Among these latter<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_143">{143}</a></span> they suddenly found themselves face to face
+with Claude. Arthur pushed past him with a sulky nod. Claude jerked his
+head after him. ‘So you’ve got hold of the culprit,’ he said; ‘is it all
+right? have you got anything satisfactory out of him?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I have got the most surprising things out of him,’ answered Sainty
+witheringly, looking his cousin straight in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>Claude did not seem to notice. ‘I’m waiting for Lady Deans and Lady
+Dalsany,’ he said. ‘Women take such an infernal time prinking. Have you
+seen your cousin Trafford? He’s supposed to be supping with us, or
+rather we with him; but what are <i>you</i> doing in this unlikely place?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, <i>I</i>’m supping in quite a different <i>monde</i>,’ said Sainty in a low
+vibrating voice, which he tried to keep very steady and sarcastic; ‘my
+brother has invited me to meet the girl of his heart. I really must
+offer you my sincerest thanks for the admirable way you’ve looked after
+him for me.’ He was swelling with righteous indignation and a
+consciousness of having driven a nail of incisive bitterness through the
+counterfeit coin of his cousin’s sympathy, as he rejoined Arthur and
+delivered up his hat to the attendant.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly with some touch of quite new prudence born of his conversation
+with Sainty, but much more probably with a view to doing proper honour
+to his fair guest, Arthur had retained a private room, rather, as it
+appeared, to the disappointment of the ladies, who had looked forward to
+seeing and being seen in the big restaurant, but immensely to the relief
+of his elder brother. The table was profusely decked with long trails of
+smilax and a quantity of those florists’ roses that are all of one size
+and shape and colour, and seem to have been manufactured by the dozen,
+ready packed in cardboard boxes, having no more suggestion about them of
+growth by any natural process than the little red silk shades on the
+electric lights.</p>
+
+<p>Miss de Vere, resplendent in green velvet, with a vast number of diamond
+ornaments, hearts, stars, crescents, arrows, and even frogs and spiders,
+pinned into the front<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_144">{144}</a></span> of her gown, sat on Arthur’s right and between
+the two brothers. She just touched a string of pearls at her throat,
+smiling archly on her host, as she took her seat. Long afterwards,
+Sainty had the opportunity of verifying his surmise that it was a
+present from that open-handed youth, when, in settling his brother’s
+outstanding liabilities, he came across it in Messrs. Rumond &amp; Diby’s
+little account in company with the claret jug that had figured on the
+occasion of his own majority.</p>
+
+<p>Seen at close quarters, the fair Cynthia was a little coarse looking,
+and it seemed to Sainty that a person to whom the art of painting her
+face must be professionally familiar, ought to have acquired more
+delicacy of touch. Her eyes were very large, and what the French call <i>à
+fleur de tête</i>; her lips were too full, too red, and seemed to show too
+much of their linings; and her teeth, which had flashed so brilliantly
+across the footlights, were less dazzling on a nearer inspection. Her
+figure and carriage were superb, but her hands, though unnaturally
+whitened, were not pretty, and her nails were ill-cared for and perhaps
+a little bitten. She was extremely gracious to Sainty, and evidently
+anxious to impress him with her <i>tenue</i> and the elegance of her manners.</p>
+
+<p>‘I met Lady Deans in the cloakroom,’ she began; ‘isn’t she a handsome
+woman? I <i>do</i> admire her. Isn’t it odd, her Christian name’s Vere, and
+so’s my surname? and we’re both so tall. Some one once said we might be
+sisters, but of course that’s nonsense. I know she’s a great deal better
+lookin’ than me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It had not occurred to me that you were alike&mdash;&mdash;’ Sainty was
+beginning, but Arthur cut in. ‘Rats,’ he said. ‘You know she isn’t a
+patch on you,’ for which gallant speech he was rewarded by a rap on the
+knuckles from his enslaver’s fork. Though he gazed enraptured in her
+face, she paid him very little attention, and continued to address her
+conversation to Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘We had a little supper at my place last night; I wish I’d known you
+were in town; your brother was there. Oh, all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_145">{145}</a></span> very quiet, of course;
+only a little soup, and lobster cutlets, and nothing else hot but the
+fowls; a few little things in aspic, and some plover’s eggs, that’s all;
+but we were very jolly. Straddles came, the famous <i>comique</i>, and sang
+some of his songs and made us roar; and one or two other people sang,
+and then we cleared away the furniture and had some dancing. We kept it
+up till four o’clock. I declare I’m quite sleepy; ain’t you, Clara?’</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingham, a little, heavily painted black and red lady, replied from
+the other end of the table that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. ‘Lor!
+we did have fun, though,’ she said; ‘how was the poor piano this
+morning, after those boys pouring the champagne into it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, don’t speak of it,’ said Miss de Vere. ‘You know that lovely new
+drapery I’d got for it, plush and Liberty silk; they completely ruined
+it. I was really cross. I don’t see any fun in spoiling people’s
+things.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What a shame!’ said Arthur. ‘May I give you a new one?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No, naughty boy, don’t you be extravagant. Why didn’t <i>you</i> come?’ she
+added, turning to Miss Hodgson, the beautiful statuesque lady who sat on
+Arthur’s left with a fixed smile on her lovely mouth that recalled the
+hairdresser’s window. She was eating a good deal, but not adding much to
+the conversation. Thus appealed to, she glanced towards the little
+Greek, still with the same amiable absence of expression, and nodded
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean I wouldn’t let you go?’ snarled Mr. Atides.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no,’ she cooed.</p>
+
+<p>‘Then why the devil didn’t you go? <i>I</i> don’t know&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>Petit monstre</i>,’ murmured Miss Balbullier to Sainty. ‘<i>Est-il
+insupportable! V’là longtemps que je l’aurais planté là si j’etais
+Mabel.</i> ‘Oby, what is “planted there” in English?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Chuck ‘im, give ‘im the mitten,’ promptly responded that gallant
+officer.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty wondered just what kind of weird irregular regiment could once
+have been commanded by this blue-nosed veteran,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_146">{146}</a></span> with his dyed moustache
+and damp grizzled curls; his hands and eyes were so much older than
+anything else about him, as to give an uncanny suggestion of magic, as
+of some imperfectly transformed Faust.</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>Tiens! la mitaine?</i> I ignore the phrase,’ said mademoiselle.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Atides continued to growl into his plate with a very evil
+expression, like a dog over a bone, and Agnes Baines, a very pretty fair
+girl with a pronounced Cockney accent pursued an eager conversation
+across him with Miss Bingham, as though he were an empty chair.</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>E’s given ’er a tiara,’ Sainty heard her say; ‘none of your little
+‘undred-pounders, a real fine one with big stones in it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Isn’t Agnes vulgar?’ Cynthia murmured to him, very impressive and
+supercilious from the heights of her superior gentility. ‘She’s had so
+few advantages, poor girl! but she is pretty, don’t you think?’</p>
+
+<p>‘They say he’s goin’ to marry ’er,’ Miss Baines continued.</p>
+
+<p>‘Your English girls are so kveer,’ the French lady remarked to Sainty;
+‘zay sink of nozzing but gettin’ married. To me zat seem so sorrrdid,’
+As Mademoiselle Elise was credited with having already ruined three
+young men during the brief period of her sojourn on these shores,
+without any thought of ceremonial formalities, this sentiment was
+perhaps not so disinterestedly high-minded as it sounded.</p>
+
+<p>Charley Hunter, who had been vainly trying to attract Miss Baines’
+attention&mdash;though perhaps more of her conversation was addressed to him
+than he realised&mdash;and gnawing his beardless lips at the ill success of
+his manœuvres, here turned his back squarely on her and addressed
+himself to Arthur.</p>
+
+<p>‘They say they’re going to raise the standard; isn’t it beastly? as if
+the damned exams. weren’t hard enough as it is.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My little feller from Aldershot says they are going to make ’em so
+stiff that none of you Johnnies will be able to pass unless you jolly
+well buck up,’ remarked Miss Bingham cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_147">{147}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I hope you will use your influence with my brother to make him work,’
+Sainty said, turning to Cynthia; ‘it’s very important he should pass.’</p>
+
+<p>‘He’s a bad boy,’ said Miss de Vere playfully, ‘but I’m always at him
+not to be so idle.’</p>
+
+<p>This speech being greeted with derisive laughter by some of the company,
+the lady indignantly demanded if they didn’t believe her.</p>
+
+<p>‘There were no exams. in my day,’ cried Colonel Hoby, ‘and damn me if I
+think they turned out less good officers than the damned spindle-shanked
+round-shouldered crew of short-sighted asses you have in the army
+nowadays. They ought to be parsons.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Hear, hear! Fieldmarshal,’ said Arthur. ‘I wish we had you in Pall
+Mall; there’d be a lot more good fellows in the army than there are, if
+you were Commander-in-chief.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was growing weak with the effort of trying to find something
+agreeable to say to either of his neighbours. He was oppressed with a
+sense of the dreariness of the whole function. He had come prepared to
+be a little shocked, but half hoping for a touch of reckless gaiety. If
+this was the sort of entertainment Tannhäuser found in the Venusberg, he
+thought the pilgrimage to Rome must have been an exhilarating change. He
+found himself almost wishing for the young men who had poured champagne
+into Miss de Vere’s piano, to lend some semblance of liveliness to the
+proceedings. With its banal unimaginative luxury and sordid second-rate
+chatter, this one excursion of his into Bohemia was as dull as one of
+his mother’s religious dinner-parties. And to think that it was for the
+privilege of frequenting this sort of society that dozens of young men
+of Arthur’s stamp ruined themselves yearly, on the very threshold of
+life! Uncle Cor might not be very exciting, but he surely was better
+company than Atides or Colonel Hoby. But then Sainty was
+constitutionally unfitted to give its due importance to love’s young
+dream.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_148">{148}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Sainty</span> rather expected a letter with some attempt at exculpation from
+his cousin; but Claude was evidently aware that in many awkward
+positions there is no course so expedient as silence. Had circumstances
+made a meeting with Sainty seem imminent, he might have thought
+otherwise; but, as things were, having nothing to say, he said nothing,
+and trusted to time to take the edge off the situation. Sainty composed
+several very withering answers to the possible letter, but as it never
+came he had no occasion to send them.</p>
+
+<p>He had not contrived to get a word with Arthur after the memorable
+supper. ‘Hope you won’t mind, old man, promised to see Miss de Vere
+home; only civil,’ the boy had murmured, as he slipped into the little
+hired <i>coupé</i> that was waiting. Mademoiselle Balbullier had hinted that
+a like attention would not be unwelcome from himself, but finding her
+hints disregarded, had driven off in a hansom with Miss Bingham,
+laughing very shrilly at some joke that seemed to tickle them hugely.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty returned to Cambridge more than ever persuaded that if anything
+was to be done for Arthur it must be done quickly. He had for some time
+had a scheme in his head, which had been germinating slowly, but for it
+to come to blossom, let alone fruit, he needed above all things the
+co-operation of Gerald Newby. He therefore made haste to seek his friend
+and lay his plans before him. He found Newby for a wonder alone.</p>
+
+<p>‘So you’re back,’ Gerald said, pushing the papers together on his desk
+and pulling the blotting-paper over them, a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_149">{149}</a></span> little trick of his which
+always exasperated Sainty, who would rather have died than look at
+anything not meant for him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Are you busy?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got something special to talk to you
+about.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m not too busy to be at the service of any one who wants me,’ said
+Newby. ‘Mere college work never seems to me as important as real human
+needs.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! I’m so glad to hear you say that; it gives me a better hope in what
+I have to say to you.’ Sainty had thought so much over the scheme he had
+to propose&mdash;it was so important to him&mdash;that now it was trembling on the
+threshold of utterance he feared lest he should not put it before Newby
+to the best advantage.</p>
+
+<p>There was so long a pause that the young don came round from his
+writing-table to a position from which he faced and dominated his
+interlocutor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m all attention.’</p>
+
+<p>‘First of all about my brother,’ Sainty began, with some hesitation.
+‘You must know that I’ve found things even worse than I expected; it’s
+not merely idleness and waste of time, as I feared; there’s a woman in
+the case.’</p>
+
+<p>Newby frowned. He had an almost feminine prudery. The fact was he knew
+very little of such things, and what he did not know always seemed to
+him dark and dangerous, a subject to be as much as possible avoided in
+conversation. ‘I am very little qualified to advise&mdash;&mdash;’ he began.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! that’s not what I wanted your help about,’ Sainty assured him; ‘at
+least, not directly; but you know I’ve often told you how I wished I
+could get rid of my most unsuitable part in life.’</p>
+
+<p>Newby made an almost imperceptible gesture of impatience, as who should
+say, ‘We are back to that old game, are we?’</p>
+
+<p>‘It was not mere talk,’ Sainty went on. ‘I have thought and thought
+about it, till I really have evolved something; I have once or twice
+wanted to speak to you about it, but have<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_150">{150}</a></span> been afraid. Why I mentioned
+Arthur just now, was that a great factor in my desire for a change of
+life was that I thought I saw my way to helping him, perhaps to <i>saving</i>
+him; and what I’ve seen in this visit to London convinces me that I’ve
+no time to lose.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You interest me,’ said Newby patronisingly. He went across and fastened
+his outer door. ‘If what you have to say to me is so important,’ he
+said, ‘we may as well secure ourselves against interruption.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ever since I was a child,’ Sainty began again, ‘it has been borne in on
+me that my brother was as pre-eminently fitted for my place in the world
+as I was <i>un</i>fitted for it. I used to think I was sure to die young, and
+that so matters would adjust themselves naturally without my
+intervention. Well&mdash;I’m nearly twenty-two, and I seem to get stronger
+every year. I don’t say I’m a tower of strength, but I fancy I’m less
+likely to die than many more robust men. For one thing, I do no
+dangerous things. You can understand that the idea is not a pleasant one
+to me that my one business in life is to keep my brother out of his
+birthright.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It isn’t his birthright; it’s yours.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s as you happen to look at it; it’s not my view. I can’t feel as
+if I had any right to what is only a hindrance and clog to me, and would
+be such a help to him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But you can’t change places with him, however much you may wish to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Legally and physically, no; virtually, yes. For ever so long I’ve been
+hatching a pet scheme, but I can’t carry it out without your help. I’ve
+not the health, the will, nor the intellect necessary; but you would be
+the ideal person to do it, and you would help and cheer me when I
+failed.’</p>
+
+<p>‘May I know what this wonderful idea of yours is?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t make him Lord Belchamber&mdash;I wish I could; but I can practically
+give him the position, if I hand over the place and income to him. He
+would be able to marry some nice girl; he is one of those who ought to
+marry young.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_151">{151}</a></span> With a healthy, out-of-door life and plenty of innocent
+congenial occupation, and the influence of a good woman at his side, all
+that is kindly in him would have room to develop. He is not naturally
+vicious, only weak and incurably headstrong and obstinate.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what do you propose to do with <i>yourself</i>?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! that is it; that’s where <i>you</i> come in. The whole thing hangs on
+you.’ Sainty looked appealingly in his friend’s face. ‘I’m half afraid
+to put it to the touch,’ he said; ‘I have it so much at heart.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t give you my views on your Utopia unless you tell me what it
+is.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty detected and grieved at the faint sneer in the use of the word
+‘Utopia.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You don’t encourage me,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘How can I, till I know what you propose?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought we might go, you and I, into one of those East End parishes
+and start a place something on the lines of Toynbee Hall, a sort of
+university for the poor, a centre of culture and light and civilisation
+in the middle of all that dreariness and barbarity; I to find the money,
+and you practically everything else, with me for your lieutenant to work
+under your orders.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty brought it all out with a rush, when once he had come to the
+point, and then paused breathless to hear how his idea would be
+received. Newby sat silent for a moment or two; at least he took the
+matter seriously.</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you thought at all what it will cost?’ he asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ cried Sainty eagerly, ‘I’ve gone into all that rather carefully.
+Say that it costs £20,000 to build the place&mdash;it could be done for that,
+very simple and plain; a big hall to begin with, and perhaps a cloister,
+and a few sets of rooms like college rooms. After the initial expense I
+don’t think it <i>could</i> cost more than £2000 or £3000 a year. Of course
+we should live in the simplest way&mdash;there would be no luxury; and
+gradually I should hope the place would begin to help pay for itself; it
+wouldn’t be a charity, you know.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_152">{152}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘And the land?’ asked Newby; ‘is that included in your £20,000? You
+would want a good big plot, for the heart of London, to put up such
+buildings as you propose.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, that could be managed. I might pay for half and raise the other
+half by mortgage on the property, or even the whole. There need be no
+difficulty about the money part of it; <i>I</i>’d see to that. The question
+is, will you help? All the rules, all the details of the working of the
+thing would have to come from you. You would be absolute master. I
+thought,’ he added a little piteously, ‘that it would appeal to you as
+an opportunity of carrying out some of your ideals. It would, of course,
+be entirely undenominational; people of all creeds should be invited to
+explain their views. It might be the beginning, the nucleus of your idea
+of universal belief and brotherhood.’</p>
+
+<p>The pleading eyes fixed on his face seemed to make Newby vaguely ill at
+ease. While Sainty was talking he had shifted his position, got up and
+walked to the window, and sat down again at his desk, on which he
+drummed a little with his fingers. Now he rose and came back to his
+friend. There was a touch of embarrassment and something like
+compunction, as he said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear fellow, it’s impossible, simply impossible.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, glancing round the charming room with its air of dignified calm
+and severe luxury, saw suddenly how sham was its austerity, how real its
+comfort.</p>
+
+<p>‘I am asking a great deal of you,’ he said; ‘too much, I’m afraid.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t say that,’ said Newby eagerly. ‘Don’t think I would hesitate at
+any little personal sacrifice; that is indeed a low view of me. But,
+believe me, I see the impracticability of the whole thing.’</p>
+
+<p>For a few seconds there was an uneasy silence. The summer breeze from
+the open windows faintly stirred the pictures on the wall. Voices
+softened by distance and pleasant outdoor sounds came wafted to them
+where they sat. It occurred to Sainty that it was not necessary for a
+young<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_153">{153}</a></span> man to ‘have great possessions’ ‘to go away sorrowful’ when
+confronted by the opportunity of the supreme sacrifice for others. No
+one knew better than he that Newby’s way of life would have been far
+harder for him to give up than his own; and this knowledge lent a great
+tenderness and humility to his voice as he asked, ‘Why impracticable if
+we are both willing?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Take yourself to begin with,’ Newby answered; ‘think of your people,
+your mother, your uncle, the duke and duchess&mdash;what would they say to
+such a scheme?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, they’d be horrified at first; but I don’t think they would offer
+any very strenuous opposition to such a simple plan of disposing of me
+in favour of Arthur.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then, think how <i>I</i> should appear in the matter. What would they say of
+me?&mdash;that I had acquired a great influence over you, and then used it to
+make you devote yourself and your money to the support of myself and the
+furtherance of my crack-brained schemes. It’s ten to one against their
+even allowing me any sincerity; far more likely they would think my one
+object was to advertise myself while living at your expense.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And do you care so greatly what people say of you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, I do. My dear boy, you are one of the great ones of the earth and
+can afford to be thought eccentric if you please; but I am a poor
+scholar&mdash;my good name is everything to me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You said once that we could never hope to do anything unless we were
+prepared to be misunderstood; that no man could really be good for
+anything of whom the commonplace respectable people spoke well.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens!’ cried Newby, with not unnatural exasperation, ‘I wish
+you wouldn’t cast snatches of things I may have said in some quite
+different connection in my teeth.’ He made another excursion to the
+window and stood looking out for a second or two. Presently he turned
+and said in a much more chastened manner, ‘Then there’s what I’m doing
+here. You yourself can bear witness that I am not without<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_154">{154}</a></span> influence on
+a number of young men, an influence you have told me was good. Have I a
+right to give up my work here, my power of influencing unnumbered young
+lives towards higher and purer ideals, for a quite problematical chance
+of doing good to costermongers, and incidentally enabling your brother
+to stand in your shoes?’</p>
+
+<p>For a few moments neither spoke.</p>
+
+<p>‘Then you refuse?’ said Sainty almost under his breath. ‘Is it quite,
+quite irrevocable?’</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear boy, some day you will see the matter in its true light and
+will thank me for having saved you from following the will-o’-the-wisp
+of your own too precipitate philanthropy. The idea is purely fanciful;
+believe me, it would never work. In the first place, the mortifications,
+the disappointments, the roughness of the life, would kill you in a
+year.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And if meanwhile my money and my feeble efforts had served to start a
+really useful work, to launch you on a career of helpfulness, what would
+that matter? Would it not even be the simplest solution of all? Arthur
+would then step into the place in which it is so much my object to
+establish him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Quâ method of suicide the machinery is cumbrous and expensive,’ said
+Newby, with dreary facetiousness; ‘and you can’t seriously expect me to
+aid and abet you in committing the happy dispatch.’</p>
+
+<p>They talked much longer, Sainty still pleading for his idea, though
+without much hope of success, Newby, gaining assurance from the sound of
+his own voice, pouring more and more cold water on the project and
+abounding in excellent reason. Sainty could not but see the sense of
+much that Gerald said; yet he came away from the interview not only
+depressed and disappointed at the ruthless killing of his cherished
+scheme, but with an uncomfortable sense of having caught a glimpse of
+his idol’s clay feet, always one of the saddest experiences of life. He
+felt too a certain closing in on him as of fate; his attempts to mould
+events or to avert catastrophes had met with singularly little success.
+Was all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_155">{155}</a></span> struggle useless, then? was it true that we were only puppets
+in the iron grip of destiny? To a person of his temperament it was only
+too easy to believe it, yet youth’s everlasting assertion of free-will
+dies hard in our twenty-second year, and it was not without many
+searchings of heart that Belchamber settled down to the conviction that
+there was nothing to be done. To say that his brother was never out of
+his thoughts would be an exaggeration. Happily for us, there is no such
+thing as complete absorption in one idea. When we have lost all that
+made life worth having, if we were honest we should own that at certain
+moments the most trivial of daily preoccupations drove our grief
+completely out of our minds. There is no evidence to show that the
+inhabitants of Herculaneum were other than cheerfully busy; and we all
+pursue a hundred frivolous objects, though lying every one of us
+inexorably under sentence of death.</p>
+
+<p>In the year that followed Sainty thought much and anxiously of Arthur,
+but he also thought of many other things. For one thing, the management
+of his estate was beginning to interest him. Having originally turned
+his attention that way purely to please his mother, he had gradually
+come to some appreciation of what he could do for his fellow-creatures
+over an area for which he was more or less responsible. Whatever his
+views might be as to the position of the land-owning class, while he
+held such a position it undoubtedly entailed many duties and
+responsibilities. Whether his land were eventually to pass to the State
+or be cut up into peasant properties, as long as it remained his it was
+clearly better that the people on it should live in well-drained,
+weathertight houses, than in insanitary hovels; that they should be as
+far as possible provided with regular employment, educated, amused, kept
+from the public-house. While Cambridge and his work for the tripos held
+him, he had thought less of all these things, secure in the conviction
+that his mother and uncle were giving them careful attention. To tell
+the truth, he had a little feared to absorb himself in them while he
+still cherished a hope that his work in life might lie in far other<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_156">{156}</a></span>
+fields, that all this might be Arthur’s business, not his. In his
+immediate neighbourhood there was no very terrible distress to stir his
+imagination; by the poor on the place Lady Charmington had scrupulously
+done something more than her duty, and hard as were the lives of the
+agricultural labourers, at least their lot had fallen to them in
+pleasant places&mdash;their work was done in the pure air of heaven. It was
+for the huddled degraded masses of the great cities, and especially of
+London, that his soul felt the overwhelming sickening pity which had
+threatened to drive him out into the wilderness. Now that he personally
+seemed to be barred from effort in that direction, that his
+long-cherished hopes of seating his brother in his place had proved
+quite impracticable, and all the fabric raised by his dreams on that
+foundation had fallen in ruins about his ears at the blast of Newby’s
+inexorable common-sense, the plain duties that lay immediately around
+him presented themselves as something to be clutched with an almost
+despairing intensity. Here, at least, was work ready to his hand, and he
+promised himself it should be done thoroughly. He absorbed himself in
+his mother’s big ledgers, her detailed and carefully kept accounts of
+all the workings of the great property, with the same student’s passion
+for mastering his subject that he had brought to his Cambridge studies.
+Had Lady Charmington been a less conscientious woman, the thought that
+her power was passing from her might not have been without a sting; but
+she had talked so much of ‘giving an account of her stewardship,’ and so
+often lamented Sainty’s want of interest in his own possessions, that,
+whatever slight pangs she may have had to stifle, she had not the face
+to express anything but pleasure at his changed attitude. So far, too,
+he was still her pupil, eagerly learning all she had to tell, and
+accepting her word as final. It is possible that she took a genuine
+pleasure in introducing him to his duties, and she may well have been
+forgiven some moments of pride in displaying to him both the quantity
+and quality of her work during his minority. Sainty, on his side, began
+to understand<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_157">{157}</a></span> all that his mother had done for him, and his wonder was
+only equalled by his gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington’s confidence in Arthur’s application to his studies
+began to be shaken about this time by his ignominious failure to pass
+his examination; and here it was she who turned to Sainty for
+help&mdash;Sainty who, impossible as it seemed, had been right where she was
+wrong.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t make it out at all,’ she would say; ‘he seemed to be working so
+hard. You recollect he wouldn’t even come home last Easter; and then in
+the summer he went off on that reading party.’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur, in fact, after a fortnight at Belchamber&mdash;a fortnight during
+which he had been moody, restless, unlike himself, and had carefully
+shunned all possibilities of private or personal talk with either his
+mother or brother&mdash;had left hurriedly on a mysterious ‘reading party.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty wrote often to the London lodgings, but seldom got any answers,
+and doubted whether many of his letters ever reached the person to whom
+they were written. It became increasingly difficult to pacify Lady
+Charmington, who passed by a rapid transition from her serene optimism
+to the depths of the gloomiest apprehension. Sometimes for days she
+would hardly talk of anything else, expressing wonder, surprise,
+disappointment, all of which Sainty had more or less to pretend to
+share, with a sense of deceit when he reflected how little surprised he
+really was, and how much he could have enlightened the poor lady.</p>
+
+<p>At Sainty’s earnest request Arthur came again to Belchamber in November
+for the shooting, his last visit, as it proved, for many a long day.
+Sainty argued, remonstrated, implored. ‘What was he doing? What did he
+intend to do? Didn’t he <i>want</i> to go into the army? He must know he
+could never get in if he didn’t work or pass his exams.’ It was all to
+no purpose. The boy took refuge in a surly silence. He had two such
+terrible scenes with his mother that for the first time in his life he
+spent Christmas away from home. ‘I’m going to the Hunters,’ he wrote.
+‘If I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_158">{158}</a></span> come to Belchamber there will only be a repetition of the ghastly
+rows I had with mother in November, and what’s the good? I hate rows;
+jawing never did me any good yet.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington appealed to her brother. Lord Firth saw Arthur when he
+came up for the meeting of parliament. Sainty could never learn
+accurately what passed between them, but his uncle, that most amiable
+gentleman, said he would not willingly speak to the boy again.</p>
+
+<p>The spring wore away miserably in sickening suspense. Arthur was still
+nominally working at ‘Monkton’s,’ but several letters had come from the
+principal of the establishment, complaining of the slackness of his
+attendance, which had not tended to soothe his mother’s feelings.</p>
+
+<p>It was getting on for a year after the supper at the Hotel Fritz, when
+Sainty, seeing a number of letters, most of which had a bill-like look
+about them, on the hall table for Arthur, took them to his room to
+re-direct. He was just about to do so, when he noticed that they had all
+originally been sent to Monkton’s, and had been forwarded from there.
+The postmarks of some of them were several weeks old, from which it was
+evident not only that Arthur had not been at the crammer’s at all for
+some time past, but that the people there believed him to be at home.
+The pen dropped from Sainty’s hand, and he sat staring at the envelopes,
+shuffling them idly from behind one another, as though they were a hand
+at cards. Finally, shutting them sharply together, he thrust them into
+his pocket, and went in search of his mother.</p>
+
+<p>Since his defection at Christmas and the failure of Lord Firth to bring
+the culprit to reason, Lady Charmington had talked much less of her
+second son; for the most part she maintained a grim and offended
+silence. Sainty wondered sometimes what this changed attitude might
+mean. He was certain that she did not think less of Arthur, or worry
+less about him. Was it possible that she had begun to distrust his
+co-operation for any reason, and was trying to find out something for
+herself without his help? Her manner, when he spoke to her on this
+particular day, was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_159">{159}</a></span> stranger than ever, and she looked at him with a
+sudden hard scrutiny which chilled him, when he asked if she did not
+think it might be well for him to go to London and look Arthur up.</p>
+
+<p>‘He never writes, and we don’t know what he may be doing,’ he said. ‘I
+can’t let things drift in this way any longer.’</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing of the letters in his pocket. Lady Charmington looked as
+if she were on the point of saying something, and then decided not to.</p>
+
+<p>‘Very well,’ she answered quietly; ‘how long shall you be gone?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know; it will depend on what I find. Mother,’ he added, ‘don’t
+you agree? don’t you think it will be well for me to go?’</p>
+
+<p>Again his mother looked at him as if she would have read his soul; it
+was the old glance that had made him stammer and look down as a child,
+the look that said more clearly than words that she thought him a liar.
+He had never been able to meet it. Instinctively he looked away.</p>
+
+<p>‘Go, by all means,’ he heard her say, and he knew that her eyes were
+still upon his face, the eyes of a judge, almost an accuser. ‘Go and see
+what you can do. You may have means of getting at the truth not open to
+me.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_160">{160}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Without</span> seeing any one at Monkton’s but the servant, or even disclosing
+his identity, Sainty was able in a very few words to establish the
+correctness of his surmises. Arthur had not been there for weeks. ‘I can
+get you ‘is address, if you’ll wait a minute,’ the man said; ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>e’s down
+at ‘is own ‘ome; I forwarded some letters to him a day or two back.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, thanks; if he’s there, I know the address and need not trouble
+you,’ and Sainty turned again to his hansom. He reflected that to find
+Miss de Vere was to find his brother, and supposed, in his innocence,
+that he had only to apply at the theatre to learn the young lady’s
+address. But when he presented himself at the stage-door and blushingly
+demanded it, he was informed that Miss de Vere was not acting at
+present, and that, in any case, they were strictly forbidden to give the
+private address of any of their ladies or gentlemen. A letter sent to
+the theatre for Miss de Vere would be forwarded.</p>
+
+<p>This was an unlooked-for check, and he wondered blankly what he was to
+do next. He sent away his cab and began to wander slowly westward again;
+he could think better on foot. He was walking sadly along Pall Mall,
+when he was passed by a young man with wonderfully broad shoulders and a
+wonderfully small waist, who paused, looked at him, and finally held out
+his hand. Sainty recognised Algy Montgomery.</p>
+
+<p>‘Hulloa!’ said the guardsman, with the smileless gloom of the
+fashionable London young man. ‘Where are you off to? I’m just on my way
+to call on my stepmother; I understand<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_161">{161}</a></span> she says I never come near her.
+Why don’t you come along and see your revered grandmother?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had been trying to make himself go and ask Claude for the address
+he wanted; he had not once set eyes on his cousin during the past year,
+and to appeal to him again for help was a bitter pill. Think as he
+would, he could evolve no other way of arriving at his end, and this
+chance meeting and invitation to Sunborough House seemed like a leading.
+He would go and see the duchess&mdash;what more natural? and if Claude
+happened to be there, how could he help it?</p>
+
+<p>‘All right,’ he said; ‘I don’t mind if I do.’</p>
+
+<p>The pair walked in silence for a few seconds, Lord Algernon trying to
+accommodate his long stride to his companion’s limp.</p>
+
+<p>‘Come up to look after your young brother?’ he asked presently, through
+the cigar which he held tightly between his teeth. ‘He’s making no end
+of an ass of himself with Topsy de Vere; he never leaves her for a
+minute&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>To talk casually to a comparative stranger of what was gnawing his
+vitals was gall and wormwood to Sainty, but he grunted some sort of an
+assent, and then asked as indifferently as he could, ‘You don’t happen
+to know Miss de Vere’s address, do you?’</p>
+
+<p>Lord Algy laughed. ‘No, for a wonder, I don’t,’ he said; ‘but I tell you
+who ought to&mdash;your precious cousin Morland. I fancy he knew his way
+there quite well at one time.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! did Claude&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Got tired of the lady; or perhaps found her rather too expensive (I
+suspect his grace don’t do his secretary particularly well), so passed
+her on to the little cousin. Sharp fellow, Morland.’</p>
+
+<p>The duchess, whom presently they found having tea in company with Lady
+Rugby and Lady Eva, had also a word to say of her prodigal grandson.
+‘Arthur <i>s’encanaille</i>,’ she remarked. ‘He is bad form; he lets himself
+be seen everywhere with <i>cocottes</i>; the young men of to-day have no
+<i>tenue</i>&mdash;none. <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_162">{162}</a></span>Formerly, yes, I don’t say men were any better&mdash;they
+have always been monsters; but they did not throw <i>ces demoiselles</i> in
+the face of the world.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eva murmured something to the effect that Arthur was a dear, and
+dropped a platitude about wild oats.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I don’t want a boy to be a <i>merle blanc</i>,’ her mother rejoined.’
+Sainty would be all the better if he were just a little naughty,
+wouldn’t you, my child? I don’t suppose Algy here, or your own boy, are
+models of virtue, but there are ways of doing things. By the way, where
+is Claude? Ring the bell, Algy, and we will see if he is in; he will
+like to see his cousin.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not feel at all sure that he would, but when Morland
+presently appeared in answer to the duchess’s message, he was as easy
+and unembarrassed as usual; it was Belchamber who was awkward and ill at
+ease. There was, perhaps, just a shade of reproachful tenderness in
+Claude’s greeting, an eloquent glance, a silent pressure of the hand, as
+who should say, ‘You may be as cantankerous and unreasonable as you
+like, my patience with those I love is practically inexhaustible.’ At
+the merest hint from Sainty that he had something to ask him, he carried
+him off to his own room, and when the request for Miss de Vere’s address
+had been stammered out, produced a little address-book from a locked
+drawer, and began to search in it with a great appearance of assiduity.</p>
+
+<p>‘Here it is&mdash;no, let me see, she left there, that’s her old address; how
+stupid of me. Ah! this is it, a flat she took; I remember now. But she’s
+always moving, I don’t guarantee that you’ll find her there; but they’ll
+be able to tell you if she’s flitted again.’ His voice was dry and
+business-like; Sainty wanted an address, he was trying to help him to
+it, as he would try to do anything he wanted. Why he had need of it was
+no affair of his. Claude prided himself on his power of implying much
+that his tongue never uttered.</p>
+
+<p>He wrung Sainty’s hand at parting. ‘Good luck to you,’ he whispered.
+‘<i>I</i> could do no good; may you be more fortunate! And oh! by the way, I
+wouldn’t mention <i>me</i> there; I’m not popular in that quarter. Cynthia
+has taken one of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_163">{163}</a></span> those absurd unreasoning dislikes to me that
+half-educated people do, and has set Arthur against me. I suppose she
+was afraid I might try and get him away from her. It’s a bad business.
+Well, <i>addio</i>, and best wishes.’</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, Claude was right in his surmise that Miss de Vere might
+have moved, but Sainty did at last discover her present abode, and
+arriving there about noon of the following day, found that she had gone
+to a rehearsal, ‘but the gentleman was in.’ Sainty was not sorry to find
+Arthur alone. The boy was at first of course very much on the defensive;
+the elder brother had to walk most warily among the eggshells of
+suspicion and susceptibility, but he soon discovered that his coming was
+not altogether unwelcome. Arthur did not attempt to disguise the fact
+that he was living with Cynthia; ‘he had made her give up her flat, and
+had taken these rooms for her; they had the whole house, and the people
+of the house looked after them; it saved the bother of servants; he was
+answerable for the rent and the housekeeping; naturally he couldn’t live
+at her expense; otherwise she wouldn’t take a penny from him, she was
+very high-minded; it was as much as ever she would let him give her a
+little present now and then. Anything she made professionally was no
+business of his; she had gone about a new engagement this morning.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But how do you do it? Surely to take a whole house like this on the
+footing of lodgings is the most expensive arrangement you can make.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It ain’t done for nothing, I can tell you,’ Arthur said ruefully. He
+was not sorry to unburthen himself a little to his brother. Sainty had
+had no idea to what extent a young man of family could live on credit in
+London, for a time at least. By carefully never paying ready money where
+it was not absolutely necessary, it was astonishing what a lot you could
+do.</p>
+
+<p>‘But what’s it all going to lead to?’ Sainty asked. ‘Do you propose to
+give up the army, never do anything&mdash;just live on here with her from day
+to day? Even supposing you were me, and had all the money you wanted,
+would this life satisfy you?’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_164">{164}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I believe you, my boy,’ said Arthur heartily.</p>
+
+<p>‘It may for a time; it won’t, it can’t, for long,’ Sainty said eagerly.
+‘And mother? Don’t you care about her? Mother’s awfully cut up about
+your not passing your exam. There’s another coming on in the autumn;
+it’ll be your last chance. Don’t you mean to try?’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur’s brow grew dark at the mention of his mother. ‘By Jove!’ he
+said, ‘you don’t know the things she said to me. She <i>can</i> let you have
+it, when she isn’t pleased, the mater can.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you must admit she had some reason <i>not</i> to be pleased,’ said
+Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Lots of fellows muff the first time,’ said Arthur lamely. ‘I’ve got
+another try.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But are you any more likely to pass the next time? Are you doing a
+stroke of work for it?’ And he narrated to Arthur how it had come to his
+knowledge that he had not been at Monkton’s for weeks. ‘I happened on
+these,’ he said, producing the letters he had found in the hall at
+Belchamber, ‘but mother might just as well have found them. She doesn’t
+know yet that you’ve dropped work altogether, but she must find it out
+soon. Monkton may write to her any day and ask when you are coming
+back.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Damn it all! I hadn’t thought of that.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No. You never think of anything half an hour ahead, do you?’</p>
+
+<p>Then Sainty told him how people were talking about him&mdash;his grandmother,
+Aunt Eva, Algy Montgomery (he did not mention Claude). ‘Don’t you see
+that in a dozen ways the whole thing may come out to mother at any
+moment?’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur was very stubborn, took refuge in the reiteration of his devotion
+to Cynthia and his determination not to be parted from her. Once or
+twice Sainty almost lost patience.</p>
+
+<p>‘You say you <i>won’t</i> leave her, and you <i>won’t</i> do this or that or
+anything you don’t choose,’ he said with some warmth; ‘but what are you
+going to live on? You own you’re up to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_165">{165}</a></span> your ears in debt, and that
+people are getting impatient. What can you do if mother cuts off your
+allowance?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m of age; I’ve got my own money.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Five hundred a year! You can keep up this sort of life so easily on
+that, can’t you? You know you can’t touch the principal. I don’t suppose
+the next two years’ income would begin to pay what you owe now.’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur looked doubtful; he began to see the weakness of his position. He
+tried a few platitudes about ‘working his fingers to the bone for
+<i>her</i>,’ at which Sainty, miserable as he felt, couldn’t help laughing.</p>
+
+<p>‘You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life,’ he said, ‘and you
+would find it so easy to get employment, wouldn’t you? You would be so
+valuable in a house of business!’</p>
+
+<p>He wisely refrained from any suggestion that the lady’s affection might
+not be proof against the trials of poverty.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, after long argument and entreaty, Arthur was persuaded to say
+he would go to a new crammer in the country till after the next
+examination, and would do his best to pass. ‘It is no good my trying to
+work at Monkton’s,’ he said candidly; ‘I should always be bolting back
+to Cynthia. You can’t think how good she is; she’s always telling me I
+ought to work and pass my exams, and please you. Don’t try and make me
+give her up or say I won’t have anything more to do with her, or any rot
+of that sort.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, too glad to have carried his point about the work, was ready to
+promise anything&mdash;payment of debts, help in the support of the lady, in
+short, whatever Arthur liked to demand. ‘And first of all,’ he said
+pleadingly, ‘you will come down home for a few days before you go to the
+new place. Poor mother’s sore and wretched at the way you’ve treated
+her. She doesn’t <i>show</i> much, but she feels a lot, and you’ve always
+been her favourite. Come and be nice to her for a bit before you take up
+your work again.’</p>
+
+<p>‘By Jove! you make me do everything you want,’ said Arthur tenderly.
+Sainty could not help smiling at the thought of how very far this was
+from being the case, but he was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_166">{166}</a></span> thankful for small mercies. He
+reflected that he had been lucky in hitting on a propitious moment, when
+the narrow matters of the house had begun to press rather importunately
+on Miss de Vere’s lover. To grant a favour, accepting the money he
+needed as a condition, was in every way pleasanter to Arthur than having
+to sue for help.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty declined to stay and lunch and see Miss de Vere. ‘I want to get
+home this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Mother’ll be so glad to know that you
+are going to work and do your best to pass; and also that you’ll come
+home for a bit. You haven’t been at Belchamber since November, and this
+is May; I don’t think you’ve ever been away for so long at a stretch
+before.’</p>
+
+<p>He travelled down to the country that same afternoon with a lighter
+heart than he had carried for many months, pleased to find he still had
+some influence over his brother, glad to be reconciled to Claude, and
+rejoicing in the pleasure he should be able to give his mother in the
+announcement of Arthur’s visit and his promise of industry and
+reformation. He pondered anxiously on the question how much he need say
+of the temptations and distractions of London life, to explain Arthur’s
+desire to leave Monkton’s and once more try a country crammer’s, and
+concluded that there was no necessity to breathe a word of the nature of
+the occupation that had kept his brother from working in town. He only
+trusted other people might be equally reticent. He had telegraphed,
+before leaving London, to his mother that he would be back to dinner,
+and as soon as he arrived at Belchamber he was met by a message that she
+would like to see him at once in her own room. It was in vain that he
+told himself she was naturally impatient to hear what news he brought;
+it was with an uneasy foreboding that he approached her door, and he had
+to pause and brace himself before he summoned courage to turn the
+handle.</p>
+
+<p>His first glance at his mother confirmed his worst anticipations. She
+was walking up and down the room, so that her back was towards him as he
+entered; but the white set face<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_167">{167}</a></span> she turned on him as he closed the door
+showed him at once that she knew everything. It was terrible to see this
+silent, dignified woman so ravaged and shaken out of her habitual
+self-control. Even at that moment he noticed with surprise the curious
+staginess of her movements and method of speech. It was true, then, that
+people in times of strong emotion did really behave in this way; and
+these gestures and phrases which he had always supposed to be pure
+literary and theatrical conventions derived from something in nature
+after all.</p>
+
+<p>‘So,’ she cried, sweeping round upon him, ‘I find what I have long
+suspected was true: my boy, who, if he was thoughtless and a little
+idle, I thought was a pure-minded, healthy boy, has been degrading
+himself with loose women; and this has been going on for a year past; it
+has been common talk; every one has known it; every one but his poor
+blind idiot of a mother. We must never know anything, of course; our
+sons may be drifting to perdition, but there is no one who will come and
+tell a poor woman. People stand by and laugh; I suppose they think it
+funny; all the godless, indecent, modern books say so. No one, no one
+will say a word till it’s too late, too late to do any good.’</p>
+
+<p>She was in a white heat of rage, tearless, tragic, almost distraught,
+all the mother and the puritan in her crying out in revolt against the
+eternal mystery of the flesh, the triumph of the senses in the young
+male. Yes, in the abstract she knew of it, recognised that men were
+sinners and full of carnal appetites; but that <i>her</i> boy, her child whom
+she had nursed and tended, whom but a few years back she had held upon
+her knee, that this pure, bright young creature should voluntarily turn
+from her to smirch its white raiment in the slough of sensuality&mdash;it was
+not to be believed. If sacred art represented the mother of the one
+sinless son with seven swords in her heart, what symbol can adequately
+depict the woes of the mothers of men?</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, with his quick sympathy, divined something of all this in the
+awful moments that he stood for the first time face to face with his
+mother. His curious, guarded, sheltered<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_168">{168}</a></span> youth, his unhealthy, abnormal
+perception of other people’s feelings, as well as the something feminine
+and maternal in his relation to his robuster brother, combined to give
+him a vision of an agony vouchsafed to few of his sex. He saw his
+mother, his cold, chaste, proud mother, stricken at once in her
+motherhood, her pride, her chastity, and yet he understood the situation
+as she could never understand it, as it could never be possible for him
+to make her understand. His whole heart yearned over her with a pity he
+seemed to have been specially created to feel in its full force. He made
+a step towards her with his arms held out, but she turned on him as if
+she would have struck him.</p>
+
+<p>‘And <i>you</i>,’ she cried, blazing with denunciation, ‘<i>you</i> come to me
+with a lying pretence of sympathy; you who have talked to me a dozen
+times of your anxiety about your brother, and seemed at one with me, so
+unselfishly, nobly distressed about him. You have known of this all
+along, have aided and abetted him in his infamy. You, who are too
+sexless and poor a creature to have known his temptations, have helped
+him in cold blood to his undoing, and with this in your heart have come
+to me to consult what was best to be done for him. Oh! you were always
+subtle and sly when you were hardly more than a baby.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Mother, mother! for God’s sake stop; you don’t know what you’re saying.
