THE HEIR
THE HEIR
A Love Story
By
V. SACKVILLE-WEST
Author of "Heritage," "The
Dragon in Shallow Waters," etc.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1922
Printed in Great Britain
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE HEIR , 1
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY ..( .. 121
PATIENCE 179
HER SON 196
THE PARROT 243
983615
THE HEIR: A LOVE STORY
To B. M.
Miss CHASE lay on her immense red silk
four-poster that reached as high as the ceiling.
Her face was covered over by a sheet, but
as she had a high, aristocratic nose, it raised
the sheet into a ridge, ending in a point. Her
hands could also be distinguished beneath the
sheet, folded across her chest like the hands
of an effigy ; and her feet, tight together like
the feet of an effigy, raised the sheet into two
further points at the bottom of the bed. She
was eighty-four years old, and she had been
dead for twenty-four hours.
The room was darkened into a shadowy
twilight. Outside, in a pale, golden sunshine,
the birds twittered among the very young
green of the trees. A thread of this sunshine,
alive with golden dust-motes,/ sundered the
curtain and struck out, horizoritalJy.-'acrosr,
the boards of the floor. One of 'the two men
who were moving with all possible discretion
about the room, paused to draw the curtains
more completely together.
3
4 THE HEIR
" Very annoying, this delay about the
coffin," said Mr. Nutley. " However, I got
off the telegrams to the papers in time, I
hope, to get the funeral arrangements altered.
It would be very awkward if people from
London turned up for the funeral on Thurs-
day instead of Friday very awkward indeed.
Of course, the local people wouldn't turn up ;
they would know the affair had had to be put
off ; but London people they're so scat-
tered. And they would be annoyed to find
they had given up a whole day to a country
funeral that wasn't to take place after all."
"I should think so, indeed," said Mr. Chase,
peevishly. " I know the value of time well
enough to appreciate that."
" Ah yes," Mr. Nutley replied with sym-
pathy, "you're anxious to be back at Wolver-
hampton, I know. It's very annoying to
have one's work cut into. And if you feel
like that about it, when the old lady was your
, aunt, what would comparative strangers
frerm London feel, if they had to waste a
They both looked resentfully at the still
figure under the sheet on the bed, but Mr.
Chase could not help feeling that the solicitor
was a little over-inclined to dot his i's in the
THE HEIR 5
avoidance of any possible hypocrisy. He
reflected, however, that it was, in the long
run, preferable to the opposite method of
Mr. Farebrother, Nutley's senior partner, who
was at times so evasive as to be positively
unintelligible.
" Very tidy, everything. H'm handker-
chiefs, gloves, little bags of lavender in every
drawer. Yes, just what I should have expec-
ted : she was a rare one for having everything
spick and span. She'd go for the servants,
tapping her stick sharp on the boards, if
anything wasn't to her liking ; and they all
scuttled about as though they'd been wound
up after she'd done with them. I don't know
what you'll do with the old lady's clothes,
Mr. Chase. They wouldn't fetch much, you
know, with the exception of the lace. There's
fine, real lace here, that ought to be worth
something. It's all down in the heirloom
book, and it'll have to be unpicked off the
clothes. But for the rest, say twenty pounds.
These silk dresses are made of good stuff, I
should say," observed Mr. Nutley, fingering
a row of black dresses