+What do you mean?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! you don’t know, do you? Do you deny that you have known this all
+along? A year ago, didn’t you go up and sup and carouse in this
+creature’s company and that of her vile companions? Answer me that. Yes
+or no? Did you, or did you not? You see, you can’t deny it. For all I
+know, you have been with them often. Is it from her house you have come
+to me now? to me, the mother of you both!’</p>
+
+<p>‘Perhaps I have been wrong, mother, but I don’t deserve this at your
+hands. I have done what I could. I have just come from Arthur. You know
+he is not very manageable; I have not had an easy part to play. And I
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_169">{169}</a></span>have got him to promise to come away; he will come home and&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Has he said he won’t go back?’ She flashed it at him like a whiplash,
+and her gesture spoke impatient contempt as he answered&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>‘No, I can’t make him say that, but I hope much from home influences;
+when we get him here, surrounded by all that will speak to him of his
+childhood, of all he owes to you&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>She cut him short. ‘You temporise with evil. Your arguments are those of
+the worldly wise.’ She was regaining her calm; argument was steadying
+her, and the old habit of rebuke brought back the judicial tone to her
+voice. ‘There are only two ways,’ she said, ‘right and wrong. You cannot
+palter and hold diplomatic parleys with vice. I am willing&mdash;I should
+<i>like</i>&mdash;to believe that your motives have been good, but I hope you see
+the harm you have done by your attempts at compromise. Why, oh why,’ she
+broke out again, ‘knowing all this, haven’t you told <i>me</i>? Surely <i>I</i>
+was the person to know, to be consulted on the subject.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I wanted to spare you, to save you pain. I may have been mistaken; I
+haven’t seen very clearly what was best, but I hoped to get him away,
+and that perhaps you might never have the sorrow of knowing. I knew how
+bitter it would be to you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! this eternal deceit! When will you learn that there can be no
+question of “not seeing what was best”? My early training of you must
+have been strangely defective, if at your age you can’t tell good from
+evil. How can it ever be anything but right to tell the truth?’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is no new burthen I’ve had to bear,’ Sainty answered, ‘to be alone
+in my knowledge of what was going on. For years I’ve stood between
+Arthur and your knowledge of the scrapes he was in.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You have, have you! So there has been a conspiracy between you to keep
+me in the dark. I don’t want to be unjust to you; you have not a strong
+or courageous character; you may have honestly believed you were being
+kind; but see what has come of your duplicity. Had I known, I might<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_170">{170}</a></span>
+have said a word in season. Arthur would always listen to <i>me</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty thought of the tempests that had raged when Lady Charmington had
+said a word in season in the autumn on a much less ticklish subject, but
+he forebore to press this home.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ his mother resumed, with a certain grim ferocity, ‘I’ve written
+now. <i>I</i> am not subtle or diplomatic, I have borne my testimony quite
+simply and faithfully.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty’s heart sank. He thought of his long and anxious contest, of how
+hardly at length he had prevailed. Of his mother’s methods of plain
+dealing he had just had a specimen; he knew, none better, Arthur’s
+impatience of the smallest interference, and the spirit in which he
+would receive even the tenderest animadversion on Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mother!’ he cried, ‘what <i>have</i> you said?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Said! What should I say? <i>I</i> haven’t temporised and beat about the
+bush. I have said plainly that he was living in mortal sin, and
+imperilling his soul; and I’ve bidden him leave that woman at once, or
+never see me again.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. He saw all
+he had striven for, all he had effected, swept away at a touch; he saw
+too that the mischief was done, and irrecoverable; there was no good in
+saying a word. The despair his attitude expressed must have touched some
+tenderer chord in his mother. She came across to him, and laid her hand,
+not unkindly, on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>‘Pray,’ she said sternly. ‘Pray to God for help; He alone can turn this
+wretched boy from his evil courses. Vain is the help of man.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty never knew how he got through the next two days. He had put a
+strain upon himself far beyond his feeble strength; the two railway
+journeys would in themselves have told on him, but the unresting
+hurrying hither and thither in London, the emotion of meeting Claude
+again, the terrible nervous excitement of his long argument with his
+brother, and then, on the top of all, when he was worn out in body<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_171">{171}</a></span> and
+mind, the shock of seeing his mother as he had never seen her, the
+bitter disappointment of finding all he had done rendered useless at a
+blow, crushed him utterly. He was glad to take refuge in physical stupor
+and exhaustion from the bitterness of his own reflections.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning of the third day, when he was gradually coming back to a
+sense of what had happened, his mother came to his room with an open
+letter in her hand. Her face was grey and drawn, and she seemed suddenly
+to have become an old woman. Her voice was hollow and unnaturally quiet.
+‘Read that,’ she said, and tossed the letter on to his bed. Then raising
+her hand, which shook as she held it up, ‘I curse him,’ she said, still
+in that same even, horrible tone. ‘Remember that you have heard me curse
+my son’; and she went slowly out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>With trembling hand Sainty drew the paper to him; he recognised Arthur’s
+schoolboy scrawl. The letter was meant to be very dignified.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear mother,’ the boy wrote, ‘I have received your letter; I will
+not notice your insults to a woman I love. You say I am living in sin.
+Very well, then&mdash;so be it. I will do so no longer. I came of age last
+week and am my own master, and curse me if I’ll take it from you or any
+one. I have to announce to you that I was married yesterday at the
+registry office in Mount Street to Miss Cynthia de Vere.’ He had begun
+another sentence, ‘Till you are prepared,’ but apparently thinking
+anything more would weaken the effect of what he had said, he had run
+his pen through the words. The letter wound up, ‘I am your son,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+‘<span class="smcap">Arthur Wellesley Chambers</span>.’<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_172">{172}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">No</span> one can live at the height of great crises. After the storm, when the
+wind has sobbed itself to sleep, the sun comes peeping shyly to count
+the damage done, the draggled, flattened flowers begin to lift
+themselves and look about, the fallen trees are sawn up and carted away.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty might take to his bed, and lie there groaning at the wreck of all
+his hopes and plans for his brother. Lady Charmington might say dreadful
+violent things, and indulge in the cheap gratification of cursing her
+son. But sooner or later Sainty must get up and dress, must come
+downstairs and see the agent and the butler, and his mother must wash
+her hot eyes and flatten down her hair, must order dinner, and scold the
+maids, and sit at the head of the table as though nothing were amiss.
+And it is just this that saves us from madness; the more we have to do,
+the less time we can afford for sitting down with our sorrow in darkened
+rooms, the better for us. Kings and business men, and the labouring
+classes generally, whose work must be done no matter what happens, have
+a great advantage over leisured mourners. Sainty crept out, battered and
+disheartened, to face a new world which yet had a great deal in common
+with the old one. He had to provide himself with a new set of motives,
+desires, objects in life. But outwardly nothing was changed. The very
+book he had put down when he left the library to find the letters for
+Arthur in crossing the hall, was still on the same table with his
+paperknife laid between the leaves to mark the place.</p>
+
+<p>He never knew how his mother had come by her information. Sometimes he
+thought of Lady Eccleston, sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_173">{173}</a></span> of the duchess. Her reference to
+the supper and his own presence at it had suggested a sickening
+suspicion of a new treachery on the part of Claude, but he finally
+decided that this was unlikely. A dozen other people might have seen him
+going in, and gossiped about his presence. Claude had mentioned that he
+was supping with Johnny Trafford; it might have come round through his
+aunt Susie. He did not want to think any worse of his cousin than he
+need, and he did Claude the justice to recollect that if he never shrank
+from doing a mean action when he had anything to gain by it, mere
+purposeless mischief was not in his traditions; indeed, he would rather
+take trouble to keep things straight. He was not one of those who turned
+explosive truths loose in the world&mdash;who ‘thought people ought to know’;
+on the contrary, on general principles he was all for people <i>not</i>
+knowing, especially awkward facts about their own relatives. On the
+whole, the causes of the catastrophe seemed to Sainty far less important
+than the consideration of what, under the circumstances, was left for
+him to do for his brother.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington, on his screwing up courage to ask if she had any views
+on the subject, forbade him peremptorily to mention Arthur’s name to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Firth said the young ass had done for himself irretrievably, but
+agreed that he couldn’t be left to starve. He was much inclined to
+think, however, that the younger brother’s £500 a year, which was all to
+which he had a legal claim under his grandfather’s will, was quite
+enough for him. ‘If you give him any more, he’ll only chuck it away.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said, ‘what’s the good of talking like that? You
+know as well as I do that Arthur will never live on £500 a year. I see
+nothing to be gained by pretending that he will. <i>I</i> could easily, but
+<i>he</i> never will. And do you suppose I could serenely sit in this huge
+house, and spend £50,000 a year, and know my brother was in want?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Whatever you give him, you may be sure he’ll spend double,’ said Lord
+Firth; ‘so I should recommend your not beginning with too large a sum;
+you had better keep some<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_174">{174}</a></span>thing for the debts you will assuredly be
+called on to pay from time to time.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’d so much rather give him a decent allowance to start with, one that
+he <i>could</i> live on and <i>not</i> get into debt.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You rebuked me just now,’ his uncle replied blandly, ‘for not looking
+facts in the face. Might I suggest that the aspiration you have just put
+forward is based on a hypothesis quite as visionary as my proposal that
+Arthur should live on £500 a year.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was forced to admit the contention. He wrote, therefore, a letter
+from which he tried as far as possible to banish all useless
+recrimination, offering to pay his brother’s debts if he would send him
+the bills, and to allow him a thousand a year; to which Arthur in due
+course returned a most characteristic reply, beginning with a
+magnificent declaration that he wanted nothing of people who were not
+prepared to recognise or receive his wife, and repetitions of his
+readiness to ‘work his fingers to the bone for her,’ and ending with a
+bitter complaint of his brother’s meanness in not making him a larger
+allowance. In due course, however, the bills arrived, and made Sainty
+gasp; nor did he find when he placed the first quarter’s allowance to
+his brother’s credit that it was returned to his own.</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain repose in the fact that the worst which one has
+dreaded has happened. To some temperaments anxiety is far harder to bear
+than sorrow, and the mother who killed her baby because she was so
+dreadfully afraid that it would die, presented only an extreme case of a
+not uncommon frame of mind.</p>
+
+<p>The sun shone, the birds sang, the early and late summer were not less
+glorious than usual on the great well-kept lawns and terraces of
+Belchamber. The places that have known us do not put on mourning for our
+departure unless it withdraws from them some fostering care, and
+Arthur’s effect upon a garden was mostly written in broken branches and
+footprints on the flower-beds. When people have been more than usually
+disappointing, we turn with an added<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_175">{175}</a></span> tenderness to things, and Sainty,
+whose regard for his beautiful inheritance had always been sentimentally
+great, began to take a more intelligent interest in the possessions he
+had been so anxious to renounce. Since it seemed that he could not shake
+off his responsibilities, he would embrace them with fervour. He found
+himself wandering about the great historic house and eagerly learning
+all he could of the treasures it contained; and he started to rearrange
+and catalogue the huge library, which had been much neglected and had
+got sadly out of order. Soon finding this a task utterly beyond him
+without expert help, he imported as librarian a young <i>protégé</i> of
+Gerald Newby from the library of his college, with whom he spent long
+mornings exploring chests and closets where dusty folios had been
+ruthlessly heaped together and left to rats and spiders. They made the
+most wonderful finds of whole boxes of manuscripts, family papers,
+parchments, letters. Among other things, they discovered one day the
+original plans on which the grounds had been laid out, signed by
+Perrault, and though there had been many subsequent alterations, Sainty
+was delighted to find how much the main lines had remained intact. The
+orangery with its enclosed garden, the bowling-green by the canal with
+its formal pleached alleys, and the whole system of waterworks, ponds,
+cascades, and fountains, were all more or less as the great Frenchman
+had designed them. Here and there his long sweeping vistas across the
+park had been cut by stupid little plantations of conifers, coverts for
+game, and these Sainty was eager to remove, reopening the grand
+perspectives. He planned, too, to restore the dignified simplicity of
+the forecourt, with its great oval expanse of turf and five statues of
+Flora and the Seasons, according to the original drawing. The statues
+had been removed and dotted without method up and down the long
+shrubbery, the great wrought-iron grille and gates carried away to one
+of the lodges, the turf broken up with flower-beds and terracotta
+baskets. It would be delightful to put everything back in its proper
+place.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_176">{176}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To these and many other schemes his mother lent an indulgent ear. She
+had that curious instinctive taste in gardens and houses which so many
+of her countrywomen combine with an utter absence of the æsthetic sense
+in all that concerns the fine arts or their own personal adornment; she
+was quite incapable of real sympathy with his joy in musty old documents
+and letters, but alterations in the garden were more in her line, and if
+she did not always think what he proposed an improvement, at least it
+was natural and normal that a man should take pleasure in his own
+possessions, instead of wishing to give them away and live in the East
+End. Sainty consulted her about everything, not merely from long habit
+of deference, but from real respect for her judgment.</p>
+
+<p>A more powerful bond of union than any alterations in house or garden
+were certain schemes for the benefit of their fellow-creatures. In their
+more radical youth Lady Charmington and her brother had started many
+such, a co-operative dairy-farm, settlements of model cottages, schools,
+benefit clubs, and a system of old-age pensions that should not lessen
+the self-respect of the recipients. Sainty’s interest in all these
+matters was no new thing, though he had formerly rather carefully
+repressed it. Now he took them up with a zeal not even second to Lady
+Charmington’s own. It was not to be expected that he and she should be
+always in absolute agreement, but on the whole they worked surprisingly
+well together. There were concessions on both sides. On his they had the
+ease of long habit, and he was astonished by a quite new tendency in his
+mother to consult his wishes and defer to his opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Though she never mentioned his brother’s name, Sainty had a conviction
+that she knew by some means or other what he had done for Arthur, and
+was silently grateful to him for defying her resentment. She helped him
+to establish himself in the west pavilion, now become uninterruptedly
+his own, and to arrange his few personal possessions that had come from
+Cambridge. The old schoolroom became his study;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_177">{177}</a></span> he turned Claude’s room
+into a workroom and place for extra books, with a writing-table for the
+librarian if he wanted him near him; but Arthur’s chamber was left by a
+tacit agreement as it had always been, and sometimes Sainty would wander
+in there and look disconsolately on the sporting prints, the school
+groups, the faded blue cap dangling from a nail, the old Eton bureau
+decorated by a red-hot poker with its owner’s name, a very large ‘Chamb’
+and a very small ’ers,’ owing to the artist’s miscalculation of the
+space at his command. Sainty did not want Claude in the old schoolboy
+quarters, and explained to that accommodating person that he needed more
+space for his books, and thought his cousin would be more comfortable in
+one of the many guest-rooms.</p>
+
+<p>By and by other people besides Claude began to occupy these apartments
+again. There were no regular parties during the year after Arthur’s
+marriage, but gradually Lady Charmington took to asking a few people at
+a time; his Aunt Susan and her sons, the Rugbies, the Ecclestons, Alice
+de Lissac and her step-daughters. His mother even suggested that Sainty
+should invite some of his own friends, and Newby came several times and
+was satisfactorily interested in his many undertakings.</p>
+
+<p>‘I like to see you taking your proper place,’ he said complacently, with
+the air of an artist contemplating his own work; but the old spring of
+grateful devotion no longer gushed responsive to Newby’s lightest word
+of commendation. To begin to grow away from a friend is a terrible
+experience, and few things are harder than to keep up the pretence that
+no such change is taking place; but when the friend in question has been
+less the equal comrade than the Gamaliel at whose feet one has sat, the
+strain of preserving the old attitude is increased to infinity. There is
+no furniture so encumbering as a fallen idol; we trip over it a dozen
+times a day. Already the blush of shame had tinged the corner of
+Sainty’s smile at Parsons’ lampoon, and now he was constantly to
+experience similar compunctions. Gerald took<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_178">{178}</a></span> a great fancy to Claude
+and held forth to him unsparingly on many subjects.</p>
+
+<p>‘Your cousin is a real Prince Charming,’ he would say to Sainty; ‘very
+refreshing, and such quaint views of things, without the university
+flavour one gets so sick of; he is of immense use to me.’</p>
+
+<p>Morland listened to Newby’s lucubrations with an air of grave sympathy,
+but made fun of him behind his back. Sainty was exasperated all round;
+he hated Gerald’s making an ass of himself, hated Claude’s gibes at his
+expense, hated himself for being amused by them against his will. Cissy
+Eccleston, on the contrary, was always ecstatically giggling at the
+young man’s witticisms.</p>
+
+<p>The Ecclestons had begun to be a great deal at Belchamber; Lady
+Charmington seemed to have endless philanthropic projects to discuss
+with her friend, which needed the latter’s constant presence.</p>
+
+<p>‘I have asked Lady Eccleston to run down for a few days,’ became a
+recognised formula; ‘I want to ask her about the G.F.S. meeting’; or,
+‘She has got to consult me about the concert at Middlesex House for Lady
+Stepney’s Home for Inebriates; she wants the duchess to be a patroness.’
+And Lady Eccleston ‘ran down,’ always taking care to thank Sainty
+effusively for ‘letting her come’; ‘I had heaps to talk over with your
+mother, and it saves such a lot of tiresome letter-writing; it <i>is</i> good
+of you to have us.’ In Lady Eccleston’s train came Lady Eccleston’s
+daughter, and sometimes a son or two. Sainty had come to have quite a
+friendly feeling for Tommy; he was such a good soul, so reposefully
+commonplace, and so unfeignedly happy and grateful at Belchamber.</p>
+
+<p>‘You don’t know what it is to a chap to get out of that damned London,’
+he said fervently. Poor Tommy, not being very good at examinations, had
+had to bow his neck under the yoke of a house of business, for which,
+after the manner of English boys, his whole previous training had most
+elaborately unfitted him. Sainty was glad to give him<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_179">{179}</a></span> the pleasures
+which would be no pleasures to himself, and Tommy responded with a sort
+of wondering gratitude made up in about equal parts of admiration and
+contempt. Once he rather tactlessly tried to express his regret over
+Arthur. The Ecclestons were at the moment the only guests, and Sainty
+said something about its being very dull for him having to go out
+shooting alone.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Thomas; ‘though, of course, I miss your
+brother. Awfully good chap, your brother. I was deuced sorry he went and
+muckered the whole show like that. Hard luck on all of you.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty winced, but he liked the boy for liking Arthur, and silently
+pressed his arm.</p>
+
+<p>‘Beg pardon,’ said Tommy, getting very red.’ Stupid of me to say that.
+The mater would comb my hair if she knew.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston indeed was almost distressingly tactful on the subject,
+stepping round it on elaborate tiptoe, as some people go about a
+death-chamber.</p>
+
+<p>She and Cissy were full of interest in all Sainty’s undertakings. They
+watched with breathless excitement the works for reinstating the grille
+and the statues, and allowed themselves to be patiently bored by long
+readings from some of the old documents which Sainty was editing for
+publication by the Historical Society.</p>
+
+<p>When there were no other young people in the house, Sainty felt it no
+less than his duty as host to try and entertain the young lady, and she
+was always ready to accompany him on his drives about the place and
+visits to the outlying farms and cottages. He thought of himself so
+little in the light of a young man for whom a girl could possibly
+entertain a warmer feeling than friendship, that it never occurred to
+him to imagine any possibility of objection to these long expeditions,
+practically <i>tête-à-tête</i> with only a stolid little groom as chaperon;
+and indeed the two mammas smiled very indulgently on them as they drove
+off. He showed Cissy all over the co-operative dairy-farm and explained
+the system of its working, and if her remarks did not display a very<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_180">{180}</a></span>
+thorough grasp of its aims, she listened with the politest attention to
+his explanations. Whether the two widowed mothers, when left alone,
+confined their conversation exclusively to topics of external
+benevolence may be doubted; but anyway they always seemed to have plenty
+to talk about, and to be quite able to spare their children; and
+meanwhile Sainty drove along the avenues of the park, or the roads and
+lanes of the countryside, with Cissy tucked in beside him and chattering
+like a sparrow. The girl had a certain sense of humour, strictly limited
+in scope, but diverting as far as it went. It is true that it mostly
+took the form of personal ridicule, and Sainty was rather scandalised at
+the frequency with which it was turned upon her mother, but he couldn’t
+help laughing at some of the revelations. ‘And, after all,’ he thought,
+‘she would not make fun of her if she did not love her; it is the
+light-hearted thoughtlessness of a child.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Mamma is very low to-day,’ Cissy said, bursting with laughter. ‘You
+know, she takes the <i>Exchange and Mart</i> and is always swopping something
+or other. I don’t think she does very good business, but she likes the
+fun of writing to people she don’t know, and the bargaining. Well, she’s
+got an old black silk gown, quite good still, it was a good silk; she
+bought it at Woolland’s at a sale (she goes to all the sales), but she’s
+worn it three seasons and it’s old fashioned, and every creature we know
+is sick of the sight of it, so she has been trying to get rid of it in
+the <i>Exchange</i>, and what do you think she was offered for it this
+morning? A goat! Think of us in Chester Square with a goat! Tommy says
+we can keep it in the back-yard and he’ll milk it, and it will save the
+dairy bill; but mamma is not amused.’ And Cissy went off into peals of
+laughter in which Sainty could not help joining.</p>
+
+<p>This power of making him laugh was the great secret of his pleasure in
+her society. At most times they might not have had much in common, but
+after all he had been through, her irresponsible frivolity was very
+restful. His morbid conscientiousness seemed overstrained and absurd by<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_181">{181}</a></span>
+comparison, and he was ashamed to be frightened by life in the presence
+of a creature who took it so lightly, displaying such a careless front
+to the slings and arrows of a quite insufficient fortune. With more
+humour than delicacy she gave him glimpses of many of her parent’s
+little economies and contrivances. ‘I’ve got to be turned out smart, you
+know, and we give awfully nice teas, lots of teas&mdash;even the little
+Sunday dinners ain’t badly done; but no one dropping in unexpectedly to
+lunch&mdash;no thank you! and if she and I dine out it’s cold mutton for the
+boys and none too much of it. You’re awfully good to Tommy; it’s just
+heaven for him being here, poor boy!’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s delightful being able to give any pleasure to any one. I have
+never been able to make any one happy though I’ve tried.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, come, cheer up! I assure you, you are giving a lot of pleasure to
+the Eccleston family at this moment; it really is ripping of you asking
+the whole family. Did you know, by the way, that your mother has said
+the two boys could come next week when Harrow breaks up, and that we
+might all stay over Christmas?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, of course I knew, seeing that it was I who suggested it. I thought
+if you had your little brothers here it would not be so dull for you,
+and my friend Newby will be here, and Claude&mdash;&mdash;’ The vivid colour came
+and went so quickly under the fair skin that Sainty could not be sure if
+it were Claude’s name that called up the faint flush. It might have been
+caused by the pleasure Cissy’s next words expressed.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, it was you! How angelic of you! As for me, I don’t think my young
+brothers add much to my enjoyment of life, nor I to theirs; besides, I
+am quite happy in this dear, beautiful place, and going all about your
+improvements and things with you is so jolly; but I’m awfully grateful
+to you all the same, and you will be more in mamma’s good books than
+ever; and with mamma, you must know, “good books” is not a mere phrase.
+She has a red book in which she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_182">{182}</a></span> enters all her friends according to
+what they have done for her; not an ordinary visitor’s-list. She puts
+down “Lady So-and-So&mdash;asked us to her squash, but gave a dance and did
+not ask us”; or “Mrs. Snooks&mdash;dined with us, but didn’t ask us back:
+Mem.&mdash;not again till she does,” and so on. It’s capital reading; if I
+can get hold of it some day I’ll show it to you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mind if we get out at the end of the shrubbery and walk home?’
+Sainty asked; ‘I want to see how they are getting on with moving one of
+the statues.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, do let’s! I should love to see Spring (isn’t she Spring, the fat
+woman with the sort of trumpet with the apples? Oh no, of course,
+Autumn) swinging in mid-air. They had just got the thing rigged up
+yesterday afternoon when I walked my parent round there. I do hope they
+haven’t got her into the cart yet.’</p>
+
+<p>They visited poor Autumn, whose head was reposing in rather a ghastly
+manner in a heap of straw on a trolly, while her trunk and cornucopia
+hung perilously from the pulleys, and her legs still graced a florid
+Dutch pedestal.</p>
+
+<p>‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Cissy said. ‘I do think it’s so clever of you putting
+them all back where they belong. I should never have had the energy to
+take all this trouble once they were here and established.’</p>
+
+<p>‘The worst of it is,’ Sainty admitted, ‘that now the thing is decreed, I
+feel almost sacrilegious tearing them from the places where I have
+always known them. If I had known what a business it was going to be,
+and what a lot it would cost, I should never have had the courage to
+undertake it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It must be lovely to have lots of money to spend,’ Cissy interjected
+almost under her breath.</p>
+
+<p>‘What I can’t understand,’ Sainty went on, ‘is the frame of mind of the
+person who spent such sums on <i>destroying</i> a good design; he must have
+disturbed his own early associations as much as I am doing, yet without
+the same reason for doing so.</p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose he thought he was improving things, just as you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_183">{183}</a></span> do,’ said
+Cissy cheerfully. ‘All the things people give such heaps for nowadays
+are what our grandmothers put in the garrets. Probably the people who
+come after you will think Faith, Hope, and Charity, or whoever the
+ladies are, would look much nicer in the park, or on the roof, or at the
+bottom of the big pond.’</p>
+
+<p>‘The people who came after him!’ The phrase struck cold upon his ear.
+Who was there to ‘come after’ him? Lady Arthur? Good heavens! Sainty
+shuddered to think what <i>her</i> notions of the æsthetic might involve. He
+had a fleeting vision of Belchamber rearranged according to the standard
+of taste suggested by the plush piano drapery so fatally baptized in
+champagne.</p>
+
+<p>This question of who was to enter into his labours and gather the fruits
+of all that he was doing contained within itself the germ of paralysis.
+The works for the outward beautifying of the place were the smallest of
+his preoccupations; but what would his successor care for all his other
+hopes, his projects for bettering the condition of the ‘poor about his
+lands’? The thought that whatever he might effect would pass with his
+own feeble and precarious life, and leave no trace behind it, was one of
+the sharpest darts in the quiver of his familiar fiend.</p>
+
+<p>They walked back to the house almost in silence, Sainty revolving these
+unhappy thoughts, Cissy, for once, not chattering. Sainty stole an
+occasional glance at his companion, wondering at her unusual quiet. Her
+eyes had a far-away look, which gave a great sweetness to her face; he
+feared to intrude on some tender maiden thoughts which he felt tolerably
+sure had little to do with him or his concerns. As they came out upon
+the lawn they saw Lady Charmington approaching from the village, bearing
+a small tin-lined basket in which she conveyed cold slabs of pudding to
+some of her dependants. Cissy waved her muff and ran forward, insisting
+on relieving her from the burthen which she was perfectly capable of
+carrying on one stalwart finger. Miss Eccleston’s manner to her hostess
+was the perfection of pretty girlish<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_184">{184}</a></span> deference and service, and Lady
+Charmington’s grim countenance relaxed at sight of her.</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you had a pleasant drive?’ she asked. ‘I hope Sainty has taken
+good care of you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lord Belchamber has been delightful,’ Cissy answered, ‘and shown me all
+sorts of interesting things. We came back by the shrubbery, to look at
+one of the poor ladies who has had her head cut off. Now I must go and
+tell mamma we are back. I will leave your basket in the little hall for
+you, dear Lady Charmington, I know just where it lives.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington turned to Sainty as the girl skipped away. ‘Give me
+your arm, my son, I am a little tired,’ she said. Now Sainty was well
+aware that his mother was never tired, and would rather have died than
+own it if she had been. ‘Good heavens, mother, aren’t you well?’ he
+asked in alarm.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes, dear, quite well; but I am getting an old woman. It is a good
+thing that you have begun to look after things yourself. What you ought
+to do for me now is to give me a nice young daughter-in-law to look
+after <i>me</i>, and some dear little grandchildren to pet and spoil.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was startled; it seemed almost as if Lady Charmington were
+answering the thoughts that had oppressed him on the way home. He smiled
+parenthetically at the vision of his capable energetic mother in the
+character of the feeble old lady cared for by pious children; nor did he
+see her ‘petting and spoiling’ any one.</p>
+
+<p>‘I am not likely to marry,’ he said. ‘With the best will in the world, I
+might find it difficult. Fairy princesses do not marry the yellow
+dwarf!’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington’s unwonted mildness fell from her miraculously. ‘You
+are almost bound to marry&mdash;<i>now</i>,’ she said, the last word pronounced
+with a sudden sharp inspiration that told how much the reference cost
+her.</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear mother,’ Sainty said gently, ‘who could possibly fill your place
+here? Who would do all that you do, or do it nearly as well?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t live for ever. As I tell you, I am getting old;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_185">{185}</a></span> already I
+can’t do all that I could. The thought of that woman in my place gives
+me fever. Do you want her to succeed me&mdash;do you?’ And Sainty felt the
+hand on his arm tighten to a clutch.</p>
+
+<p>‘We have both got to die before that happens, mother. If you are not in
+your first youth, you are very strong, and if I am not a tower of
+strength, at least I have youth on my side; we may both have more
+vitality than many younger or stronger people.’ Alas! that his chances
+of long life, once so fiercely resented, should have come to be the
+buckler on which he counted to interpose against the speedy succession
+of his brother, which in those days he had so ardently desired!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_186">{186}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">It</span> was natural that with other people in the house Sainty should see
+less of Cissy; he told himself so several times a day, yet the thought
+was not altogether a pleasant one that she only welcomed his society as
+a refuge from solitude or Lady Eccleston. The frost had put a stop to
+the works in front of the house, and a bad chill and sharp attack of
+neuralgia warned Sainty to discontinue his drives until milder weather.
+Skating on the big pond became the amusement of the moment, a pastime in
+which his lameness prevented his joining. Gerald Newby, in a straw hat,
+spent hours upon the ice, and fell down with Spartan perseverance in his
+determination to accomplish figures of eight.</p>
+
+<p>‘Why is it a necessary part of the make-up of the good young man to wear
+a straw hat in the winter?’ Claude asked; ‘I notice that serious youths
+always do, curates and schoolmasters. Is it a mark of asceticism, as
+being obviously not the comfortable thing to do, or to give the
+impression that their brains are overheated with excess of thought?’</p>
+
+<p>Claude, who skated, as he did everything else that he attempted, with
+elegance and precision, had undertaken to instruct Cissy in the art, and
+Sainty had to watch them gliding about together, both her hands tightly
+clasped in his, and even a sustaining arm occasionally flung out when
+the maiden was more than usually wobbly. It was all perfectly natural;
+there was not the smallest ground for objecting. Lady Susan Trafford and
+her sons, Claude’s mother, Newby, and Cissy’s three brothers were all on
+the ice the whole time; the pond, though a good-sized sheet of water,
+was visible from end to end; there were no corners or islands behind
+which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_187">{187}</a></span> the flirtatiously-inclined could disappear; yet the sight of
+those perpetually clasped hands became a constant irritation to
+Belchamber, and it was quite vain for him to reiterate that with her
+mother and brothers in the house, it was less than no business of his
+how Miss Eccleston amused herself. ‘Had it been any one else but
+Claude,’ he thought, ‘he should not have minded.’</p>
+
+<p>It soon became evident to him that he was not alone in the apprehension
+with which he watched the growing intimacy between Cissy and his cousin.
+Lady Eccleston, it was plain, viewed it with quite as little favour as
+he did. Swathed in furs, and with a blue nose, the poor lady fluttered
+on the bank, in a manner strongly suggestive of a hen whose ducklings
+have taken to the water. One day, having invited him to take her for a
+walk, while the hoar frost crackled under their feet in the winding
+mazes of the shrubbery, she quite unexpectedly unburthened herself to
+him on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can talk to you, dear Lord Belchamber,’ she said, ‘as I would to an
+older man; you are so good, so pure, so unlike the others, and I am so
+sorely in need of advice.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good gracious! Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, with hypocritical
+surprise, ‘what’s the matter? How can I help you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m so afraid you’ll think it strange of me to talk to you on such a
+subject, but, as I say, you are not like an ordinary young man; you have
+always been so serious for your age, and then, you know your cousin
+better than any one; you have been boys together.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Claude?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, Mr. Morland. How kind of you to understand and help me out; but
+you <i>are</i> so sympathetic, more like a woman in some ways, I always say.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was only partially pleased by this equivocal compliment. ‘What
+about Claude?’ he asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘I will be quite frank with you; you won’t misunderstand me, I know. A
+mother’s solicitude; and, after all, what can be more natural? Left so
+early a widow, and with these<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_188">{188}</a></span> young ones to guide and bring up. If my
+dear husband had lived it would all have been so different; but I have
+no one to turn to. Tom is a mere boy, really no more help than the young
+ones. Ah! Lord Belchamber, children are a sad responsibility.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yours seem to be very good ones,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘You <i>do</i> think so? I <i>am</i> so glad. Yes, I think they are, but of course
+I feel a mother is not a judge&mdash;her great love blinds her; but they
+<i>are</i> good children, I must say they give me very little trouble. Only
+the high spirits of youth are always a pitfall. And Cissy&mdash;she’s a dear,
+good girl, and we haven’t a secret from one another; we are more like
+sisters. Yet it is for her that I sometimes feel the greatest anxiety.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Some people think her pretty; again, of course, my partiality prevents
+my judging; but lots of people have told me she was pretty. <i>Do</i> you
+think her pretty?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I should think no one could help admiring Miss Eccleston,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! that’s it. There’s no denying it. I can’t help seeing it; why
+should I pretend I don’t? The girl does have a lot of admiration; I <i>do</i>
+hope it won’t turn her head. She’s as good as gold, but London’s an
+awful place. I’ve done all I can to keep her from all knowledge of evil,
+and so far, thank God! the child is a thoroughly healthy-minded, pure
+girl. Doesn’t she strike you so?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, certainly; but what&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘You were going to say “What has all this to do with Mr. Morland?” You
+won’t mind my talking to you quite frankly? it <i>is</i> such a comfort.
+Well&mdash;any one can see your cousin admires Cissy immensely. And of course
+she’s pleased by his attentions. I must admit he is charming; but <i>is</i>
+he the kind of young man a mother would like to give her daughter to?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you any reason to suppose your daughter cares at all for Claude?’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_189">{189}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no, no, no! don’t misunderstand me; I’m quite <i>sure</i> she doesn’t.
+But girls are so thoughtless; the more innocent they are, the more
+imprudent. If I so much as try to venture a hint to her to be a little
+more circumspect, she says, “I don’t know what you <i>mean</i>, mother,” and
+she looks at me in such a way I’m quite ashamed, I really am.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course Miss Eccleston is all that is delicate and refined, but if
+you are certain she does not at all return my cousin’s partiality&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, of that I’m <i>sure</i>; she’s such a mirror of candour&mdash;if she had the
+very smallest feeling she would have told me&mdash;but your cousin is most
+fascinating, that I must admit, and she <i>might</i> get to think she cared.
+Now, I ask you, who know him so well, <i>is</i> he just the sort of man in
+whose hands a very pure-minded girl with high ideals would be happy? I
+know my child so well; if she were ever to find out that the man she
+married had been at all fast, it would simply kill her. And the young
+men of the day <i>are</i> so wicked, or so they tell me. One can’t help
+hearing things <i>de temps en temps</i> in London, no matter how much one
+hates gossip, and <i>no</i> one hates it as I do.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty thought he knew some one who hated it at least as much as her
+ladyship. He was wondering what Claude really felt for Cissy. In the
+light of their conversation about Miss Winston, he found it difficult to
+believe that his cousin was courting a portionless girl with a view to
+marriage; but he could not catechise him as to his intentions towards
+every young woman with whom he ever saw him, especially after the scanty
+encouragement he had met with on that occasion. Were he to answer Lady
+Eccleston truthfully, there could be little doubt of what he must say;
+but the thought of acting secret police in this fashion was not
+agreeable to him.</p>
+
+<p>‘You must see&mdash;&mdash;’ he began.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! I do, I do,’ cried the lady; ‘I see <i>just</i> how unpleasant it would
+be for you to have to say a word against your cousin, and, dear Lord
+Belchamber, do let me say how<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_190">{190}</a></span> much it makes me like you, though, to be
+sure, that wasn’t necessary, for I’ve always said you were my ideal
+young man. Cissy and I have so often agreed in talking over some of the
+young men we know, Tom’s friends, and the men we see at balls, and
+others, that there is <i>no</i> one quite like you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No, I’m well aware that I am not like other young men&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! be thankful you’re not, dear Lord Belchamber; the young men of the
+day, I’m <i>sorry</i> to say, are not nice. And thank you so much for
+listening to me so patiently, and telling me <i>just</i> what I wanted to
+know. I can’t tell you the comfort this little talk has been to me. You
+see, I have no one to turn to, and I do think it so sweet of you not to
+want to say a word against Mr. Morland.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty wondered a little afterwards just what the information was for
+which Lady Eccleston was so grateful, for though the interview was
+nominally sought with a view to consulting him, while he had received a
+number of interesting confidences, he could not recollect having
+expressed any opinion at all. Lady Eccleston, however, had apparently
+found him a satisfactory counsellor, for the next day she returned to
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>‘You remember what I said to you yesterday about Cissy and Mr. Morland,’
+she whispered, dropping down beside him on one of the seats in the
+winter-garden after lunch. ‘I’m more than ever convinced she doesn’t
+care for him; it is foolish of me to take fright as I do, but there is
+just one point I <i>do</i> want to put myself right with you about. I was so
+afraid afterwards you might think&mdash;and yet&mdash;no, come to think of it, I’m
+sure you wouldn’t; but I should like just to say that I hope you
+<i>didn’t</i> think what I said had <i>any</i>thing to do with Mr. Morland being
+poor, or what the world would call not a good match. As long as he was a
+good man, and a man of principle, and some one in her own <i>monde</i>, I’ve
+always said I didn’t care who my girl married. No one can say I’m
+mercenary. My poor dear husband and I married on next to nothing, and
+there never was a happier<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_191">{191}</a></span> marriage. I wish you had known Sir Thomas,
+you would have loved him,’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty expressed a suitable regret at having missed the pleasure of Sir
+Thomas’s acquaintance. ‘Some people,’ Lady Eccleston continued
+pensively, ‘some people think I’m wrong. Only last week a dear friend of
+mine said to me that it was all very well to despise money, but that
+other things being equal, it was a great power, and that in this age of
+the world it was impossible to get on without it. I said “You may be
+right, dear, and I don’t deny that for my children’s sake I’ve sometimes
+wished I had a little more of it, but money isn’t everything. It can’t
+give happiness.”<span class="lftspc">’</span> And her ladyship raised her eyes to a statuette of
+Venus in a cluster of palms, with the expression of a dying martyr
+regarding a crucifix.</p>
+
+<p>‘No, Lord Belchamber, if a man’s a gentleman and a good man, for me, he
+may be as poor as&mdash;as he pleases&mdash;<i>that</i> isn’t what I fear; but though
+Cissy seems such a child, she has a very strongly marked character, and
+intensely deep feelings, and were she to marry a man she could not
+respect, she would never know a moment’s happiness. What she needs above
+all is a man of strict principles, of high ideals, and with a pure mind
+and life, and where is such a man to be found? But forgive me for boring
+you with all this; it can’t interest you. George, dear,’ to her second
+son, who passed at the moment, ‘are you going skating? Do you know where
+Cissy is? Is she going with you? I want to speak to her’; and with a
+little nod of good understanding to her host, Lady Eccleston skipped
+with her usual amazing agility off the ottoman, and departed with her
+arm twined about the boy’s waist.</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber pondered much on these conversations. ‘The ordinary clever
+man,’ he thought, ‘who prides himself on knowledge of human nature,
+would be sure that Lady Eccleston was trying to “hook him” for her
+daughter, and would, as usual, be wrong. If the lady is not, a monument
+of wisdom, at least I give her credit for not being so obvious<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_192">{192}</a></span> as
+<i>that</i>. No; she is treating me, as women always do, as a creature
+removed from all thoughts and hopes of love, a sexless being set apart
+like the priest in Catholic countries to be the safe recipient of tender
+confidences in which he can have no personal concern.’ Still he
+sometimes dreamed (as who may not at twenty-three?) of what life might
+come to mean if Love should breathe on its dry bones and bid them live;
+if it were possible that some maid more discerning than her fellows
+should see with the eye of the soul, beneath his dreary, unattractive
+exterior, the wealth of love that was waiting like the sleeping princess
+for the awakening kiss! ‘Perhaps I might even have the luck of the
+unhappy monster in <i>L’Homme qui rit</i>, and meet with a blind girl!’
+Hideousness, even deformity, was no bar to the love of woman, that he
+knew. He thought of Wilkes, of Mirabeau, of many others who had been
+more passionately loved than your pretty fellows. Deep in his heart he
+knew his real disability; it was not his lack of personal beauty, nor
+even his lameness that was the bar, but his miserable inherent
+effeminacy. A man might be never so uncouth, so that the manhood in him
+cried imperiously to the other sex and commanded surrender. ‘More like a
+woman in some ways.’ Had not Lady Eccleston said it? There lay the
+sting. And yet&mdash;who could tell? Might not a miracle be worked? Might he
+not some day find himself face to face with this stupendous, unhoped-for
+happiness?</p>
+
+<p>He wrote many poems at this time, poems not addressed to any concrete
+personality, but to that ‘not impossible she,’ the divine abstraction
+who should recognise and respond to what lay hidden in his heart. He
+felt very sure that Cissy Eccleston, with her frank pagan enjoyment of
+life and the moment, was not the lady of his dreams. Those little curved
+lips of hers might seek the red mouth of a lover, but would never bestow
+the heroic salute that should cleanse the leper, or restore his true
+form to the enchanted beast. Yet, forasmuch as he had seen so few girls,
+his Beatrice sometimes came to him clad in something of the outward
+semblance,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_193">{193}</a></span> the virginal candour and freshness of this sojourner within
+his gates. He found himself wondering if Lady Eccleston’s account of her
+daughter’s ermine-like recoil from all contact with moral impurity had
+any foundation in fact, or whether this fancy portrait of the girl dying
+of a stain on the premarital robe of her husband were not as purely
+fallacious as some of his mother’s theories about Arthur. It had been
+borne in on him that mothers were not always infallible in what
+concerned their children’s characters; he was farther rendered a little
+sceptical as to the young lady’s excessive innocence by some of her own
+conversation, and notably a certain curiosity displayed with what seemed
+to him a lack of delicacy on more than one occasion as to his
+unfortunate sister-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course one knew all those girls by sight,’ she remarked, with
+engaging candour, ‘but I’m not sure just <i>which</i> was Cynthia de Vere; it
+<i>was</i> the tall one with the beautiful legs and the rather big mouth,
+wasn’t it? I told Tom so, and he said it wasn’t; but I’m sure I’m right,
+ain’t I?’</p>
+
+<p>On another occasion she startled him by the plainest possible reference
+to the relations of Charley Hunter and Miss Baynes.</p>
+
+<p>‘I didn’t know young ladies knew anything about such things,’ Sainty
+said rather severely.</p>
+
+<p>‘They do now,’ said Cissy, ‘whatever they used to; but I suspect they
+always knew more than they let on. There was a friend of mine who
+married Teddie Hersham last season; I was one of her bridesmaids; she
+was awfully proud of taking him away from Totty Seymour; she used to
+boast of it to all her friends.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t bear to hear you talk like that,’ Sainty answered. ‘It would
+give people who didn’t know you such a wrong idea of you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ll try not to, if you don’t like it; but it isn’t easy for me to
+pretend to be different to what I am.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t want you to. I only ask you to be true to yourself, and not say
+things that I am sure are quite foreign to you for the sake of startling
+people.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_194">{194}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I must own I do enjoy shocking <i>you</i>. You are so awfully proper,
+you know; but why should you care what I do or say?’ she added, with a
+little arch glance.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know, I’m sure, but I do. I suppose I&mdash;I like you too well not
+to mind your behaving in a way I don’t think worthy of you.’</p>
+
+<p>What wonder if Miss Eccleston found Claude Morland a more amusing
+companion than his cousin? Sainty was the first to admit the likelihood.
+He was well aware that Claude would not have offended her by championing
+her innocence against herself, or have made any difficulties about
+gratifying her girlish curiosity as to that other world of which she
+knew so little. The thought of Morland’s long, deft fingers delicately
+removing the bloom from this young creature irritated him unaccountably.
+Oh no! it was not jealousy; that, again, was what the stupid, knowing
+people would think; he could never care for this empty-headed little
+thing in that way, and knew only too well how much more impossible it
+was that <i>she</i> should care for <i>him</i>. Only, he did not want her to
+suffer, nor to coarsen and deteriorate.</p>
+
+<p>He was revolving some such thoughts as these as he walked by himself one
+day, perhaps a week after his conversation with Lady Eccleston, when he
+was startled by loud cries from the neighbourhood of the pond, and made
+all the haste he was able in that direction. The air was certainly
+milder; there had been unmistakable premonitions of a thaw. He
+remembered the discussion at breakfast as to whether the ice would still
+bear, and the eager affirmations of the young Traffords and Ecclestons
+that it was as sound as ever. Bertie Trafford and Randolph Eccleston had
+been sliding all over it, and had even stamped in places to see if it
+would give way; but Mr. Danford, the agent, had come in in the course of
+the morning to say that it had a damp look about the edges he did not
+like, and to advise them to keep off it. Sainty had not been greatly
+interested; the pond, though large, was mostly artificial, and nowhere
+more than three or four feet deep, and if the boys liked to risk a
+wetting, it did<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_195">{195}</a></span> not seem to him to matter much. Now his thoughts flew
+to Cissy; he wondered he had not thought of her before, and the next
+moment he turned a corner, and found himself one of an excited group,
+the centre of which was Claude, hatless, dishevelled, and very wet,
+bearing in his arms the inanimate form of Miss Eccleston. Her eyes were
+closed, and every trace of colour was gone from her face; her lips were
+blue, and the water ran in streams from her clothing. The boys crowded
+round, all talking at once, and making a number of foolish suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>‘Is she drowned? Is she dead?’ wailed little Randolph, and was sternly
+bidden by George not to be an ass unless he wanted to get kicked.</p>
+
+<p>‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ asked Sainty, and was conscious
+of saying the silly thing even before Claude answered with studied
+politeness, ‘Don’t you see? Miss Eccleston has caught fire, but we have
+luckily extinguished the flames.’</p>
+
+<p>Claude was seldom cross, but he hated scenes and emotions and spoilt
+clothes. ‘If some one would help me to get her up to the house it would
+be some use,’ he added; ‘and can’t any one lend a dry coat to wrap round
+her? Mine’s no good, it’s as wet as a sponge. Oh! not <i>you</i>, Sainty,
+<i>you</i>’ll catch cold.’</p>
+
+<p>A little way from the house they encountered Lady Eccleston, who had got
+wind of the catastrophe, and was hurrying to meet them; and Sainty was
+struck by the change in her manner in face of emergency. Her foolish
+flightiness seemed to have dropped from her like a garment that an
+athlete throws off. She had all her wits about her, and gave the most
+sensible directions. She had her daughter upstairs and in bed between
+warm blankets in less time than it takes to write it down, and by the
+afternoon she was able to report to them that Cissy was quite
+comfortable, only a little feverish and upset by the shock; but she did
+not think she would be much the worse for her wetting.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy, however, was a most unaccountable time in getting<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_196">{196}</a></span> over that
+shock. Lady Eccleston expressed herself as amazed that her daughter
+should take so long to recover from so small a thing.</p>
+
+<p>‘Really, Lord Belchamber, I’m ashamed; you’ll think you are never going
+to get rid of us; but the doctor says positively that the child mustn’t
+come down yet. I can’t understand it at all, for the chill she has
+<i>quite</i> got over. Of course she had a dreadful feverish cold, and at
+first we thought it would settle on her lungs, but, thank God! all
+danger of that seems at an end. Then I ask <i>what</i> is the matter? and Dr.
+Lane says, “It’s the shock to the nervous system.” But I’m mortified. I
+really am. Do you know how long we’ve been here?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t want to know, Lady Eccleston. I only know we are too glad to
+keep you as long as you can stay, and I am sure my mother feels as I do
+about it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! you are too kind about it, both of you! But one has <i>some</i>
+compunctions, you know. And after all your goodness about the boys and
+all!’</p>
+
+<p>George and Randolph had returned to Harrow, and Tom to his hated office
+in Throgmorton Avenue, Claude’s presence had been once more required by
+his respected chief, and the rest of the party had melted like the snow
+that had followed the long frost; but still Cissy lay in a most becoming
+pink dressing-gown in a small boudoir that had been arranged for her
+next her bedroom. It took Lady Eccleston days of modest trepidation to
+bring herself to admit Sainty to these sacred precincts. ‘Was she very
+unconventional? Well, she supposed she was&mdash;people always said so&mdash;but
+she was weak where her children were concerned, and Cissy had said, “Why
+<i>shouldn’t</i> Lord Belchamber come to see me, mamma?” Not for worlds would
+she have introduced the ordinary young man’; and then Sainty was once
+more assured of his ‘difference,’ his purity, the perfect confidence an
+anxious mother could repose in him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Her brothers are gone, you see, and she misses them so, poor child. And
+though we are <i>such</i> friends, an old woman<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_197">{197}</a></span> is dull company <i>pour tout
+potage</i>; and then my wretched throat gives out; I am no good for reading
+aloud. Now it would be <i>angelic</i> of you, if you would read to her a
+little; <i>would</i> you? Oh! <i>how</i> kind! She is a perfect baby about being
+read to; and you are so clever; you will know just what to read; you
+have such literary taste; everybody says so.’</p>
+
+<p>Thus Sainty found himself installed as reader to the invalid, and spent
+many hours a day by her sofa. At first Lady Eccleston was always there;
+then, when they were deep in their book, she would sometimes slip away
+to her voluminous correspondence or long consultations with her maid
+over the endless transmutations of her wardrobe. Sometimes Lady
+Charmington would look in, with a few words of grim tenderness, and lay
+a large cool hand on Cissy’s hair. Gradually the young people came to be
+left alone for longer and longer intervals. Belchamber rather wondered,
+himself, at the relaxation of all watchfulness on the part of their
+chaperons. ‘It is the old story,’ he told himself gloomily; ‘I am
+certainly not considered dangerous.’</p>
+
+<p>One day Lady Eccleston was much perturbed at breakfast over her letters.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know what to do,’ she cried, ‘it is most unfortunate; do advise
+me, dear Lady Charmington. There are a dozen things I ought to be in
+London for. I have a committee on Tuesday; they say they can’t do
+without me; and things seem to be all at sixes and sevens at home: poor
+Tommy writes that he is most uncomfortable; he says the maids are always
+out, and he believes the cook gives parties; that there are&mdash;what is it?
+Oh! yes, here&mdash;“sounds of revelry by night”; he is always so absurd,
+poor dear; but it <i>is</i> hard on him. I really feel we ought to go, and
+Cissy is just beginning at last to be a little better.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why don’t you run up for a day or two, and do what you have to, attend
+to your committee, and give an eye to things in Chester Square?’ said
+Lady Charmington. ‘Leave Cissy to us, if you will trust us; we will take
+every care of her.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_198">{198}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘O dear Lady Charmington, I <i>couldn’t</i>; that <i>would</i> be an imposition.
+Of course she would be ever so much better here, and she is so happy,
+poor child; Chester Square is so noisy, and of course directly she gets
+back to London, people will begin to want her to do things, and I shall
+never keep her quiet. But I simply couldn’t; it would be monstrous to
+put on you to such an extent.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nonsense,’ said Lady Charmington. ‘It is a thousand pities to take her
+back to town just when she is getting on so well; a few weeks more of
+good air and rest will do everything for her; she must come downstairs
+first, go out for a few drives, before she thinks of a journey. Don’t
+you agree with me, Sainty?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course we shall be only too glad, if you think Miss Eccleston would
+not be dull&mdash;&mdash;’ Sainty began.</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! dear Lord Belchamber! dear Lady Charmington! how good you both
+are!’ cried the tender mother. ‘I am ashamed, positively ashamed, but
+what can I say? She will be overjoyed. She had to gulp down a big lump
+in her throat when I told her we must go home; she was so good, she
+wouldn’t say anything, but <i>I</i> could see; love sharpens our wits when it
+is a question of our children’s happiness, doesn’t it, dear?’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is generally not difficult to see through young people,’ said Lady
+Charmington. Sainty was wondering if the necessity for Lady Eccleston’s
+presence in London had arisen out of the letters she had received since
+she came downstairs, when she could have had the conversation on the
+subject which had brought the lump into her daughter’s throat, but he
+was too polite to inquire.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion of the whole matter, as might have been foreseen, was
+that Lady Eccleston departed to London, leaving Cissy at Belchamber, and
+the readings were continued with even less supervision than before.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy’s literary taste was decidedly undeveloped, and it may be doubted
+if some of her host’s finest reading was not merely an accompaniment to
+the thinking out of new hats;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_199">{199}</a></span> but Sainty enjoyed immensely introducing
+a novice to his best beloved authors, and the new sensation of being
+able to minister to a sufferer, and lighten the long hours of some of
+their dullness and depression. He wasted an immense amount of care and
+thought on the selection of suitable gems, passages that should be
+characteristic and of the highest beauty, and yet milk to the
+intellectual babe. Sometimes he almost forgot his listener in the
+pleasure of voicing things long dear to himself, especially poetry, and
+he read a good deal of poetry. Cissy displayed but little enthusiasm;
+she always thanked him very prettily when he finished, if she was not
+asleep, and ‘hoped it didn’t bore him awfully,’ but she made few
+comments, and listened for the most part in silence and often with her
+eyes closed. Sainty put down her apparent indifference to the languor of
+convalescence. Once, indeed, she startled him by the energy of her
+appreciation. He was reading <i>Maud</i> to her, and she had several times
+disappointed him with a calm ‘very pretty’ when he had paused after some
+exquisite lyric that left him vibrating like a harpstring. When,
+however, he came to&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Oh that ‘twere possible<br></span>
+<span class="i2">After long grief and pain<br></span>
+<span class="i1">To find the arms of my true love<br></span>
+<span class="i2">Round me once again!’<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">her quickened respiration showed her interest; and at the stanza
+beginning ‘When I was wont to meet her,’ she half raised herself, saying
+eagerly, ‘I like that; read that bit again, please; do you mind?’ and on
+Sainty’s complying, she repeated dreamily to herself, as though the
+words called up some image that gave her pleasure,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘We stood tranced in long embraces,<br></span>
+<span class="i1">Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter<br></span>
+<span class="i1">Than anything on earth.’<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">‘Who did you say wrote that?’ she asked. ‘Oh! of course, yes, Tennyson,’
+and with a great sigh she sank back on her cushions. Then she looked
+suddenly at him, as though she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_200">{200}</a></span> feared she had betrayed something, and
+flushed crimson. ‘Go on,’ she murmured; ‘beg pardon,’ and relapsed into
+her habitual expression of polite endurance. Next day she asked him to
+lend her the book, as she wanted to copy some of it out.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was delighted, but surprised.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_201">{201}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Lady Eccleston’s</span> business kept her in London longer than she expected.
+Each day brought hurried notes from her, full of regrets and apologies,
+compunction for all the trouble they were giving, but joy that her dear
+child was in such good, kind hands, and a plentiful supply of a mother’s
+blessings. She was a swift and copious letter-writer, economising time
+by the ruthless excision of articles, pronouns, and other short words.
+Tommy always declared that his mother could write two letters at once,
+one with each hand, and interview the cook at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>Breakfast in bed was the last lingering trace of Cissy’s mysterious
+ailment, by the time her parent reappeared upon the scene.</p>
+
+<p>‘What have you done to my little girl?’ cried Lady Eccleston in a
+transport of gratitude; ‘she is a different child.’ And truly it would
+have been hard to find a more blooming specimen of girlhood. Indeed,
+when you come to think of it, six weeks is a liberal allowance of time
+for a perfectly healthy young woman to get over the effects of a
+momentary immersion in cold water.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have been so kind to my darling,’ Lady Eccleston said to Sainty.
+‘She has been telling me of all your delightful talks and readings; it
+is just what she needed, a little intercourse with a really cultivated
+mind. She has always felt the dissatisfaction of the frivolous life of
+society; there has been the desire to improve herself, the love of
+reading, but no one to guide her taste, or put her in the right way.
+Now, if you would draw up a little table of reading for her, tell her
+<i>what</i> to read, and in what order and connection, it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_202">{202}</a></span> would be just
+everything for her; and perhaps even her ignorant old mother might find
+a little leisure now and then to profit by your help. One is never too
+old to learn, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>So Sainty drew up tables, lent books, and marked passages, like the
+simple little pedant that he was, but without producing any very marked
+impression on Cissy’s fundamental ignorance. Sometimes he wondered if
+the girl were not very dull at Belchamber, and how it was that people
+who had always seemed to have so many engagements could spare so much
+time to one house. It is true that Lady Eccleston was perpetually
+threatening departure, but she was as often persuaded to remain by the
+very mildest expostulation that civility demanded.</p>
+
+<p>At last a date was definitely fixed, and Sainty had to acknowledge to
+himself that he would miss the charming companion of his walks and
+drives. He felt tolerably sure that he was not in the least in love with
+Cissy, but he had come to feel a sort of tender protecting friendship
+for her, an interest in her welfare, and a desire to shield her from
+evil and unhappiness. Thus, one day, when he had heard raised voices and
+rather excited talking as he passed Lady Eccleston’s door, and Cissy had
+appeared at lunch with red eyes, he burned to know what was wrong, and
+if possible to help and comfort her. Sorrow seemed so inappropriate to
+this bright young creature; yet, during the last few days of the
+Ecclestons’ stay, the air was heavy with suppressed tears. It was like
+the weather when people look each evening at the clearing heavens and
+say, ‘There must have been a storm somewhere’; an actual shower would
+have been a relief. To a person of Sainty’s temperament such a state of
+things was unendurable. He could not ask Cissy what was wrong; she who
+had been so ready to walk, or drive, or read, seemed suddenly to have
+become unapproachable.</p>
+
+<p>One day he watched the mother and daughter returning from a walk. They
+were talking excitedly in low hurried voices and with a good deal of
+gesture; it was obvious even<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_203">{203}</a></span> at a distance that they were discussing no
+ordinary topics, and what is more that they were having a decided
+difference of opinion. Lady Eccleston seemed to be appealing urgently
+about something. Sainty saw her lay her hand not too gently on her
+daughter’s arm, but the girl threw it off with an impatient gesture,
+broke from her, and fairly ran towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>So swift and unexpected was her coming that Sainty had no time to
+withdraw, and they met in the hall. Cissy’s face was working, her eyes
+dry and burning.</p>
+
+<p>‘Miss Eccleston&mdash;Cissy,’ said Belchamber, ‘what is wrong? Can I do
+anything&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>At sight of him she started away like a shying horse.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, let me alone!’ she cried, and hurried upstairs, and Sainty could
+hear her sobbing as she went. At that moment Lady Eccleston appeared
+upon the scene, with heightened colour and decidedly out of breath. An
+indefinable change came over her expression as she saw the young man, a
+certain exultation seemed to leap in her eyes, to be immediately
+extinguished in a confusion which had every appearance of being genuine.</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, moving eagerly to meet her, ‘what is the
+matter with Cissy?’ He did not notice that in his excitement he had
+twice called the girl by her Christian name.</p>
+
+<p>‘O Lord Belchamber, how unfortunate! I would have given worlds not to
+have met you just now. Give me a minute or two, I’m all upset.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty opened the door of the morning-room and ushered the agitated lady
+in there. His heart was beating uncomfortably; he felt something
+decisive was going to happen. Lady Eccleston sank into a chair and
+struggled with emotion, giving vent to a series of little sniffs and
+hiccoughs, and dabbing her eyes and mouth with her pocket-handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>‘To-morrow we should have gone, and you need never have known,’ she said
+at last in broken accents.</p>
+
+<p>‘Known what? I don’t understand.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_204">{204}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I blame myself,’ Lady Eccleston went on, not heeding the interruption.
+‘It was my fault; I ought to have had more foresight and discretion; I
+see it all now. If Sir Thomas had only been spared it would never have
+happened; he had such sterling sense.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘I alone am to blame,’ Lady Eccleston repeated tragically. ‘Of course I
+see it now. You are both so young, so pure-minded, so unsophisticated;
+and dear Lady Charmington has lived so long out of the world; but <i>I</i>
+ought to have seen. Oh! I am inexcusable. But I did hope at least <i>you</i>
+would never know’; and like Agamemnon she once more veiled her grief.</p>
+
+<p>‘I might have known, I might have been sure,’ she continued after a
+pause. ‘Heaven knows I have enough reason to know how malicious people
+are, but my belief in my fellow-creatures is incurable. I can <i>not</i>
+bring myself to realise the love of scandal in evil-minded people.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens!’ said Sainty, now thoroughly alarmed. ‘What can you mean?
+Surely no one has presumed&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘People have talked,’ Lady Eccleston mourned. ‘Cissy being here so long,
+and my leaving her here, and all. It seems people have drawn all sorts
+of silly conclusions. I have been asked&mdash;&mdash; I can’t say it; you can
+guess what; and the poor child has had letters, hints, and
+congratulations, and all that; you can fancy it has upset her terribly;
+she is almost beside herself; I can do nothing with her; you saw her
+just now’; and Lady Eccleston took a little side-glance at Sainty behind
+her pocket-handkerchief. ‘Of course, <i>I</i> understand perfectly, and so
+does she; but I see how it would strike outsiders. Oh! why is one always
+wise after the event? Now you see why I am so angry with myself.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was much perturbed. ‘This is monstrous, monstrous!’ he cried;
+‘that she should be annoyed, distressed in this way, is horrible. I
+hope, Lady Eccleston, you don’t think that I have behaved badly, that I
+have taken any advantage of the confidence with which you have honoured
+me.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_205">{205}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Oh dear no, Lord Belchamber; you have been kindness itself, and so has
+your dear mother. I never can forget all your goodness. I knew how
+absolutely I could trust <i>you</i>; but I ought to have thought, to have
+remembered. Well, I had hoped and meant that at least we alone should
+bear the burthen. This is an ill return to make to you for all your
+sweetness and hospitality. You will wish you had never heard our name.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Believe me, I am not thinking at all about myself. The one question is,
+how is Miss Eccleston to be shielded from any annoyance in the matter?
+It is intolerable that she should have to suffer.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How like you! always so noble and unselfish,’ said Lady Eccleston
+fervently. ‘I shall always remember how splendidly you have behaved. I
+don’t blame <i>you</i> for a single instant, but I can never forgive
+<i>myself</i>. It is so like me; I am so impulsive. I thought only of the
+immense benefit it would be to her intellectually, the intercourse with
+such a mind as yours. I should have recollected there were dangers; that
+at her age the intellect plays but a very small part beside the
+heart&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good gracious! you don’t mean that she has thought me capable of
+pestering her with my attentions? I knew well enough that I was only
+allowed such liberty because&mdash;because I was different from other men.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No, no; I don’t <i>think</i> she thought anything of it. <i>I</i> should have
+known that it was only your kindness to a poor little invalid, your
+desire to instruct a little ignoramus. But Cissy is very young; she may
+have fancied&mdash;&mdash; Oh! I don’t know what I’m saying.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had grown very pale; he had to hold on to a table for support.</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eccleston,’ he said in a low voice, ‘you can’t mean to imply that
+Miss Eccleston could possibly care for <i>me</i> in that way.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lord Belchamber, this is unfair,’ cried Lady Eccleston, starting up.
+‘You have no right to try and force the chil<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_206">{206}</a></span>d’s poor little secret from
+me. You found me all unstrung after a terrible talk with her, and I have
+let out far more than I should. I have told you I entirely exonerate you
+from all blame; I appreciate that your motive was pure kindness. Is not
+that enough for you? If people have been tiresome and tactless it is not
+your fault, still less hers, poor girl. I blame <i>myself</i>, as I say, more
+than I can tell you, but that has nothing to do with you. If I have been
+foolish I am more than punished; but I only regret that I cannot bear
+<i>all</i> the punishment; we never can. The fault or folly, call it what you
+will, was mine, but much of the price must be paid by my poor innocent
+child&mdash;that is the thought that unnerves me’; and her ladyship once more
+had recourse to her pocket-handkerchief. ‘She has no father,’ she
+wailed; ‘her brothers are mere children in knowledge of the world; and
+I, her mother, who should have shielded her from trouble, in my blind,
+foolish desire to procure her a little intellectual advantage, have
+brought on her the bitterest trial of her life.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was twisting his stick in his fingers in great agitation. ‘It is
+too bad, too bad,’ he said, ‘that she should be pestered like this and
+made unhappy. I would do anything in my power to repair the harm of
+which I have been the unwitting cause. But if the trouble is, as I
+suppose, only what stupid people have been saying or writing to her, I
+don’t see what I can do. Poor child! I can well understand how her pride
+and delicacy must have been hurt.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No, no; there is nothing to be done, nothing,’ said Lady Eccleston. ‘I
+never meant that you should know; and, Lord Belchamber, promise me one
+thing: never refer to this to Cissy; she would die of shame, if she
+thought I had told you. We are going to-morrow; try and forget what I
+have said, especially&mdash;especially&mdash;&mdash;’ and she broke off abruptly, and
+made a stumbling grope at the door-handle, as though she would leave the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>‘Stop a minute, please,’ Sainty cried, interposing. ‘Don’t go. I don’t
+want to be indiscreet, but you said something <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_207">{207}</a></span>just now which seemed to
+hint&mdash;&mdash; Oh! I know it’s incredible; but don’t you see, it would make
+all the difference whether her distress came <i>only</i> from the
+mortification of people having coupled our names, or if it was possible
+that she could look on me as&mdash;as&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Say no more, say no more. I understand you perfectly,’ interrupted Lady
+Eccleston. ‘You are the soul of punctilious honour. You are capable of
+any sacrifice, if you thought that even, as you said just now,
+<i>unwittingly</i> you had made a poor girl care for you; but I have not said
+it, and I will not say it. I have pride for her, as I should have it for
+myself. I would <i>never</i> admit it. You are perfectly justified in
+believing that her distress arises <i>solely</i> from what people have said,’
+and this time the lady, with a magnificent gesture of renunciation,
+really did get to the door, and left Sainty in a whirl of conflicting
+emotions. Was it possible that he had touched the heart of this
+beautiful young creature? It was inconceivable that <i>she</i> should be in
+love with <i>him</i>, and he turned with a pathetic smile to the long glass
+between the two tall windows. Yet her mother had seemed to hint it. If
+it were so, then there was nothing simpler than saving her from trouble.
+A word would do it. But it could not be; the thing was unthinkable. And
+he fell to wondering if he wished to think it, or not. What was his
+feeling towards her? Was this protecting, pitying tenderness, this
+longing to interpose between her and sorrow, was this love? It was very
+unlike what he had dreamed it to be. But was not everything in life
+strangely unlike our young idea of it? And ought he to consider his own
+feelings in the matter at all? If, however innocently, he had led her to
+think he cared for her, if in her youth and inexperience she had
+mistaken his friendship, his interest in her studies, for a warmer
+feeling; above all, if the inscrutable workings of the female heart had
+led her for some mysterious reason to return it, was he not in honour
+bound to think only of her happiness in the matter? If a young and
+beautiful woman had done him this honour, was it for him, him of all
+people, to feel anything but humblest gratitude? The thought was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_208">{208}</a></span> not
+without a certain sweetness that a woman had recognised the qualities of
+his head and heart, to the extent of forgetting his lack of all that
+women most prized in man, strength, courage, virility. He acknowledged
+that a man could not have done so, that had the positions been reversed,
+had he been handsome, vigorous, physically attractive, she ugly,
+misshapen, unhealthy, no beauties of the soul would have stirred in him
+the wish to make her his wife. He bowed his head in awe before the
+greater spirituality of woman; even a thoughtless London girl brought up
+among worldly surroundings and low ideals was capable of higher flights
+than the most refined and least carnal of men. And he had presumed to
+patronise, almost to look down on her, because she had not dulled the
+edge of her originality with much reading. After all, why did he
+hesitate? Had he not dreamed of some such possibility as this, yet
+hardly dared to hope for it? Was it likely that two women would be found
+willing to overlook his many deficiencies? was not this precisely the
+one chance of his life? His mother had said she wished him to marry. His
+mother! Strange that he had not thought of her sooner! He would go and
+consult his mother; <i>she</i> would know better than any one how to advise
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington listened indulgently to his recital. She did not seem
+surprised.</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought all that poetry reading would come to something of the sort,’
+she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t make out now,’ said Sainty, ‘whether what is troubling her is
+anything more than resentment of idle gossip, the natural repulsion of a
+delicate-minded girl from having her name coupled with a man’s.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I suspect it is more,’ said his mother. ‘But you? Are you fond of
+the girl on your side?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know that I am in love with her, even now, and I certainly
+never dreamed of the possibility of <i>her</i> being in love with <i>me</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, her mother certainly gave you to understand that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_209">{209}</a></span> she was; it is
+unfortunate if you have made the poor girl care for you, and don’t feel
+you can return it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens, mother! If it were possible that such a creature had
+really stooped to love me, I ought to thank her on my knees.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t quite see <i>that</i>; but I should be sorry to have any one able to
+say that you had trifled with her. You see, her mother left her in my
+charge; and I suppose I ought not to have let you be so much alone
+together.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But surely,’ cried Sainty, ‘you don’t think I am capable of taking
+advantage of the confidence reposed in me, to&mdash;to&mdash;&mdash; Oh! the idea is
+ludicrous; you must see its absurdity.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I must say you have given the girl every reason to think you liked
+her,’ said his mother judicially. ‘I have never seen you show the same
+desire for anybody’s society before; it is not surprising if she mistook
+the nature of your attentions. Pretty girls are not in the habit of
+having young men so devoted to the improvement of their minds.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I would not “behave badly,” as people call it, for worlds,’ said
+Sainty. ‘I only can’t get over the extreme grotesqueness of its being
+possible for me to do so. In spite of both you and Lady Eccleston, it
+still seems to me quite incredible that I should rouse any such feeling
+in her.’</p>
+
+<p>‘There is a very simple way of finding out,’ said Lady Charmington.</p>
+
+<p>‘But how if in her kindness and inexperience she is mistaking pity,
+gratitude, affection&mdash;call it what you will&mdash;for Love? It is possible
+even (God forgive me for thinking of such a thing!) that the
+surroundings, the place, the name, the whole business may have acted on
+her almost unconsciously, and helped her to mistake her own heart.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Judge not,’ said Lady Charmington, with all the air of one who had
+never done such a thing in her life; ‘I should be sorry to think so
+badly of the poor child as that.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I didn’t mean to blame her. I am sure she would not <i>consciously</i>
+have let such considerations weigh with her; but it seems so abnormal
+that any woman should feel any<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_210">{210}</a></span>thing like love for me, that I am still
+trying to find some explanation to fit the facts.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘My dear boy,’ she said,
+‘you are not called upon to understand <i>her</i> feelings; what you have got
+to do is to try and understand your own. It has been the dearest wish of
+my heart to see you happily married; especially since your brother’s
+behaviour has brought such bitter sorrow and disgrace upon us all. Here
+is a nice, good girl, well brought up, and I think she loves you. The
+question is whether you like her well enough to make her your wife.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty shook his head. ‘The question is whether I could make her happy,’
+he said; ‘what have I to give her in exchange for the priceless treasure
+of a good woman’s love?’</p>
+
+<p>Dinner that evening was a cheerless meal. Lady Charmington, never a
+great talker, was more than ordinarily silent. Belchamber made several
+attempts to start a conversation on indifferent subjects, and Lady
+Eccleston chattered feverishly, with one eye on him and one on her
+daughter, who sat sullen and defiant and ate nothing. Sainty’s heart
+smote him as he looked on her. Whether their two mothers were right or
+not, he would speak to her after dinner. If she took him, he would
+consecrate his life to her happiness. If, as he still thought far more
+likely, their wishes had misled them, and she did not care for him, she
+had only to refuse him, and her pride was healed. Then, when her friends
+said, ‘We thought you were going to marry Lord Belchamber,’ she would
+only have to say, ‘He wanted me to, poor man, but I couldn’t do it.’
+That he was thinking entirely of <i>her</i> happiness showed how little he
+was really in love with her, but that neither affected his decision nor
+seemed to him to matter in the least.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington was a skilled and experienced knitter, and Lady
+Eccleston, who kept a bit of property crochet to hook at when she was
+with other women who worked, became surprisingly interested in the
+intricacies of the garment on<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_211">{211}</a></span> which her friend was engaged. Her voluble
+inquiries and apologies for her own stupidity kept up a running
+accompaniment to the click-clack of the needles and Lady Charmington’s
+occasional terse explanations. Cissy had withdrawn to the extreme other
+end of the long room in which they sat, and pretended to immerse herself
+in a book. Sainty drew a chair up to hers, so as to interpose the view
+of his own back between her and the two older women.</p>
+
+<p>‘Miss Eccleston,’ he said, ‘I have got something I want to say to you.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy looked up from her book. ‘Yes?’ was all she said. Her attitude
+expressed only weariness; she did not appear to be at all fluttered.</p>
+
+<p>‘You are worried, unhappy,’ Sainty went on. ‘I am afraid you have been
+annoyed by people gossiping about your stay here, about the relations
+between you and me.’ He spoke in a low voice, for her ear alone; he was
+looking into her eyes, trying to surprise some indication of what effect
+his words had on her. Cissy did not look down or betray any
+embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose mamma told you that?’ she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t bear to see you like this, and to know that, however
+unintentionally, I am the cause.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! that’s all right; I am sure you meant nothing but what was kind.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Miss Eccleston&mdash;Cissy, I want to tell you I am quite well aware of the
+extreme unlikelihood of your being able to care for me. I understand
+that you should be angry and sore at vulgar people’s mistaking the
+nature of our friendship. I am not silly or vain enough to suppose that
+you would be willing to marry me; but remember if any one ever says
+anything more to you about this, your position is quite simple; you have
+only to say you have refused me&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy never shifted her calm, level gaze. ‘Lord Belchamber,’ she said
+quietly, ‘am I to understand that you are proposing to me?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t for a moment expect you to accept me; I just<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_212">{212}</a></span> want you to know,
+and other people to know, that if you don’t it is entirely because you
+don’t wish to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I see; you mean you will make me a sham proposal, on the distinct
+understanding that I say “no,” so that I may have the satisfaction of
+telling my friends that I might have been a marchioness if I’d liked;
+but you’d be awfully sold if I said “yes.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>‘You know I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ said Sainty. ‘But I know
+how hopeless it is that a girl like you should care for a man like me,
+and I wouldn’t insult you by supposing that anything I have to offer
+could make any difference. I don’t want to add to your troubles the pain
+of thinking I had hoped you might accept me and that you have got to
+disappoint me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then it <i>is</i> a <i>bonâ fide</i> offer that you are making me?’ said Cissy
+sardonically; her tone expressed anything but exultation, and though she
+still looked at him her eyes seemed to be looking at some one else a
+long way off. ‘It’s the queerest proposal, I should think, any one ever
+made,’ and she gave a little dry laugh. ‘Take care I don’t accept it.
+Whatever you may think, a little pauper like me might well be tempted by
+what you have to offer, as you call it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that,’ Sainty said. ‘I know it is
+only a joke, but there are things I don’t like joked about. That’s the
+way you used to talk, but you’ve been so different lately.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lord Belchamber,’ said Cissy, ‘let’s understand one another. If you are
+making me an offer out of chivalry, that I may have an answer to
+people’s malicious chatter, I can only say I’m very much obliged to you;
+but if you really want me to marry you, I’m quite ready to do so. I
+can’t say fairer than that, can I? After all,’ she added in a softer
+tone, ‘quite apart from worldly considerations, I think I might do much
+worse for myself; you’ve been very good to me, and you’re a much better
+sort than&mdash;than most of the men I’ve met,’ and for the first time she
+looked away, and gave a little sigh.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_213">{213}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty was much moved. ‘Cissy,’ he said, ‘do you really mean that in
+spite of everything you think you could love me a little?’ and he tried
+to take her hand; but at the touch of him the girl flung herself back
+into the furthest corner of the big chair in which she sat, and her
+glance once more crossed his, steel-bright like a rapier. ‘Do I
+understand,’ she asked, ‘that I have your authority to announce our
+engagement to our respective parents?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty stared blankly; he could only nod. Cissy wheeled her chair
+sharply back, and called out, ‘Mamma! Lord Belchamber has proposed to
+me, and I have accepted him.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston was across the room in two bounds. ‘My darling, what a
+way to tell me such a thing! You really are the strangest child. What
+can Lord Belchamber and Lady Charmington think of you? Dear Lady
+Charmington, you must forgive my Cissy; she’s so excitable, I think
+happiness has turned her head a little; and mine too, for that matter,
+for it would be useless to pretend I’m not delighted, only it is all so
+sudden, so unexpected,’ and she clasped her daughter to her heart, and
+kissed and wept over her in the most approved fashion. Cecilia did not
+return her mother’s kisses; she looked at her with a very queer eye
+indeed, before which Lady Eccleston’s effusiveness drooped a little. She
+turned to her future son-in-law and held out both her hands. ‘Dear
+Sainty (I may call you Sainty?), I must kiss you too,’ she cried.</p>
+
+<p>As Sainty submitted to the threatened salute, it struck him as grimly
+humorous that it should not be his intended who kissed him, but her
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy crossed the room, and picked up the ball of wool which Lady
+Eccleston had shed in her rapid transit, and by which she was still
+fastened like a spider to the place where she had been sitting. ‘Lady
+Charmington,’ she said, ‘mamma has adopted your son with great
+readiness; have you nothing to say to me? Are you not pleased?’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington had risen and laid aside her work. ‘Of course I am
+pleased,’ she said; ‘I have wished, of all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_214">{214}</a></span> things, to see Sainty
+married; but, my dear,’ she added, something in the girl’s manner
+seeming to strike her as peculiar, ‘I hope you are not taking this
+solemn step lightly; have you examined your heart, and asked God’s
+blessing on what you are doing? Are you sure you love my son enough to
+be happy with him, and to make him happy?’</p>
+
+<p>But Lady Eccleston was a whirlwind of tears, protestations, laughter,
+and congratulation; she caught them all up, and swept them away in the
+current of her rejoicing. No one else was allowed to say anything.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty also had drawn near, and now stood before his mother. She took a
+hand of each of the young people in hers, and said solemnly ‘God bless
+you, my children.’</p>
+
+<p>At the moment Sainty had a vision of the intensity with which she had
+cursed her other son, on a like occasion, and thought irresistibly of
+the fountain that ‘sent forth sweet water and bitter.’ The context rang
+in his head like a knell: ‘My brethren, these things ought not to be.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_215">{215}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> wedding was fixed for the first week in June. As Lady Charmington
+said, there was no reason for delay, though it must be owned that
+neither of the young people seemed very eager to press on the date. Lady
+Eccleston could not have borne a wedding in Lent, and Lady Charmington
+had a lingering old Scottish superstition, of which she was heartily
+ashamed, against May marriages. All things considered, the beginning of
+June seemed plainly indicated. Everybody would be in town then, and it
+was to be a London wedding. Cissy grumbled a good deal at having to miss
+the season; but her mother affected to treat her lamentations as a joke.</p>
+
+<p>‘Of <i>course</i> she doesn’t mean it,’ she said, in answer to Sainty’s
+expression of his willingness to consult Cissy’s wishes in everything.
+‘You know how absurd my children are; they always must make a joke of
+everything, but it doesn’t mean that their hearts are not in the right
+place; under all their nonsense, which I never check, for I do so love
+to see them merry, they have very serious feelings about all the big
+things of life.’</p>
+
+<p>A cousin of Lady Eccleston’s, who was married to a newly-made peer with
+a large income, and who had never before shown the slightest inclination
+to do much for her poorer kinsfolk, expressed her approval of Cissy’s
+brilliant match by offering the use of her house for the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is very good of dear Louisa,’ said Lady Eccleston, ‘and I must own
+we should have been sadly squashed in our little <i>bicoque</i>. Still, if we
+hadn’t always been <i>as</i> sisters, I couldn’t have taken it from her. Poor
+dear! It is such a bitter regret to her having no children of her own.
+Natur<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_216">{216}</a></span>ally, mine are a great deal to her; and I can quite understand her
+pleasure in having Cissy married from her house. Don’t think I’m
+ungrateful to the dear creature, Sainty, but I own in my heart I would
+rather have had the girl go to her bridal from her own and her mother’s
+little home; but that is <i>entre nous</i>, my dear boy; I wouldn’t hurt poor
+Louisa’s feelings for worlds.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty found being engaged very different from anything he had read of
+it. Things seemed so little changed with him, that he wondered at times
+if it could really be he who was to be married in a few weeks. Was it
+possible that at a date definitely fixed, and not very far distant, his
+whole being was to undergo this tremendous transformation, was
+henceforth to be linked in closest union with a creature of whom he knew
+practically nothing, and that not for a season, like any other
+circumstance in life, but as long ‘as they both should live,’ ‘till
+death did them part’? The prospect terrified rather than attracted him.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes he tried to feel elated at the thought that he was to join the
+ranks of normal happy people who love and are loved, was to lead about a
+wife like other men, and hold up his head among his fellows. He told
+himself that this supremest gift was far beyond anything he had dared to
+hope. It was to no purpose. He might be flattered, grateful, touched,
+but he was conscious of none of that blissful thrill that is said to
+transfigure existence and make a heaven on earth. Sometimes he wondered
+how it had all come about so suddenly. Everything he had done had seemed
+not only natural, but inevitable at the time. He had walked into the
+situation as simply as going in to dinner; yet now there were moments
+when the thought of what they had both undertaken appalled him. He was
+as frightened for Cissy as for himself. Did she know what she was doing,
+what it meant? A dozen times a day he recalled the scene in the library,
+her hard, unflinching gaze, the mocking tones of her voice. Was that the
+way that a woman made the ‘irrevocable sweet surrender’ to a man who had
+won<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_217">{217}</a></span> her heart? If she had made a mistake, if she did not love him,
+ought she not still to be saved from the fate she had accepted, even at
+the eleventh hour?</p>
+
+<p>He saw extremely little of his betrothed. He had never had much to do
+with engaged couples, but he had an impression that they were generally
+left a good deal alone together, that people and things combined to
+respect the privacy of mutual love; yet from the day of his engagement
+it was no exaggeration to say that he had hardly seen Cissy alone for
+five minutes. It is true that she had not actually left Belchamber next
+morning; but after their surprising freedom from other claims, both she
+and her mother seemed now all impatience to be gone, and during the time
+that they remained, they were mostly shut up in their own rooms
+announcing the event to a hundred correspondents, or dashing off their
+thanks for the congratulations that arrived by every post. ‘She must
+really get home, and begin to see about clothes; there was none too much
+time, and this was such a bad time of year; just when every one was
+busy.’ Cissy was sure, if she delayed another day, she ‘shouldn’t have a
+decent rag to her back, and should have to be married in her
+petticoats.’</p>
+
+<p>From the day they went to town there began a round of shoppings and
+tryings-on, of scribbling notes, unpacking, cataloguing, and rapturously
+thanking for wedding-presents, which, as Cissy was marrying a rich man
+with a house full of beautiful things, were, of course, far more
+numerous and costly than if she had married a curate, or a captain in a
+marching regiment. Then the list of people to be invited to the wedding
+had to be discussed <i>ad infinitum</i>, at first with regard to the size of
+the house in Chester Square, and after the cousin’s offer, to be
+enlarged, amended, and corrected. With every fresh batch of presents,
+the number swelled of those whom it was deemed indispensable to ask,
+till it seemed to Sainty that there was not a stranger in the whole
+great indifferent city who had not been called in to assist at his
+nuptials.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_218">{218}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He also had come to town, as in duty bound, and was staying with his
+uncle Firth, but though he spent several hours a day in Chester Square,
+he found himself horribly in the way there. Lady Eccleston and Cissy sat
+squashed sideways by the open drawers of their respective
+writing-tables, like people playing a perpetual duet on two organs with
+all the stops pulled out. The absurdly inadequate pieces of furniture on
+which women transact business became so littered with lists, letters,
+acceptances, refusals, the drawers so bulged with stacks of
+silver-printed invitations and stamped envelopes, that the little hands
+with the scratching pens seemed by their perpetual movement to be
+feverishly preserving an ever narrowing space for themselves, as ducks
+keep a hole open in a rapidly freezing pond.</p>
+
+<p>Of happy interchange of rapturous feelings, murmured talks in quiet
+corners, or those long palpitating silences that lovers know, too
+blissful to be marred by talk, our engaged couple had no experience.
+Though Sainty was far too delicate-minded for the mere physical aspects
+of courtship to appeal strongly to his imagination, it did occur to him
+that an occasional embrace was not inappropriate between people about to
+be married; but on the one occasion when he attempted anything of the
+sort, he had been repulsed with such energy and decision that he had
+immediately desisted. He had a conviction that Cissy thought him a fool
+for accepting defeat so easily, but to struggle for a kiss like an
+enamoured costermonger was repugnant to all his ideas. So he continued
+to meet and greet his promised bride as though she were the most
+indifferent of strangers.</p>
+
+<p>One morning at breakfast he asked his uncle if he ought not to make his
+betrothed a present. Lord Firth came out from behind the morning paper
+with a bound.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear boy! do you mean to say you haven’t done so?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Not yet,’ said Sainty; ‘but I supposed, of course, I should have to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Not even a ring?’ asked Lord Firth. Sainty was forced to admit it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_219">{219}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Why, the very day she accepted you, you ought to have given her a ring;
+if you hadn’t got one fit to offer her, you should have telegraphed to
+town at once for some. You must get one at once and take it to her; and,
+of course, you must give her other things too, a tiara or necklace or
+something really handsome, and a bag or dressing-case. You know the kind
+of thing. Find out from her mother what she’s got, and which she would
+like, and get the duchess to help you choose things; <i>she</i> knows what’s
+what. They must think it very odd that you haven’t done it already.’</p>
+
+<p>‘There are the emeralds,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course she’ll have them to wear,’ said his uncle, ‘but you can’t
+<i>give</i> them to her, because they are heirlooms. As it happens, the one
+thing you are rather poor in is jewellery. Your grandmother had a lot,
+but it was her own, and you may believe she didn’t leave any behind her;
+your mother never cared for it, and never had much. She will probably
+give your wife, or leave her, what she has; but of course you must see
+that she has the proper things, and do the thing well. Don’t be stingy
+about it.’</p>
+
+<p>The duchess was delighted to help, and echoed Lord Firth’s astonishment
+at Sainty’s dilatoriness in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>‘You really are the most extraordinary boy,’ she said. ‘I’m just going
+for my walk; we’ll go round to Rumond’s at once and see what he’s got.’</p>
+
+<p>‘We’ve been expecting a visit from your lordship,’ said the great
+jeweller unctuously, ‘ever since we heard the happy news. May I be
+permitted to offer my congratulations on the event? We have always had
+the honour of supplying your family, and hoped that on such an occasion
+you would not desert us. I was remarking to Mr. Diby only the other day
+that I had been wondering we did not get a telegram to go down to
+Belchamber&mdash;either he or I would have been delighted; but you preferred
+to wait till you came to town: quite right, quite right.’</p>
+
+<p>They were ushered into a little sanctum, where presently on a mat of
+dark blue velvet were displayed treasures which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_220">{220}</a></span> made Sainty blink, and
+of which the prices gave him cold shivers down his back. The duchess
+handled and appraised the gems with the sangfroid of long habit; but her
+grandson had never in his life had occasion to buy any jewellery, and
+had not the faintest idea of what such things were worth. To deck the
+bright curls of a woman with the cost of a hospital, or hang the price
+of a working-men’s college round her neck, seemed to him absolutely
+vicious; it had a horrible flavour of that life into which he had
+obtained his only glimpse at Arthur’s supper-party&mdash;poor Arthur, whom
+almost alone he would have cared to have near him on his wedding-day,
+and who he knew would not be there, because his wife could not be asked.</p>
+
+<p>He left the shop with a horrible sense of guilt, and a feeling that the
+act which in him would be applauded as a fitting generosity was very
+much in the same category with his brother’s prodigalities, not
+differing in kind, but only so much more blameworthy as it was so much
+greater in degree. Arthur, he felt sure, would not have hesitated to
+hang the girl of his heart in jewels, nor have wasted a thought on what
+it cost, and again he wondered whether his qualms were the result of his
+well-known parsimony, or one more proof that he was not really in love
+with her who was to be his wife.</p>
+
+<p>It was soon clear that Cissy did not share his views on these subjects;
+the evening on which his presents arrived in Chester Square was the only
+occasion since their betrothal on which she expressed anything
+resembling affection for him. Her eyes sparkled like the diamonds in her
+little crown as she tried the things on, and pirouetted about the room
+with them. She waltzed up to Sainty and dropped him a deep curtsey. ‘How
+does my lord and master think I look?’ she said coquettishly; and then
+in a sudden gust of gratitude she caught his hands in hers, and for the
+first time bent forward and kissed him. Sainty blushed hotly; this kiss,
+which spontaneously given would have meant so much to him, was like the
+stamp on a receipt for cash value<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_221">{221}</a></span> received; and it was the last, as it
+had been the first, of their singular courtship.</p>
+
+<p>As the weeks passed, Cissy grew stranger and more unlike herself. The
+intervals of feverish gaiety, which had marked the earlier stages of her
+engagement, became rarer, and were succeeded by fits of gloom and
+depression that seemed utterly foreign to her nature. Whatever she might
+be at other times, that came to be the mood in which she invariably
+received Belchamber. She never willingly addressed him, and there were
+days when it seemed beyond her power to speak peaceably to him.
+Sometimes she was so rude that Lady Eccleston would playfully
+remonstrate, or Tommy would burst out with, ‘Hang it all, Cissy, you’ve
+no right to speak to Sainty like that. If I was him, I’m jiggered if I’d
+stand it.’</p>
+
+<p>They had never from the first been allowed many unwitnessed interviews,
+but now it seemed to Sainty that it was Cissy herself who carefully
+avoided any occasion of finding herself alone with him, and if ever she
+could by no means escape, she would take refuge from his attempts at
+conversation in sullen monosyllables, and sometimes even in absolute
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>One day he asked her in desperation if she felt she had made a
+mistake&mdash;if she wanted to be released. ‘It is not too late,’ he said,
+‘but it soon will be; if you repent of what you have done, if you want
+me to give you back your freedom, in mercy to yourself, to me, speak
+while there is yet time.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy,’ he pleaded, after waiting in vain for any answer, ‘if you don’t
+feel that you love me enough, don’t do a thing that will ruin both our
+lives.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do I seem as if I loved you?’ she asked brutally.</p>
+
+<p>‘So little, that I can’t help feeling that the idea of marrying me is
+repugnant to you. If so, never mind me; have the courage to put a stop
+to the whole thing; a word from you will do it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! will it? It is not as simple as all that.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_222">{222}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I will help you in any way I can; I will do anything you want.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy continued to stare into the fire in silence; she had never once
+looked at him. ‘I don’t know what I do want,’ she said at last,
+hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was about to say more, but at that moment, with a great
+admonitory rattling of the door-handle, Lady Eccleston hurried in, with
+her arms full of parcels.</p>
+
+<p>‘More presents, children,’ she cried gaily; ‘here, Sainty, come and take
+this top one off, or I shall drop it. That makes three hundred and
+seventy-nine. Ouf! I’m glad I’ve no more daughters to marry.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Listening! I thought so,’ cried Cissy, starting up, and without a
+glance at the gifts from which her mother was beginning to remove the
+wrappings she left the room. At No. 379, fans and smelling-bottles, and
+even small articles of jewellery, were becoming a drug in the market.
+Lady Eccleston got very red, but took no notice, affecting to be
+absorbed in undoing a bit of ribbon that had got into a knot. ‘<span class="lftspc">“</span>With
+best wishes, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> she read; ‘really very good
+of them. We hardly know them, and I hadn’t meant to ask them. It is the
+seventeenth pair of paste buckles, but they are pretty though not old,
+and they come in for shoes. Who’s this? “Every good wish, Mr. Austin
+Pryor.” What a beauty! It is the prettiest fan she has had; really
+charming! What <i>can</i> this be? A pincushion! “Fondest love from Miss
+Henrietta Massinger.” What rubbish. I wish people wouldn’t send all this
+trash. Give me the green book on my writing-table, Sainty, and let’s
+enter them before I forget it. Three more notes for that poor child to
+write, and she’s tired out; any one can see it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, ‘do you think Cissy’s <i>only</i> tired? To me
+she seems very unhappy&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Tired, my dear boy, worn out; her nerves are in fiddle-strings; I shall
+be thankful for her sake when it’s all over,’ and she murmured as she
+wrote, ‘Pair of paste buckles, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter, 377.
+Tortoiseshell fan,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_223">{223}</a></span> Watteau subject, Mr. Austin Pryor, 378. Embroidered
+velvet horseshoe pincush&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do stop writing a minute, and listen to me,’ said Sainty. ‘It’s your
+daughter’s happiness that is at stake. Tell me, truly, do you think she
+loves me?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Loves you! My dear Sainty, what a question! <i>Of course</i> she loves you,’
+cried Lady Eccleston. ‘Miss H. Massinger, No. 379,’ and she looked up
+with a bright smile, as she rubbed energetically on the blotting-paper.
+‘Have you been having a lovers’ quarrel?’ she asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘No, no, nothing of that sort; but you yourself must have seen how oddly
+she behaves. She never will be alone with me for a minute if she can
+help it; she hardly ever speaks to me, and if I speak to <i>her</i>, as often
+as not she doesn’t answer me. It is the queerest way of showing love.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston smiled again, a little indulgent smile full of <i>finesse</i>.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear child,’ she said, ‘is <i>that</i> all? How little you know girls.
+Can’t you understand that to a girl of Cissy’s temperament, so
+absolutely pure and modest, marriage represents the unknown, the
+terrible; the prospect of it fills her with a thousand tremors and
+apprehensions. Believe me, a girl who can approach her wedding-day with
+calm nerves and a cheerful, smiling face, is either a cow, and has no
+sensibilities, or else she knows a great deal too much.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But she looks at me really as if she <i>hated</i> me,’ Sainty persisted. ‘If
+she has mistaken her feelings, if the idea is repugnant to her, if she
+feels that, having once given her word, she is bound, either out of
+consideration for me, or fear of all the talk, to go through with
+things, is it not our duty, yours and mine before all others, to save
+her from herself while there is yet time?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear modest fellow! Every word you say makes me love you more, and
+convinces me how exactly you are suited to such a nature as Cissy’s; I
+see how well you will understand her; how patient, how gentle you will
+be with her. As to her behaviour to <i>you</i>, I know; I feel for you a
+dozen times<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_224">{224}</a></span> a day; but you must not doubt her affection. Good gracious!
+I treated my poor dear husband a thousand times worse when we were
+engaged. My mother used to say she didn’t see how he stood it; but the
+dear man had endless patience; he never doubted; and he soon succeeded
+in reconciling me to my fate,’ added the lady, with a modest simper,
+‘when once we were married.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Maidenly tremors are all very well,’ said Sainty, ‘but Cissy’s
+behaviour gives me the impression of a much deeper seated repugnance.
+Don’t, for pity’s sake, let her wreck her life if she isn’t sure she
+cares enough for me to marry me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You are generous, considerate, unselfish as ever,’ cried Lady
+Eccleston. ‘But trust <i>me</i> who know her so well. My dear Sainty, do you
+suppose if I were not absolutely sure this marriage was for my child’s
+happiness, that I, her mother, who must have her welfare at heart,
+should not be the first to oppose it?’</p>
+
+<p>After that there seemed nothing more to be said. Still Sainty was not
+satisfied, and he determined to carry his perplexities to his uncle, on
+whose sterling commonsense he had often leaned comfortably in boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Firth looked grave, and pursed up his mouth judicially.</p>
+
+<p>‘This is awkward,’ he said, ‘infernally awkward. Do you mean to say you
+want to get out of it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no! not for myself at all. I don’t say I’m desperately in love; but
+I don’t know that I ever should be. As long as I thought Cissy cared for
+me, I was very much honoured, and ready to devote my life to making her
+happy; but as the time comes nearer, I am more and more convinced that
+she does not love me. She may have felt sorry for me; she may have let
+herself be dazzled by what she would gain in a worldly way. I don’t
+pretend to understand why she took me; but I am sure that she repents
+what she has done, that, if it could be managed for her, she would be
+glad to be released.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Have you told her so? Have you offered to release her?’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_225">{225}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Yes.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, what did she say?’</p>
+
+<p>‘She said nothing. When I pressed her she said she didn’t know what she
+wanted. Then her mother came in, and Cissy went out of the room.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Did you say anything about it to the old woman?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes; I said what I’ve just told you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what did <i>she</i> say?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, she said girls were always like that, that I didn’t understand
+them&mdash;which God knows I don’t&mdash;that a modest girl was always in a funk
+before marriage, and that she would be all right afterwards.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Hm,’ said Lord Firth. ‘Well, I’m an old bachelor, and don’t know much
+about them either; they’re queer creatures. I always vaguely distrust
+that Eccleston woman; but I’ve no reason for supposing she would sell
+her daughter, and I must say the girl never struck me as being
+particularly under her mother’s thumb. On the contrary, she’s always
+been rather pert to her when I’ve seen her.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t make it out; it all seems a hopeless tangle,’ said poor Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘The whole business struck me, when I heard of it, as being rather rash
+and ill-advised,’ said his uncle. ‘If I had been consulted, I should
+have suggested you had better both have been a little surer of your own
+feelings before announcing the engagement. I suspected your mother and
+Lady Eccleston of cooking up the affair when I heard of the Ecclestons
+being so much at Belchamber, but I didn’t feel called upon to interfere.
+It was obviously desirable that you should marry, and if you fancied
+Miss Cissy, I knew nothing against the girl, though I don’t much care
+for the mother. Besides, you are of age, and capable of arranging your
+own life without the interference of a guardian.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then you think there is nothing to be done?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t see what. You say you’ve offered the girl to break it off, and
+she didn’t seem to wish it, or at least wasn’t sure, and that her mother
+assured you she was only shy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_226">{226}</a></span> What more can you do? If <i>you</i> want to
+back out, it’s another matter. Though it would look very bad so near the
+time, I suppose it might be done.’</p>
+
+<p>As a last resort, Sainty wrote to his mother, though he felt sure what
+her answer would be; and sure enough Lady Charmington wrote with no
+uncertain pen. ‘If you had any misgivings you had better not have been
+in such a hurry to propose. Now it is altogether too late to go back on
+your word. I consider that you are bound in honour almost as if you were
+already married. It would be abominable to throw the girl over at the
+eleventh hour, when she has got her things, and all the invitations are
+out for the wedding. Think of the mortification to her, of the scandal
+it would cause. People might even say you had found out something
+against her. It would be enough to prevent her making another match, for
+every one would know of it, and talk about it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was struck for the hundredth time with the inevitability of his
+mother’s misapprehension. She passed over in silence all question of
+Cissy not caring for him, which was the one point on which he had
+insisted, and instantly assumed that his misgivings arose from nothing
+but the fatal weakness of his character, which made flight his one
+impulse in face of any decisive act.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had made his last effort, and proceeded to drift resignedly with
+the stream. There was just one other person to whom he had momentarily
+thought of applying for counsel and help, and that was his old friend
+Mrs. de Lissac; but Alice had behaved rather strangely, he thought,
+about the whole matter. On first coming to London, he had gone to see
+her as a matter of course; but though she had made a grand dinner for
+him and Cissy in honour of the engagement, and had showered magnificent
+presents on them both, the old cordial welcome was somehow lacking. She
+seemed ill at ease with him, and had fluttered hastily away from all
+attempts on his part to talk about Cissy, displaying positive terror if
+he showed any disposition to become confidential.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was easier than to discourage Sainty from talking<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_227">{227}</a></span> about
+himself. If his confidences were not met, as Alice de Lissac had always
+hitherto met them, more than half-way, they died a natural death.</p>
+
+<p>The day of Belchamber’s nuptials dawned inevitably in its turn. No
+convulsion of nature destroyed Lord Firth’s comfortable bachelor
+quarters, or buried the north side of Chester Square in ruins. Sainty
+got through the morning somehow, in a sort of waking dream, listening
+abstractedly to Gerald Newby, who had come up from Cambridge at his
+request to act as his ‘best man,’ and had much to say on many subjects,
+from the marriage-service of the Church of England&mdash;of some parts of
+which he strongly disapproved&mdash;to the tyranny of custom which imposed
+the high hat and frock coat, garments neither comfortable, convenient,
+nor æsthetically beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington, who was staying at Roehampton with old Lady Firth,
+brought her mother in for an early lunch as the wedding was fixed for
+half-past two.</p>
+
+<p>At the appointed time Sainty found himself planted by a great bank of
+palms and heavy-scented white flowers that made him feel sick. From
+where he stood the whole great church was visible. Dimly, as through a
+mist, he could descry his mother, straight and stern, in puritanical
+drab, beside the huddled white chuddah and nodding plumes of his
+grandmother, the duchess strapped into a petunia velvet, with a silver
+bonnet whose aigrette seemed to sweep the skies, his Aunt Eva in a
+Gainsborough hat, taking rapid notes for the <i>Looking-glass</i>, and
+Claude, slim, cool, and elegant, his beautifully gloved, pearl-grey
+hands crossed upon his cane, which he had rested on the seat beside him
+as he stood sideways looking for the bride. Behind them a sea of faces,
+mostly unknown, of light colours and black coats, of feathers, flowers,
+and laces, stretched back to where, in a cloud of pink and white, the
+bridesmaids clustered round the door, holding the great bouquets of
+roses he had so nearly forgotten to order for them.</p>
+
+<p>The organ boomed, and the knowing-looking little choristers<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_228">{228}</a></span> in their
+stiff surplices went clattering down the aisle followed by a perfect
+procession of smug ecclesiastics, among whom Sainty caught a fleeting
+glimpse of dear old Meakins from Great Charmington. Lady Eccleston,
+emotional, devotional, and gorgeous as the morning, rustled hastily to
+her place in the front pew where George and Randolph were already
+nudging each other and giggling. Then the little white-robed boys began
+to come back, shrilly chanting, and as the choir separated to right and
+left Sainty could see Tommy, very solemn and as red as the carnation in
+his buttonhole, and on his arm a vision of soft shrouded loveliness,
+coming slowly towards him. All the riddle of the future was hid in that
+veiled figure. How little he really knew what was in the little head and
+heart under all that whiteness; was it happiness or misery she was
+bringing him? an honoured, dignified married life, an equal share of
+joys and sorrows, ‘the children like the olive branches round about
+their table’? or a loveless existence, the straining bonds of those
+unequally yoked, the little sordid daily squabbles that eat the heart,
+perhaps even shame, dishonour ...? What thoughts for a bridegroom
+stepping forward to meet his bride at the altar! But who is master of
+his thoughts?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_229">{229}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> Duke of Sunborough having only a castle in Scotland, a palace in the
+Midlands, a detached house with a garden in the centre of London, a
+shooting-lodge in the north of England, and an old manor-house on the
+border of Wales, had acquired in his stormy youth a little place in
+Surrey some twelve or fifteen miles from town, a villa with terraces and
+cedar-trees and hothouses and shady lawns sloping to the river, where,
+if Rumour may be credited, there had sometimes been fine goings-on, but
+which was now only used on rare occasions for what it has become the
+fashion to call ‘week-end parties.’</p>
+
+<p>This modest retreat, which would have seemed to most people a good-sized
+country-house, had been lent to the young couple for their honeymoon,
+and thither they repaired, for greater state and privacy, in a large
+closed carriage with four horses and postillions, their two new
+dressing-bags sitting solemnly opposite to them on the back seat, while
+the servants and luggage went by train.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy, attired in the latest fashion and the palest hues, with a very
+white face and very red eyes and nose, sat huddled in one corner and
+stared out of the window, occasionally dabbing her features with a
+little damp ball of a pocket-handkerchief. From the other end of the
+long seat, on which a third person could easily have found room between
+the little bride and bridegroom, Sainty watched her compassionately. He
+contrasted the woebegone aspect and silent aloofness of his companion
+with the cheerful garrulity of the same young lady when she had driven
+about the country with him only a few months before. Then, had she
+seemed depressed or unhappy, he would not have hesitated to ask the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_230">{230}</a></span>
+cause of her melancholy, to offer help or at least consolation. Why,
+now, was he afraid to attempt to comfort or even to make a movement
+towards her? The explanation seemed a strange one: then she had been an
+acquaintance, now she was his wife. His wife! The words struck with a
+certain irony on his startled consciousness. It was that half-hour in
+church which was to make them ‘one flesh’ which had thrust them so far
+asunder.</p>
+
+<p>At last the silence became unendurable.</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy,’ he said suddenly, ‘are you very miserable?’</p>
+
+<p>His voice breaking in on the monotonous sounds of their progress
+startled himself hardly less than his companion.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy shook herself and raised her head.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ she said defiantly, without looking round.</p>
+
+<p>‘Because of me?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes&mdash;because of you.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why, what have I done?’ There was a relief in speech. If she would only
+talk, no matter what she said; she might abuse him, accuse him&mdash;anything
+was better than that horrible mute damp woe. But Cissy would not answer.</p>
+
+<p>‘Won’t you tell me how I have offended you? What have I done that you
+don’t like?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You’ve married me,’ she snapped at him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Isn’t that a little unjust?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Most likely it is, horribly unjust. I don’t care if it is. I hate
+myself and you and everybody, and I wish I was dead.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy, Cissy,’ cried Sainty, dreadfully pained, ‘don’t say such
+things.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then why did you ask me?’ she retorted; ‘why can’t you let me alone?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty told himself that if there was ever a moment for patience it was
+now; so much might depend on what he said next. He made a motion as
+though he would take her hand, but at that there flashed out of her face
+a look so evil, such a genuine naked horror as civilisation seldom lets
+us show. Sainty fell back appalled; he felt that he had seen in her eyes
+the very bottom of her feeling towards him, and viewed<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_231">{231}</a></span> in the light of
+that revelation the whole hopelessness of their future relations stood
+momentarily clear before him. He lay back dazed and frightened, thankful
+as a man to whom lightning has shown the danger of his surroundings for
+the friendly darkness that once more veils them from his sight; and for
+the rest of the drive neither occupant of the carriage said a word.</p>
+
+<p>When at last they drew up at their destination the house was on Cissy’s
+side, and as soon as a bowing servant had opened the carriage-door she
+jumped out before Sainty could offer her any assistance. A little shower
+of rice that had lodged in the folds of her gown fell pattering from her
+in the precipitancy of her flight, which caused a discreet grin on the
+damp, red faces of the postillions and of the duke’s under-butler, who
+had been sent down to help Sainty’s valet with the service.</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber caught a glimpse of an inscription framed in laurel leaves
+stretched across the lintel, of which all that was clear to him were the
+words ‘happy pair,’ as he followed his bride into the hall. Here the
+women who had charge of the house were drawn up together with Cissy’s
+new maid and his own valet.</p>
+
+<p>The housekeeper had embarked on a little speech, evidently prepared with
+care. ‘May I be permitted,’ she was saying, ‘on behalf of myself and
+fellow-servants, to welcome your ladyship on this auspicious occasion,
+and to wish you and the marquis every happiness, and I am sure we shall
+do our very best to make you comfortable, and his lordship too.’ Seeing
+that Cissy stared at the woman with a dull eye, Sainty came to the
+rescue.</p>
+
+<p>‘I am sure we are both very much obliged to you all,’ he said, ‘but Lady
+Belchamber is very tired, and would be glad to see her room, if you will
+show it to her.’ Cissy started at the sound of her new name in the mouth
+of her husband, but moved off in the wake of the housekeeper, who had
+dropped from the monumental tone of her welcome into a more comfortable
+colloquialism. ‘I am sure your ladyship <i>must</i><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_232">{232}</a></span> be tired&mdash;it’s a most
+trying day; and you’ll like to see your room, and would you like a cup
+of tea or anything after your long drive? Dinner isn’t ordered till
+eight, and it’s only half-past six. Tea is set out in the morning-room,
+but it will be quite easy to bring it up to you. I have tried to think
+of everything, but, of course, anything your ladyship wishes
+altered....’ Sainty heard her voice growing fainter down the corridor as
+Cissy and the maid followed her to the staircase. He watched the little
+procession out of sight and then turned wearily into the first room he
+came to and dropped with a long sigh upon the gaudy chintz flowers of a
+comfortable easy-chair. For him, too, the day had been ‘trying’ in more
+ways than one.</p>
+
+<p>His man brought him a cup of tea and said that ‘her ladyship’ was having
+hers in her room and was going to rest till dinner-time. He had not yet
+been four hours wedded, and he noted with shocked surprise the distinct
+relief with which he hailed the prospect of being free for a little from
+the strain of his wife’s presence. Four hours! The morning seemed a
+hundred years ago! For the rest of his natural life had he got always to
+face this mute resentment? And for what? He had not forced her to marry
+him; indeed he had adjured her not to. It was unheard of that she should
+treat him as a criminal; he examined his conscience and found that so
+far from having anything with which to reproach himself, he had behaved
+to her throughout with the most scrupulous consideration. Could Lady
+Eccleston be right, and might Cissy’s behaviour be nothing but the
+natural nervousness of a modest young woman? Were girls always so
+terrified in presence of the bridal mysteries? If that were all, she
+might count on his perfect sympathy. No girl could be more of a stranger
+to all that side of life than he, or approach it with more invincible
+shyness. In all their talks it had seemed to him that the balance of
+true modesty had been rather on his side than hers; he had often been
+shocked by things she had said, but he could recollect no occasion on
+which any remark of his had appeared to embarrass her in the least.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_233">{233}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tired nature must have come to rescue him from his many perplexities,
+for he was recalled to consciousness from a doze by the clock striking a
+half-hour, and finding it was half-past seven, he decided to go upstairs
+and get ready for dinner. He had no difficulty in finding his room.
+Through almost the first door on the upper landing he saw his new
+brushes adorning the dressing-table, his clothes laid out upon the bed.
+As he turned in, he noticed the sharp click of a key in another door
+from that by which he had entered, and which evidently communicated with
+the next room, for behind it he could hear sounds of people moving
+about, the opening and shutting of drawers and cupboards, and
+occasionally Cissy’s voice speaking to her maid. That he heard all these
+sounds but indistinctly was presently explained to him. Having changed
+his clothes he tapped discreetly, and receiving no answer proceeded to
+turn the handle; to his pleasure it yielded; he had been mistaken then;
+she had not the distrust of him he had fancied. But his gratification
+was shortlived; there were double doors between the rooms, and the inner
+one was quite securely fastened.</p>
+
+<p>‘Who’s there?’ cried Cissy sharply.</p>
+
+<p>‘I hope you’re rested,’ Sainty called in a voice which he tried to make
+pleasantly indifferent; ‘I’m going down, shall I tell them to get
+dinner, or are you not ready?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’ll be down in a minute. Don’t wait for me,’ she called back, but made
+no offer to undo the door.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner was not a cheerful meal, when presently Cissy appeared in a smart
+new tea-gown, and took her place opposite to him. She crumpled her bread
+and drank a great deal of water, and played with the wine-glasses and
+her rings and the lace upon her dress. The meal passed almost in
+silence, the two men gliding softly about and handing the dishes. Cissy
+ate nothing, and Sainty felt obliged to break and taste a long
+succession of undesired meats.</p>
+
+<p>‘They have given us much too much,’ he said. ‘We must tell that good
+lady to-morrow that we don’t want all these things.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_234">{234}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Cissy assented indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>‘You’re not eating anything,’ Sainty said, after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m not hungry. I had tea so late.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty found himself talking to the servants, and asking for things he
+did not want, to break the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>If Cissy ate nothing while the servants were present, she made up for it
+when they had left the room, by piling a whole dish of strawberries on
+her plate, covering them with cream, and eating them voraciously. Sainty
+watched her uneasily, with a sudden dread that she might be going mad.</p>
+
+<p>Things were not much more lively after dinner. The smiling housekeeper
+had explained that she had not had the drawing-room lit up as she
+thought they would be more ‘cosy’ in the ‘boodwar.’ Cissy sank deep in a
+big armchair, and appeared to be immersed in a novel she had brought
+with her. Sainty tried to read too, but his attention wandered; his eyes
+fell first on his companion, the swirl of diaphanous drapery that
+escaped from the arms of her chair and flowed out upon the floor like
+water between the piers of a bridge, the little foot in its bead-wrought
+slipper, the hands flashing with new rings that held the gaudy
+book-cover like a shield between her face and him. From her they roved
+to her surroundings. The room in which they sat had been decorated about
+the year 1860 by Italian artists. Trellised grape vines were painted on
+the walls, mixed with roses and large blue flowers of the convolvulus
+family. Birds of gay plumage and highly imaginative butterflies were
+sprinkled about them, and here and there a plump cupid in a pink
+loincloth stood poised on one foot among the foliage, swinging a basket
+of flowers. Cupids, indeed, were everywhere; several of them floated
+round a hook in the sky-coloured ceiling, and made believe that it was
+not it, but they, who supported the glass chandelier. They crawled in
+white marble all over the bulging sides of the low flamboyant
+mantelpiece. On the French clock above it, a gilt Eros perpetually
+clasped his Psyche, while from the console between the elaborately<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_235">{235}</a></span>
+draped windows, a biscuit representation of the same divinity held his
+finger discreetly to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>The note of old-fashioned gaiety which is somehow lacking in our more
+correct modern apartments seemed specially to fit the place to be the
+frame of love. Its amoretti and impossible flowers, its white marble and
+gilding and pale silks, suggested accustomed complicity. In presence of
+what human kisses had those little ormolu lovers continued their
+indifferent embraces? What scenes of passion had been multiplied in
+endless reproduction by those tall opposing mirrors? Perhaps in that
+very room, Sainty thought, his grandmother might have been tempted
+towards the breaking of those same vows he had that day taken on
+himself. He came on her portrait presently in a book of beauty, bound
+with much tooling in faded crimson calf, which he was idly turning over
+on the red velvet centre-table. He took it over and showed it to Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘Look at grandmamma,’ he said; ‘wasn’t she beautiful?’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy took the picture and stared at it with no answering smile. It
+seemed to have a curious fascination for her. ‘How like!’ she murmured.
+‘How very like!’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! come,’ said Sainty, glad to get her to talk about anything. ‘I
+can’t say I think her grace looks much like that nowadays.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I didn’t mean that it was like the duchess,’ said Cissy with a
+hysterical gulp. ‘But don’t you see the extraordinary likeness to Cl&mdash;&mdash;
+to your cousin Mr. Morland?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty could not have explained why the sudden mention of Claude was
+displeasing to him.</p>
+
+<p>‘He is thought like our grandmother,’ he said shortly, ‘but he is not
+nearly so good-looking; the duchess was a great beauty in her youth.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy did not discuss the question, but she kept the book absently in
+her lap, and when Sainty had returned to his reading, he could see her
+turning the pages.</p>
+
+<p>As the long hours wore away, Belchamber became intolerably weary, and he
+suspected Cissy of being not less so; but<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_236">{236}</a></span> when taxed with fatigue, she
+eagerly repudiated the idea, and professed a tremendous interest in her
+book. ‘I <i>must</i> see how it is going to come out,’ she said; ‘it’s
+awfully exciting.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty ached all over, but he could not insist. He returned to his own
+reading, which he found less stimulating than Cissy seemed to find hers.
+After a while he noticed that she had moved into a harder and more
+upright chair. She was struggling against sleep; in half an hour she had
+not turned a page of the work she found so enthralling. Finally, towards
+midnight, he saw the book waving to and fro, the fair head bowed almost
+down on it. He went softly over to her, and touched her. With a cry she
+started to her feet; the book fell on the floor with a bang.</p>
+
+<p>‘You must go to bed, Cissy,’ Sainty said kindly; ‘you’re dropping with
+sleep.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m not tired; I’m not sleepy,’ she cried. ‘I must finish this&mdash;it’s so
+interesting.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nonsense. I’ve been watching you; you haven’t read a page in half an
+hour; you can’t keep your eyes open.’</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were open enough now, wide and strange, like those of a hunted
+animal. She made a gesture with her hands as though to thrust him back.
+‘I can’t&mdash;I won’t,’ she panted. ‘You shan’t make me. Keep away. Don’t
+touch me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My poor child,’ Sainty said, ‘what are you afraid of? Do you think I
+would do anything you don’t like? You can’t sit up all night. You are
+dead tired, and must have rest. I won’t come near you, if you don’t wish
+it.’</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him but half reassured. ‘Do you mean it?’ she said
+doubtfully. ‘Can I trust you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I am not accustomed to lie,’ Sainty answered. ‘Do you think I would
+take advantage of you by a shabby trick?’</p>
+
+<p>She sighed, and half turned away, then suddenly faced him again. ‘It is
+not enough,’ she cried. ‘It is not only to-night. You may as well know
+it first as last. You are odious to me&mdash;horrible. <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_237">{237}</a></span>I can
+never&mdash;never&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Hush, hush!’ Sainty interrupted her. ‘Take care what you say. You are
+tired, excited, overwrought. So am I. Go to bed now, in God’s name. You
+know you have nothing to fear. We will talk of this some other time,
+calmly if we can, but not to-night, not to-night.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes, now, to-night,’ she insisted. ‘Why put it off? It’s got to be
+faced, and why not at once? I tell you you are repulsive to me. I can
+never be your wife in anything but name. I thought I could, but when it
+comes to the point, I can’t do it. It’s stronger than me. It’s no use.’
+She spread her hands with the gesture of one who renounces a struggle.
+On her finger blazed the ring he had given her, and below it shone the
+plain gold hoop which he had placed there that morning, the outward and
+visible sign of the obligation she was repudiating.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty staggered as though she had struck him in the face. ‘I don’t
+understand,’ he whispered. ‘If you feel like this towards me, if I am
+repulsive, loathsome to you, why did you marry me?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, it’s simple enough,’ she answered, with a little cruel laugh. ‘You
+had so many things that I have always wanted, money, position, rank,
+everything I have been brought up to think desirable. Since I can
+remember, not a girl has been married among our friends that the first
+question has not been, was she making a “good” marriage? which meant,
+was she getting a big enough share of all these things in exchange for
+herself? No one could say I wasn’t. I’ve made the match of the season.
+There isn’t a girl I know, or a mother, who isn’t green with envy of me.
+You can’t say it wasn’t a temptation.’ And she laughed again
+hysterically.</p>
+
+<p>‘But feeling as you did about me, as you must before the end have known
+you felt, why in heaven’s name didn’t you turn back, when I gave you the
+chance, before it was too late?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you think I was allowed a minute to think? Wasn’t my mother there
+every minute of the day? At the very time you speak of, wasn’t she
+listening at the door, and didn’t she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_238">{238}</a></span> come hurrying in before I’d time
+to answer? If for a moment I ever forgot the title, and the money, and
+the jewels, the big house, all the things I’d set my heart on, she was
+always ready to talk about them, to dangle them before me. If I ever
+wavered, she would tell me what a slur it was on a girl whose engagement
+was broken off, how no one would ever believe I had given up all these
+things of my own free will, how people would say there was something
+against me, and how I should never marry. There wasn’t an oldish poor
+girl we knew, losing her looks, and still tagging about to balls, and
+trying to pretend she was cheerful, that she didn’t remind me of. Never
+directly, mind you. They were just casually mentioned. O Lord! if I so
+much as suggested to her that she wanted me to marry for money, she was
+all virtuous indignation.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How ghastly!’ Sainty whispered in horror. ‘I’ve read of such things, of
+mothers selling their daughters, bullying them into marrying men they
+couldn’t love for the sake of an establishment; but I’ve always thought
+it was exaggerated, not true to life. I didn’t think a mother <i>could</i>
+condemn her own child to lifelong misery.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, you mustn’t be too hard on mamma,’ Cissy said. ‘She thought she was
+doing the best thing for me. Remember she has the very highest opinion
+of you, and was quite sure you would make an excellent husband; and she
+knew how much I wanted all the other things. If marriage were nothing
+but that, nothing but living in the house with a person who was
+good-natured and never interfered with one, and provided all the good
+things of life for one, it would be well enough. That is what every one
+in England always talks to girls as if it were. Mamma would have thought
+it most indelicate to suggest there was another side. You are made to
+forget that as much as possible. Oh, of course I <i>knew</i>, because I’m not
+a fool, and girls are not such ninnies as people think them; but I tried
+to forget, and when I didn’t see you, I <i>did</i> forget. That was why, when
+I did see you, I was always so beastly to you; for I’m quite ready to
+admit I <i>was</i> beastly to you.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_239">{239}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As Cissy’s terror abated, her engaging frankness began to return to her.
+Sainty couldn’t help liking her for it. He began to be so full of
+sympathy with her point of view, so sorry for all she must have
+suffered, that he almost forgot the cruel wrong she had done him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mamma knew I should never be happy with a poor man,’ she went on. ‘She
+knew how I cared for all the things you could give me. She was quite
+right, I <i>did</i> want them; I wanted them awfully; I want them still as
+much as ever: only when it comes to the point I can’t give the price. I
+thought I could, but I can’t. Mamma was so far honester than me. She
+never supposed that once the bargain was made I should hesitate to pay.
+It’s so like me to want things dreadfully, and not to have the courage
+to do what’s necessary to get them.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was appalled by her cynicism, even while he admired her
+straightforwardness. What became of his dreams of romance, of the eye
+that had seen beneath his unattractive exterior, and loved him for the
+beauties of his soul? The blue eyes had seen nothing but the sparkling
+of diamonds. In her vision of married life he had been only the
+necessary evil, the odious, inevitable condition to which she must
+submit, if she would have his name and money, as the princess in the
+story had to kiss the swineherd to get possession of the toys she
+coveted. Still the princess <i>had</i> kissed the herd, and even after all
+that she had said he thought he would make one last appeal to her. If
+she realised how much he felt for her, how entirely he understood her
+unwillingness, how patient, how gentle he was ready to be, perhaps she
+might be touched, might learn to think of him with something less of
+horror. To him who had all his life wished for nothing but to make other
+people happy, it was intolerable to think of himself as the brutal
+gaoler, the tyrant before whom this young thing paled with terror.</p>
+
+<p>In the eagerness of her explanation, Cissy had come nearer to him. They
+were standing quite close together, face to face. ‘Cissy,’ he said
+gently, ‘is it quite, quite impossible?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_240">{240}</a></span> Do you think that if we lived
+together for a long time, you might in the end get used to me, even come
+to care for me a little?’ But at that she sprang back from him again
+with an unmistakable gesture of repugnance that said more than words.
+‘No, no, no&mdash;never,’ she cried hurriedly. ‘I’ve told you it’s no good. I
+can’t help it, my mind’s made up. I’d rather give up everything, face
+anything, for of course I can’t expect you to keep me. You can send me
+back to my mother. Life’ll be hell upon earth, but it’ll be better than
+<i>that</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>With all his desire to be fair to her, Sainty could not but be struck by
+her intense egotism, her inability to appreciate any point of view but
+her own. She was evidently unaware of the brutality of her attitude
+towards him. To his morbid self-depreciation her undisguised horror of
+him appeared only too natural. Still, no one likes to be told these
+things quite so bluntly.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have nothing to fear,’ he said a little loftily. ‘After what you
+have said, you may be sure I shall never ask the smallest thing of you.
+It is a little unfortunate that you didn’t make up your mind rather
+earlier, as you have made it up so irrevocably now. Had you but been as
+sure of your feelings a month, a week, even twenty-four hours ago, you
+might have saved us both from what I hardly dare look forward to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I can go home; I had better go home,’ Cissy whimpered. Of course the
+sight of distress melted Sainty at once.</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘that to go home now would make just five
+hundred times the talk and scandal that you felt you couldn’t face if
+you had broken off your engagement?’</p>
+
+<p>‘It can’t be helped,’ Cissy sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have brought us both into a horrible situation,’ Sainty answered,
+‘and I frankly don’t see just now what is best to be done; but I’m sure
+that further talk will do no good just now. It is long past twelve
+o’clock, and we are both tired out; you can’t go back to Chester Square
+to-night,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_241">{241}</a></span> if you want to ever so much. If I were you I shouldn’t get up
+to breakfast. Good-night.’</p>
+
+<p>Some compunction seemed to seize Cissy as she got to the door. She
+turned. ‘I’m awfully sorry, you know,’ she said. ‘I suppose, when you
+come to think of it, I haven’t treated you any too well; and&mdash;and&mdash;of
+course what I said wasn’t very civil, but I thought it best to be
+honest&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘All right, all right,’ Sainty answered hastily; ‘please don’t say any
+more about it.’</p>
+
+<p>As he lay sleepless and uncomfortable on his lonely bed, he wished that
+the necessity for honest dealing had impressed itself on his wife a
+little sooner. He thought of the night three years before, when he had
+lain awake (as he lay now) listening to the sounds that celebrated his
+coming of age. Somehow the great festal days of his life did not seem to
+bring him personally much enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_242">{242}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> Belchambers took possession of their new town-house just in time for
+the opening of Parliament in the ensuing year. It was only partially
+furnished as yet, and most uncomfortable; but, as Lady Eccleston
+remarked with great originality, ‘the only way to get the workmen out of
+a house was to move in yourself.’ The first-floor rooms still echoed
+with shouts and hammerings, but the upper part of the house was more or
+less ready, and so were the dining-room and some back rooms on the
+ground-floor, which Cissy had reluctantly decided should eventually be
+given up to Sainty. It was astonishing how swiftly she had</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Shaped her heart with woman’s meekness<br></span>
+<span class="i1">To all duties of her rank,’<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">except the vulgar and obvious one which she would have shared with the
+humblest of wives. Having once made it quite clear that she was to
+receive everything and give nothing, she soon ceased to talk of
+returning to her mother, and Sainty was amazed at the ease with which
+she adapted herself to the awkwardness of the situation. In her place,
+he felt sure, he would not have rung a bell, or asked for a postage
+stamp, but it never seemed to occur to Cissy that there was anything
+curious in the arrangement; she annexed all her husband’s possessions
+without scruple or hesitation as soon as she discovered that no
+embarrassing condition attached to doing so.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her son’s entreaties that she would stay with them, Lady
+Charmington had retired to the dower-house immediately after the
+marriage, and they had barely returned<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_243">{243}</a></span> from their brief and dismal
+honeymoon in the duke’s villa before Cissy began to dispose of
+everything at Belchamber as if it had all been hers from earliest
+childhood. There had been some talk of a wedding-journey on the
+Continent, but Cissy had no desire to prolong the <i>tête-à-tête</i> with
+Sainty, which she did not enjoy. It was England, which she knew and
+understood, that was to be the scene of her triumphs; and the sight of
+strange lands had no charms for her compared to the fun of swooping down
+as mistress on the great house, where she had been an unconsidered
+little guest, settling which should be her own rooms, having them
+redecorated according to the taste of the latest fashionable
+upholsterer, and moving into them whatever took her fancy in other parts
+of the house.</p>
+
+<p>She was so happily busy that she almost forgot to regret the Season, and
+gave up Ascot without a sigh, contenting herself with Cowes and
+Goodwood, which she did with great <i>éclat</i> from a friend’s yacht, while
+Sainty enjoyed a fortnight of peace and seclusion.</p>
+
+<p>Congenial as she found the task of establishing herself in her husband’s
+ancestral home, it was nothing to the delirious enjoyment of selecting,
+decorating, and furnishing a big London house, regardless of expense;
+and all the time she could spare from entertaining shooting parties in
+the autumn was devoted to the feverish prosecution of this new delight.</p>
+
+<p>Of course every one agreed that they must have a town-house. The duke
+and Lord Firth were not less convinced of its necessity than the large
+circle of acquaintances who hoped to be entertained in it. Even Lady
+Charmington, while she winced at the recklessness of the expenditure,
+was partly consoled by the sight of her son taking what she considered
+‘his proper position in the world.’ She consoled herself with the
+thought that it was her long years of careful management that made all
+this profusion possible. Sainty must attend the debates in the House of
+Lords, and though she was rather scandalised by his Radicalism, she
+reflected that the limited number of peers on that side, since the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_244">{244}</a></span> Home
+Rule split, made some small office not improbable for him, when the
+Liberals came in again.</p>
+
+<p>And Sainty, though he cared for none of these things, had no heart to
+refuse them to the girl whom he had married. The fact was that the more
+he thought about the matter the sorrier he felt for his wife. For his
+part, he told himself, he was not made for love, had never expected it
+to play any part in his life, and was no worse off than he was before.
+The disadvantage of taking a consistently humble view of one’s own
+attractions is not without its compensations; thus the wound to his
+self-love, of which a vain man would almost have bled to death, was to
+Sainty, who had no vanity and very little self-love, only in the nature
+of those scratches which smart and feel sore, but rob us of no drop of
+heart’s blood. Life was not perceptibly more unpleasant to him than it
+had been before, and he had still the same substitutes for a more active
+happiness with which he had been accustomed to fill it, his studies, his
+schemes of beneficence, the management of his property. But this poor
+child, so well fitted by nature to love and be loved, whose one chance
+of rising above the empty frivolity of her surroundings might have lain
+in the ennobling influence of a great passion, for something how much
+less satisfying than a mess of pottage had she bartered her birthright,
+a handful of tin counters, a paper crown! In spite of what he considered
+her generosity in taking the blame on herself, he was more and more
+inclined to regard her as the victim of her mother’s worldliness,
+enmeshed like himself in the toils of that careful schemer. It was not
+in nature that a creature so young and fresh should be so greatly
+influenced by considerations of wealth or rank; he could not think it.
+These things had been dangled before her eyes till she had been dazzled
+by their false lustre. She was too innocent, he reflected, to realise to
+what extent she had sacrificed all chances of woman’s best happiness to
+gain them. The question was how to shield her from the consequences of
+her own act, to save her from the bitter repentance only too likely to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_245">{245}</a></span>
+follow. To do so might not be permanently in his power; but meanwhile,
+if she so keenly desired the undesirable as to be ready to risk the ruin
+of her life for it, what was simpler than to give it to her? Jewels,
+clothes, a house in town, the means to feed the thankless rich, the
+power to walk out of the room before older women&mdash;if these things could
+make her happy, as far as they were his to give, let her take them in
+full measure. They were freely hers. He had no particular use for them
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the spectacle of the ease and gusto with which she flung herself
+into her new <i>rôle</i> of the great lady was not without a certain satiric
+amusement for him.</p>
+
+<p>One day he would find her on the pavement before the house, attended by
+Algy Montgomery and a grave professional gentleman who looked the ideal
+of a racing duke, while a pair of high-stepping bays were driven up and
+down for her inspection. ‘Haven’t we more horses than we know what to do
+with?’ Sainty would ask.</p>
+
+<p>‘My dear boy!’ Cissy cried, ‘a parcel of old screws. Jane Rugby was
+saying only the other day that we hadn’t a decent pair o’ horses in the
+stable.’</p>
+
+<p>On another, she would be busy comparing designs for carriages. ‘Those
+old bathing-machines at Belchamber,’ she remarked loftily, ‘are all very
+well for the country; but in my position it would be too grotesque for
+me to be seen driving about London in them. The duchess has been awfully
+kind about advising me. It was her idea to send for the old chariot and
+see if it can’t be done up for drawing-rooms. She says unless it has got
+dry-rot or anything, that a couple of hundreds spent on it ought to make
+it as good as new; and of course I don’t want to waste money on a
+tiresome thing one would never use on other occasions, if by spending a
+little on the old one it can be made to do. But I <i>must</i> have a decent
+brougham and open carriage at once; you must see yourself there are no
+two ways about it. And, come to think of it, you ought to have a
+brougham of your own. We are sure to clash and want it at the same time,
+if we try and do with one.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_246">{246}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Perhaps one of the bathing-machines from Belchamber might do for <i>me</i>,’
+suggested Sainty, not without malice.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Cissy quite gravely, ‘I don’t know that it mightn’t.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Who told you of these people?’ Sainty asked, examining the neatly
+painted little pictures.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, they make all the duke’s carriages, and <i>they</i> are always smartly
+turned out. Your cousin Claude told them to send me these sketches, and
+he has promised to go with me to Longacre to see what they have in the
+shop.’</p>
+
+<p>Since she married, Cissy had ceased to mention Claude as ‘Mr. Morland,’
+and the prefix ‘your cousin’ was bridging the narrow chasm between that
+and calling him ‘Claude.’ Morland was able to be uncommonly useful to
+the pretty new cousin; not only at the coachbuilder’s were his taste and
+knowledge invaluable, but at the upholsterer’s, the <i>bric-à-brac</i> shops,
+the sales at Christy’s, and he had even been called on to give his views
+(and very sound views too) in the more intimate province of the modiste
+and the dressmaker. Sainty was obviously of no assistance. What could be
+more natural, if the lady needed counsel in such matters, than to turn
+to a near kinsman of her husband, and one so well qualified to help? It
+is true that Lady Eccleston was more than ready to assist her daughter
+in mounting her establishment on a suitable scale, and would very
+willingly have accompanied her to the shops, not, perhaps, without a
+hope of gleaning a few scattered ears on her own account from the
+harvest Cecilia was reaping with so large a hook; but that unnatural
+young person seemed to prefer almost any advice or companionship to her
+mamma’s. Ill as he thought of her, for the manœuvres with which she had
+compassed his union with her daughter, Sainty could not help a secret
+sympathy with the poor lady, who bore her pitiless relegation to a back
+place with a smiling stoicism worthy of a Red Indian. The old fiction of
+the perfect confidence and sisterlike relation between herself and her
+daughter was still gallantly maintained even to him, and when he
+reflected<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_247">{247}</a></span> what potentialities of tearful complainings she had
+heroically foregone, he came near to feeling actual gratitude. But he
+need have been under no apprehension of plaintive confidences; anything
+natural or direct had long ceased to be possible to Lady Eccleston.</p>
+
+<p>‘I cannot have mamma dropping in to lunch whenever it suits her,’ Cissy
+remarked ruthlessly. ‘I have told her she must not come more than once a
+week, unless she’s asked.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But I thought you said you meant to let people know you were always at
+home for lunch?’</p>
+
+<p>‘So I do; it is a very convenient way of seeing my friends. That’s just
+why I’ve had to speak to mamma. I should have her here every day if I
+didn’t. And it would bore a lot of younger women, who don’t know her
+particularly well, like Vere Deans or Ella Dalsany, to find her here
+perpetually&mdash;not to speak of the men.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not retort that Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany were not so very
+much younger that Lady Eccleston. It was no affair of his; and it soon
+became evident that Cissy’s mother was not the only relation whom it
+bored her friends to meet at her luncheon-table. Sainty had been brought
+up in a certain old-fashioned code of manners. His mother, seeing that
+he was shy and awkward in company, and being not less so herself, had
+insisted rather unduly on the ceremonial side of social life. He had
+been taught that hospitality demanded that he should receive and take
+leave of guests with some form, accompanying them to their carriages,
+and putting on their cloaks, which the groom of the chambers, who was
+much taller and unencumbered with a stick, would have done much better.
+But he was not long in discovering that these attentions were by no
+means demanded by the ladies of the set into which the duchess and
+Claude had made haste to introduce his wife.</p>
+
+<p>If Cissy’s friends found Sainty tiresome, it must be admitted that he
+found them no less so. The repulsion was certainly mutual. He wondered
+sometimes what had become of all the people she had known and liked, and
+from whom<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_248">{248}</a></span> she had received kindness, during the three or four seasons
+that had preceded her marriage; they seemed to have vanished like smoke.
+She was absorbed in a little knot of married women, for the most part
+considerably her seniors, much in the world’s eye, and none of them
+exactly qualified for the <i>rôle</i> of Cæsar’s wife. Their conversation was
+extremely esoteric, and the minute fragments of it which were
+intelligible to him shocked him profoundly. Occasional paragraphs in the
+papers assured him that ‘young Lady Belchamber,’ or ‘pretty little Lady
+Belchamber, who was among the most attractive of last season’s brides,’
+was ‘very smart’ or ‘quite in the innermost set’; from which he was fain
+to derive such comfort as he might. He once ventured to ask Cissy why
+she never saw anything of the de Lissacs; he had hoped something for her
+from Alice’s influence. ‘I thought you and the girls were very
+intimate,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! girls bore me,’ she answered; ‘and besides, they are not the least
+in it; they wouldn’t have anything in common with the people they’d meet
+here. Of course with their money they <i>might</i> have done anything, but
+poor dear Mrs. de Lissac has no <i>flair</i>, don’t you know; she simply
+doesn’t take any trouble. I’ll ask them, if you like, some day when I’m
+having a duty dinner.’ And she did.</p>
+
+<p>‘Why do we never see anything of you?’ Sainty asked of his old friend on
+that occasion. ‘I had hoped that when we came to town we should be much
+together.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well&mdash;here we are!’ said Alice, with rather frosty playfulness. ‘And
+you know,’ she added more gently, ‘how welcome you always are in
+Grosvenor Square.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy is always at home at lunch, you know,’ Sainty persisted. ‘Why
+don’t you come in sometimes?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Belchamber has never told either the girls or me that she was at
+home at lunch,’ said Alice, freezing again, and went on hurriedly to
+praise the beauty of the house and the taste of its mistress. Sainty
+looked round him. ‘Cissy has a genius for spending money,’ he said
+gloomily. ‘Wait till you see the drawing-rooms; these rooms are nothing
+to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_249">{249}</a></span> plunges she is making upstairs.’ Before Mrs. de Lissac could
+answer, they were swooped upon by Lady Eccleston bringing Lady Deans
+with her.</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear Alice,’ she cried, ‘Lady Deans fears you don’t remember her; you
+met at Belchamber. She is going to have a stall at the World’s Bazaar,
+and this is such an opportunity to have a little quiet talk about it. I
+have been telling Lady Deans that you are one of our <i>very</i> kindest
+helpers, and that you have given the most superb things; a few <i>really</i>
+good things that can be raffled for are such a help, and one can always
+raffle the same things two or three times over&mdash;no one ever knows.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why shouldn’t we have a lottery?’ asked Lady Deans. ‘I mean a <i>real</i>
+lottery, not for sofa-cushions and things, but for money prizes like
+they have abroad. I’m sure it’ld catch on.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But I thought lotteries were illegal,’ Sainty objected.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! not at bazaars, or for a charity,’ cried Lady Eccleston. ‘I know
+dear Father Stephen of St. Rhadegund’s, Houndsditch, told me they had a
+most successful one for their parish room and made heaps of money. I
+think Lady Deans’s is a lovely idea.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well&mdash;it’s gambling, you know,’ said Sainty. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t
+allow a roulette table&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why don’t you have a Derby sweep while you’re about it?’ suggested Algy
+Montgomery. ‘You could sell the tickets at the bazaar, and as the Derby
+won’t be for a good couple o’ months later you could forget to draw it
+at all. People would only suppose some other fellow had won, don’t yer
+know.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston was enchanted with the notion. ‘Dear Lord Algy! <i>Could</i>
+you work it for us?’ But Mrs. de Lissac, inured as she was to bazaar
+morality, was, as a clergyman’s daughter, a little alarmed at any
+connection with the turf. ‘How are you getting on with the people for
+the Café Chantant?’ she asked, to change the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston rattled off a list that seemed to contain<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_250">{250}</a></span> every one of
+any celebrity in the theatrical or musical world.</p>
+
+<p>‘And have you got them all?’ asked Lady Deans.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I’ve written to a good many of them, and one or two have
+answered,’ said Lady Eccleston; ‘but I shall pop them all down&mdash;their
+names will look splendid on the programme.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But will they come?’ asked Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh <i>dear</i> no, they won’t come; very few of them will <i>come</i>. But some
+will; I shall make sure of one or two, and we can get some really good
+amateurs; and every now and then some one can get up and say that Ellen
+Terry regrets she couldn’t manage it at the last moment, or something.
+We shall let people in for ten minutes at a time in batches; they’ll
+think they just missed some of the best people&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Seems to me you <i>will</i> “let ’em in,”<span class="lftspc">’</span> chuckled Lord Algy.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you think,’ asked Lady Deans, ‘there would be any chance of getting
+Lady Arthur to sing or dance, or anything? I suppose, Lord Belchamber,
+<i>you</i> couldn’t ask her for us?’</p>
+
+<p>‘But she never <i>could</i> sing or dance, or do anything,’ interposed Lord
+Algernon.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! that wouldn’t matter, as long as she would appear. You see, all the
+story of her marriage and everything made her a celebrity.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But it was all two years ago,’ Lady Eccleston interrupted. ‘People have
+forgotten all about it,’ and she deftly piloted the discussion to other
+projects, so that Sainty was spared the necessity of making any answer
+to this astounding proposition.</p>
+
+<p>The bazaar in connection with which so many happy suggestions had been
+offered was one of Society’s periodic sacrifices to philanthropy.
+Certain fair ones, to whom no form of self-advertisement came amiss,
+were ready to dress up in the cause of charity and display themselves to
+a wider public than that which usually had the opportunity of admiring
+them, on the understanding that none of the trouble of organisation
+should fall upon them, and that the date should<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_251">{251}</a></span> be fixed for before
+Easter, when there wasn’t much else going on. On these conditions, Lady
+Eccleston and a little band of zealous fellow-workers had secured a most
+imposing list of stall-holders. It was calculated that the suburbs and
+the Stock Exchange would come in their thousands to see and converse
+with the ladies whose names and doings Lady Eva Morland made weekly
+familiar to them in the pages of ‘Maidie’s Tea Table’ in the
+<i>Looking-glass</i>. The proceeds were to be handed to a charity in which a
+very great personage was interested, and the bazaar was to be opened on
+at least two of its three days by different members of the royal family.
+Lady Eccleston was in her element, and running the whole concern. If it
+was not she who had the brilliant inspiration of making the various
+stalls represent the countries of the earth and dressing the fair
+vendors in national costume, at least she took the credit for it. In
+spite of his mother-in-law’s repeated injunctions to him to attend the
+opening, Sainty had not the slightest intention of doing so. Indeed, he
+had hoped, by liberal contributions, to get off altogether, but Alice de
+Lissac had reinforced Lady Eccleston with gentle persistence.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think you should put in an appearance,’ she said, ‘just to support
+your wife, you know; it will look queer if you don’t, when she and her
+mother are so much interested. <i>I</i> should have thought you would come to
+the opening’; and finally Sainty was fain to buy immunity from being
+present at this ceremony with a promise to visit his wife’s stall in the
+course of one afternoon. It was not till somewhat late on the last day
+of the three that he brought himself to redeem his given word.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he arrived, the whole show, though brilliantly lighted and
+to his perception still disagreeably crowded, had become a little the
+worse for wear. The stalls were denuded of half their contents, the air
+had a vitiated second-hand taste, and a fine impalpable dust, raised by
+the passing of so many feet, hung like a light haze over everything.
+Tired dishevelled girls, looking curiously sham in their fancy dresses<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_252">{252}</a></span>
+by the side of people in everyday garb, and flushed under the rouge that
+had been thought a necessary part of their costume, moved among the
+crowd making a last effort to dispose of the remainder of their wares,
+excited by competition to perilous lengths of flirtation with unknown
+and rather common young men, with whom on no other occasion they would
+have thought of exchanging a word.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was patiently elbowing his way like Parsifal among the
+flower-maidens, and meditating on the mystery of what was and was not
+permitted to the London girl, when he was suddenly confronted by Mr.
+Austin Pryor. Every buttonhole of the young stockbroker’s neat
+frock-coat was decorated with faded vegetation and his arms loaded with
+a number of quite useless purchases.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, Belchamber,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with your wife;
+too bad of her, I call it. I’d an awful good time here yesterday with
+her, and she made me promise to come again to-day and bring a lot of our
+fellows from the city. I told ’em all how ripping she looked in her
+Polish get-up, and now they’ve all come and she isn’t here; she’s gone
+and given us all the slip. Most unprincipled of her, I call it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, while expressing suitable distress at the faithless behaviour of
+his spouse, was secretly not sorry to be spared her encounter with the
+gallant Lotharios of Throgmorton Street, when he thought of the
+fragments of conversation he had already overheard in passing.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know what has happened to her, I’m sure,’ he said politely; ‘I
+expected to find her here myself.’</p>
+
+<p>When at last he arrived at the lath and canvas pavillion, much bedraped
+with liberty muslin and flags, across the front of which a scroll
+displayed the legend, ‘Poland&mdash;Marchioness of Belchamber,’ he found only
+the de Lissac girls and another maiden, clad in little hussar caps and
+dolmans hung coquettishly on one shoulder, resentfully eyeing the ebbing
+tide of custom, while Alice and Lady Eccleston, aided by her obedient
+son Thomas, were feverishly tying parcels in the background.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_253">{253}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Have you written on that one, Tommy,’ Lady Eccleston was saying, ‘Mrs.
+Brown, Elm Lodge, Streatham? Oh dear, <i>which</i> parcel is the big yellow
+cushion? I am sure that was the one she bought. Well, never mind, this
+is a cushion anyway, it feels soft; that’ll do. Ah, Sainty, you’ve come
+a little late, dear. Everything is over.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What’s become of Cissy?’ Sainty inquired.</p>
+
+<p>The young ladies were evidently not in the best of tempers, and this
+innocent question served to open the floodgates of their wrath.</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy’s gone,’ Norah de Lissac said crossly, ‘and left us in the lurch.
+She <i>said</i> she was tired, but <i>I</i> think she was only bored. When it got
+dull and shabby and all the nice people had gone it didn’t amuse her any
+more.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It puts us in such a foolish position,’ Gemma chimed in. ‘People
+naturally come here to see her, and when they don’t find her they are
+not best pleased. One man asked me if I was Lady Belchamber, and when I
+said I wasn’t, he said, “Then which of you is?” Of course I had to say
+we none of us were, and then he was quite rude and said, “Then you’ve no
+business to put her name up over the stall.” It wasn’t at all pleasant.’</p>
+
+<p>Norah took up her parable again. ‘She didn’t even take the trouble to
+put on her costume to-day, just came in her ordinary clothes, and of
+course we looked like dressed-up fools beside her. If she had just sent
+us word she wasn’t going to we wouldn’t have put ours on either.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, dears, it would have been a great pity,’ said Lady Eccleston,
+emerging from a pile of brown paper with her mouth full of pins. ‘You
+look charming in your dresses; they really suit you better than Cissy;
+and it would have been so flat if none of you had been in costume, for
+there really <i>is</i>n’t much in the stall itself to suggest Poland, I must
+admit I think Cissy really <i>was</i> tired, you know; she has had a hard two
+days of it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, we were tired too,’ said the implacable Norah. ‘She’s not the
+only person who has had a hard two days.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_254">{254}</a></span> Can’t we go home now, at
+least, and get off these ridiculous clothes?’ she asked, turning to her
+step-mother. Alice looked distressed and murmured something about ‘not
+deserting Lady Eccleston.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, don’t <i>think</i> of me,’ cried that lady. ‘You and the dear girls go.
+Tommy and I can soon finish what’s left to do. The people are thinning
+fast, and we’ve done very well. I <i>can’t</i> thank you enough for all your
+splendid help’; and she embraced the whole party with a last galvanic
+effort at cheerful enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty saw the de Lissac party to their gorgeous equipage, and was just
+turning away from the door when a small voice at his elbow demanded,
+‘Shall I please to call the kerridge, m’lord?’ and looking down he had a
+vision of two large appealing eyes and a white kid forefinger pressed
+tightly to a curly hatbrim. He recognised the diminutive boy who
+decorated Cissy’s coach-box when she rode abroad.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ he said; ‘if the brougham is here, I may as well take it. Lady
+Belchamber has gone home.’</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the drive he wondered why he had taken the trouble to
+come to the bazaar, and who had been benefited or pleased by his visit.</p>
+
+<p>He had hardly got to his room and sat down to his book by the fire, with
+a sigh of relief, when a servant came to him.</p>
+
+<p>‘If you please, my lord, Gibson wants to know if there are any more
+orders for the carriage.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Not for me,’ Sainty answered, his mind on what he was reading. ‘Ask her
+ladyship.’</p>
+
+<p>The man looked surprised and still lingered doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘what is it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘If you please, my lord, my lady hasn’t come in yet.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I think she must have&mdash;&mdash;’ Sainty was beginning but stopped
+himself. He saw no reason for discussing Cissy’s movements with the
+servants. ‘Then you must wait for orders till she does,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered a little why, if she left the bazaar because<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_255">{255}</a></span> she was tired,
+she had not come home. But after all, Norah’s explanation was probably
+the correct one. She was bored with the whole thing and took the
+shortest cut for freedom; it was not Cissy’s way to allow herself to be
+bored. ‘In any case it is no affair of mine,’ he thought, as he turned
+again to his book.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_256">{256}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">After</span> Easter, when Cissy had a morning-room and a boudoir, and the
+drawing-rooms were practically finished, Sainty entered into undisputed
+possession of his two back rooms, and spent more and more of his time in
+them. Only faint echoes of the turmoil in which Lady Belchamber had her
+being penetrated to that peaceful seclusion. Evening after evening Cissy
+would dine out with a few of her special cronies and their attendant
+swains, and go to the theatre or the opera till it was time to begin the
+round of balls or parties, from which she returned in grey summer dawns,
+far too tired for there to be any question of her coming down to
+breakfast next morning. Sometimes Sainty did not set eyes on her for
+days together. Gradually he slipped back into his old studious life,
+snatching sketchy little meals from trays, when he remembered to eat
+anything, and as little a part of the life of the house as if he were in
+lodgings round the corner.</p>
+
+<p>In May, Lady Charmington came to town, to attend the meetings of the
+‘Ladies’ No Popery League,’ of which she was a leading member.</p>
+
+<p>‘My mother writes me she is coming to London,’ Sainty said. ‘Of course
+she will come to us.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, she can, if you wish it,’ Cissy answered; ‘but I warn you you’re
+preparing trouble for yourself. She won’t like the way we live, and when
+she doesn’t like a thing, she is not always silent and accommodating.
+She’ll expect a family breakfast at 9.15, with prayers at 9. I don’t
+suppose she ever breakfasted in her room in her life. I don’t know where
+<i>you</i> breakfast, but <i>I</i> certainly shan’t come down.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_257">{257}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose you couldn’t, just for the time she’s here?’ Sainty
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m not such a humbug as to alter my way of life to please her. She may
+as well find out first as last that I am not cut on her pattern.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I think she has pretty well made that discovery already,’ Sainty
+retorted.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Cissy, ‘she can come if she likes, and if you want her, but
+she must take us as she finds us. I told you she wouldn’t like it. She’d
+be a great deal happier at Roehampton with Lady Firth. She could come in
+to her meetings, and if she wanted to lunch here any particular day, I
+could always tell people to keep out of the way.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You can’t say I interfere with you much, or often ask you to do
+anything to please me,’ said Sainty earnestly; ‘but when we have a great
+house here, and my own mother wants to come up, I do think it would look
+strange for us not to take her in.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, please yourself. After all, I was only thinking of you. <i>I</i> can
+generally hold my own, but if your mother gets her back up, as she
+inevitably will, <i>you</i>’ll have the devil of a time of it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had presently occasion to prove the accuracy of his wife’s
+forecast. Acting on Cissy’s hint, he dutifully appeared each morning to
+give Lady Charmington her breakfast. The first day, she lingered before
+sitting down, as though she were waiting for something.</p>
+
+<p>‘Won’t you make the tea for me, mother?’ Sainty asked. ‘It’s like old
+times, you and I having breakfast together.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You don’t have prayers, I see,’ Lady Charmington remarked, as she took
+her seat. ‘Or were they earlier? I can quite well come down sooner, if
+you wish it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you see, Cissy never comes down to breakfast, and, as you know, I
+am not a great eater, so when we are alone, I generally have a cup of
+tea and an egg in the study.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why doesn’t your wife come to breakfast? is she ill?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no, she’s well enough. But she’s out late at parties and things
+every night, and I’m glad she <i>does</i> rest a little in the mornings; it’s
+the only time she does.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_258">{258}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I confess I’m a little disappointed in Cissy,’ Lady Charmington
+remarked, after contemplating the toast-rack judicially for a time in
+silence. ‘I never thought her a very deep or earnest nature, but I did
+<i>not</i> expect to find her so entirely given up to worldly pursuits.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy’s young and pretty, and people make a great deal of her. After
+all, it’s natural at her age that she should like to enjoy herself.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington sniffed. ‘Enjoyment! People nowadays seem to think of
+nothing but enjoyment. We were not put into the world to enjoy
+ourselves.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, most of us fulfil the object of our being pretty thoroughly
+then,’ Sainty said, ‘and yet every one seems to <i>want</i> to be happy; and
+it is a good deal to expect of the few who have it in their power that
+they should voluntarily forego what most people fail to obtain.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that, my boy; you don’t seem to have
+a proper sense of your blessings. You have very much to be thankful
+for.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington saw nothing incongruous in finding fault with some
+acrimony if things were not to her liking, but she was always swift to
+rebuke a complaining spirit in others.</p>
+
+<p>‘Her poor mother, who, if a little too fond of society, has a very
+sincerely religious side to her, must be sadly distressed at her
+daughter’s light-mindedness.’</p>
+
+<p>The thought of Lady Eccleston as a pious matron wounded by her child’s
+care for earthly matters was too much for Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Why, Lady Eccleston goes wherever a candle’s lighted,’ he said; ‘or if
+she doesn’t, it’s because she’s failed to get an invitation.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Censorious, censorious!’ replied his mother. ‘Who art thou that judgest
+another man’s servant? You should watch against that spirit; it’ll grow
+on you.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was only too glad to have diverted the precious balms to his own
+head, which had been accustomed to that form of unction for too many
+years to be easily broken. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_259">{259}</a></span> saw his mother off to the first of her
+meetings before there was the smallest chance of her encountering her
+daughter-in-law, and then betook himself to his own rooms to read the
+papers. As he drew near to the fire that his languid blood demanded in
+this uncertain season, his eye fell on the letters he had not as yet
+thought of opening. As a rule his correspondence was not exciting. It
+consisted mainly of advertisements and begging letters. The first that
+he took up this morning had such a family look of these last, that he
+opened it with a weary certainty of his correspondent’s need for £3, 5s.
+6d. to prevent the bed being taken from under his sick child; but though
+it was written on cheap paper in a hand carefully made to appear
+illiterate, its contents were far other than he had expected.</p>
+
+<p>‘Ask your wife where she was on the third afternoon of the World’s
+Bazaar. A friend.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty had never in his life received an anonymous letter, and the
+experience was distinctly unpleasant. He shook it off into the fire as
+St. Paul did the other venomous thing, but failed to get the poison out
+of his system so cheaply. In case it should not work, his nameless
+‘friend’ took care to repeat the dose, and several other communications
+of a like tenor followed the first, but none of them produced in him the
+unpleasant sensations of that chilly May morning, when he stood watching
+the sparks run along the blackened paper and the gray ash writhe and
+twist for its final flight up the chimney. After a time he came to
+regard them as more or less in the natural order of things, and even
+ceased to read them; but the writer showed such skill in varying the
+address, that in no case was he able to detect one without opening it.
+Some contained but a single sentence, others were much longer, but all
+suggested doubts of his wife’s conduct, and recommended a surveillance
+of which the very notion was repugnant to him. Of course he could take
+no notice of such things. He wondered if he ought to speak to Cissy
+about them, only to dismiss the idea as impossible. Still less could he
+mention them to any one else. Eventually he decided<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_260">{260}</a></span> that there was but
+one way to treat an anonymous letter, which was to behave as if it had
+not been received. None the less they stirred in him a vague uneasiness.
+The feeling that somewhere about one an unknown enemy is watching for a
+chance to hurt, fills life with an unpleasant sense of ambush. He could
+think of no one who had cause to wish him ill. The enmity, then, must be
+to Cissy. A disappointed rival? He needed no reminder of the extreme
+unlikelihood of any one’s grudging her the possession of his affections.
+But how if the rivalry were for the possession of some one else’s
+affections? That possibility was not without its sting. For him there
+could be no question of jealousy, in the ordinary sense of the word; but
+he began to apprehend the possibilities of scandal, to understand that
+his acceptance of the anomalous part which his wife had thrust upon him
+by no means exhausted her power of injuring his happiness or his honour;
+in short, that he was saddled with an obligation to guard what he did
+not possess.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he found himself in the no less ironical position of having to
+champion her many doings, which in his heart he disliked, against his
+mother, with whom he secretly sympathised. Lady Charmington was far from
+having said all her say on that first morning at breakfast. Cissy’s
+prediction of her disapproval of their London life was amply verified.
+Occupied with the matters that had brought her to town, and going into a
+totally different world from her daughter-in-law’s, she was as ignorant
+as her son of the things that would most have stirred her wrath; but she
+found quite enough to rebuke in the house itself. Cissy’s idleness and
+dissipation, her late hours, her card-playing, her neglect of her
+household duties, and the consequent waste and profusion, her
+Sabbath-breaking, and the completeness with which she ignored her
+husband and her home (not to speak of her guest and mother-in-law) were
+each and severally the subjects of the elder lady’s severe
+animadversions to the offender herself when occasion offered, but far
+more often to the patient ears of poor Sainty, who had to defend the
+culprit as best he might.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_261">{261}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another fruitful topic of maternal discontent was Lady Belchamber’s
+failure to provide an heir to the property. This, it may well be
+supposed, was not an agreeable topic to Sainty, nor one on which he had
+any ready rejoinders at his command.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have been married close on a year,’ said Lady Charmington, ‘and I
+see no signs or hope of a child. I said something to Cissy about it one
+day, and she laughed disagreeably, and said she was glad of it. I asked
+if she didn’t think she had any duty to the family in the matter. I am
+almost ashamed to tell you what she answered: that a baby was a great
+tie and a nuisance, and she hoped if she had to have one, it would be at
+a convenient time of year, when it didn’t interfere with things.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t suppose very young women ever <i>want</i> to have a baby,’ Sainty
+said doubtfully, feeling something was expected of him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy is not so young as all that. She must be two-or three-and-twenty.
+I can’t imagine any woman marrying and <i>not</i> wanting to have a child. I
+am sure when I married I prayed most fervently that I might give my
+husband a son.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you know, the answer to your prayer was not quite all you could
+have wished,’ suggested Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington ignored the interruption. ‘It is not as though she were
+not a perfectly normal healthy young woman,’ she said, ‘for I never was
+taken in for a minute by all that business of the shock to her nervous
+system at Belchamber. Constant dissipation, racketing about morning,
+noon, and night, and tight lacing are not the ways to go about having an
+heir. I only hope she mayn’t do anything else, if she’s so afraid that
+the duties of a wife and mother will cut her out of a party or two.’</p>
+
+<p>‘O mother!’ Sainty expostulated.</p>
+
+<p>‘If she is not going to have any children, what was the use of your
+marrying?’ continued his aggrieved parent. ‘We are just where we were
+with regard to that other woman. <i>She</i><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_262">{262}</a></span> has children fast enough! Cissy
+seems to think she has come into the family merely to have what she
+calls a good time, and spend the money that I pinched and scraped
+together for you for so many years. I have <i>never</i> seen such sinful
+waste as goes on in this house.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington was only putting into words what her son had often,
+with some bitterness, asked himself. What was the use of his marrying?
+He had not perhaps quite so crudely admitted, even in his inner
+consciousness, how much he had been influenced in making up his mind to
+such a step by the thought of excluding the children of Lady Arthur from
+the succession to his name and estates, but it had none the less been a
+powerful motive with him. Had his brother passed his examinations, gone
+into the army, and in due course married some commonplace,
+unobjectionable young lady, it is more than doubtful if even Lady
+Eccleston would have succeeded in dragging Sainty into matrimony. For
+one thing, she would have had to reckon with Lady Charmington as an
+enemy instead of an ally, which would have put a quite different
+complexion on the affair. The young man reflected sometimes with dumb
+rage on how his life was turned topsy-turvy, haled from familiar field
+and woodland to this hated city, that a girl, who was really no more to
+him than any other, should junket from morning till night with a set of
+people he could not endure, and squander money, with which he might have
+benefited millions of his fellow-creatures, on her senseless, unoriginal
+pleasures. And all for what? Sooner or later the children of his
+undesirable sister-in-law would sit in his place, and inherit his
+patrimony as surely as if he had followed his natural bent, and led a
+peaceful, laborious life remote from all connection with Lady Deans and
+her play-fellows. And with it all Cissy had not even the common decency
+to avoid the tongue of scandal, as these odious anonymous letters showed
+him. He really did think she might have spared him that. Day after day
+he thought of saying something to her on the subject, and always he was
+prevented by lack of courage or opportunity, or else some<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_263">{263}</a></span> unfortunate
+speech of his mother drove him back into the position of his wife’s
+involuntary champion.</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy tells me she is going away for Whitsuntide,’ Lady Charmington
+announced one day, with the sniff that indicated much more than met the
+ear in this apparently simple announcement.</p>
+
+<p>‘Is she?’ said Sainty, anxious not to commit himself.</p>
+
+<p>‘Has she not even deigned to let you know?’ inquired her ladyship
+scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think she <i>did</i> say something about the Suffords having asked her
+there.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Were <i>you</i> not included in the invitation?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I really don’t know; I never asked. I didn’t want to go. I suppose Lady
+Sufford went through the form of asking me, but she probably knew I
+shouldn’t come. It would be too terrible if I were obliged to go
+wherever Cissy does.’</p>
+
+<p>‘The arrangement seems to suit <i>her</i> perfectly,’ said Lady Charmington;
+‘but I can’t see why you shouldn’t go.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It would add to no one’s pleasure, and take away considerably from
+mine,’ said Sainty promptly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Always pleasure!’ cried Lady Charmington. ‘The invariable argument! no
+thought of duty!’</p>
+
+<p>‘If a thing which is purely a question of amusement doesn’t amuse one,
+why make a duty of it?’ argued her son.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, if it is not your duty to go about with your wife, I should have
+thought it was hers to stay at home with you. Of course I quite
+understood that she mentioned her plans to me with the delicate
+intention of letting me see that she could not keep me beyond next week;
+but she need not trouble; I had settled to go to mother on Tuesday in
+any case. She has failed very much lately, and I shall have to be with
+her more. By the way, I found she was rather hurt that Cissy had never
+once been to see her since she came to town in February, nor asked her
+to come in and see your new house.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear me!’ said Sainty, ‘I ought to have thought of it. Of course we
+should have been only too delighted to see granny, if I had only thought
+she would care to see the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_264">{264}</a></span> house; but she seems always so absorbed in
+other things, it never occurred to me. It was very stupid of me. I’ve
+been several times to see her, but she always talks as if it was such a
+business to drive into London. I never dreamt of asking it of her. And
+she says her sight has got so bad, that I wasn’t sure how much she would
+see if she came.’</p>
+
+<p>‘She would probably see a great deal that would shock her, as I have,’
+said Lady Charmington. ‘Have you ever calculated at all what this house
+is going to cost you by the time it is finished?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I’ve kept pretty good track of the expenses. I’ve paid for a good
+deal of the work as it went along. It has all been done much more
+extravagantly than I thought necessary. Indeed, as far as I am
+concerned, I shouldn’t care if we had no London house at all; but Uncle
+Cor seemed to think it indispensable, and he doesn’t consider that we
+have done much we need not. He is always afraid that, with my saving
+tendencies, I shall fail to do myself credit. He needn’t be uneasy as
+long as Cissy is on hand to provide the antidote.’</p>
+
+<p>‘There is a great difference between having things suitable to your
+position and being foolishly and wickedly extravagant,’ remarked Lady
+Charmington.</p>
+
+<p>‘Perhaps I have deliberately rather given Cissy her head about this
+house,’ Sainty answered, ‘to keep her hands off Belchamber; there was a
+great deal she was thinking of doing there, but I hope I have put a stop
+to that.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Belchamber!’ cried out his mother in horror. ‘What could she want to do
+there? It was always kept in perfect repair; there wasn’t a door knob
+missing nor a tap out of order, and when you came of age there was an
+immense amount of money spent in cleaning and restoring. I always
+thought it quite unnecessary her doing up those rooms in that ridiculous
+way last summer. They looked to <i>me</i> more like an improper person’s
+apartments than like anything in an English lady’s house.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I can’t say I always admire Cissy’s taste, myself; there’s a
+little want of knowledge about it.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_265">{265}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not judge it necessary to tell his mother how far reaching
+had been Cissy’s plans for the remodelling of Belchamber; he had
+surprised them by an accident, and had promptly and firmly opposed them.
+He could not bear the desecrating touch of fleeting fashion on anything
+so artistically and historically complete as the home of his childhood,
+and had been glad to purchase its immunity from the threatened changes
+by larger concessions in the matter of the London house. Perhaps, even
+so, Cissy would not have abandoned her projects without a struggle, but
+for the appearance of a most unlooked-for ally to her husband in the
+person of Claude Morland, who had supervened in the height of the
+discussion and thrown all the weight of his authority into the scale for
+the saving of Belchamber.</p>
+
+<p>‘Sainty is perfectly right,’ he said, with his most pontifical air; ‘it
+would be vandalism. There isn’t a more beautiful specimen of its period
+in England than the great saloon or the Vandyke dining-hall; they are
+perfect. And the red, yellow, and green rooms, though they are later and
+not so pure, have a great <i>cachet</i> of their own, and are perfectly <i>de
+l’époque</i> as far as they go. No, no, my dear Cissy, it would be a sin. I
+am all for your using the rooms, and living in them; but, believe me,
+you mustn’t touch them. Do what you like here; you have a clean slate to
+work on; but don’t attempt to “improve” Belchamber.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was astonished at the meekness with which Cissy abandoned her
+cherished schemes, but much too grateful to Claude for backing him up to
+resent this evidence of his cousin’s greater authority. He knew, too,
+that he owed it to him that the London house, if a little over-decorated
+and too obviously costly, was, on the whole, harmonious and in good
+taste.</p>
+
+<p>By dint of unremitting vigilance and almost superhuman tact, the date of
+Lady Charmington’s departure had almost been reached without any more
+serious encounter than a few skirmishes between her and her
+daughter-in-law; but one afternoon, having heard his mother come in, and
+gone in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_266">{266}</a></span> search of her, Sainty saw at a glance that a battle royal was
+raging. Cissy was lolling exasperatingly calm and contemptuous among the
+piles of cushions she delighted to heap upon the furniture, while Lady
+Charmington sat stiffly erect, an ominous light in her eye, and a pink
+spot burning in the centre of each sallow cheek. Her son heard her voice
+as he entered, and quailed at the familiar tone of it.</p>
+
+<p>‘I am well aware,’ she was saying, ‘that nothing <i>I</i> say will have the
+smallest influence on your behaviour, but none the less I feel it my
+solemn duty to protest, when I see things going on of which I entirely
+disapprove.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why trouble, if you are so sure that you will produce no effect?’ asked
+Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘Because <i>I</i> have some consideration for my son’s honour, to which you
+and he seem to be equally indifferent.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! His honour!’ protested Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes; his honour,’ persisted Lady Charmington. ‘When I was first
+married, a young woman of your age, a young wife not a year married, who
+received men alone, sprawling about on sofas in that kind of indecent
+clothing, would have been considered to have lost her character.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Mother!’ interposed Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, it’s largely your fault for allowing such things,’ his mother
+flashed out at him. ‘If you were more of a man, your wife would never
+dare treat you as an absolute nonentity in your own house.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But what’s it all about?’ asked Sainty. ‘What has Cissy been doing?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m sure <i>I</i> don’t know,’ answered Lady Belchamber. ‘You had better ask
+your mother.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I came in just now,’ said Lady Charmington,’and found her with that
+flimsy rag she calls a tea-gown half off her back lolling about among
+the cushions there with Algy Montgomery. I don’t call it decent.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why, Algy’s a sort of relation, you know,’ answered Cissy; ‘his
+stepmother’s Sainty’s grandmother; it makes him a kind of uncle.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_267">{267}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Kind of fiddlestick! a good-for-nothing young rip in the Life Guards,
+of six-or seven-and-twenty at the outside.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you suppose, if I were doing anything that wasn’t perfectly
+innocent, that I shouldn’t have taken jolly good care that you didn’t
+come spying in?’ inquired Cissy, with lofty scorn.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington choked. ‘It is not my habit to spy,’ she cried, ‘and I
+am not accusing you of actual misconduct; but it’s not only to-day that
+I object to. It’s your general mode of going on. Yesterday you were shut
+up for ever so long with that vulgar little Mr. Pryor, and you drive
+Claude all over London in your brougham. No honest woman should take any
+man in her brougham, no matter who it is, that isn’t her husband or her
+brother.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Would her grandfather be admissible?’ asked Cissy sweetly. ‘I must say
+for a high-minded person who angrily repudiates the idea of spying, you
+seem to be strangely well informed as to all my movements.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy!’ expostulated Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, what is it?’ she asked, turning to him politely.</p>
+
+<p>‘I have been deceived in you, very much deceived,’ Lady Charmington
+broke out. ‘When you wanted to marry my son, you were all sweetness and
+honey to me; now you’ve attained your object, you insult me. From the
+day I arrived here you have studied in every way to let me see I was
+unwelcome; there wasn’t an attention you could have paid me you didn’t
+pointedly omit, or a possible slight that you neglected to put upon me.
+I can well see that a mother-in-law in the house by no means suited your
+book.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Even such a sweet affectionate one?’ interposed Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mark my words,’ continued the exasperated dowager, ‘you will come to
+grief. You are playing a dangerous game, my lady. You have no
+conscience, no principle, no sense of duty to restrain or save you. If
+you forget God and go after your own vain amusements from morning till
+night, you will assuredly make shipwreck in the end.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, at least you will have the satisfaction of thinking it was not
+for want of being warned.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_268">{268}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Your sarcasms will never prevent my speaking my mind. I have seen
+nothing in this house against which I do not think it incumbent on me,
+not only as the mother of your husband but as a Christian woman, to bear
+testimony&mdash;luxury, waste, riotous living, and indelicate behaviour. I am
+going away, and I know you will be glad to be rid of me, but I couldn’t
+have reconciled it to my conscience to go without speaking.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I must say you have eased your conscience very thoroughly, and most
+agreeably. Is there anything else your sense of duty impels you to
+mention before you go?’</p>
+
+<p>At this, Lady Charmington fairly lost her temper. She strode over to
+Cissy, and Sainty flung himself between them, afraid that she was going
+to strike her. ‘You little minx!’ she cried. ‘You little selfish, vulgar
+minx! You have lied and wheedled your way into this family, and grabbed
+all you could lay your hands upon, and what have you done in return? The
+one thing that was asked of you, to bear a child, and give the house an
+heir, you have most lamentably failed in doing.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy sprang to her feet, a curious evil look in her face, and for a
+moment the two women looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Oh! in the matter
+of a baby, take care I don’t astonish some of you yet,’ she cried.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_269">{269}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></h2>
+
+<p>‘But you will come to <i>my</i> ball,’ said the duchess with decision. The
+‘but’ was in answer to Sainty’s assertion that he did not go to balls.
+‘<i>Vous vous faites ridicule, mon enfant.</i> That you shouldn’t accompany
+your wife everywhere, that I can see; it would be silly; but equally it
+is not right never to be seen at all. People ask if anything is wrong
+with you that you can’t appear, if you are half-witted or have fits.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is very kind of them to occupy themselves with my affairs,’ said
+Sainty. ‘I shouldn’t have supposed that most people remembered that I
+exist.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But it is perhaps as well they <i>should</i> remember it sometimes,’ said
+his grandmother, with a significant glance at Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>‘I should have thought the one form of entertainment from which a lame
+man might have been held excused was a dance,’ Sainty persisted.</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! there are dances and dances,’ replied the duchess. ‘This is not a
+dance <i>où l’on dansera</i>, it is a serious entertainment. I don’t say it
+will be amusing; I don’t give this kind of thing for my own amusement or
+for other people’s; there will be ministers, public men, royalties;
+<i>enfin</i> a solemn thing, and you are of the family. You must come,
+mustn’t he, Cissy?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, certainly, if you wish it, dear,’ Cissy answered lightly. ‘I should
+think it would just suit him. He will find people to whom he can talk
+about the housing of the working classes. You know how I always <i>love</i>
+coming to Sunborough House, but not to <i>this</i> kind of thing; you have
+said yourself how it bores you.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty smiled at his wife’s complete assumption of equality<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_270">{270}</a></span> with his
+grandmother, both in age and position. He couldn’t help reflecting how
+enchanted Lady Eccleston’s daughter would have been a short year ago at
+the prospect of attending the function of which she now spoke so
+slightingly as being for the uninitiated.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you will both come, like good children,’ said the duchess easily.
+‘We don’t live only to amuse ourselves, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>And so it came about that Belchamber found himself attending the ball in
+question, and very much lost in that glittering throng. At first he had
+been amused by the show, as he might have been by a scene in a
+pantomime. The pompous men, bearers of great names or high positions,
+stuck about with orders, the indecent bejewelled women, the lights, the
+flowers, the music: it all made an effect of some gorgeousness, with the
+really stately beautiful house as a background. But after an hour or so
+he became aware of a sense of intolerable weariness. He had taken it for
+granted that he and Cissy would be entirely independent of each other,
+and that after he had shown himself to his grandmother and the duke, and
+amused himself for a little while with the pageant, he would be free to
+depart whenever it pleased him; but to his astonishment Cissy had
+remarked that she had no intention of staying late and she would be very
+much obliged if he would take her home in his brougham. ‘I want Gibson
+early to-morrow morning,’ she explained, ‘so I don’t want to take him
+out to-night, and I haven’t been in bed before three one night this
+week. We can just show ourselves, and then slope.’</p>
+
+<p>Once at the ball, however, she seemed to find it less dull than she had
+anticipated, for Sainty several times caught sight of her dancing, which
+she had announced that she certainly should not do, and had quite failed
+in his endeavour to get speech of her to tell her that he would walk
+home and leave the carriage for her. The night was fine and his own
+house not five minutes away. Any one but Sainty would simply have gone
+and left his wife to find it out. But this<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_271">{271}</a></span> was a course which his
+invincible conscientiousness forbade his taking. As he hung forlornly
+about, hustled by the people who crowded in and out of the rooms, he
+thought that surely no sound in nature was so ugly as that of a quantity
+of human voices all talking at once and endeavouring to dominate each
+other. He came presently on Mrs. de Lissac, who always soothed his
+exasperated nerves; but after all he need not go to a ball to see <i>her</i>.
+‘We could have had a much pleasanter talk in your house or mine, without
+having to try and outshout a hundred other people,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I never can quite get over the strangeness of being here at all,’ Alice
+answered. ‘It always seems rather like a fairy story to me, when I think
+of my very simple bringing-up at the rectory, that I should come to rub
+shoulders with all these grandees.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is a fairy story in which you have certainly been the good fairy,’
+said Sainty warmly. ‘I can’t tell you the difference it has made to me
+having you in London to come and talk to sometimes.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It is dear of you to say that. I like to think that to you I am not the
+rich woman and possible subscriber or hostess, but just your old govey
+that you loved when you were a little boy. Sometimes, dear,’ she added,
+with a timid look of great tenderness, ‘I fancy you are not much happier
+now than you were then.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty passed the back of his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘Happy,’ he
+said; ‘is anyone happy? Think of the lives that are being led within a
+mile of us to-night; can any one be happy with the cry of those millions
+in his ears? Certainly not these people with their eternal desperate
+pursuit of amusement who are afraid of being left for five minutes in
+company with their own thoughts.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Poor boy! you certainly are <i>not</i> happy or you would not be so bitter.
+It is dreadful to think of those poor people. I often wonder if we have
+a right to be so rich when there are so many starving; but my dear
+husband says this is Socialism, and if we weren’t rich we couldn’t give
+away so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_272">{272}</a></span> much, and certainly he is very generous; and he says that all
+these things that I feel as if it was wrong to spend so much on give
+employment to lots of poor people to make, who would be out of work if
+there were no rich people to buy things.’ She brought out this
+time-honoured piece of argument with such a triumphant pride in her
+spouse’s wisdom that Sainty thought of nothing less than combating it.</p>
+
+<p>‘There is one form of happiness that <i>you</i> ought to enjoy in
+perfection,’ he said, ‘that of being and doing good.’</p>
+
+<p>Alice blushed. ‘Oh, you mustn’t call me good,’ she said; ‘but I was
+going to say, if there is a lot of misery and poverty, I’m sure there
+has never been so much done towards relieving it as nowadays.’</p>
+
+<p>‘The “World’s Bazaar,” for instance,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well&mdash;yes, dear&mdash;that and other things. And I’m sure if, as you say,
+being and doing good makes us happy, you ought to know it too.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I!’ cried Sainty. ‘Whom do I make happy?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, you are always doing kind things for people, and see how happy you
+make your wife.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My wife’s happiness is very much independent of me; indeed, I am rather
+the principal drawback to it.’ The words slipped out almost before he
+was aware. Even to this kind old friend he had never spoken of his
+relations with his wife, and this seemed neither the time nor the place
+he would have chosen to do so. Mrs. de Lissac looked pained, but she
+took advantage of his little outbreak to say, ‘I have sometimes wanted
+to speak to you about your wife, but have not quite liked to. I think
+you and she should be more together. You leave her too much to herself.
+She is very young and pretty to be so independent, and perhaps a little
+thoughtless.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Talking of Cissy,’ Sainty interrupted, ‘can you tell me where she is?
+As a beginning of acting on your advice, you see we have come into the
+world together to-night, and I am actually waiting to go home till she
+is ready.’</p>
+
+<p>A sinuous young lady, clad in a sheath of some glittering,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_273">{273}</a></span> shimmering
+blackness, turned at the words and held out her hand. ‘How d’ye do, Lord
+Belchamber?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you remember me. Are you asking
+for Lady Belchamber? I saw her not five minutes ago with Mr. Morland.’</p>
+
+<p>With a start Sainty recognised Amy Winston. The unrelieved black of her
+dress, and of a long pair of gloves that were pulled up to her elbows,
+lent a baleful pallor to her face and neck, and above her brow there
+shone in her dusky tresses a single diamond star which, if real, was a
+very remarkable ornament to belong to a single woman said mainly to
+support herself by the manufacture of magazine tales and occasional
+verse. At sight of this siren good Mrs. de Lissac fell back into the
+crowd, while the young man to whom Miss Winston was talking, after a
+half glance at Sainty, made off not less hastily, so that they were left
+facing one another.</p>
+
+<p>‘I remember you perfectly, Miss Winston,’ Sainty said, ‘although we have
+not met very lately. You were kind enough to say you had seen Lady
+Belchamber. I wish you would tell me where I should find her; she wanted
+to go home early to-night, and I think may be looking for me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘She didn’t appear to be, ‘replied the young woman, with the faintest
+suspicion of insolence; ‘nor, I must say, did she seem in any particular
+hurry to get home. She was going into the garden with <i>le beau cousin</i>.
+Didn’t you know the garden was lit up? it is one of the great features
+of the Sunborough House parties. Let’s go and look for them.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty couldn’t well refuse. He was thinking how much more indecent a
+very low-necked bodice was on a thin woman than on a fat one.</p>
+
+<p>‘Wasn’t that Ned Parsons who left you just now?’ he asked, as they made
+their way towards the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes. He has become very fashionable since his book was such a success;
+he goes everywhere now. By the way,’ she added, with a little laugh, ‘I
+suppose that’s why he bolted at sight of you; he thinks you haven’t
+forgiven him for the liberty he took with your coming-of-age party.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_274">{274}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I should have thought he had quite as much reason to fear my
+grandmother; yet I find him at her house.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, well&mdash;a great ball like this is hardly being at people’s house, you
+know; it doesn’t count. But as a matter of fact he and the duchess have
+quite made it up. They met at Lady Eva’s, and the duchess prepared to
+crush him. “I hear, Mr. Parsons,” said she, in her most regal manner,
+“that you have put me in a book.” “Who can have told you such a thing?”
+Ned asked, with touching innocence. “The duchess in my book is old and
+ridiculous; how <i>could</i> she be meant for you?”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty couldn’t help laughing. As they emerged into the cooler and less
+crowded garden, his guide waited for him to come up beside her. Hitherto
+she had preceded him, worming her way through the crowd with a deftness
+bred of long habit, at which Sainty marvelled, and talking lightly to
+him over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>‘One doesn’t often see you at this sort of thing,’ she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is only the second ball of my life,’ Sainty answered. ‘You were at
+my first too.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah! the famous ball immortalised by Parsons. Is it possible that it can
+be three years ago?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nearly four now.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good heavens! so it is. How old we are all getting! Your wife was there
+too; it was the year she came out. How little any of us thought what was
+going to happen, except perhaps dear Lady Eccleston. I shouldn’t wonder
+if <i>she</i> had had an inkling even then.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not like his companion’s tone, but hardly knew how to resent
+it. He had hoped by a rather stiff silence to intimate his want of
+appreciation of her particular form of humour, but she continued to
+chatter quite unabashed by his unresponsiveness.</p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy is quite a success,’ she continued; ‘it is astonishing how
+quickly she has caught on. I don’t know any one who has more admirers,
+unless perhaps it’s Mrs. Jack Purse, and she’s been much longer on the
+scene of battle.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_275">{275}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘And who may she be?’ Sainty asked, hoping to divert the stream of Miss
+Winston’s malevolence from his own vegetable patch.</p>
+
+<p>‘Lord Belchamber, where <i>have</i> you lived? I wish she could hear you;
+she’d die of it. Why, Mrs. Jack is smartest of the smart. She knows
+hardly any one but Jews and royalties. I was quite astonished to find
+her at the Suffords’ at Whitsuntide. Hylda Sufford said she couldn’t
+imagine why she came to her, but I think the Guggenheim’s party for the
+prince falling through had something to do with it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My wife didn’t tell me she met you at the Suffords’.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, I don’t know how I came to be asked, but I was.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And did you amuse yourself?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, we had great fun. One night we all dressed up for dinner. Hylda was
+a harlequin and Ella Dalsany the columbine.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean to say that Lady Sufford came down to dinner in tights
+before the footmen?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Gracious, yes! And Gladys Purse was Mephistopheles and Lady Deans
+Marguerite; but we all thought Cissy had the best idea.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And what was that?’ asked Sainty nervously. He had neither asked nor
+received any account of the Suffords’ country-house party.</p>
+
+<p>‘Why, she just put on her best frock and all her diamonds, and said she
+was the Traviata.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was not sure that this inspiration of his wife’s exactly appealed
+to him. He walked in gloomy silence.</p>
+
+<p>‘Didn’t she tell you about it?’ asked Miss Winston. ‘She had a
+tremendous success. Mrs. Jack, with her red legs and cock’s feather, was
+nowhere. Cissy has one immense pull over Gladys Purse as far as the
+younger men are concerned. It’s terribly expensive to admire Mrs. Jack;
+whereas a charming but impecunious youth like Claude Morland gets many
+little advantages by the way from his devotion to his pretty cousin.’</p>
+
+<p>In spite of an effort to keep her talk on the level of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_276">{276}</a></span> impartial
+ill-nature, Miss Winston could not quite help a touch of scornful
+bitterness in her mention of Claude.</p>
+
+<p>Scattered images had been loosely grouping themselves in Sainty’s brain
+as she talked, half-forgotten incidents of his coming-of-age party, the
+softly opening door, his encounter with his cousin in the sleeping
+house, his examination of Claude as to his feelings for this same
+lady&mdash;it seemed to him that he began to detect a certain method in the
+apparently purposeless gossip with which she was favouring him. And
+then, blinding in its sudden illumination, there flashed across his mind
+the recollection of the anonymous letters. Here was the key to their
+authorship thrust suddenly into his mind. He felt the quick instinctive
+recoil of a man about to tread on something nasty, and then a sort of
+shuddering pity for what the creature at his side must have suffered.
+None knew better than he how they were wounded who put their trust in
+Claude Morland. He wanted to turn and hurry from her, or at least to
+find something that should stop the flicker of her evil tongue. He found
+nothing better to say in the shock of the moment than ‘Do you think you
+ought to talk to me so about my wife?’</p>
+
+<p>Sunborough House has, for the heart of London, a relatively large
+garden, which being cunningly illumined with Chinese lanterns and little
+coloured lamps, the next day’s papers were already reporting that the
+effect was ‘fairy-like.’ Despite these beauties and the somewhat chilly
+allurements of an English summer night, only a few of the most
+flirtatiously inclined had been persuaded to drag their expensive skirts
+over the sooty London grass, and Sainty and his companion had the
+further end of the enclosure, which they had now reached, practically to
+themselves. As he made his feeble protestation, they came, round a tree,
+upon the glass doors of a sort of little summer-house which backed up
+against the high railing that divided the garden from the Park.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Winston gave one glance into the lighted interior. ‘I think we are
+<i>de trop</i> here,’ she said, turning to Sainty, and, slipping nimbly from
+his side, she vanished in the soft<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_277">{277}</a></span> shadows of the shrubbery. Almost at
+the same moment the door was opened from within with such suddenness
+that Sainty, who had not the agility of the fair Aimée, could only save
+himself from being struck by throwing himself back into the angle formed
+by the tree and the railing, and in this small space he now found
+himself made a close prisoner by the open door, which was firmly held in
+position by the broad back of a man, as he could see through the glass.
+He reflected that his position was not a dignified one, that as the
+inmates of the summer-house were evidently leaving it, he had only to
+stay quiet till they were gone, and then push the door and follow them
+at his leisure; and they need never know how nearly he had been tricked
+into playing the spy upon them. Miss Winston had evidently counted on
+finding her quarry there (perhaps from personal knowledge of his
+cousin’s habits), and had hoped that she could so excite his jealousy
+that he would not be able, once there, to resist the temptation of
+looking. He had no doubt as to whom he would have seen, even before he
+recognised Claude’s voice. He was relieved to hear that there was
+nothing lover-like in it. Morland spoke in brief business-like tones
+through which pierced a scarcely disguised note of annoyance. ‘Then you
+won’t see him?’ he said, pausing against the door, evidently continuing
+some discussion they had been having.</p>
+
+<p>‘I daren’t,’ Cissy answered. ‘I’m sure it would kill me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Then you must do the other thing; there are not two ways about it; and
+the sooner the better. If you’re right, you’ve no time to lose. But are
+you quite sure?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes, quite. I wasn’t at first, but I am now.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s cursedly unfortunate&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>They spoke low, and as they moved off he could hear no more.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty pushed the door, and stepped out from his temporary prison. Of
+the fragment of dialogue that he had overheard he did not understand a
+word; indeed, he did not pay it any particular attention at the time; he
+supposed it to refer to some of the many plans the two were always
+discuss<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_278">{278}</a></span>ing. He was accustomed to Cissy’s use of needlessly strong
+language. ‘I should simply die of it’ was a common phrase with her for
+expressing dislike of the most trivial things. It was not till months
+after they were spoken that the words came back to him with a new
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>He followed the retreating figures up the garden, his feeling one of
+relief at the failure of an ill-natured plot of which he had been meant
+to be the victim. Miss Winston’s motive was not difficult to guess. It
+all seemed like something in a novel or a play, curiously theatrical and
+unlike life; but at least the <i>dénouement</i> had been essentially
+undramatic.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the front hall, he found Cissy already cloaked among the
+group of people who were waiting for their carriages.</p>
+
+<p>‘Where <i>have</i> you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for
+you. I told you I wanted to go home early. I thought you must have
+gone.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I was looking for you,’ Sainty answered. ‘I was told you had gone into
+the garden, so I went there after you; but we must just have missed.’</p>
+
+<p>In the brief transit to their own door neither spoke. Sainty was
+wondering if he ought to say anything to Cissy of the ill-will that was
+dogging her footsteps, to put her on her guard against evil tongues. A
+woman in her exceptional position could not be too careful to furnish no
+weapons to scandal. Yet it was not only Miss Winston’s vengeful jealousy
+that had warned him to look after his wife. Had not kind little Mrs. de
+Lissac tried to suggest that he left her dangerously unguarded? Even the
+duchess had hinted the advisability of his being more with Cissy. It was
+evident that she was being talked about. Cissy herself seemed to provide
+him with just the necessary opportunity for speech, so difficult to find
+in their divided lives. To his surprise, instead of going immediately
+upstairs on arriving at home, she followed him into his rooms on the
+ground-floor. His study, though of Spartan simplicity compared to the
+rest of the house, had the indefinable pleasant air of rooms much<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_279">{279}</a></span> lived
+and worked in. Everything in it was meant for use, and daily used. Books
+seemed to accumulate round Sainty like some natural growth. The one lamp
+with its plain green shade lighted the comfortable litter on the big,
+serviceable writing-table, and on another table near it was the humble
+appliance by help of which, as in his college days, he sometimes
+refreshed himself with a midnight cup of tea if he was working late.</p>
+
+<p>‘How cosy you are in here,’ Cissy said, looking about her. ‘I must have
+spent five times as much on my boudoir, but with all its silk walls and
+cushions and frills and furbelows it doesn’t look as homey as this.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You’re never in the house for long enough to do more than scratch off a
+dozen notes,’ said Sainty, ‘unless you have people with you. Nothing
+ever looks like a home in which people don’t live.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I think it’s the books,’ Cissy went on. ‘They are wonderful furniture.
+I really must get some.’</p>
+
+<p>She lingered, wandering about the room looking at one thing and another.
+‘What’s this for?’ she asked, coming to the old kettle with its lamp.</p>
+
+<p>‘Sometimes I like a cup of tea if I’m working. It’s a bad habit I got
+into at Cambridge.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How shocking for the nerves, my dear,’ cried Cissy, with a lifelike
+imitation of old Lady Firth. ‘Well, you might have a decent-looking
+kettle and teapot. I shall have to give you one. Do you mean you could
+make a cup of tea now, this minute? What fun! Do make me one. I’m cold
+and famished. It will be lovely.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty obediently set about lighting the spirit-lamp and preparing the
+demanded refreshment. He was not a little puzzled by this latest caprice
+of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy went to the door, and called the butler. ‘You needn’t sit up,’ she
+said. ‘Give me a candle, and then put out the lights and go to bed.’ She
+came back, and flung herself into an armchair, her summer wrap of satin
+and lace billowing foamlike round her.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_280">{280}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty, as he made the tea, was wondering how he could introduce the
+subject on which he wanted to speak. It was not once in six months he
+would have such an opportunity. He must not let it slip. And yet he was
+unwilling to sermonise when for once she was in so friendly a mood. He
+brought the cup of tea to her, and stood looking down at her as she
+gulped little teaspoonfuls of the hot liquid.</p>
+
+<p>‘You have never told me anything about your visit to the Suffords’,’ he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy looked up suddenly. ‘What about it?’ she asked distrustfully.</p>
+
+<p>‘I mean about the dressing up for dinner and all that. Was it amusing?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, <i>that</i>!’ said Cissy indifferently, but with an air of relief. ‘I
+didn’t suppose it would amuse you to hear about such nonsense. Who told
+you?’ she asked, with a return of suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>‘Miss Winston. I met her to-night. I hadn’t seen her for years.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s a nasty cat,’ Cissy remarked with conviction. ‘She hates me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, you know it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Know it? Of course I know it. Why&mdash;&mdash;’ She seemed to think better of
+what she was going to say, and checked herself. ‘What did she say about
+me?’ she asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘She spoke in a way I didn’t like,’ Sainty answered. ‘For some reason
+that woman is your enemy, and I wanted to tell you to be on your guard
+against her.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, thanks, that’s all right. I’m not afraid of Aimée Winston,’ and she
+smiled a little cold smile at her own thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t you think,’ said Sainty, with some hesitation, ‘that you are a
+little imprudent sometimes? a little careless of appearances? that, in
+fact, you rather give a horrid woman like Miss Winston occasion to take
+away your character?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, my character!’ said Cissy lightly. She had set<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_281">{281}</a></span> down her tea-cup,
+and was pulling off her long gloves, and rubbing her round white arms
+softly over each other.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think, you know,’ Sainty went on, ‘you are beginning to be talked
+about a little. It was not only Miss Winston, but some one else, a nice
+woman, who&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Mrs. de Lissac, for a fiver!’ interjected Cissy. ‘There’s another woman
+who don’t love me, though not for the same reason.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, it <i>was</i> Alice, as it happens,’ Sainty admitted; ‘but she only
+said the kindest things, that you were too young and pretty to be left
+so much to yourself. You know even the duchess implied that I ought to
+be seen with you sometimes.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Cissy imperturbably, ‘why aren’t you? It seems to me that
+it is <i>you</i> who are failing in your duties, according to all these
+ladies, not me.’</p>
+
+<p>The coolness of the retort took Sainty’s breath away for the moment.</p>
+
+<p>‘But you know,’ he stammered, ‘that there is nothing you would like
+less. I have never pretended to any right to control your actions. You
+know you are free to amuse yourself as you like. All I ask is that you
+won’t compromise yourself, won’t get talked about, and&mdash;and all that.’
+He ended rather lamely. He half expected an outburst. To his surprise
+she leaned towards him, and laid her hand very gently on his.</p>
+
+<p>‘Don’t you think,’ she said, and her voice was kind, ‘that you <i>are</i>
+rather to blame perhaps? If I <i>am</i> talked about, isn’t it partly your
+fault? Can I help it if other men admire me?’ She had unclasped her
+cloak, as the tea warmed her, and now, as she rose, it slipped from her
+and fell into the chair. She was standing very close to him, a beautiful
+woman, her beauty enhanced by everything that dress could do for it. Her
+breath was on his cheek, the faint heady fragrance of her garments
+troubled his nostrils, the dazzling fairness of her bare shoulders was
+close under his eyes. He drew back a little, bewildered. ‘I don’t
+understand,’ he murmured. ‘I have tried not to annoy you. You remember
+what you said. After that I naturally could not trouble you.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_282">{282}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Cissy sprang suddenly away, and caught up her cloak. There was in her
+movement something of the recoil of a spring that has been forced too
+far in one direction and has suddenly escaped.</p>
+
+<p>‘Ah, no,’ he heard her whisper, ‘I can’t&mdash;&mdash;’ and then aloud, with a
+sudden scornful flash, ‘No, <i>of course</i> you can’t understand,’ she said.
+‘Heavens! it’s nearly three ... and I, who meant to go to bed early.
+There’s a fate against it. Give me my candle. Good night&mdash;or what’s left
+of it.’ She hurried past him, almost snatching the candle from his hand.
+The feeble flicker of it had vanished from the great well of the
+staircase, while he still stood in the doorway dumbly wondering.</p>
+
+<p>What had she meant? Was it possible that she repented of her cruelty,
+that she wished&mdash;&mdash;For a moment it had seemed so. Yet he could not
+believe it. Vividly he recalled the night of their wedding, her agonised
+repetitions that she never could be his. And yet her following him to
+his room, her words, still more her looks. He stood there long
+irresolute, wondering if he were losing a great opportunity. Once he
+started to go and seek her. He looked up at the skylight far above,
+where the first faint coming of morning was making a pale twilight. He
+listened, but in all the silent greyness of the big house he could hear
+no sound but the innumerable ticking of clocks. A breath of chill
+discouragement seemed to steal down to him where he stood. He had a
+vision of the grotesque figure he should cut, misled by his own fatuity,
+and meeting closed doors, or the half concealed impertinence of a
+waiting-maid, and slowly he turned back into his own rooms and shut the
+door.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_283">{283}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">From</span> the time of their coming to London it had required no effort on
+their part for the Belchambers to be very little together, but after the
+ball at Sunborough House, Sainty was aware that they avoided each other.
+On the rare occasions when they met, he was conscious in his wife’s
+manner of a more thinly veiled contempt, while on his side he felt a
+shyness with her which was the beginning of dislike.</p>
+
+<p>There was something almost frightening to him in the absolute quality of
+her egotism. In the scene of which he had been a horrified witness
+between her and his mother, Lady Charmington had by no means displayed a
+conciliatory courtesy, but if she had been rude she had at least lost
+her temper in a thoroughly human manner&mdash;she had <i>cared</i>. Had Cissy
+shown heat in return, he could easily have understood it. What revolted
+him in her attitude was the complete indifference as to what her
+mother-in-law thought of her, or whether they were on good terms or ill.
+The way in which, when she wanted nothing more of them, people simply
+ceased to exist for her, seemed to him monstrous. She had summarily
+declined to make any overtures towards peace, alleging, not without
+justice, that she was the injured party. ‘Lady Charmington had insulted
+and abused her in her own house, and she had taken it with the meekness
+of a lamb. She really could not see what there was for <i>her</i> to
+apologise about; she was quite ready to <i>accept</i> an apology if her
+mother-in-law wished to make one’; but that lady, oddly enough, showed
+no signs of any such desire. She had departed next day without so much
+as seeing Cissy again, merely mentioning to her son before she left that
+he would probably suffer the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_284">{284}</a></span> curse of childlessness, as a punishment
+for his wife’s behaviour and his own inability to guide and chasten her.</p>
+
+<p>So the young couple drifted more and more apart, Sainty realising with a
+terrified fatalism the extent to which this creature, at once so hard
+and so capricious, who bore his name and spent his money, yet had never
+been his wife and had become almost a stranger to him, had it in her
+power to injure him irretrievably.</p>
+
+<p>After the duchess’s ball he received no more anonymous letters, which
+confirmed him in his theory of their authorship. Miss Winston, having
+played her trump card in the disclosure she thought she had made to him,
+evidently judged it useless to continue the letters which were meant to
+lead up to it. One day, however, the post brought him an envelope which,
+at first sight, he made sure was the beginning of a new series. He was
+on the point of destroying it, unopened, when he was aware of his own
+coat-of-arms and crest gorgeously emblazoned on the back, and a closer
+inspection proved that the illiterateness of the handwriting was not
+feigned but perfectly genuine. It was from Lady Arthur, and contained
+the unwelcome news that his brother had been ill, more seriously than
+she had at first imagined, and a request that he would come and see him.
+‘He won’t make the sign,’ she wrote, ‘and I expect he’d be very angry
+with me if he knew I was writing, but all the same I know it would be a
+comfort to him to see you. He’s worrying about money matters. You see,
+being so ill has made him think if he was to die what would become of me
+and the children.’ It was put rather crudely, but Sainty admitted that
+it was a legitimate cause for solicitude, and hailed this proof that
+Arthur was taking thought for others. Even if it were the others who
+were taking thought for themselves, a poor woman could not be blamed for
+wishing to secure the future of her helpless offspring. He decided that
+he must go down and see his brother. He was sorry Arthur had been so
+ill; he never remembered him ill in his life, since the measles and
+chicken-pox of early childhood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_285">{285}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not judge it necessary to say anything to Cissy about his
+expedition; it required no diplomacy on his part to conceal any of his
+movements; if he should be absent for a week, she would neither know nor
+care, and he found by consultation of Bradshaw that he could go and
+return in the long summer day. It was a relief to him that he need not
+spend a night in the house of kinsfolk whom he did not receive in his
+own. The situation was awkward and unpleasant, and when he thought of
+all that Arthur’s marriage had made him do and suffer, it must be
+confessed that he approached his brother’s home and wife with invincible
+repugnance.</p>
+
+<p>The Chamberses had taken up their abode (of course in a hunting country)
+in an old vicarage from which a victim of shrunken tithes had been glad
+to move into a smaller house. Arthur had added new and magnificent
+stables that had cost Sainty a pretty penny before they were completed.
+The house itself might have been transplanted bodily from the heart of
+Belgravia. It was of such commonplace and uncharacteristic architecture
+that even the process known to Lady Arthur as ‘Smartenin’ the old place
+up a bit’ had failed materially to disfigure it. It was approached
+through all the dignity of a lodge gate and ‘carriage sweep,’ which
+swept round a mound of damp laurels opposite the front door, and
+deposited Sainty at a small Ionic portico of stucco pillars. Having
+confided his name and business to a dingy man in a shiny dress-coat who
+opened the door to him, Belchamber was told ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>is lordship was expecting
+of ‘im, and would ‘is lordship please to walk this way,’ and followed
+the butler upstairs to Arthur’s room. He smiled to see how exactly the
+interior of the house corresponded with his anticipations: everything
+was modern, ugly, expensive, and already shabby. A great litter of caps,
+gloves, sticks, and hunting-crops encumbered the hall, together with a
+female garden-hat ornamented with huge red bows and faded muslin
+poppies. A strong smell of cooking pervaded the staircase, and from some
+of the many open doors came the sound of wome<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_286">{286}</a></span>n’s voices in dispute, and
+high above all else the shrill wailing of a baby.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a conflict of feelings that Sainty found himself once more
+face to face with Arthur, whom he had not seen since his fruitless
+attempt to detach him from the woman who was now his wife. They had
+parted as boys, they met again as married men, and with no particularly
+happy experiences behind them. Sainty noted with pained surprise how
+much of his brother’s good looks had been what the French call ‘the
+devil’s beauty.’ That boyish freshness was gone for ever, and the face
+had gained nothing of manly dignity in its place.</p>
+
+<p>The young man was sitting propped with pillows in a big easy-chair,
+arrayed in a gorgeous silk dressing-gown. His recent illness had given
+him a pinched bluish-white look about the nose, but the colour had set
+and hardened on the cheek bones, and the eyes had a tired shifty look.
+The beautiful curls were already worn a little thin at the temples, and
+an absurd little fair moustache seemed to be ineffectually trying with
+its waxed points to conceal the two lines that ill-temper had traced
+beside the nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>‘Very good of you to come,’ he said, as he held out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been ill. What was it?’ Sainty asked, as he
+sat down beside him, struggling with a lump that would rise in his
+throat.</p>
+
+<p>‘I fancy I’ve been pretty bad,’ Arthur answered. ‘Some superior form of
+mulligrubs. I don’t believe the damn fool of a doctor knows quite what
+<i>was</i> the matter. I think he was frightened himself. He gets into
+corners with Topsy and whispers, till I want to break his head. I’ve
+pulled through all right, but, of course, another time I mightn’t, you
+know, and that’s what I wanted to see you about.’</p>
+
+<p>There was no suggestion that he wanted to see him for any other reason.
+They met after two years of absence and estrangement, and after what
+seemed a very fair chance that they might never meet again. The elder
+brother was husky<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_287">{287}</a></span> with emotion, the younger as unmoved by any thought
+of their common past as though it were his solicitor whom he had
+summoned to the discussion of a matter of business.</p>
+
+<p>His coldness reacted on Sainty, and helped him to steady his voice as he
+answered, ‘Your wife intimated in her letter that you were troubled
+about money matters.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s it. You see, as long as I live I’ve got this cursed pittance. A
+fellow can’t live like a gentleman on it, but at least we don’t starve.
+But as the missus pointed out to me, if I was to hop the twig, there’d
+be just nothing for her and the kids; so I made her write and tell you I
+was ill; I thought I owed it to her. She grumbles a good deal, and she’s
+a damn bad manager, and we have our rows, but she’s not a bad sort of an
+old girl. Last winter she went without a pony for her shay, so as I
+could keep another hunter. Now that was rather decent of her. I’m not
+very partial to the kids myself; it’s unbelievable how they yell; but I
+shouldn’t like ’em to be left in the gutter, you know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you know me so little, Arthur, that you could suppose, if anything
+happened to you, I shouldn’t provide for your wife and children?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, you were never a particularly free parter, you know, old man, and
+then you didn’t approve of the connection. How was I to know?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course, in case of your death, I should continue the same allowance
+to your widow.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Would you now? Well, <i>that’s</i> all right. But I say, suppose <i>you</i> were
+to kick? you’re not so remarkably strong, you know, yourself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘In that case, your boy comes in for the whole thing, and of course the
+trustees would make a suitable provision for his mother.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh, gammon! we don’t count on that, you know. What’s to prevent your
+having children yourself? By the way, isn’t Lady Belchamber showing any
+signs yet?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Er&mdash;no; as a matter of fact&mdash;not&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, she’d better look sharp, or we shall begin to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_288">{288}</a></span> indulge unholy
+hopes. But, bar chaff, you couldn’t put it in writing, could you, about
+the allowance going on in case we were both to what the papers call
+“join the majority”?’</p>
+
+<p>‘If it will be any comfort to you I can, but I should think you could
+trust me; and in case I should ever have an heir, I promise at once to
+add a codicil to my will, providing for your children.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, let’s have that in writing too; then there can’t be any mistake
+about it, and Topsy’ll let me alone. She’s got her damned old mother
+with her (she’s an old vulgarian, I tell you), and the two of ’em have
+nagged my life out of me about this. I never will have old Mother Mug
+here, but I was going to town for a lar&mdash;on business, if I hadn’t been
+taken ill, and so I said she could have her to keep her company while I
+was away, and I’m blowed if the old devil didn’t turn up, just the
+same.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How do you like this place on the whole?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘It isn’t bad in the winter; just between two packs, you know; and one
+or two of the people round have given me some shooting. But at this time
+o’ year it’s simply infernal; not one blessed thing to do. As I told
+you, if it hadn’t been for this cursed illness, I was going to town for
+a bit; if I didn’t get away now and then I should rot and burst.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Is there nobody you see or like in the neighbourhood?’</p>
+
+<p>Arthur winced. ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘most of the huntin’ lot go
+away in the summer, and the regular county sort of set ain’t
+particularly lively; and then the women jib a bit at Topsy. One or two
+of ’em have called, but not many. Our parson and his wife toady her
+freely; they ain’t particular as long as she’s my lady, and will give
+’em money for the school treat. I assure you she’s becoming quite the
+charitable religious lady; nothing else to do, poor girl. But most of
+these county women are a damned stiff-backed lot; they ain’t like
+Londoners.’</p>
+
+<p>At this point in the conversation the dingy butler, who looked like the
+‘heavy father’ of a not very prosperous<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_289">{289}</a></span> travelling company, came to say
+that ‘lunching was served, and Lady Harthur Chambers ‘oped Lord
+Belchamber would do ’er the honour to come down.’ He also brought
+Arthur’s meal on a tray, over which the invalid let fly a volley of
+curses: ‘the napkin was dirty, the soup was cold, the bread was stale;
+he could take it back to the damn cook and tell her,&mdash;&mdash; her, if she
+couldn’t send up a decent basin of broth to a sick man,&mdash;&mdash; her, and&mdash;&mdash;
+her, she’d better&mdash;&mdash; well go.’</p>
+
+<p>To this rolling accompaniment, Sainty got himself out of the room,
+saying he would come up again after lunch, and was conducted by the
+seedy retainer into the presence of his sister-in-law, who received him
+with much state.</p>
+
+<p>The three years that had elapsed since their last meeting had not
+treated Lady Arthur more kindly than her husband. They were in her case
+three years considerably nearer to the term of youth. In the days of the
+supper at the Hotel Fritz she had been a decidedly handsome young woman,
+if a little over-florid. In the interval she had grown more florid and
+less handsome, and suggested an impression of having run to seed. A
+growing tendency to corpulence was resisted by violent compression, with
+disastrous results to the complexion, imperfectly corrected by a
+plentiful application of <i>blanc de perle</i>. Her attire was gorgeous
+beyond the needs of the occasion, but left somewhat to be desired in the
+matter of tidiness, and exhaled a heavy scent of musk that made Sainty
+feel sick. She presented him to her mother, a terrible warning of what
+she was on the highroad to become. This lady was a shorter and twenty
+years’ older edition of Lady Arthur, more coarsely painted, more frankly
+vulgar, more consentingly fat, and she wore an olive green wig of Brutus
+curls.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you like the country, Mrs. de Vere?’ Sainty asked, as they sat at
+meat together in heavy silence.</p>
+
+<p>‘Muggins,’ the lady corrected, with a giggle. ‘De Vere was Maria’s&mdash;I
+mean Cynthy’s&mdash;stage name.’</p>
+
+<p>‘My <i>Nong de Tayarter</i>,’ said her daughter, with a warning<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_290">{290}</a></span> look at the
+dingy man, who was handing the potatoes with an air of forced
+abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘I was connected with the profession myself
+when I was young; there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it. It’s an art,
+and nowadays very highly considered. But you was askin’, my lord, if I
+liked the country. For a little visit like this, I don’t say, but to
+live in, year in, year out&mdash;no thank you. It may be all very well for
+them that were born to it, but give me London. I like to see my
+fellow-creeturs. I should think Cynthia’d die of the mopes in this
+place. I should, I know, if I was her.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It isn’t very lively,’ assented her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t think whatever you find to do all day,’ said the elder lady.</p>
+
+<p>‘I have my children,’ said Cynthia, with the air of a Cornelia, ‘and I’m
+getting quite interested in the village and the poor people.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, it wouldn’t amuse <i>me</i>,’ said her mother. ‘I call it cruel of
+your brother, my lord, to keep her mewed up in a place like this. Such a
+winter as she’s had. It’s all very well for him, ‘untin’ five days a
+week, and shootin’ with Squire this, that, and the other, but what fun
+does <i>she</i> get out of it, poor child? Their stuck-up wives don’t even
+come and see her, and the moment the ‘untin’ and shootin‘ ’s over, my
+lord was off to London and Newmarket, if he hadn’t been took ill. He was
+hardly here a week last summer. Does he offer to take <i>her</i>?&mdash;not him,
+not if he knows it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Three weeks at the sea was all the change <i>I</i> got last year,’ said Lady
+Arthur.</p>
+
+<p>‘And <i>that</i> I had to make you insist upon, or you wouldn’t have got
+<i>that</i>,’ chimed in mamma.</p>
+
+<p>‘It was more for baby’s sake than my own,’ said Cynthia; ‘the child
+needed sea air.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear little Arthur was baby then,’ explained Mrs. Muggins; ‘the second
+little dear wasn’t even expected. Now there’s two of ’em they’ll want a
+change more than ever.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_291">{291}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘You have two children?’ Sainty said. ‘Are they both boys?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Both of ’em,’ assented Lady Arthur proudly. ‘Poor as we are, there’s
+many people would be glad of my two little boys, or even one of ’em,’
+and she pointed this delicate allusion by a side glance at her mother,
+as who should say ‘I had him there.’</p>
+
+<p>The ill-concealed hostility of these people, the way they abused his
+brother to him, his sister-in-law’s hint at the want of ease in their
+circumstances, all combined to make Sainty’s visit thoroughly
+uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>‘What’s been the matter with Arthur?’ he asked, to change the subject.</p>
+
+<p>‘Eating and drinking too much,’ responded Mrs. Muggins readily. ‘And so
+I told him. “Arthur, my boy,” I says to him, “you mark my words: you’re
+digging your grave with your teeth.”<span class="lftspc">’</span></p>
+
+<p>Lady Arthur simpered. ‘It’s rather awkward to talk about insides to
+gentlemen,’ she said; ‘but it was of that nature. The doctor said he had
+had a narrow squeak of&mdash;what was the word?&mdash;perrynaitis, or perrytaitis
+or something. I told him he couldn’t expect ladies to remember his long
+Latin names, but it was some kind of inflammation from what he said.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What she don’t tell you,’ put in the irrepressible Mrs. Muggins, ‘was
+how she nursed him. Three nights she never went to bed nor had her
+clothes off her, and, as often as not, sworn at for her pains.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I only did my duty,’ said Cynthia nobly; ‘but I hope I shan’t often
+have to do the same again.’</p>
+
+<p>‘What she wants,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘after being shut up so much, and
+the anxiety and all, is a good change. Why don’t you come up and stop
+with me a bit, when I go back, and see the theatres and the shops? The
+spring fashions are very pretty: sunshades are very tasty this year, I
+must say.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I do want a new sunshade,’ Lady Arthur admitted, ‘and for that matter,
+lots of things; but Arthur don’t care <i>how</i> <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_292">{292}</a></span>I’m dressed, <i>now</i>,’ and
+she removed a discoloured tear with the untorn corner of an imitation
+lace handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>As they were leaving the dining-room, she detained Sainty a moment to
+whisper in his ear, ‘Has Arthur spoken to you about what I wrote?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘we have talked about it. I assured him that
+would be all right.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Arthur looked relieved. ‘What should I have?’ she asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh!&mdash;er&mdash;the same as now,’ Sainty gasped.</p>
+
+<p>‘You’ll think me very mercenary, I fear,’ said his sister-in-law, with
+an attempt to climb back into the grand manner from which she had so
+swiftly descended. ‘I don’t care for myself, you know; I’ve worked for
+my living before, but a mother must think of her children; even a bear
+will fight for its cubs.’</p>
+
+<p>The ‘cubs’ were presently produced, of course. The baby was a mere
+bundle of lace and ribbons; but the elder child, who appeared to be
+nearly two, and had been most carefully combed and starched and
+decorated for the occasion, was set upon two chubby legs within the
+door, and stared stolidly at his uncle. Sainty tried hard to see
+something of Arthur in the little boy who would probably be his heir,
+but the younger Arthur was a most unmistakable miniature edition of Mrs.
+Muggins, with the same prominent eyes and hanging lower lip, and even
+his ‘oiled and curled Assyrian locks’ suggested a sort of childish
+imitation of the Brutus wig. His grandmother was fully aware of the
+likeness, and evidently thought it must be a cause of unmixed
+gratification to Lord Belchamber.</p>
+
+<p>‘He favours our side of the family,’ she said proudly, ‘and, though I
+say it that should not, a handsomer little picture of a cherub I don’t
+think you’ll easily find.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Give uncle a sweet kiss, dearie,’ said the proud mother; but on
+Sainty’s stooping to receive the embrace, the amiable infant set up such
+a piteous howl, in which the baby promptly joined, that both children
+had to be conducted into retirement.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think,’ said Sainty, ‘if you’ll let me, I’ll go up and see<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_293">{293}</a></span> my
+brother again for a few minutes. I see I must be leaving in about half
+an hour, if I am to catch the afternoon train up. I told the fly to come
+back for me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, if you <i>must</i> go,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘there’s no good
+pressing you to stop. I’m afraid the lunch was not what you’re
+accustomed to. No doubt you have a French cook and every luxury, but
+<i>we</i> have to cut our coats according to the cloth, you know. I may not
+see you again before you go, I’m going to take mamma for a bit of an
+airing. I hope Lady Belchamber is well. She has no children, I think.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Arthur, when Sainty returned to him, ‘what do you think of
+old Mother Mug? <i>She’s</i> a beauty, isn’t she?’</p>
+
+<p>‘She seemed to think you were a little inconsiderate about your wife,
+that she needed a certain amount of change and amusement; and, indeed,
+that poor woman must have a dull life, so very different to everything
+she has been accustomed to.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No doubt the pair of ’em have been abusing me finely, and, of course,
+you take their part. What the devil’s she got to complain of, I should
+like to know? Haven’t I made an honest woman of her, and jolly well
+muckered my own life by doing it? I suppose she expects me to give up
+the little fun I do get, and take her to London and show her round.
+Don’t you marry your mistress, old man. You can take it from me, it
+isn’t good enough. But there!&mdash;you <i>are</i> married, and you haven’t got a
+mistress.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty did not escape without the usual demand for money, which Arthur
+irritated him by calling a loan.</p>
+
+<p>‘What’s the good of talking like that?’ Sainty said. ‘You know you
+haven’t the slightest intention of repaying it. As you are always
+rubbing it into me that you can’t live on what I give you, is it likely
+that next quarter, or next year, you will be able to save the amount you
+require out of the same insufficient allowance?’</p>
+
+<p>‘You don’t suppose I enjoy having to ask you for every dirty penny I
+want?’ retorted the invalid sullenly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_294">{294}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Then why don’t you try to live within your income, and then you
+wouldn’t have to?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I must say you always make it as unpleasant as possible.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, don’t let’s wrangle about money; I give it just the same. I’ll
+send you a cheque. Good-bye, and I hope you’ll soon be better.’</p>
+
+<p>‘And these are the people who are to come after me!’ Sainty said to
+himself bitterly as the train took him back to London. He had a vision
+of Belchamber, his beloved Belchamber, overrun and ravaged by these
+barbarians; of Cynthia ‘smartenin’ the old place a bit,’ with the aid of
+Mrs. Muggins’s suggestions as to what would be ‘tastey’; of Arthur
+cutting down the trees and selling the books and pictures to buy more
+horses and lose bigger bets; of that unattractive child with its stiff
+curls and goggle eyes coming in turn to make final havoc of the ruin its
+parents had left. And it was for this end that he had given his name,
+his future, his honour, into the keeping of a beautiful parasitic
+creature without heart or conscience, who obeyed no law but her own
+imperious appetites!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_295">{295}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Although</span> Belchamber had become a very different place from the home of
+his childhood, it was still a relief to Sainty to get into the country.
+It must be confessed that the parties with which Cissy delighted to fill
+the house were extraordinarily unexacting in the attention they demanded
+from their host, so that he was able, as in London, to lead very much
+his own life, undisturbed by his wife or her guests. Except at dinner,
+or in occasional passage meetings, as he slunk from the library to his
+own sacred quarters in the western pavilion, he seldom met any of them.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the young couple were, for the moment, nearly alone. Most of
+the society which Lady Belchamber specially affected was either at Cowes
+and Goodwood, or devoting a fortnight to the care of its property and
+the reception of its schoolboys before the annual round of Scottish
+visits. Sainty had been passingly surprised at Cissy’s decision to
+forego a very gay house-party in Sussex, and return quietly to
+Belchamber at the beginning of August. The young woman did not seem to
+be in her accustomed health; indeed, she admitted she was quite done up,
+and needed rest; there had even been a talk of ‘waters.’ She had begun
+to be not quite herself before they left London, and then there had been
+the curious incident of her fainting at her own party.</p>
+
+<p>Quite early in May, before Lady Charmington’s unfortunate visit, Cissy
+had announced her intention of giving some kind of entertainment, but
+the difficulty of deciding on what form it should take, and the
+impossibility of finding an evening when it would not interfere with
+something else she wanted to do, had combined to defer the execution of
+the plan till<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_296">{296}</a></span> nearly the end of the season. She found it so much easier
+to go to parties which other people had the trouble of arranging than to
+take the trouble to arrange one for herself, that Sainty had begun to
+hope the whole thing might fall through, when she suddenly fixed a date,
+called in Lady Eccleston to assist her, and telegraphed to Roumania to
+offer a fabulous sum to a celebrated violinist, who had not been heard
+in England that summer. By eking out this star with the only two
+expensive singers who had not yet left the opera, and rigorously
+excluding from her invitation-list any one to whom it could be a
+pleasure or excitement to be present, she managed to have a very
+brilliant and select little gathering indeed, which, but for the
+unfortunate <i>contretemps</i> above mentioned, would have been an
+unqualified success. The right dowagers were slumbering in the front
+row, the right younger people were jostling and chattering in the
+doorways, the talented performer was executing his most incredible
+calisthenics, when Sainty, jammed into a far corner of one of the big
+rooms, became aware of a bustle and commotion near the door of the
+boudoir. People moved and heaved and whispered, and ceased to bestow
+even a perfunctory attention on the music, which came rather abruptly to
+an end. He saw Claude Morland elbow through the crowd with a bottle and
+a glass, and some one near him said ‘Lady Belchamber has fainted.’</p>
+
+<p>Among the many duties thrown unexpectedly on him by the catastrophe,
+appeasing the anxiety of the guests and soothing the susceptibilities of
+the artists, he was startled by the speech, accompanied by a meaning
+pressure of the hand, with which Alice de Lissac took leave of him. ‘I
+am <i>so</i> glad,’ she whispered; ‘<i>now</i>, I feel sure all will come right.’
+Enlightenment as to her meaning came most unexpectedly from his
+mother-in-law next morning when he inquired of her after his wife’s
+health. Lady Eccleston, who had been the last to depart the night
+before, arrived at an amazingly early hour, and after a long visit to
+her daughter was still able to appear in Sainty’s apartments almost
+before he had finished his<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_297">{297}</a></span> breakfast. She was evidently in high
+good-humour and began by embracing him tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>‘How did you find Cissy?’ Sainty asked. ‘I haven’t sent to ask after her
+yet for fear of disturbing her. She seemed quite worn out last night; I
+think she has been doing much too much.’</p>
+
+<p>‘She is not <i>ill</i>,’ said Lady Eccleston, with a world of meaning. ‘I
+will not allow that she is <i>ill</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Sainty. ‘I thought she looked very seedy
+last night, I must say.’</p>
+
+<p>‘She will admit nothing,’ continued her ladyship. ‘I think I have told
+you <i>how</i> delicate and reticent she is on certain subjects. Even to
+<i>me</i>, her mother, and you know we have always been like sisters, she
+will tell nothing. Do you know what I think? she will tell no one till
+she has told <i>you</i>. That’s it; you may be sure that’s it. She will run
+no risk of your hearing it from any one but her. For heaven’s sake don’t
+let her know I have even hinted at anything&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘What <i>do</i> you mean, Lady Eccleston?’ Sainty gasped, a supposition of
+which only he knew the full grotesqueness beginning to dawn on him.</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear, sweet, innocent Sainty!’ cried Lady Eccleston, in a transport of
+archness. ‘You and my girl are made for one another. You are like a pair
+of child-lovers in a fairy-tale. I have told nothing, remember that; I
+will tell nothing. I will not rob dear Cissy of the joy of announcing it
+herself. Besides, as I say, I can only conjecture; she has absolutely
+refused to admit it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear Lady Eccleston,’ cried Sainty, in great perturbation, ‘I can’t
+pretend to misunderstand you; but, believe me, I think you are wrong. I
+am sure&mdash;I am <i>almost</i> sure&mdash;it cannot be as you suspect.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston shook her head and pursed her lips mysteriously. ‘A
+mother is not deceived,’ she said. ‘But recollect I have told you
+nothing. Cissy would never forgive me. I will not even congratulate you
+till <i>you</i> tell <i>me</i>. Meanwhile I shan’t breathe a word, not a word.
+Trust me’; and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_298">{298}</a></span> she again folded her son-in-law to her heart. ‘It was
+the one thing wanting to our happiness,’ burst from her, as it were
+involuntarily, as she hurried away, leaving Sainty too much bewildered
+to protest.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later they went into the country. Cissy was certainly not
+feeling well. She asked Sainty if he would mind going sooner than had
+been settled; she thought rest and country air would set her up. No, she
+wouldn’t see a doctor; there was nothing wrong with her. ‘I’m just
+knocked up with being on the go, morning, noon, and night, for months.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Your mother suggested the weirdest explanation,’ said Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy flushed crimson and then grew so pale that he feared she was going
+to repeat the performance of the night before.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mamma really is a bigger fool than I thought,’ she said hotly. ‘I
+didn’t think she would have had the idiotcy to carry that nonsense to
+<i>you</i>. What did you say?’</p>
+
+<p>‘What could I say? I told her it was impossible, but she would listen to
+nothing.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course it’s impossible! no one should know that better than <i>you</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of his first day at Belchamber Sainty ordered his
+little cart and drove as in duty bound to pay his respects to his
+mother. He had not seen Lady Charmington since she had left his house in
+wrath, and though he had written to her several times he had received
+only the briefest and coldest answers. It was not, therefore, with any
+very pleasing anticipations of the coming interview that he set out to
+visit her.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of those perfect, cool autumnal days which English people
+mistake for summer. The open spaces of the park were dappled with
+pleasant temperate sunlight like the flanks of the deer that fed there.
+Hundreds of rabbits squatted in the familiar glades or tilted themselves
+hastily into covert as he passed. Never had his home looked lovelier or
+more peaceful, or appealed more strongly to him. The woods and coppices
+called to him with a thousand voices,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_299">{299}</a></span> and his poor heart, starved of
+all human emotion, answered as only the lonely and despised among her
+children can answer to the great cry of Nature the universal mother.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as he drove along the smooth green alleys, there came to him the
+recollection of his brother and of the woman his brother had married.
+Ever since his visit to them Sainty had thought much about his
+sister-in-law, and had striven in his own mind to do her justice;
+terrible as she was to him æsthetically, he was forced to admit that she
+was a better sort than her husband. She did think of her children and do
+her duty by them according to her lights, whereas Arthur thought of no
+one but himself. After all, were Cissy’s ideals in life, except
+superficially, much less vulgar than Lady Arthur’s? He sometimes
+wondered if it were not better to have been frankly improper before
+marriage and settle down into an irreproachable wife and mother, than to
+be a frivolous little worldling, refusing to live with her husband, and
+lending numberless occasions to the tongue of scandal.</p>
+
+<p>Argue as he would, and rigidly impartial as he strove to make his mental
+attitude, the thought of his successors poisoned the beauty of the day
+for him and blotted out the sunshine. It was vain to tell himself that
+Cynthia’s standard of personal conduct was higher than Cecilia’s. Her
+ghastly veneer of gentility shocked his taste more than even her
+mother’s frank vulgarity or Arthur’s callous selfishness. To think of
+her and her shiny-faced babies at Belchamber was to profane his most
+sacred associations.</p>
+
+<p>He soon found that he need not have doubted his mother’s welcome. She
+received him with what, for her, was almost cordiality. On the rare
+occasions when Lady Charmington assumed a staid and humorless jocosity,
+she was wont to affect a Scottish accent and manner of speech, and
+Sainty noted with surprise this mark of unusual hilarity. ‘Come ben the
+house, man,’ she remarked; ‘the sight of ye is good for sair een.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How pretty you have made everything,’ said Sainty. ‘Your borders are
+lovely. There is no one like you for a garden, mother.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_300">{300}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington looked round her with a certain pride. ‘Yes, I think
+I’ve improved the place,’ she said. ‘Do ye know these late-flowering
+delphiniums? this is the only kind that blooms as late as this. I
+thought at one time my hollyhocks were going to have the disease, but
+I’ve brought them through it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘They are lovely; and how beautiful these roses are.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s the pink Ayrshire; it’s not so common as the white. You know the
+big bush in the corner of the west wing, I brought it from Scotland with
+me soon after I married; these are some cuttings from it I took a few
+years ago, and last autumn I moved them here; haven’t they grown?’ Thus
+talking on safe subjects, they entered the house, where Sainty’s
+admiration was claimed and freely given for various ingenious
+arrangements and improvements.</p>
+
+<p>‘And how’s Cissy?’ asked Lady Charmington presently, a certain subdued
+excitement in her look and manner.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is very good of you, mother, to ask after her so kindly,’ Sainty
+answered. ‘She doesn’t seem to me very well; she’s a little knocked up
+with all her gaieties, I think, but she won’t admit there’s anything
+wrong with her which a little rest and country air won’t set right.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Wrong with her! certainly not; what should ail her?’ cried Lady
+Charmington, with the same curious air of meaning more than she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I hope,’ Sainty began awkwardly, ‘that you won’t remember her rudeness
+and bad behaviour to you last May; it would be terribly painful to me to
+have you on bad terms with one another. I quite admit she behaved
+shockingly to you, but I hope you will overlook it. I feel sure if you
+will come and see her you’ll find her ready to meet you more than
+half-way.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I bear no malice,’ said Lady Charmington, with bewildering good-humour;
+‘and indeed I could find it in my heart to forgive her at this moment
+worse things than a little incivility to myself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s very kind of you,’ Sainty said; ‘but why specially at this
+moment?’ He was beginning to feel uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_301">{301}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington leaned forward and looked sharply in his face.</p>
+
+<p>‘Is it possible you really don’t know?’ she said. ‘You are the queerest
+couple I ever came across. I made sure you had come here to announce it
+to me, and I didn’t want to take the wind out of your sails by letting
+you see that I knew it already.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Know what? announce what?’ cried Sainty. He was beginning to divine his
+mother’s meaning; his mind reverted to his conversation with Lady
+Eccleston. Why did all these women persist in mocking him with
+congratulations on the impossible as though it were an accomplished
+fact? ‘Have you heard from Lady Eccleston?’ he asked, with apparent
+irrelevance.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington pounced on the implied admission.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oho! So you are not quite as ignorant as you pretend! But why should
+you try to keep it from <i>me</i>, when you must know it is the bit of news
+which it would give me more pleasure to hear than anything in the
+world?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear mother,’ said Sainty, ‘do you suppose if I had any such news to
+tell as you seem to imagine, that I shouldn’t have rushed to you with
+it? But it’s not so. It can’t be so.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But why shouldn’t it be so?’ asked Lady Charmington.</p>
+
+<p>‘Believe me, it’s impossible,’ Sainty was beginning, and then
+recollected that he couldn’t tell his mother <i>why</i> it was impossible. ‘I
+don’t know what’s come to everybody,’ he said lamely.</p>
+
+<p>‘Why did you ask if I had heard from Lady Eccleston? It shows you
+guessed what I meant.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Because she too has run away with the same idea, and when I told her
+that she must be mistaken, she only became more positive.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You see,’ said Lady Charmington triumphantly, ‘her own mother thinks
+so, and <i>she</i> ought to know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But really, really, I feel sure you are all wrong. I don’t want you to
+build on this, mother, because I know what a disappointment it will be
+to you.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_302">{302}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean to say your wife is not going to have a baby?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I certainly think not; she said herself her mother had been talking
+nonsense. Did she tell it to you as a fact, in so many words?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Lady Eccleston’s style is sometimes a little involved, but I certainly
+took her letter to mean&mdash;&mdash; Oh yes&mdash;there’s not a doubt of it; she
+<i>can’t</i> have meant anything else.’ Lady Charmington turned over a pile
+of letters on her writing-table, and selecting one began to mumble
+through it. ‘Um, um, London emptying fast, just on the wing myself,
+cannot go till I’ve found some one to read to my dear blind ... um, um,
+um. Ah! here it is: “I cannot refrain from giving you a hint of the
+great news. I know how it will rejoice your heart. But don’t betray me
+till the dear children tell you themselves. I should not say a word
+about it, only they are both so absurdly reticent and sensitive; it is
+quite possible they may neither of them mention it. Dear Cissy was
+almost angry with me; she tried to make out I was mistaken, but a
+mother’s eye! you and I know when....” Well, we needn’t go into all
+that; but you see, her mother’s convinced.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘I can only set on the other side that Cissy denies
+it herself.’</p>
+
+<p>‘How about her being taken ill at the party?’ It was evident that Lady
+Eccleston had gone into details.</p>
+
+<p>‘People may faint without being in that condition,’ protested Sainty;
+‘no one should know that better than I. Believe me, you are all building
+too much on that momentary loss of consciousness, which may as likely as
+not have come from tight lacing.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington shook her head impatiently. ‘Her mother says she has
+never been known to faint before in her life; and any one can see with
+half an eye she has always laced....’</p>
+
+<p>After this the conversation languished perceptibly. It was obviously
+futile to go on discussing the prospects of an heir, when the parties
+principally concerned agreed in denying<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_303">{303}</a></span> that there <i>were</i> any
+prospects. Lady Charmington, ‘convinced against her will,’ was very much
+‘of the same opinion still’; but balked of the topic on which she burned
+to dilate, she resolutely declined every other which her son brought
+forward. Sainty’s well-meant efforts to extract information on local or
+farming subjects were killed by the stony indifference she opposed to
+them, so that he presently took his leave, without obtaining more than a
+very qualified and doubtful agreement to his suggestion that she should
+come and see Cissy.</p>
+
+<p>At first the pertinacity of their two mothers in attributing miraculous
+offspring to Cissy and himself had seemed only a peculiarly galling
+mystification. Sainty never knew at just what moment a horrible solution
+of the puzzle had begun to suggest itself to him as possible. Had he
+fought against the conviction from the first, or did it come to him
+slowly and insidiously as his mother marshalled the reasons for her
+belief against his repeated denials? He could put his finger on no point
+in time when the suspicion had flashed into his brain; but by the time
+he reached his own door again, it seemed to him that there had been no
+hour of his unhappy married life when this terror had not sat grinning
+behind every trivial incident. He determined to see his wife, to know
+the worst at once. He asked for her, but learned she was out. ‘Her
+ladyship had gone driving late, after tea, and had not come in yet.’ He
+had no chance of speech with her through the evening, but when at last
+she went to her room, he followed boldly, hardly waiting for the answer
+to his knock before entering the room.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy had thrown herself on the sofa, and the loose sides of the
+tea-gown she had worn at dinner had a little fallen back. At the sound
+of the opening door she started up, and drew her draperies so swiftly
+about her that Sainty could not be sure if he had noticed or only
+imagined a slight change in her figure.</p>
+
+<p>‘You!’ she cried.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ he said, in as steady a voice as he could. ‘I want<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_304">{304}</a></span> to speak to
+you, and I could find no other chance of seeing you alone.’</p>
+
+<p>Their glances crossed and he read in her eyes a confirmation of his
+worst suspicions. Still he must be sure, must hear it from herself. She
+had looked startled, almost frightened, as she faced him, then her face
+took on a dogged sulky expression.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well?’ she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘I went to see my mother this afternoon,’ Sainty began.</p>
+
+<p>‘Your mother,’ Cissy broke in. ‘Oh! <i>she’s</i> been making mischief.’</p>
+
+<p>‘On the contrary, she was all amiability and delight, ready to make it
+up with you, to forgive everything “at this moment,” as she said.’</p>
+
+<p>‘That’s very kind of her; but why?’</p>
+
+<p>‘She was bursting with congratulations and excitement; she had had a
+letter from your mother.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Belchamber muttered something very unfilial about her parent. ‘And
+what did <i>you</i> say?’ she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>‘I? What <i>could</i> I say? I said they were both mistaken. That you had
+told me it was not true; and of course it isn’t&mdash;it <i>can’t</i> be; I don’t
+need to be told that.’</p>
+
+<p>He was pleading against his own certainty; from the time he came into
+the room, he knew what he should hear before he left it. Yet with his
+whole heart he was begging her still, if it were possible, to deny the
+shame that had come upon his house. He stood mute and suppliant before
+her, and she looked at him almost pityingly. Then with a little
+discouraged gesture she turned away and sat down again on the sofa.</p>
+
+<p>‘It <i>is</i> true,’ she said quietly. ‘You may as well know it first as
+last. In any case I couldn’t conceal it much longer; and now that mamma
+has guessed it, she will have told it to at least fifty people already.
+She little knows what she’s doing,’ she added, with a hard laugh that
+jarred on Sainty’s overstretched nerves.</p>
+
+<p>He had been sure of it, had known it. Yet now that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_305">{305}</a></span> words were
+spoken, that the fact confronted him, admitted, undeniable, irrevocable,
+he staggered with the blow.</p>
+
+<p>‘You are going to have a child?’ he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, and for all answer threw back the covering she had pulled
+across herself.</p>
+
+<p>‘But it is not mine.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yours!’ impatiently. ‘How should it be?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Good God!’</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence. Sainty moved restlessly about, as agitated as
+though it were he who was making the confession. Cissy was far the more
+self-possessed of the two. She sat upon her sofa watching his agonised
+motions with a faintly inquisitive distaste, as a person of imperfect
+sympathies might observe the contortions of some creature he had
+unwittingly injured.</p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose,’ she said presently, ‘you want to know whose it is?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No, no!’ cried Sainty shudderingly. ‘That least of all. For God’s sake
+don’t tell me!’ and he made a step towards her, as though he would have
+choked back the name he feared to hear.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy stared. ‘Queer!’ she ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause. A clock struck midnight, and was echoed loudly
+or faintly by others near or distant. Sainty counted the strokes, and
+was conscious of irritation when one began before another finished and
+embroiled his counting.</p>
+
+<p>It was again the woman who spoke first, and the question was
+characteristic, severely practical.</p>
+
+<p>‘What are you going to do about it?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know&mdash;I can’t think. Give me time&mdash;give me time to think.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy looked at him with undisguised contempt. ‘<i>I</i> should know what to
+do,’ she said. After a while she added, ‘Of course I can’t stay here
+now.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know&mdash;I don’t know,’ Sainty kept repeating. ‘We must do nothing
+in a hurry. Think of all it means, all the consequences.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_306">{306}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Cissy shrugged her shoulders. ‘It seems rather late for that,’ she
+remarked. ‘Besides, we can’t keep it to ourselves indefinitely, you
+know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘At least give me to-night to get my ideas into some sort of order,’
+Sainty pleaded. ‘You can’t be surprised if this is rather a shock to me,
+can you?’ he added, almost apologetically.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy laughed. ‘I wonder if any man ever took this announcement in just
+the same way?’ she said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_307">{307}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">To</span> Sainty, sitting alone in his old room in the western pavilion, it
+seemed that there was no bitterness left untasted. Far into the night he
+sat, his elbows on the table, his head buried in his hands. At first all
+seemed mere chaos and horror; he was stunned and could not think. But
+for the haunting consciousness of misery, he could almost have fancied
+that he had slept. Gradually, however, definite images began to emerge
+from the bewildered trouble of his brain.</p>
+
+<p>What was this thing that had come on him, through no fault of his own?
+He had done no wrong, snatched no forbidden pleasure; it was those other
+two who had sinned and enjoyed. Why must he be pilloried with them,
+share the scandal and the punishment? He, with his morbid shrinking from
+publicity, to have his private life turned inside out to the scorn and
+laughter of the vulgar! He knew well enough how little sympathy he had
+to expect; in all times and countries had not the betrayed husband been
+a butt for mirth? He wondered why. It seemed hard to him that of the
+three characters in the eternal drama of adultery, it should always be
+the one innocent person that was selected for satire. Surely it was the
+most elementary justice that punishment should fall on him who injures
+his fellow, not upon the injured. Yet of they three, who would suffer
+most? He, without a doubt, who had the greatest capacity for suffering.
+He saw, as in a dream, the dingy scene of the divorce-court, the
+headlines in the papers, his name dragged in the dirt. He pictured to
+himself the long martyrdom of cross examination, the bar pathos, the bar
+wit; he knew how he should flinch and writhe at the stake.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_308">{308}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In his case, moreover, the situation was complicated by the coming
+child. He had not only to proclaim his dishonour to the world, but must
+lay bare to every grinning idiot the grotesque story of his married
+life. If the husband whose rights had been invaded was absurd, what of
+him who had not even been able to obtain those rights. And he must stand
+up in open court and tell this thing of himself, he who felt the mere
+idea of marriage too sacred for spoken words! The cruel irony of it all!
+Was there no other issue but through that horrible sordid ordeal? What
+did men do in his position? What was the <i>beau rôle</i> for the injured
+husband? He thought of Dumas’s ‘<i>Tue-la!</i>’ and wondered how it would
+have advanced matters if he had murdered Cissy, supposing he had the
+strength and courage to do it. It was only to shift the scene; another
+court, an added horror, but the same publicity, the same scandal, the
+same story to tell, the same agony to undergo.</p>
+
+<p>He almost regretted the foolish old fantastic code of honour which would
+have made it incumbent on him to challenge the seducer, and as likely as
+not be killed by him. Death <i>might</i> have been a solution, but there was
+no such easy way out of the situation as that. The hand that had done
+him so much wrong would not render him that supremest service.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto he had succeeded almost without conscious effort in keeping the
+inevitable third in this grim trio almost an abstraction. Yet he
+remembered how passionately he had refused to know, when his wife had
+offered him the name of her lover. Now the figure was beginning to take
+shape against his will; a tall figure with a false air of slenderness, a
+figure that by the languid grace of its movements counteracted the
+slight tendency to heaviness in the hips and shoulders. How well he knew
+that back, the sinuous curves of the waist, the sidelong persuasive
+droop of the head; he had seen it walking away beside Cissy on the
+afternoon of their very first meeting. It had been pressed against the
+glass door that held him an unwilling witness on the night<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_309">{309}</a></span> of the ball
+at Sunborough House. How clearly the impressions came back to him, the
+dusky garden speckled leopard-wise with lanterns, the lithe, shimmering
+blackness of the figure at his side trying to instil the doubts he would
+not harbour, the swift swing back of the door, the words so clearly
+overheard, that then had held no meaning for him. Still it was only a
+back, he had not seen the face, the gentle, kindly, sly, mocking face.
+He pressed his icy fingers tight against his hard straining eyeballs as
+if he could shut it out, that face he would not see. Not <i>he</i>! not he of
+all men! Had not his mother mentioned other men with whom her imprudence
+was compromising Cissy? Oh! but that back was unmistakable. And then the
+voice! low and soft, but so distinct; he could hear it, could hear the
+words, counselling the horrible meanness of which he had so nearly been
+the dupe. He understood <i>now</i> the secret of her mysterious behaviour in
+the library that night. Surely such baseness was unbelievable; even
+Cissy had recoiled from carrying out the scheme.</p>
+
+<p>For one brief moment he wished she could have done it&mdash;that he might
+have been deceived. ‘I need never have known!’ he cried, and his voice
+speaking aloud in the silence of the night startled him like the cry of
+a creature that is being killed.</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head and looked about him. The candle he had brought had
+burnt almost to the socket; he rose and lighted two others from it, and
+blew it out. The chill of the tireless summer night made him shiver, but
+there was that which lay so cold about his heart that he welcomed the
+physical discomfort as almost a relief. He moved about the room for a
+little, but soon tiring, went and sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>The same procession of black thoughts kept up their weary circle through
+his head; round and round he followed them, yet came no nearer any
+light, nor any decision of what it behoved him to do under the
+circumstances. Was this the end of all his dreams, all his sacrifices,
+all his endeavour for others, all he had hoped to accomplish? Was
+everything to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_310">{310}</a></span> go down in this whirlpool of a disgrace greater even than
+that which Arthur’s marriage had brought upon them? It was Arthur’s
+marriage that had been the origin of all his troubles. Oh yes, he saw it
+clearly enough now; however he had deceived himself at the time, he had
+married, had taken on himself the most sacred obligations, for no object
+but the mean one of excluding his brother. Perhaps this was his
+punishment.</p>
+
+<p>He saw what a puppet he had been in the hands of two strong-willed
+women, an instrument to satisfy the vulgar ambitions of the one, the
+angry revenge of the other. What a failure, what a dreary failure he had
+been all through! For years he had had but one thought, one object in
+life, to steer Arthur past the rocks and quicksands of youth, and anchor
+him safe in the harbour of property and responsibility, and with what
+result? What had come of all his plans, his careful tact, his delicate
+manipulation of his mother and brother? Arthur’s marriage afforded a
+comment of grimmest irony on his efforts in that direction. Since then,
+as ardently as he had once longed to renounce his birthright in favour
+of his brother, he had striven to preserve it from that contaminating
+touch, to keep that brother’s wife from sitting in their mother’s place;
+and, once more, with what result? To instal in the innermost shrine of
+all he held most sacred a woman no less wanton than her sister-in-law,
+only without her redeeming qualities and the excuses of her early
+training, one who would make his home a wilderness, his name a by-word!
+Shame, then, shame either way, and nothing accomplished!</p>
+
+<p>It is not to be supposed that he thought these things out for himself,
+coldly, sententiously, in order, as, for the sake of the reader, they
+have to be written down. They were the residuum of all sorts of wild and
+whirling fancies, flung up at him, as it were, out of a seething
+cauldron of black wretchedness, which was rather sensation than thought.
+Not once, moreover, but a thousand times, did each and all of them
+appear and vanish in a kind of witches’ dance to his weary<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_311">{311}</a></span> brain,
+without perceptible sequence or connection. He seemed somehow to be
+outside his own consciousness, to sit and watch these images, as, one by
+one, some demon held them up for his tormenting, yet all the while every
+nerve in him tingled with the apprehension of how intimately they were
+part of himself.</p>
+
+<p>As he sat gazing stonily at despair, there came a soft stirring of the
+stillness, a murmur, a breath; then from without, a faint chirping.</p>
+
+<p>
+‘... as in dark summer dawns,’<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="nind">he quoted mechanically, and was aware of a vague irritation that he
+could not remember the beginning of the line.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds<br></span>
+<span class="i1">To dying ears, when unto dying eyes<br></span>
+<span class="i1">The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.’<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">He looked. The chintz curtains that veiled the windows were growing
+ghostly and transparent. It was the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>All through the night he had sat with his trouble, yet the morning found
+him as helpless and undecided as ever.</p>
+
+<p>‘To dying ears, when unto dying eyes,’ he repeated dully. ‘Ah! if it
+were but that! Death! how easy to die! What a rest, what an escape!’ It
+was life, not death, life with its hideous decisions and
+responsibilities that he had got to face.</p>
+
+<p>The candle flames became more spectral as the light slowly broadened,
+the light of a new day, the day in which he would have to make up his
+mind, to take a line, to <i>act</i>. There was no way out&mdash;none. Once more he
+was confronted with the inevitable, the pitiless future coming every
+moment nearer, with all it held of suffering and shame, the
+fruitlessness of all his efforts, all in vain, in vain!</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly, as if some voice had spoken, came the question ‘Why?’ Why
+need it be in vain? The solution, after all, lay ready to his hand. He
+had only to hold his tongue. It was all so simple. ‘Their strength is to
+sit still,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_312">{312}</a></span>’ he thought. Why, among all that had passed through his
+wretched head, had this never struck him? He had wished for a child to
+bar his brother and his brother’s sons from the succession. Well! here
+was the child, his wife’s child, born in wedlock, legally, lawfully his.
+Who could ever say it was not? No one but they two, and of their silence
+he could be tolerably sure.</p>
+
+<p>At first he put the idea from him with horror. It was a cheat, a fraud.
+He, with his fastidiously high standard of conduct, to cozen his brother
+out of his inheritance by a shabby trick. Impossible! The thing was
+impossible.</p>
+
+<p>He got up, and put back the curtain, and stood looking out into the
+silence of the growing morning. Over opposite to him, the grey sky was
+beginning to flush with palest rose, in which the last stars were
+growing dim; but as yet the great quadrangle lay all in black shadow,
+out of which the restored statues stood vaguely up like shapes of evil
+menacing the eastern glory. No, no, no. Better the talk, the scandal,
+the publicity of the divorce court, than to stand convicted before the
+tribunal of his own conscience. Whatever else went down in the shipwreck
+of his life, let him at least keep his self-respect. ‘What did it profit
+a man to gain the world, and lose his own soul?’ Yet how often in the
+old days, in his talk with Newby, had he inveighed against the
+selfishness of the Puritan idea, which would make the saving of one’s
+soul the object of conduct. Surely the only rational motive was the
+consideration of how one’s acts affected others. In the present instance
+who would be the worse for his silence? No one would be hurt or
+disappointed. These people did not expect to succeed; they had given up
+all hopes of it when he married. Had they not told him so themselves? On
+the other hand, there was his mother, his mother who had done so much
+for him. He remembered how he had found her, when she had first learned
+the truth about Arthur, and terror mixed with his grief at the mere
+conjecture of what she might say and do with the marriages of both her
+sons thus ending in shame. Their talk that afternoon had shown him how<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_313">{313}</a></span>
+much her hopes were centred in the birth of an heir to Belchamber. The
+mere prospect had blotted out the very recollection of her quarrel with
+Cissy, and Lady Charmington was not a forgiving woman. His fear of her
+had always gone hand in hand with his love of her, and both made him
+wince at the thought of her disappointment. Had he the right to bring
+this fresh blow upon her, who had suffered so much, merely to salve his
+own conscience? After all, had he any self-respect to sacrifice? Was it
+possible for him to have a meaner opinion of himself than he had always
+entertained?</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the sun topped the mass of the eastern wing, flooding
+with light the broad spaces of grass and gravel at his feet, and casting
+a long ray over the tall, stately <i>façade</i> of the beautiful house. And
+at the thought of all that was symbolised by that pomp of hewn and
+fretted stone, the aristocrat that lurked so deep within him, so
+overlaid with fine theories of brotherhood and equality that he was
+unconscious of his very existence, stirred and claimed his own. ‘For the
+credit of my house,’ he murmured uneasily, as he turned away from the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>He did not yield at once, or without a struggle, but he knew from the
+first that it would come to that. From the moment the idea leaped
+full-grown like Athene from his brain, it was fully armed to meet every
+point that had distressed him. He feared scandal. There need be no
+scandal. He shrank from the ignominy of a divorce case. There need be
+none. Did the thought of unveiling to the public eye the bitter
+humiliation of his married life revolt him? Here was a means not only of
+secrecy, but actual disproof. Did it break his heart to think of
+inflicting such a blow upon his mother? He had only to be silent to
+crown her dearest wishes, and make her the happiest woman in England.
+Had he married, enduring all that marriage had brought him, that he
+might keep his sister-in-law and her children from the heritage of his
+name and home? Here, too, was the one thing necessary for that end. And
+to attain all these desired objects there was nothing to do, no word to
+say, no lie to tell.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_314">{314}</a></span> He had only to let things take their course. It
+was the line of least resistance, so easy, so fatally easy!</p>
+
+<p>To a man of his character and disposition, what a temptation, what a
+terrible temptation! He was weakened by his long vigil, the little stock
+of vitality that he could ever call to his assistance, worn almost to a
+thread with watching and misery. He knew he should give in. To all the
+arguments in favour of it, what had he to oppose but one poor little
+scruple of personal honour?</p>
+
+<p>He wondered if his wife had known what he would do before he had thought
+of it himself? Had she traded on her certainty of his cowardice? At such
+a suspicion, he almost grew strong again; but no&mdash;she had seemed to
+entertain no doubt that he would repudiate her. He fancied she had even
+felt a certain relief at the prospect of being rid of the semblance of a
+connection with himself, and the freedom to claim openly the protection
+of the man whom, in her way, she loved. If so, here was another argument
+in favour of silence. By it he could thwart and punish her.</p>
+
+<p>He wandered into his brother’s old room, next his own. Here the drawn
+blinds made still a glimmering twilight, and lent an unreality to the
+familiar objects. He went and looked at the old school photographs.
+There was one of Arthur in a group of the cricket eleven, which had
+always been his special favourite. The figure stood squarely on its
+legs, the brawny arms bare to the elbow and crossed upon the chest, a
+boyish grin lighting the handsome face, from which the cap was pushed
+back by the strong upward spring of the hair above the brow. It was the
+image of youth, and life, and happiness. Long he stood motionless before
+it, and then he bent forward and pressed his poor pale lips to the cold
+glass. ‘Arthur,’ he whispered. ‘My little Arthur, you are dead, and so
+is your miserable brother who loved you so. You are no more that brutal,
+querulous egoist that I saw the other day, than he is the wretch who can
+stoop to crime to rob you.’</p>
+
+<p>Distant sounds showed him that the household was beginning<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_315">{315}</a></span> to be astir.
+Before his man came to wake him he must have removed the signs of his
+long vigil. He returned hurriedly to his own room, once more drew the
+curtain across the window, extinguished the lights, and, hastily
+undressing himself, crept into bed. Already the sense of having
+something to hide stung him with a terrible self-contempt. He had caught
+sight of his drawn, haggard face as he passed the mirror. It was the
+face of a coward.</p>
+
+<p>He did not leave the pavilion all day. He sent word he was ill. That at
+least was true enough, but late in the evening, as he was lying on the
+sofa in his study, there came a knock at the door, and Cissy entered.
+Though perhaps a shade paler than usual, nothing in her appearance
+suggested a guilty wife come to hear her sentence.</p>
+
+<p>‘I have come to return your visit of last night,’ she said, as she stood
+looking down on him.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty groaned and hid his face. At sight of her, the desire to brand
+her as what she was almost conquered, where conscience and sense of
+honour had failed&mdash;almost, but not quite.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy kept her indifferent pose, playing with the ornaments she wore.</p>
+
+<p>‘Well?’ she asked at last. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes.’ His voice came muffled and strange.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Belchamber started. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded, with
+slightly quickened interest.</p>
+
+<p>‘Nothing.’</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause.</p>
+
+<p>‘Do you mean to say,’ she asked at last, ‘that you are going to
+acknowledge the child?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes.’</p>
+
+<p>She turned away from him with a half-stifled exclamation. Was it relief
+or disappointment? he could not tell. After a time she flung a word over
+her shoulder: ‘Why?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Because it happens to suit me,’ he said doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>The silence was broken by the little laugh he hated.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_316">{316}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘I suppose I ought to be very grateful to you,’ she sneered.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty sprang from the couch. ‘I have ceased to expect gratitude or any
+other kindly feeling from you,’ he blazed out at her; but his wrath fell
+as quickly as it had flared.</p>
+
+<p>Her puny disdain was powerless to hurt him, merged in the measureless
+ocean of his self-contempt. There would be lies enough, acted, looked,
+and lived, if not spoken. At least to her there need be no pretence of
+an attitude; if not with an accomplice, with whom may one permit himself
+the luxury of being honest?</p>
+
+<p>‘After all, why should I scold at you?’ he said wearily. ‘You have
+nothing to thank me for. Don’t suppose, if I stoop to this incomparable
+baseness, that it is with any thought of pleasing <i>you</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy stared at him, cowed by the dim apprehension of a tragedy she was
+incapable of understanding; and it was not without a certain
+satisfaction that he saw in her eyes the vague terror of the
+incomprehensible beginning to permeate her habitual scorn of him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_317">{317}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIV">CHAPTER XXIV</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">Though</span> the birth of an heir to the house of Belchamber might naturally
+be supposed a festive occasion, it brought little satisfaction to those
+principally concerned. It is true that Lady Charmington talked broad
+lowland for weeks; nor was Lady Eccleston, who kept a supply of
+conventional sentiment always on tap, likely to be wanting at such a
+time; but in spite of every grandmotherly effort to impart a correct
+sense of rejoicing, a certain flatness attended what should have been
+such an auspicious event. Cissy, entirely preoccupied by terror of
+physical suffering, insisted that her confinement should take place in
+London, where she would be within reach of the best professional aid, to
+the extreme disgust of her mother-in-law, who had decided that
+Belchamber was the appropriate scene on which the newcomer’s eyes should
+first open. Sainty, being appealed to, expressed the most complete
+indifference on the subject; he said he didn’t suppose it mattered to
+the baby where it was born, or that it would be likely to retain the
+smallest recollection of the event. ‘It will be a great disappointment
+to everybody,’ Lady Charmington remarked. ‘Besides, it will mean your
+not being here at Christmas. How do you expect your people to rejoice in
+the birth of an heir, if you slink away and let it happen in London,
+like anybody else’s child?’</p>
+
+<p>‘How do you know it will <i>be</i> an heir?’ Sainty said. ‘Why shouldn’t it
+be a girl?’</p>
+
+<p>His mother disdained to notice such a preposterous suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>‘It ought to be here,’ she kept repeating.</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>I</i> wasn’t born here,’ Sainty said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_318">{318}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘That was quite different; Belchamber wasn’t our home in those days.
+Your father and I hardly ever came here in the old lord’s time; for that
+matter, they weren’t here much themselves. Besides, I wanted to be with
+my mother; there is nothing to prevent Cissy having <i>her</i> mother with
+her here; things are very different for <i>her</i> from what <i>I</i> had to put
+up with. I should like to have seen my mother-in-law allowing me to be
+confined in her house! but your poor father felt it very much.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well,’ Sainty said at last, ‘you can settle it with Cissy; if you can
+persuade <i>her</i>, you’re welcome to; <i>I</i> never can, and in the present
+case I don’t care to.’</p>
+
+<p>Every allusion to the coming event was the turning of a sword in his
+heart. His mother’s restrained eagerness was not less terrible to him
+than Lady Eccleston’s loud jubilation.</p>
+
+<p>He never knew if Lady Charmington availed herself of his suggestion that
+she should appeal to Cissy. Certainly, if she did, it was with no
+success, for long before there was any possibility of the child making
+its appearance, Lady Belchamber removed to London, taking her parent
+with her. Cissy, as usual, when frightened or needing help, turned to
+her mother, for whom, as we know, she cherished no very profound respect
+at other times; and Lady Eccleston was not even permitted to return to
+her own house in Chester Square, but must take up her abode with her
+daughter, who considered it a great concession if she allowed her to go
+out for an hour’s shopping. It is not to be wondered at if mamma became
+a little important under the circumstances, and gave herself airs in
+writing to the other dowager, who must have hated having to stay and eat
+her heart out at Belchamber, with no hand in what touched her so nearly.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Lady Charmington abounded in strange recondite lore, and gave much
+advice which was a little out of date at the stage proceedings had
+reached. ‘On no account let her mother coddle your wife,’ she wrote to
+Sainty. ‘If she wants a son, make her take exercise and not be too
+luxurious or over-eat herself.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_319">{319}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Every day the letters came, advocating a Spartan <i>régime</i>; but the
+messages never reached their destination. Sainty would have cut his
+tongue out sooner than address a word to Cissy on the subject, who, none
+the less, produced in due course an infant of the desired sex.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington hurried up to Roehampton, and actually dragged poor old
+Lady Firth into London to visit her great-grandson. The old lady, who
+had become nearly blind, and now hardly ever left her own fireside,
+peered curiously at the baby through two pairs of spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>‘I don’t know who he is like,’ she said. ‘You <i>have</i> a look of your
+father, Sainty, but you are <i>more</i> like our family; this little lamb
+isn’t like either. No, certainly not a bit like <i>you</i>, nor yet like your
+wife, who is so fair. I don’t know, I’m sure, who he takes after.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Does it matter much, grandmamma,’ Sainty asked, ‘as long as he is
+strong and healthy?’</p>
+
+<p>His mother turned on him promptly. ‘Oh! <i>you</i> never think anything
+matters. Can’t you even take an interest in your own first-born son?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Come, mother, it doesn’t follow that I take no interest because I don’t
+think it matters who he looks like,’ Sainty protested meekly.</p>
+
+<p>He had several occasions to curse the propensity common to the whole
+female sex, when brought into the presence of a newborn babe, to hunt
+down and fix a likeness for it to some one or other of its kinsfolk. It
+seemed as though the one important thing to do for the little Lord
+Charmington was to determine this vexed question of resemblance. The
+child was of a marked type, too, with long-lashed dark eyes, and an
+unusual quantity of very black hair, as far removed from Sainty’s sandy
+insignificance as from the delicate fairness of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>At last the matter was set at rest quite unexpectedly, and Sainty
+breathed more freely. The duchess, who had come to town for a little
+Christmas shopping, called to inquire after Cissy, and requested to be
+shown the baby.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_320">{320}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘<i>Eh bien! vous voilà père!</i>’ she remarked, looking rather quizzically
+at her grandson, as he piloted her upstairs. ‘My compliments! And how is
+Monsieur Bébé? Is he pretty, at least? brown or blond, a Chambers, a
+Bigorr, or,’ with the faintest pause of indescribable insolence, ‘an
+Eccleston?’</p>
+
+<p>Belchamber took dexterous advantage of opening doors, giving warning of
+steps, and such small attentions, to avoid giving any direct answer, but
+he might have saved himself the trouble. The eternal topic was at once
+brought up by the monthly nurse, as she proudly displayed her charge.</p>
+
+<p>‘We can’t think who he is like, your grace,’ she said, folding the
+flannel back from the tiny face. ‘Just look at his beautiful great eyes,
+and did ever you see such a head of hair on a babe?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty could have throttled her. ‘That’s the one thing every one seems
+to think of,’ he said rather testily.</p>
+
+<p>‘Like?’ said the duchess. ‘There can be no question; he’s like <i>me</i>. You
+know the miniature of me as a little girl&mdash;the child is the image of
+it.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty started; he had so entirely forgotten that her grace was ever
+dark, that the resemblance had escaped him, but once pointed out it was
+salient. He felt like a criminal who discovers that the detective he has
+been dodging is on the track of some one else. After all, she was <i>his</i>
+grandmother too!</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course!’ he cried, ‘how stupid every one has been not to think of
+it.’ And the next time the unwelcome subject was mentioned in his
+presence (by his mother, who had been showing the precious infant to
+Alice de Lissac), he said quite naturally, ‘Oh, we’ve settled <i>that</i>
+question. He’s just like the miniature at Sunborough House of the
+duchess when she was a child.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington, who loved her mother-in-law no better than Cissy did
+hers, was most unwilling to admit the likeness, but could not deny it;
+and there being no doubt that baby derived his appearance from the
+member of the family she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_321">{321}</a></span> least wished him to resemble, was in future as
+averse as her son could desire to all discussion of what had occupied
+her so much.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston, on the contrary, who loved all great people, was
+enchanted to point out the likeness to every member of her huge
+acquaintance. ‘Isn’t he like the <i>dear</i> duchess?’ she would cry. ‘It is
+<i>so</i> clever of him to have picked out the most beautiful of all his
+relations to take after, bless him!’</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, the shortlived interest in the hope of the Chamberses
+rapidly waned. The bonfires in his honour had hardly burnt themselves
+out before this poor little scion of a noble house found himself in as
+much danger of being altogether neglected as if he had been of quite
+humble birth. Lady Charmington returned to the country, and Lady
+Eccleston, having provided a grand nurse and nursery-maid with
+unimpeachable testimonials out of one of the most aristocratic nurseries
+in the land, gradually allowed herself to be reabsorbed by her numerous
+avocations, social and philanthropic.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy has been most inadequately represented if it need be stated that
+the very last person to trouble her head about the poor little thing was
+its mother. She was entirely at one with the fashionable <i>accoucheur</i>
+who attended her, in his opinion that to nurse the child would be far
+too great a strain on her constitution. After the briefest period of
+seclusion which the same authority could be got to say was sufficient
+for her own restoration, and a flying visit to the seaside, she seemed
+to have but one object in life, to make up by extra assiduity for the
+weeks she had been compelled to sacrifice from the engrossing occupation
+of amusing herself. If before she had been much out of her own house,
+she was now hardly ever in it. The only limit to the number of her
+engagements was the fear lest she should be betrayed into doing
+something that was not ‘smart’; and even with this important
+restriction, they were far too numerous to admit of her having any time
+to bestow upon her son.</p>
+
+<p>As for Sainty, he hardly ever saw her. In so large a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_322">{322}</a></span> house, with a
+perfectly mutual desire to keep apart, it was not difficult to avoid
+meeting. He had had one necessary interview with her after the birth of
+the boy, in which he had told her some very plain truths.</p>
+
+<p>‘You may as well understand the situation quite clearly,’ he said. ‘In
+return for the various things you enjoy as a result of being believed to
+be my wife, I have hitherto asked nothing of you; after what has
+happened, I would not take it if you offered it on your knees. I made
+just one condition, which you have not thought fit to observe, that
+there should be no scandal; to avoid it, I have sacrificed my last shred
+of self-respect. Don’t, therefore, think that you can count on a like
+cowardice on my part in the future. I pretend to no sort of control over
+your actions. What you <i>do</i> is of no consequence to me; but on just this
+one thing I <i>insist</i>: I must never hear you talked about, and, above
+all, there must be no repetition of this&mdash;this occurrence.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I see,’ said Cissy. ‘Having by hook or by crook got the heir for which
+you and your mother were so anxious, you have no further use for me, and
+will seize the next opportunity to get rid of me.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty looked at her a moment, so antagonistic, so hard, so insolent in
+her youth and beauty, to which her late recovery lent a character almost
+ethereal. Bitter as her taunt was, he could not deny its substantial
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>‘Precisely,’ he said, and left her without another word.</p>
+
+<p>While Cissy immersed herself in social frivolities, Sainty was trying to
+find in work forgetfulness of the child he was ashamed to remember. He
+devoted long hours to humble toil and study, of which the only result
+would be a paragraph in the report of some learned society, read by no
+one but its own members. He attended the debates in the House of Lords
+with unparalleled assiduity, and came to be a familiar figure in the
+gallery on important nights in the other House. The scarcity of Radical
+peers gave him an extrinsic value for the leaders of his party, while
+his patience, powers of work, and known interest in all schemes of
+beneficence,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_323">{323}</a></span> marked him as specially designed by Providence to serve on
+Parliamentary Committees.</p>
+
+<p>There was one important point of difference between the couple. While
+Cissy’s absorption in her favourite pursuits was quite natural and
+genuine, and she found no difficulty whatever in forgetting her maternal
+duties, it was only by consistent effort that Sainty succeeded in
+shutting out the recollection of his shame. The image of the baby, with
+its tell-tale dark eyes, was perpetually between him and the page he was
+writing or the pamphlet on which he was trying to fix his attention.</p>
+
+<p>As we know, his rooms were on the ground-floor of the London house,
+while the nurseries were up three flights of stairs; it seemed
+impossible that any echo should penetrate from them to his study, yet he
+was always fancying that he detected faint sounds of crying from the
+upper regions of the house. Sometimes he would stop in his work and
+listen, and then, convinced that his imagination had played him a trick,
+turn again to his reading or writing, only to be haunted by this
+illusive wailing as before.</p>
+
+<p>One day in the early spring, the child being then some three months old,
+this impression was more than usually persistent. At last, exasperated
+by his inability to fix his mind on what he was doing, Sainty pushed
+away his papers and went out upon the back stairs to listen. This time
+there was no question of imagination. Perhaps some door usually closed
+had been left open, but whatever the explanation, there was no doubt
+that a most real and material lamentation, such as the human infant
+alone is capable of producing, was echoing through the house. He
+returned to his table and sat down again. ‘I suppose babies of that age
+always yell,’ he said to himself, and he recalled Arthur’s complaint of
+that tendency in his own offspring. Why, of all people in the world,
+need the baby’s crying make him think of his brother? The recollection
+of that stucco rectory in the shires, where the birth of the little Lord
+Charmington must have aroused anything but enthusiasm, made him start
+and tremble like a felon.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_324">{324}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For a moment he fancied the noise had ceased, but a second visit to the
+landing convinced him such was not the case. He looked at the clock. It
+was almost time for him to go down to Westminster; he would go out and
+walk a little first&mdash;sometimes he thought he did not have enough fresh
+air&mdash;it would do him good. He put away his papers, gathered together
+some loose sheets of notes that he wanted, and left the room.</p>
+
+<p>What made him turn to the stairs instead of the front door he never
+quite knew. Some occult power seemed to draw his feet. He couldn’t go
+out to do battle for the children of the poor with that lamentable
+wailing ringing in his ears, and make no inquiry into what ailed the
+child under his own roof.</p>
+
+<p>He had not mounted to these upper floors since he had conducted the
+duchess thither, but if he had been in any doubt about the room, the
+cries, which seemed to redouble in force as he drew nearer, would have
+been a quite sufficient guide. Through the wide open door Sainty could
+see the interior of the nursery before he entered. Lady Eccleston had
+given the rein to her grandmotherly fancy in the provision of all things
+needful and luxurious for the young heir. He was at least sumptuously
+lodged; the walls were gay with sanitary illustrations of juvenile
+literature from Miss Greenaway’s charming designs; buttercups and
+daisies sprinkled the window hangings; everything streamed with pale
+blue satin ribbon, and the very powder-box, of choicest ivory, had the
+mystic word ‘Baby’ slanting in turquoises across the lid. But nothing
+was ranged, or ordered, or in its proper place. The costly little
+garments so lavishly provided were tossed about with careless profusion,
+damp cloths trailed over the floor, a common enamelled saucepan for
+heating the child’s food had been set down on a lace robe, and
+half-washed-out feeding-bottles mingled on the table with the materials
+from which the nurse had evidently been manufacturing a new hat for
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>The room was bare of human presence save for the emitter of the howls,
+who was lying alone in his cot, roaring himself<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_325">{325}</a></span> purple in the face. He
+had kicked himself free of his wrappings, and his poor little legs were
+quite cold to the touch. Without attempting to cope with the
+complication of integuments, Sainty loosely pulled the coverlet over the
+child, and then looked with horror and anxiety at the convulsed face.
+What was to be done? ‘Don’t!’ he said imploringly, in no particular
+expectation of being understood, but from a general instinct to say
+something. ‘<i>Please</i> don’t!’</p>
+
+<p>Whether the sense of a human presence was of some comfort to the baby,
+or it was only startled by the sound of an unfamiliar voice, it is
+certain that it intermitted its screaming, and slowly unpuckering its
+face, allowed the hidden eyes to appear. They were all wet and shiny
+with tears, their long lashes glued into points like a series of tiny
+camel’s-hair paint brushes.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty wondered if he dared wipe them. ‘It can’t be comfortable to have
+one’s face all slobbered over like that,’ he thought, and taking out his
+handkerchief began, as lightly and tenderly as he could, to remove some
+of the superfluous moisture that seemed to exude from every feature. The
+baby, far from being sensible of this attention, showed unmistakable
+signs of being about to resume its lament. Sainty swiftly desisted from
+his endeavours, and once more implored its forbearance.</p>
+
+<p>The baby, with its face all made up for a fresh howl, paused suddenly
+when, so to speak, half-way there, and once more opened its eyes. It
+stared solemnly at Sainty and Sainty stared back at it. What dumb
+interchange of intelligence passed between them it would be hard to say,
+but presently a faint windy smile flickered across one side of the
+baby’s face leaving the other immutably grave.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was transported with gratitude; he nodded and smiled repeatedly
+at the baby and tried to think of pleasant noises to make to it. One of
+the little hands had broken loose from under the coverlet and was
+beating the air&mdash;sparring at life with the aimless hostility of infancy.
+Very gingerly Sainty laid his forefinger against the palm, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_326">{326}</a></span>
+instantly the absurd fingers closed round it and held him prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>Long he stood beside the cradle gently swaying the hand that held his
+own back and forth and contemplating the baby, which, soothed by the
+rhythmic movement, seemed inclined to sleep. Since it ceased crying, its
+face had become a touch pleasanter and more normal colour, and, as the
+suffusing crimson died away, Sainty could notice how the poor chin was
+chafed and red where it had rubbed on the wet unchanged bib; the tiny
+nails, too, were edged with black, and surely, he thought, a carefully
+tended baby ought not to smell as sour as this one did. It was being
+borne in upon him that the child was neglected, a thought which made him
+not less indignant that he could not feel wholly without blame in the
+matter. True, the child was not his, but by acknowledging it he had
+accepted responsibility; he knew far too well how little reason there
+was to expect that its mother would occupy herself with such matters to
+think of sheltering himself behind the plea that it was her business. It
+was monstrous that the sins of its parents should be visited on this
+helpless creature. The queer little claw still grasped his finger, and
+he was still swinging it and crooning gently, when the nurse hurried
+into the room and was visibly taken aback at sight of her master. At
+once she was voluble in explanation and excuse.</p>
+
+<p>‘That was the worst of these girls, you never could trust ’em; her back
+wasn’t a minute turned that that Emma wasn’t off to her own affairs. She
+hadn’t but just stepped downstairs to give the orders herself about his
+lordship’s milk, which, it was surprising, with all these lazy servants
+in the house, never <i>could</i> be sent up at the right time, and had
+particularly told the girl not to leave the room for a second till she
+came back ...’ with much more to the same effect.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty grimly eyed the artificial roses she was whisking out of sight
+with clumsy dexterity, in her attempt to bring order out of chaos, with
+one hand, while with the other she made<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_327">{327}</a></span> playful passes at the baby,
+crying ‘Did he?’ and ‘Was he, then?’ and ‘Nana’s here, precious.’</p>
+
+<p>Neither Sainty nor the baby was in the least taken in by this
+transparent comedy.</p>
+
+<p>‘I think this child is not properly looked after,’ the former said
+sternly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Not looked after!’ Nurse was outraged in her finest feelings. ‘Not
+looked after! She didn’t know what his lordship meant. She was never
+away for a minute all day and often up half the night with the little
+darling; not that she grudged it, not she; she was well aware it was but
+her duty and what she was paid for, but it <i>was</i> hard after all to be
+told she didn’t look after the dear child, and she did think no one who
+hadn’t done it had any idea what it was to be with a young infant at
+night....’</p>
+
+<p>And just then the peccant underling returning from her own private
+expedition in neglect of her duty, she made a diversion by falling on
+her and smiting her figuratively hip and thigh in a frenzy of righteous
+wrath.</p>
+
+<p>The baby’s official guardians having for the time being returned to
+their posts, Sainty did not judge it necessary to remain and enter into
+details in which he might easily betray his ignorance. Having made his
+sweeping indictment and seen his heir restored to tranquillity by a
+bottle, he returned to his own neglected duties, feeling a little as if
+the Lord Chancellor might address to him some of the scathing reproaches
+he had just heard flung at the head of Emma.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to immerse himself in his usual employments, but, do what he
+would, he was haunted for the rest of the day and far into the night by
+the vision of the piteous, dirty baby left to howl by itself in the
+midst of its luxurious surroundings, and felt the cold clasp of the tiny
+fingers growing gradually warm and moist upon his own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_328">{328}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXV">CHAPTER XXV</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">The</span> interview last recorded between Belchamber and his heir was to have
+momentous consequences for both of them. The principal gain was at first
+to the baby, as the immediate result was the dismissal of his neglectful
+attendants. Cissy, for her part, first delicately expressed surprise at
+Sainty’s interesting himself in the matter at all, and then adopted the
+simple plan of refusing to believe a word against the nurse, whom she
+eventually passed on to another young mother, with as strong a
+recommendation as she had received of her, adding in explanation: ‘My
+husband took a dislike to the woman, and so, of course, she had to go.’</p>
+
+<p>Lady Eccleston was full of concern and astonishment. ‘I <i>can’t</i>
+understand it,’ she cried. ‘Lady Quivers gave her the very <i>highest</i>
+character, and before that, she was four years in the nursery at
+Branches, first as nursery-maid and then as under-nurse, and I went to
+see dear Lady Olave myself, who couldn’t say enough about her. I <i>can’t</i>
+think she would really neglect the darling.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty repeated his experience, and ‘Go and see for yourself,’ he said.
+‘The child is ill-cared for; he isn’t even kept clean.’</p>
+
+<p>Grandmamma went to inspect, and returned declaring the angel was as neat
+as a new pin. ‘You can’t, no matter <i>how</i> careful you are, prevent their
+dear little chinnywinnies from getting a wee bit chapped if they dribble
+much,’ she said.</p>
+
+<p>‘No doubt he was clean enough after my unexpected visit,’ Sainty
+answered; ‘but I assure you <i>I</i> didn’t find him so; his hands were dirty
+and nothing about him was fresh. I don’t know much about babies, but I’m
+sure they ought not to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_329">{329}</a></span> smell so nasty. He was hungry and cold too, poor
+little chap! and left all alone to yell himself into a fit.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nurse declares she wasn’t gone five minutes; she was dreadfully
+distressed that you should have found the child alone. I feel sure one
+can trust that woman; I can always tell by people’s faces and the way
+they look at one; and Lady Quivers said she was <i>so</i> devoted to her
+last, and I know it was a very delicate little thing.’</p>
+
+<p>For once, however, her son-in-law was inexorable. ‘The woman may have
+been all you say when she came,’ he said; ‘but it is not surprising if
+the best of nurses grows neglectful when the mother sets her the
+example.’</p>
+
+<p>This was taking the matter to very unsafe ground, where Lady Eccleston
+felt that it behoved her to walk warily. ‘I <i>can</i> want nothing but the
+darling baby’s good,’ she said hastily. ‘I hold no brief for nurse, and
+if you are dissatisfied with her, dear Sainty, of course she had better
+go, though I don’t see what precautions we can take more than we did in
+getting this one.’</p>
+
+<p>It was Alice de Lissac who finally discovered a successor to Lady
+Quivers’ treasure, and imported a pet lamb from her mother’s bible-class
+at Great Charmington to act as nursery-maid.</p>
+
+<p>Once the treasure was gone, the other servants abounded in evidence,
+which more than justified her removal, though they would apparently have
+had no difficulty in reconciling their consciences to perpetual silence
+had she remained. It transpired that it was her frequent habit to
+administer narcotics to her unfortunate charge, in order that she might
+fulfil evening engagements of her own, from which she had sometimes not
+returned till the small hours of the morning; yet when Sainty felt it
+his duty to impart this information to her new employer, he was very
+civilly shown the door, with profuse thanks, but a polite intimation
+that his interference was not required; from which he was forced to
+conclude that Cissy was not as exceptional among fashionable mothers as
+he, in his ignorance, had imagined.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_330">{330}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He carried the child off to Belchamber, where he knew that Lady
+Charmington would keep a lynx eye on the new nurse and her acolyte, and
+where, indeed, it soon began to improve visibly in condition.</p>
+
+<p>Since its mother seemed to be without the common instincts of the animal
+kingdom, he imposed it on himself as a duty to see that the poor little
+creature was at least warmed and fed, and not poisoned with drugs. The
+duty was at first rather a painful one, involving as it did a constant
+recollection of what he would fain forget; but, as the months went by,
+like other things originally taken up from the sternest sense of
+responsibility, it came to have for him a decided interest.</p>
+
+<p>It has been somewhat cynically said that to be under an obligation to a
+man is the beginning of dislike; be that as it may, there is no doubt
+that any one to whom, in a world of frustrated effort, we have been able
+to do a tangible service, establishes thereby a distinct claim on our
+gratitude. ‘This,’ we say to ourselves with a pardonable glow, ‘is our
+work; here is something accomplished, some one better or happier for our
+existence,’ And it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling towards
+the person who has procured us such a pleasing reflection.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty found his mind constantly running on his small charge; he dwelt
+with pleasure on the prospect of seeing it; he even began to make
+excuses for more frequent visits to Belchamber, where it was astonishing
+how often his presence and personal supervision seemed to be required.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the baby, there was now another person there, on whom he
+had the pleasure of knowing he had conferred a benefit; he had rescued
+his brother-in-law, Thomas Eccleston, from the hated thraldom of the
+broker’s office, and placed him with his agent, Mr. Danford, who was
+beginning to feel, as age stole upon him, the necessity for help in
+managing the huge property.</p>
+
+<p>The good Tommy, his legs permanently gaitered, his honest pink face
+burnt to a healthy brickdust colour, and his hands hardened by much
+congenial outdoor labour, was as<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_331">{331}</a></span> happy as a rabbit in a vegetable
+garden. To initiate this neophyte into his duties, and at the same time
+keep things smooth between Danford and the pupil in whom his jealousy
+could not but scent a possible successor, called for many visits from
+the master. Sainty made time for them gladly, half ashamed to admit even
+to himself how much the new tenant of his old nurseries had to do with
+his alacrity. It surprised him to find how eagerly his eyes would scan
+the walks and lawns for the distant gleam of white in the perambulator.</p>
+
+<p>Week by week, and month by month, the little life was expanding and
+developing like an opening flower in the sunshine, and Sainty noted the
+changes, watching with reverent awe the miracle of the dawning
+intelligence. He brought wonderful toys, heads in fancy costume that
+could by a turn of the wrist be made to gyrate on a handle to a feeble
+lute-like accompaniment; wonderful parti-coloured acrobats in the
+attitude of St. Andrew on his cross, who shook their extended limbs with
+a great tinkling of bells; white furry animals that emitted strange
+squeaks when pressed in the abdominal regions.</p>
+
+<p>It must be confessed that the toys left the baby rather cold; sometimes
+he looked at them with solemn and contemptuous eyes, sometimes with an
+indulgent smile; more often he swept them from him with a downward
+sabre-cut action of the right arm. Whatever he did seemed to Sainty an
+indication of unusual capacity. He thought with a pang of fierce
+hatred&mdash;was it envy? was it contempt?&mdash;of the men who begot such
+marvellous beings, and grudged an occasional moment from their low toils
+or pleasures to glance impatiently at them and order them from the room.
+Of a mother who could bring forth a child and leave it to take its
+chance of life or death in the care of hirelings, he dared not trust
+himself to think at all.</p>
+
+<p>A hunger of paternity possessed him. How he could have adored a child of
+his own! His own! Was this child <i>not</i> his own? To whom did it rather
+belong? the father who<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_332">{332}</a></span> disowned, the mother who neglected it, or to him
+who had tended and cared for it, and was learning to love it? And the
+crowning wonder of all was that the child was learning to love <i>him</i>. It
+was not a merry baby&mdash;‘a solemn wise-like thing,’ the nurse called
+it&mdash;looking out upon the world with grave mysterious eyes, and that
+peculiarly detached, far-off expression that belongs only to babies and
+cats; but at sight of Sainty the rare smile never failed to light up the
+little white face, the legs would jump and kick against the nurse, the
+arms be held out for his embrace.</p>
+
+<p>A baby’s partiality has as little cause or meaning as its aversions, and
+it is as unreasonable to be flattered by the one as to be hurt by the
+other; but a man must be of a sterner temper than our poor Sainty to
+resist a certain mild elation when a little creature hurls itself into
+his arms with such confident self-surrender. To him, moreover, the
+novelty of the experience made it doubly dear. His mother had doubtless
+loved him in her own grim way, because he was her son; others, as his
+uncle, had pitied, or done their duty by him; others again might have
+paid him attention for what they hoped to obtain from him; but never in
+the course of his existence could he remember that any living thing had
+been simply attracted to him by the magnetism of his own personality;
+and no one can suspect a baby of any complexity of motive. So, when his
+coming was greeted with jubilant laughter and dancings and outstretched
+arms, a warmth crept about his heart, and he owned to himself with
+humble gratitude that out of what had seemed his greatest affliction had
+come the best happiness his life had ever known.</p>
+
+<p>Of course he did not arrive at this height of devotion all at once; it
+was the growth of many months, and every time he came to Belchamber, the
+little tendrils wound themselves more closely round his heart. At the
+end of the session, he established himself there with a more joyful
+sense of homecoming than he had known for years.</p>
+
+<p>To those who have experienced how rich in possibilities is the intimacy
+of a baby of six months, it were unnecessary to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_333">{333}</a></span> describe it; they who
+have not would hardly credit it, however cunningly set forth. There is
+something intangible about it that must necessarily evaporate in the
+mere attempt to put it on paper. Sainty fell into the habit of having
+the child almost constantly with him; often it slept on the sofa in his
+study, or in its perambulator under the great cedars while he read or
+wrote beside it, and the sense of its nearness at once soothed and
+stimulated him; even if it woke, it was so gentle and quiet that it
+hardly disturbed his work.</p>
+
+<p>He abandoned his little cart in favour of a larger open carriage in
+which the nurse and baby could accompany him on his drives. Not
+infrequently they would start by way of the dower-house, where Lady
+Charmington would be a willing addition to the party. Sainty and his
+mother were brought very close together by their common worship of the
+child; at no previous time, and on no other subject, had her son been in
+such constant need of the good lady’s advice. Exactly what the baby had
+suffered at the hands of the ‘treasure’ remained in doubt, but certainly
+its internal economy was none of the strongest, and many changes of diet
+had to be tried, which its two guardians discussed by the hour. Then it
+began to cut its teeth exceptionally early, with all the usual
+accompaniments of heaviness, loss of appetite, and restless nights.
+Without his mother’s rocklike commonsense to lean upon, Sainty would
+have worked himself into a fever of anxiety; her experience of the
+frailty of his own early days was of inestimable comfort to him.</p>
+
+<p>‘I tell you, this child is a tower of strength to what you were,’ Lady
+Charmington would say. ‘I’ve been up night after night with you when you
+were teething.’</p>
+
+<p>‘But was I as hot and restless as baby?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Hot and restless? I should think you were! twice as bad, and croupy
+into the bargain, which this child, thank God! hasn’t a symptom of.’</p>
+
+<p>So Sainty took heart, and when, after a time, he was made to feel with
+his finger two tiny white points in the red gum,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_334">{334}</a></span> this also seemed to
+him an almost supernatural achievement on the part of one so young.</p>
+
+<p>He had come to regard the precious infant as so entirely his charge,
+that he did not bestow much thought upon its recreant mother. Cissy had
+started on a round of visits at the end of the Season, hardly going
+through the form of inquiring if Sainty thought of accompanying her. It
+was a shock to him to find how completely she had gone out of his
+existence, when she presently announced that she was coming to
+Belchamber; she had spent a day or two there, before going North, to get
+some country clothes and give her maid a chance to repack, but had not
+seen the baby more than two or three times, nor appeared to take any
+particular interest in what was being done for it. It never occurred to
+Sainty as likely that she would in any way occupy herself with the child
+or its relation to him; it was therefore no small surprise to him to
+discover, before she had been many days in the house, that it was a
+distinct irritation to her to see them together.</p>
+
+<p>The first time she found it under the cedars with him, she inquired,
+with a perceptible shade of annoyance in her voice, where the nurse was,
+and why she hadn’t taken it out.</p>
+
+<p>‘Baby generally spends most of the morning with me here if it’s fine,’
+Sainty said. ‘The doctor likes him to be in the open air as much as
+possible, and it gives nurse a chance to do various little things for
+him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Nonsense! it’s her place to be with him; she’ll get utterly spoilt if
+you do her work for her; she has got a girl in the nursery. If she can’t
+manage, she had better have another. There’s no earthly reason for you
+to do nursery-maid.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I like having baby with me, and <i>this</i> woman doesn’t neglect her
+duties; at least she doesn’t leave the child alone, when he’s <i>not</i> with
+me, like the one your mother got for him.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You were always unjust about that poor woman. Ah! here you are, nurse.
+You had better take baby and walk him about. You shouldn’t leave him
+here to worry his lordship.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon, my lord partick’larly<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_335">{335}</a></span> <i>wished</i> for the
+child to be left with him,’ retorted the nurse, as she wheeled the
+perambulator viciously away, quivering with suppressed indignation.</p>
+
+<p>‘You see the results of your spoiling that woman,’ Cissy remarked. ‘If
+she’s going to be insolent to me she’ll have to go.’</p>
+
+<p>‘No&mdash;by heaven! I’m hanged if she shall,’ Sainty burst out ‘She’s
+devoted to the child, and takes very good care of him, and he isn’t very
+strong. It would be monstrous, after never giving him a thought from the
+time of his birth till now, if you undertook to sack the people who <i>do</i>
+look after him, because you considered they didn’t sufficiently kowtow
+to <i>you</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s precisely what you did to her predecessor.’</p>
+
+<p>‘On the contrary, I sent her away because she neglected him, which was,
+no doubt, what gave you a fellow-feeling for her.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! well, don’t let me interfere between you and your <i>protégée</i>. I
+don’t even pretend to inquire what terms you are on with her; but I must
+confess I can’t see what particular pleasure you derive from the
+constant presence of another man’s child.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Hush!’ Sainty said, casting a swift, frightened glance around to see if
+any one was within earshot. ‘Be careful what you say. Remember the child
+is <i>mine</i>. He has got to be mine. Your remark was in your usual
+excellent taste, but on that particular subject you will have to forego
+the pleasure of wounding me. If you are so fond of reminding me that I
+am not his father, you will say something one of these days before
+others that you will regret.’</p>
+
+<p>It gave him a horrible sense of complicity to be obliged to entreat her
+discretion a feeling that, bound by their guilty secret, let them hate
+each other as they would, they dare not quarrel. Probably Cissy was not
+less aware of this necessity than her husband, for though her object
+remained the same, she altered her tactics. She would try to keep the
+child from him by little underhand manœuvres, sending it out when she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_336">{336}</a></span>
+thought him likely to want it, and even going so far as to take it with
+her when she drove; but she did not risk another face attack.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty, on his side, did nothing to provoke an encounter. He saw the
+child not less, but as it were by stealth, and this introduction of a
+slightly clandestine element into their intercourse only heightened his
+love for it. Not that it required any great exercise of tact or
+ingenuity to evade Cissy’s notice. Lord Charmington would have fared ill
+had he been dependent on the fitful attentions of his mamma for care and
+comfort. Even the amiable desire to deprive her husband of his one
+pleasure could not make a domestic character of Lady Belchamber. She was
+much away, and when at home constantly surrounded by guests who absorbed
+her attention. It was only at rare intervals that she found any leisure
+to bestow on the separation of her husband and her child.</p>
+
+<p>She had a trick of arriving when least expected, swooping suddenly into
+visible space like a comet, and, like a comet, followed by her train;
+though to speak of her appearances as comet-like gives a false
+impression of something periodical and calculably recurrent, whereas no
+one could foretell when Cissy might take it into her head to entertain a
+party, which seemed to be her only idea of the uses of a home.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when he thought she was safely launched on a round of
+country-houses, Sainty had asked his old friend Gerald Newby, for whom
+she entertained no great regard, to pay him a visit. They were at tea on
+the lawn, when, preceded at a short interval by a heralding telegram,
+her ladyship descended on them with a few friends, and the announcement
+of a further contingent for the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Charmington had come over from the dower-house, and Tommy had
+dropped in for tea and to play with his nephew, about whom he was almost
+as weak as Sainty.</p>
+
+<p>No one looking at the group under the cedars would have guessed that he
+was witness of anything but the most delightful scene of domestic
+felicity. The stately ancestral home, the superb trees, the great
+stretches of smoothly mown turf,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_337">{337}</a></span> the young married couple with their
+baby between them, surrounded by all that wealth and great possession
+could give, the adoring grandmother, the loving uncle, the admiring
+friends, the glow of flowers, the cheerful, intimate little meal, all
+combined to make the picture complete. It appealed strongly to Newby,
+who beamed indulgently on the party.</p>
+
+<p>‘Our dear Sainty appears in a new and most amiable light,’ he said; ‘I
+am not accustomed to see him as Kourotrophos. It is the epithet applied
+to Hermes in his character of the child-tender,’ he added explanatorily
+to Cissy, who looked rather blank.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t think why nurse doesn’t fetch baby,’ that lady remarked; ‘or,
+for that matter, why she brought him down at all. I’ve always told her
+not to when any one was here. Whatever one may think of one’s own
+children, one has no right to bore other people with them.’</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>I</i> asked to see the child,’ said Lady Charmington, the light of battle
+waking in her eye.</p>
+
+<p>‘Mother had settled to come over before I knew you were coming,’ Sainty
+said quietly. ‘When I got your telegram it was too late to stop her, and
+as she had come on purpose to see baby, I couldn’t refuse to send for
+him. No one need bother about him; he will be quite good with me.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Dear little man!’ said one of the ladies who had come with the fond
+mother. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t stop him, Lord Belchamber. I love
+babies. I’ve been trying to think who he reminds me of. He’s not a bit
+like you or Cissy.’</p>
+
+<p>‘We think him like my grandmother&mdash;’ Sainty began.</p>
+
+<p>‘I never could see that he was so like the duchess,’ Lady Charmington
+cut in.</p>
+
+<p>‘To <i>me</i> he’s the image of Claude Morland,’ remarked the luckless Tommy.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden hush that may have lasted some five seconds ere it
+was broken by Newby inquiring, ‘What has become of your charming cousin?
+I liked him so much, and hoped I might meet him here.’</p>
+
+<p>‘We see very little of Claude now,’ Lady Charmington<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_338">{338}</a></span> responded. ‘He
+never seems to come here. I suppose he finds other places more amusing.
+He was glad enough to come in old days.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I fancy,’ said Sainty, ‘as the duke gets older that he is more
+dependent on him. He very seldom gets away.’</p>
+
+<p>He had, in fact, for some time been conscious that Claude came much less
+to the house than formerly, and was acutely aware of a like
+consciousness in Cissy, though each was careful to say nothing about it
+to the other.</p>
+
+<p>‘By the way, that reminds me,’ said Lady Charmington to Sainty. ‘I had
+almost forgotten. Alice de Lissac writes she is coming to her father for
+a little, and she is very anxious to see baby. May I bring her over some
+day?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Why should Claude remind you of Mrs. de Lissac?’ Cissy asked, with a
+little laugh, her desire to score off her mother-in-law getting the
+better of her prudence. ‘I never knew they had much in common.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Only because Alice says in her letter they have seen a good deal of him
+lately. He seems to have been several times to Roehampton; and mother
+mentioned his coming in to see her one day with one of the girls.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Morland’s a deep ‘un,’ ejaculated Tommy. ‘Shouldn’t wonder if he was
+after one of the heiresses. Those girls’ll have a devil of a lot of
+money. The mater was always egging me on to be civil to ’em. Do you
+remember the World’s Bazaar, Cissy? Oh my!’</p>
+
+<p>‘I wonder if he can be thinking of Gemma,’ said Lady Charmington
+thoughtfully. ‘Alice doesn’t <i>say</i> so, but&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s not true,’ Cissy burst out; then, seeing awakened curiosity in
+several surrounding pairs of eyes, she added more indifferently, ‘I know
+Claude well enough to feel sure he would never be attracted by that
+black Jewess.’</p>
+
+<p>‘He might be by her blond sovereigns,’ suggested Tommy.</p>
+
+<p>Cissy became suddenly solicitous for the comfort of her guests. ‘I am
+sure you want to see your rooms,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like a bath
+after that dirty journey?’ and swept them into the house.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_339">{339}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Cissy don’t seem to fancy the idea of Morland being sweet on the dark
+lady,’ Tommy giggled. ‘She used to flirt with him herself once. I
+remember mater&mdash;&mdash;’</p>
+
+<p>‘Tommy,’ said Sainty, ‘do, like a good soul, ask nurse to fetch baby.’</p>
+
+<p>He felt sick and frightened. The contrast between the appearances of
+life and the ghastly things that were so thinly overlaid by them
+suddenly appalled his spirit. Almost unconsciously he picked up the
+baby, and clasped it closely to him. It was on that same spot, and on
+much such an afternoon, that he had first seen Cissy five years before.
+With the clearness of a picture thrown on a screen, he saw her standing
+as she had stood that day with Claude beside her, her girlish beauty
+bathed in soft golden light, and recalled the prophetic pang with which
+he had watched them turn away together under the baleful gaze of Aimée
+Winston. As he sat holding their child to his heart, the permanent
+dweller in his cupboard seemed to grin out at him with a more than
+usually fiendish malignity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_340">{340}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXVI">CHAPTER XXVI</a></h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="smcap">One</span> morning early in October, Thomas Eccleston appeared in his
+brother-in-law’s study with a shade of distress deepening the habitual
+ruddiness of his open countenance.</p>
+
+<p>It has already been intimated that Sainty cherished a very real
+affection for this young man, holding a character so manly and direct to
+be little short of miraculous in a child of Lady Eccleston.</p>
+
+<p>‘What’s the matter, Tommy?’ he asked. ‘You look perturbed. Have you and
+Danford been coming to blows?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh no, Danny’s all right; it so happens I’m rather in his good books
+just now. But the fact is, I’ve had rather a queer letter, and I didn’t
+quite know what to do about it, so I thought the simplest thing was to
+bring it to you, though it’s not by any means what he intended me to
+do.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Who’s “he”? Danford?’</p>
+
+<p>‘No; I tell you it’s nothing to do with him,’</p>
+
+<p>‘To begin with, then, who’s your correspondent?’</p>
+
+<p>‘Well, if you want to know, it’s your brother.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty started. ‘Arthur? What <i>can</i> he want of you?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I think the best way would be for you to read it,’ Tommy said, holding
+out the letter.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty hesitated a moment, then took it and read:</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="smcap">Dear Eccleston</span>&mdash;I expect you’ll be rather astonished at hearing from
+me, and still more at what it’s about. The fact of the matter is, I want
+you to do me a good turn. I was awfully glad to hear my brother had got
+you at Belchamber, and it suddenly occurred to me you would be just the
+chap to do what I want. To cut a long story short, I want to come to
+Belchamber. I suppose it’s very undignified of me, but <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_341">{341}</a></span>I’m badly in
+want of a little amusement, and I thought if they were going to have a
+shoot, and it wasn’t a very big party, you might suggest to your sister
+to pop me in as one of the guns. You may think it funny that I don’t
+write straight to my brother, but I know he’d be infernally sniffy, and
+say I had no proper pride; and Cissy always seemed a good sort, and so
+did you, and I thought between you, you could work it for me. I know
+they won’t ask Lady Arthur, and I don’t ask it of ’em. At first I was
+afraid she mightn’t take it kindly, but she’s been all right about it;
+she says she don’t want to go where she isn’t wanted, but don’t mind my
+going without her. Do you think you can work it through your sister? Do,
+if you can, and oblige yours ever.&mdash;<span class="smcap">A. W. Chambers.</span>’</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! <i>how</i> like Arthur!’ Sainty murmured, as he refolded this
+characteristic letter.</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought,’ said Tommy, who had been watching him uneasily as he read,
+and fiddling with the things on the writing-table, ‘that it was better
+to come straight to you than to go to Cissy about it.’</p>
+
+<p>‘So it is, and I’m very grateful to you, dear boy, for all your
+loyalty’; and Sainty laid a thin claw in Thomas’s large red hand. The
+sub-agent pressed it fervently.</p>
+
+<p>‘What had I better say?’ he asked. ‘It puts me in such a deucedly
+awkward posish, don’t yer know.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Of course he had no business to write to any one but me,’ Sainty said.
+‘Well&mdash;you needn’t answer; I’ll write to him myself.’</p>
+
+<p>Tommy looked much relieved. ‘Hope I didn’t do wrong,’ he said
+doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>‘On the contrary, you did more than right,’ Sainty said warmly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Shall you ask him?’ Tommy ventured, after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>‘I can’t say straight off; I must talk to Cissy about it, and’ (with an
+ill-concealed tremor) ‘to my mother,’</p>
+
+<p>Cissy made no objections. Arthur was a pleasant, good-looking fellow,
+and a man you could ask without his wife was as good as a bachelor.
+Rather to Sainty’s surprise, Lady<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_342">{342}</a></span> Charmington was not less willing. She
+hardly ever mentioned Arthur. Since the day when, livid and furious, she
+had solemnly cursed her younger son, Sainty could almost count on the
+fingers of one hand the times when she had spoken his name; but when,
+with some trepidation and much uncertainty, he approached her on the
+subject, he was met quite half-way.</p>
+
+<p>‘Unto seventy times seven,’ she remarked, ‘the Scripture tells us we
+must forgive. That woman I will <i>never</i> receive, but as long as he is
+willing to come without her, I see no reason you shouldn’t have him at
+Belchamber; and&mdash;and&mdash;you may tell him I am willing to see him too, if
+he likes.’ And Sainty read in the sudden suffusion of the hard eyes, the
+tale of the poor woman’s long silent yearning for a sight of her
+favourite son.</p>
+
+<p>So Arthur had his wish, and came once more to Belchamber. There was, no
+doubt, a certain awkwardness in the situation, and Sainty was surprised
+and touched to find that, though he certainly felt it much the most,
+Arthur was not without a perception of it, too. He was decidedly subdued
+during the first days of his visit, and Sainty’s ready sympathy went
+out, as usual, to any one who was ill at ease. Had Arthur been in his
+accustomed mood of complete self-satisfaction, he would have felt less
+tenderly towards him, but seeing him so humbled and brought low, on the
+footing, as it were, of a guest and poor relation in the home of their
+common childhood, was almost more than he could bear.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Arthur intentionally rather accentuated this note, conscious of
+the effect it would have on his brother. He would pointedly ask leave to
+do the most obvious things. ‘There’s a spare gun in the gun-room,’ he
+would say; ‘the keeper says he doesn’t know whose it is. Should you mind
+if I took it, old chap? I’ve only one here, and it got so hot yesterday
+I could hardly shoot with it.’ Or it would be, ‘Tommy and I are going to
+practise a bit; may I use this old bat? I fancy it must once have been
+mine, but I’m not sure.’ Or, ‘Would it be convenient for me to have a
+horse<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_343">{343}</a></span> this morning? I was thinking of riding over to see the mater.’
+Formerly, whatever the house afforded was as freely his as Sainty’s. If
+he was not the owner, he was something more than an ordinary heir, and
+guns, bats, and horses were so emphatically his natural property, that
+it was unthinkable his asking permission to use them.</p>
+
+<p>On the first morning of his visit, the brothers had wandered out
+together, and Arthur had commented on the new arrangement of the
+forecourt.</p>
+
+<p>‘You’ve fetched all the old statues out of the shrubbery, I see,’ he
+said. ‘What did you do that for?’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty explained, almost apologetically, that it was an attempt to
+return to Perrault’s original plan.</p>
+
+<p>‘Is it so long since you were here?’ he said. ‘I had forgotten&mdash;&mdash;’
+Then, as the other remained silent, gloomily sucking at his pipe, ‘I’m
+afraid you don’t like it,’ he suggested meekly.</p>
+
+<p>‘Oh! well, of course, it’s none of <i>my</i> business. I must say I think
+they looked better where they were, but I’m not much of a judge.
+Naturally, don’tcherknow, I liked ’em where I’ve always seen ’em. I
+can’t bear changes in the place.’</p>
+
+<p>‘I’m sometimes half sorry I did it, myself,’ Sainty admitted. As he
+spoke he was aware that the moment had come which he had been dreading
+ever since his brother’s arrival, the first appearance on the scene of
+the baby, who was being taken out for his morning’s airing.</p>
+
+<p>‘And so this is the son and heir, is it?’ said Arthur. ‘Hulloa! little
+‘un, how do you do? I’m your uncle. You look very solemn, but it would
+be more natural if I did. You don’t know the difference your small
+existence makes to me and mine.’</p>
+
+<p>The baby, as usual, at sight of Sainty, began making demonstrations of
+welcome, doubling himself forward over his restraining strap, and giving
+vent to a note like that of the nightingale, which is conventionally
+represented in print as ‘Jug-jug-jug,’ and a cry of ‘A-da, A-da-da,
+A-da,’ which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_344">{344}</a></span> was a sort of sound of all work with him for the
+expression of his varying emotions.</p>
+
+<p>‘He wants his dada,’ said the nurse, eager to display her charge’s
+precocity, and, at the same time, gratify her master. ‘He says “Dada”
+quite plain, my lord, and it’s the first word he’s said.’</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s a wise child that knows his own father,’ said Arthur jocosely.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty could not restrain a hasty glance at him, but he was evidently
+innocent of any special or personal application of the often-quoted
+adage.</p>
+
+<p>They walked on for a little beside the child, Sainty resting one hand
+lovingly on the edge of the little carriage, the baby squirming round
+and looking up into his face, wrinkling its nose and gurgling to attract
+his attention. When their ways divided, the parting was not effected
+without a burst of protest from the infant, which Sainty soothed and
+diverted as skilfully as the professional attendant.</p>
+
+<p>‘The little beggar seems to like you,’ Arthur remarked. ‘I don’t
+remember either of mine ever yelling for <i>me</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You have probably never taken as much notice of them as I do of baby.’</p>
+
+<p>‘You were always a kind of old granny; you’ll probably spoil that brat.
+Have you done anything to the stables since I was here?’</p>
+
+<p>Once received, the prodigal brother came several times to Belchamber in
+the course of the winter. He liked the luxury, the magnificence, the
+good food, the gentlemanly licence of the conversation, the fine horses
+to ride (he soon ceased to ask if he might take one), better than the
+shabby gentility of the stucco rectory, the half-trained grooms, the
+half-lame hunters, the half-refined wife of his own home. It sometimes
+seemed to Sainty that he almost forgot he was a husband and father at
+all, and there were not wanting among the ladies of Cissy’s surrounding
+some who were quite willing to help him to this pleasing oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>‘I like Lady Deans,’ he would say confidentially; ‘sh<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_345">{345}</a></span>e’s rare sport,
+and there’s no nonsense about her; she don’t care what she says, and you
+haven’t got to think twice about what you say to <i>her</i>. Now if I were to
+say half the things to Topsy I do to her, she’d bridle and shy and look
+as sour as if she’d been brought up by a bishop. And when you think&mdash;oh
+my!’ and the sentence would end in a long puff of cigar smoke, or the
+burial of the speaker’s nose in a tall whisky and soda.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur was a decided success with the members of the softer sex. The
+story of his romance cast quite a halo about him, and the very few
+mothers of grown-up girls who were tolerated in that gay company felt
+almost tenderly towards a detrimental who had put it out of his own
+power to marry their daughters.</p>
+
+<p>As for Cissy, she and her brother-in-law got on capitally. She pressed
+him to come whenever he liked, partly, no doubt, because she divined
+that his presence was a constant unhappiness to her husband. The sight
+of him in juxtaposition with the baby kept a keen edge on all Sainty’s
+feelings of remorse; nor was Arthur likely to be restrained by a
+fastidious delicacy from all allusion to the change which the birth of
+an heir had made in his own position. His remarks on the subject were
+not always in the best possible taste; he affected jokes about the Babes
+in the Wood, referred to himself as the ‘wicked uncle,’ and ‘wondered
+Sainty was willing to trust him in the house with the precious infant.’
+Such pleasantries, of a slightly sub-acid jocularity, went through and
+through Sainty in a way that the speaker could neither have guessed nor
+intended; he probably thought, on the contrary, that he was taking his
+blighted prospects with an easy amiability which did him infinite
+credit. He was not indeed without certain touches of kindliness towards
+his nephew. ‘When he gets a big boy, you must let his poor old uncle
+teach him to ride and shoot,’ he would say. ‘We must make a good
+sportsman of him, and you know <i>you</i> won’t do much in that line for him,
+old man.’ Sainty wondered if he wanted the boy to be a sports<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_346">{346}</a></span>man. His
+personal hatred of taking life extended itself to this nurseling of his
+affections. Must those tiny fingers be taught to curl round a trigger,
+that innocent heart learn to find its pleasure in slaughter and
+destruction? Yet he desired all forms of perfection for his darling; he
+hated to think of him at the same disadvantage among those with whom he
+would have to live as he himself had always been. He would have him
+strong and brave and daring, trained in all arts and exercises that
+became a gentleman; for instance, there could be no doubt that a certain
+proficiency in horsemanship was desirable for the ideal youth, but he
+recalled with horror his own early efforts to attain it, and shuddered
+to think how he should tremble, when, in course of time, the child came
+to an age to face these dangers.</p>
+
+<p>He began to see how ill-fitted he was to be the trainer of a young man.
+Hitherto he had imagined himself only as a nurse of callow infancy,
+shielding the little one with his greater insight and sympathy from the
+misunderstandings that had made his own childhood unhappy. Somehow he
+had fancied the child would be like him, timid and shrinking, needing
+protection; but now it struck him that there was no reason why it should
+resemble him at all, and he recoiled with sudden terror from the thought
+of what unlovely qualities the offspring of two such parents might have
+inherited. How would he be able to bear seeing the treachery of the one,
+or the hard egotism of the other, reproducing itself in the being he
+loved best in the world? Had he the firmness needed for correcting such
+tendencies? Could he ever steel himself to the necessity of punishment?</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it was hardly to be desired that the little boy
+should grow up on his pattern. He was not so conspicuous a success in
+his position that it was an object to educate a successor on the same
+lines. He began to understand the kind of problems his own bringing up
+had presented for solution to his mother and uncle; he remembered how
+futile had been the efforts of these two strong natures, with all the
+advantages of example, to instil<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_347">{347}</a></span> into his feeble soul a more virile
+attitude towards life, and the sum in proportion of what difficulties he
+would have to encounter in a like endeavour was not a hard one to work
+out. If Lady Charmington, absolutely sure of what she wanted, and with
+her bull-dog tenacity of purpose, had failed so lamentably of her
+object, what kind of a creature would he turn out, assailed by a hundred
+doubts, fears, and indecisions, and desiring simultaneously quite
+irreconcilable ideals?</p>
+
+<p>He recognised that the child had become the chief preoccupation of his
+life, its health, its food, its education&mdash;for he already tormented
+himself with questions that, by their very nature, could not have to be
+faced for years to come; and the more he troubled himself about the
+little thing, the more he loved it, the greater his love grew, the
+greater grew the desire to do his duty by his charge, the greater the
+anxiety as to what that duty might be.</p>
+
+<p>So far, however, his troubles were only those common to all parents and
+guardians who took their responsibilities somewhat morbidly; his special
+self-torture began where theirs left off. When all was said and done,
+the thousand dangers that dog the steps of youth safely passed, the
+pitfalls on either hand successfully avoided, the boy trained to all
+perfection of manly virtue and delight&mdash;what then? To what purpose, and
+for what end, should he have fashioned this splendid creature? To be the
+means by which he was to rob his nearest kinsfolk of their birthright!
+If his remorse was constantly awakened by Arthur’s presence, and the
+things that he said, it yet addressed itself less to Arthur than to the
+child. It was not so much the injury to his brother and his brother’s
+children that was becoming an hourly torment to his conscience, as the
+injury to this innocent accomplice in making him the instrument of
+wrong. Was that, then, the best that he could do for the son of his
+heart, the being who was daily becoming more and more the centre of his
+existence, dearer than are the children of their loins to ordinary
+fathers, to use him as the unconscious<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_348">{348}</a></span> weapon of his own fraud? There
+was no way out, no turning back; he could not now disavow him if he
+would. The crime was committed, irremediable, to go on breeding
+injustice, perpetuating wrong to the last chapters of the history of his
+race.</p>
+
+<p>He saw in imagination the little boy passing from childhood to youth,
+from youth to manhood, growing tall and strong and beautiful, in his
+turn marrying, and begetting children to become links in the long chain
+of falsehood and carry on the consequences of his lie. And he would have
+to live and watch this happening, always alone, always in silence, with
+no one to whom he could unburthen his heart. There would only be two who
+shared his knowledge, and to neither of them could he say a word on the
+subject, though hideously, eternally aware that they knew, and were
+watching with himself. And then a new terror assailed him. When a secret
+was already the property of three people, could he be certain that no
+breath of it would ever reach the person principally concerned? He had
+plenty of experience of how recklessly Cissy could talk on occasion,
+what rash and terrible things the desire to wound could make her say,
+and he trembled lest in some fit of sudden anger with her son, some
+momentary loss of self-control, she might turn and crush him with the
+story of his birth. The word once spoken could never be recalled; he saw
+the poor boy coming, white and stern, to ask him if this thing were
+true, and felt by anticipation the agony of his own inability to deny
+it. A dozen times a day he lived through the misery of that confession,
+and watched the love and respect die out of those dear eyes, as his
+unwilling hand dealt the final blow. Perhaps it would be some fair
+growth of young romance, the prospect of an innocent, happy marriage
+with a good girl, that he would have to blast with that terrible avowal.
+He heard himself condemning the boy to sterile loneliness or the devious
+byways of illicit love, to make a tardy reparation, and restore the
+stolen heritage to its rightful owners.</p>
+
+<p>These thoughts were with him day and night; they went<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_349">{349}</a></span> to bed with him,
+and got up with him; they followed him about the place; they sat with
+him beside the sleeping baby, and looked at him out of its great solemn
+eyes when it woke. Truly ‘the Lord his God was a jealous God,’ that
+fastidiously high standard of conduct and personal honour, his one sin
+against which was to be ‘visited upon the children, unto the third and
+fourth generation.’</p>
+
+<p>And then on a sudden the end came, and he learned the futility of his
+crime and his remorse alike. The poor little life that had been to him a
+source of such happiness and such self-torture came to an end as
+independently of any act of his as it had come to its beginning. It may
+have contained from the first the germs of some mortal disease, or
+perhaps the practices of its former nurse had left behind more fatal
+results than any one suspected. It is probable that too rapid teething
+had something to do with it. A baby’s life is at best but such a newly
+kindled flame, feeble and unsteady, that a puff of wind will make it
+flicker and go out. The whole thing did not take a week. The child was
+flushed, heavy, restless, as it had so often been before. ‘He is cutting
+another big tooth,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s no wonder he’s a little
+fractious, poor lamb! It’s the third in a fortnight.’ Lady Charmington
+was appealed to, and repeated, for the twentieth time, her comfortable
+assertions of how much more Sainty himself had suffered during the same
+anxious period; by constantly reassuring her son with them, she had
+finally almost persuaded herself that the baby was as strong as she
+wished it. She declared it was ridiculous to send for the doctor. ‘Have
+him, if you like,’ she said; ‘but I know just what he’ll say. Baby has
+been exactly like this so often, and each time you always think it is
+something dreadful. Nurse knows exactly what to do for him, don’t you,
+nurse?’</p>
+
+<p>On the third day Sainty grew restive, and sent for him all the same. The
+doctor, if not as well satisfied as Lady Charmington, yet seemed to
+think there was no particular cause for anxiety. He detected a little
+sound in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_350">{350}</a></span> bronchial pipes, and asked if the child could have got a
+chill in any way. ‘It might all very well come from the teeth,’ he said.
+‘The little fellow is feverish; you had better keep him in for a day or
+two.’</p>
+
+<p>He came once or twice more, a little uncertain, very non-committal; and
+then, one day, there was a swift unexplained rise of temperature, a
+convulsion or two, and, before even Sainty, with his genius for
+prophesying disaster, had fully realised the danger, all was over in
+this world as far as the baby was concerned.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_351">{351}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXVII">CHAPTER XXVII</a></h2>
+
+<p>‘My little boy, my poor little boy! You were conceived in sin, and your
+birth was a lie. Your father never owned you, your mother never loved
+you. It was left to me, who should have hated you, to tend and cherish
+you. It was little enough that I could do for <i>you</i>, but God only knows
+what you have been to <i>me</i>. It was no fault of yours, my baby, but my
+misdoing, that would have made your innocent existence an injury to
+others. I might have known that you could do no harm, that you would go
+away before your life could wrong them.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was murmuring broken phrases, his face bowed upon the face of the
+dead child. The tiny coffin, almost like a toy, was supported on two
+chairs facing each other, and on a third chair beside it he had sat
+almost continuously since the room had been put in order and the people
+turned out of it. His mother had said it was bad for him, but, with that
+single exception, there was luckily no one who cared enough to try and
+take him away, and so he had remained, hour after hour, steeped in the
+great quiet that surrounded that little figure.</p>
+
+<p>The pale diffused daylight came sifted through the lowered blinds,
+giving an unreal look to common objects, turned suddenly useless, and
+ranged against the walls. Sainty himself had helped to order the room,
+and to deck it with flowers. He would allow no heavy fragrance of white
+funereal blossoms, but all the greenhouses of Belchamber had been
+ransacked for the unseasonable roses of winter, and to this day the
+smell of roses brings back to him the little white waxen face, barred
+with its black-fringed lids, at which he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_352">{352}</a></span> gazed so long in those sacred
+hours of communing with the dead.</p>
+
+<p>It was his first experience of death. His father had died when he was a
+mere baby, and both his grandfathers in his early childhood; since he
+had been able to reflect or remember, he had never lost a friend. It
+struck him as strange that he, who had tasted so many sorrows, should
+have had no experience of this the supremest and commonest that man is
+called upon to bear. It was different from any other trouble he had ever
+known, deeper, more awful, more hopeless, yet somehow for that very
+reason more bearable too. There was no element of meanness in it,
+nothing petty or small. Such grief was large, calm, august, and above
+all very still; in presence of this perfect peace he could not strive
+nor cry. Shelley’s words about the Niobe came back to him as he sat
+there, and he kept repeating them to himself, ‘Her tender and serene
+despair.’ Despair, then, was ‘tender and serene’; how true it was! He
+was not even very unhappy. The consciousness of the aching void in his
+life would come later; but, for the moment, the bitterness of parting
+was lost in the relief of seeing his darling free from the suffering it
+had been torture to watch and know himself powerless to allay. He
+understood why David had arisen and washed his face and taken food, when
+they told him that his child was dead.</p>
+
+<p>The baby hands were folded, and held a bunch of violets; and as he bent
+over them, laying his parched lips upon their marble coldness, the
+comforting promise seemed to steal down to the sources of his being,
+that at last, far off, after all the fever and the pain, this rest on
+which he looked was waiting for him, as for every one.</p>
+
+<p class="astt">. . . . . . .</p>
+
+<p>A discreet tap on the door jarred the silence like a drumbeat, and
+Sainty went across and opened it. A servant stood there wearing the
+decorous expression of those officially connected with mourning which is
+not a personal grief to them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_353">{353}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Her ladyship has been inquiring for you, m’lord,’ the man said, ‘and
+the post has come. I have put your lordship’s letters on your
+writing-table.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty came out into the passage, and locked the door behind him,
+slipping the key into his pocket. ‘You can tell her ladyship she will
+find me in my study,’ he said; ‘or if she prefers, and will let me know,
+I will come to her.’</p>
+
+<p>He wondered what Cissy could have to say to him; he felt a sure
+foreboding that it would be nothing he should care to hear. What more
+was there for her to say to him henceforth, for ever?</p>
+
+<p>He went to his study in the old western pavilion and sat down at his
+writing-table; it was heaped with a great pile of letters; the morning’s
+mail had been added to those which, yesterday, he had had no heart to
+open. They would have to be gone through some time, he supposed; it was
+a task he could not well leave to his secretary. Why not attack them at
+once while he was feeling calmed and strengthened? He drew a few towards
+him and nerved himself for the ordeal of reading them. He thought he
+knew so well what they would contain, yet in the very first that he took
+up he found matter quite unexpected, which even at that moment arrested
+his attention.</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="smcap">Dear old Sainty</span>,’ he read: ‘I don’t at all like the idea of intruding
+my happiness on your grief; but I equally don’t want you to hear of it
+from any one but me, which you would be sure to do if I didn’t write at
+once. And first let me just stop and tell you how awfully sorry I am for
+you and Cissy losing your little boy. I can’t bear to think of you with
+your sensitive nature. The only thing to be said is that it was better
+than if he had been older, when you would have missed him so much more;
+you can’t personally have seen very much of him at that age. But to come
+back to myself. I hope I am the first to tell you (as you are almost the
+first that I have told) of my engagement to Gemma de Lissac. You who
+know my Gemma, and the admirable woman to whom she owes so much, will
+realise without any words of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_354">{354}</a></span> mine what a lucky fellow I am. I need not
+say I am tremendously in love, and absurdly happy. Mr. de Lissac has
+been most awfully good about it, and very generous. Of course, a
+wretched pauper like me could never have married a girl who hadn’t got
+something. For myself, as you know, my wants are few, but I couldn’t
+have asked Gemma, who has always had every luxury since she was a baby,
+to give up all she has been accustomed to, especially her thousand and
+one good deeds. Mr. de Lissac wants me to chuck my P. S.-ship and go in
+for parliament, and the duke has been very kind in promising his help.
+Forgive such a long letter about myself when you are in trouble, but
+happiness is always egotistical, and I can’t help hoping that mine won’t
+be indifferent to you. As I have written you such a yarn, and have so
+many letters to write, will you please tell Cissy, with my love, and ask
+her to forgive my not writing to her separately. I haven’t written to
+Aunt Sarah either, as I think Mrs. de Lissac is writing to her. Wish me
+joy, old man. There is no one whose good wishes I shall value more. Your
+affectionate cousin, <span class="smcap">Claude Morland</span>.</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>P.S.</i>&mdash;I don’t offer to come to the funeral. I know you’ll feel just
+as I should about it, and want to keep it all as quiet as possible.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty read the letter through twice. He had hardly finished his second
+perusal of it, when the door opened, and Cissy stood before him. She was
+dressed in hastily improvised mourning of incongruous showiness. The
+black clothes enhanced her fairness, and accentuated the slim
+girlishness of her figure, but her face had no youth in it, and her eyes
+glittered with an unnatural brightness.</p>
+
+<p>‘You wanted to see me?’ Sainty asked.</p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have got something to say to you, and I may as well
+say it first as last.’ Then, as he stood waiting in silence to hear her,
+‘You and I have got to have an explanation,’ she added.</p>
+
+<p>‘Is it the moment, with the child lying dead in the house?’ Sainty
+asked, with a gesture of protest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_355">{355}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘it is just that I wanted to speak about. As
+long as he lived, I have stayed for my child’s sake.’</p>
+
+<p>Sainty gave a convulsive laugh. ‘You have done a great deal for the
+child’s sake!’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>‘Now,’ she went on, ‘I have no reason for remaining. I have come to tell
+you that after the funeral I am going away. I can’t keep it up any
+longer. We hate each other, you know we do. Life together has become
+intolerable.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Life together!’ Sainty repeated. ‘Do you call it life together? To me
+it seems that we could hardly be more apart. In Kamchatka I should not
+be further from you.’ And indeed she seemed so far away, that he felt as
+if his voice could hardly reach her; he wondered how she could ever have
+affected him for pain or pleasure. He looked at her across a chasm in
+which lay the dead child.</p>
+
+<p>‘And where do you propose to go?’ he asked indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>‘I shall go to the only man I have ever really loved,’ Cissy said
+dramatically.</p>
+
+<p>‘I thought we were coming to that.’ It all seemed no business of his,
+not to affect him in any way; he even felt a little sorry for her under
+the blow he was going to deal her. He found himself casting about in his
+mind for the best way of telling her. How strange that that letter
+should just have come (or was it, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence?),
+that he should have selected that hour for opening it, that it should
+have been the first one that he had read! He still held it in his hand,
+and without saying anything he moved it so that the writing might
+attract her attention.</p>
+
+<p>‘What have you got there?’ she cried, turning suddenly very white. ‘Let
+me see it. Is it from Claude?’ She sprang upon it, and snatched it from
+him before he could give it to her, and he heard the two sheets rattle
+against each other with the shaking of her hands.</p>
+
+<p>‘There is a message for you in it,’ he said, as he turned away. He did
+not want to pry into her misery. He felt no<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_356">{356}</a></span> exultation, only a sick
+contemptuous pity, pity in which there was no love.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, hearing her give a sort of hoarse cry, he looked round. She
+had sunk into a chair, with one arm laid along the table, her other
+hand, clenched, rested on her knee. The letter had fallen on the floor.
+She sat looking straight in front of her, and her mouth moved as if she
+were speaking, but no sound came. She had evidently forgotten his
+presence altogether. She was frightening like this, her lips drawn back
+a little from her teeth, her face set in a grimace that made her almost
+monkey-like, ugly as strong emotion always is. After a time she began to
+beat on the edge of the table with her hand. ‘Blackguard! Blackguard!’
+she kept repeating under her breath.</p>
+
+<p>Sainty was longing for her to go and leave him alone with his grief. The
+presence of this other misery which, by the nature of the case, he could
+do nothing to soothe only aggravated his own; it seemed to bring him
+down to earth, to drag him back to the sordid and base, from the regions
+to which he had risen in the chamber of death. What had he to do with
+this woman’s fierce resentment, balked of her earthly passion, he who
+had been so near the borders of eternal peace?</p>
+
+<p>He went over to her and spoke very gently. ‘I think we should be better
+apart,’ he said, ‘each with his own sorrow. We can do nothing to help
+each other.’</p>
+
+<p>She seemed hardly to understand what he said, but she nodded dully and
+rose, and he held the door open for her to pass.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing to him, he reflected, whether she went or stayed, whether
+she played out the dreary farce of their married life to the end, or
+broke away to follow her own devices. The shame, which had seemed so
+unendurable that he had bartered his personal honour to avoid it,
+appeared to him now as a thing of no importance. He wondered how he had
+ever cared about it. Let her go, in heaven’s name, if she had a mind to!
+He almost wished that she would, but he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_357">{357}</a></span> knew in his heart that Claude’s
+letter had done its work; there would be no more talk of her going. He
+stooped and picked up the crumpled papers, smoothing them out and
+looking at the beautiful neat little handwriting, not an erasure, not a
+correction. Whatever the writer might say of haste and want of time and
+pressure of correspondence, that letter had not been written in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>‘It’s so complete,’ he said to himself; ‘the last touch. Nothing was
+wanting but this.’ He found himself almost admiring the absolute quality
+of his cousin’s villainy, so rounded and finished, with no loose ends.</p>
+
+<p>In a few seconds his mind flew back over all the stages of his
+connection with Claude, the first coming to Belchamber of the large pale
+boy, with his dreamy eyes and curious fascination, the old Eton days,
+his baleful influence on Arthur, the story of his connection with Aimée
+Winston, the double treachery of his behaviour about Cynthia.... But
+when he came to the part Morland had played in his own married life, his
+imagination shuddered and winced, he could not, dare not, think of it.
+‘And now, to crown all, this&mdash;&mdash;’ And his hand struck the pages with
+their rippling conventional expressions of happiness and affection,
+their bland pretence of sympathy offered and demanded. For a moment the
+room swam round him, and he had to clutch the table for support. Could
+he let this thing be? Ought he to allow this girl to be sacrificed, and
+not make an effort to save her? But almost simultaneously he recognised
+the futility of any such attempt. He thought of Gemma, conceited,
+headstrong, self-confident, and at the same time superlatively
+sentimental, and imagined the reception he should meet with if he were
+to tell her the man into whose hands she had just surrendered her
+existence, was&mdash;what? The lover of his wife, the father of his child.
+How could he tell this thing, and that he had known it and accepted it
+in silence? No wonder Claude had dared to write as he did; he knew well
+enough that from Sainty at least he was safe from all attack.</p>
+
+<p>Should he have to answer, to thank, to congratulate, to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_358">{358}</a></span> ‘hope they
+would be happy,’ to send gifts? At least he would not have to go to the
+wedding; his mourning would save him from that&mdash;his mourning for the
+child of the bridegroom! He felt a wild longing to get back to that
+upper chamber where all these mad thoughts were stilled. What had he to
+do? The letters. Why should these people steal the little time he had
+left to be with his lost darling? With a sigh of ineffable weariness he
+sat down once more, and hastily tore open two or three. The same little
+phrases recurred in all. ‘Sincere condolences,’ ‘heartfelt sympathy,’
+‘God’s will,’ ‘Consolation where alone it may be found.’ He remembered
+employing some of them himself on like occasions. Why make these
+attempts to plumb the unfathomable? As well smear ointment on a door
+behind which a man lay wounded.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned over the heaps of still unbroken covers in search of a
+handwriting that promised at least the relief of tears, his eye was
+caught by one unfamiliar, yet not unknown. He took the letter from the
+rest and held it poised upon his palm, trying to fix the memory it
+recalled. The anonymous denunciations of his wife? Ah! no, that was
+impossible. Yet as he broke the seal he realised why his only other
+sight of this writing was associated with that time. It was from his
+sister-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>‘<span class="smcap">Dear Lord Belchamber</span>,&mdash;I know you have never liked me, and did not
+approve of your brother marrying me; but though it is little kindness or
+notice I’ve ever received from you or yours, I am a mother myself, and I
+know what it would be to me to lose either of my little darlings; and so
+I feel I must write a few lines of condolence with you and Lady
+Belchamber in your great sorrow, for I really do sympathise with you in
+the death of your dear little boy. I know you think me a common,
+grasping woman, but I don’t give a thought to any difference it may make
+to us, and, as Arthur says, what is to prevent your having others? I
+have a <i>heart</i> (indeed it was me made Arthur write and offer to come to
+Belchamber without me, and he’ll come to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_359">{359}</a></span> funeral too). I’m not
+really a bad sort, and can feel for your loss. With sincere condolences
+to you and Lady Belchamber, I should like to sign, Your affectionate
+sister-in-law,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Cynthia Chambers</span>.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>‘<i>P.S.</i>&mdash;I have ventured to order a wreath sent, which please accept.’</p>
+
+<p class="fint">
+THE END<br>
+<br>
+Printed by T. and <span class="smcap">A. Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty<br>
+at the Edinburgh University Press<br>
+</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77826 ***</div>
+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77826
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77826)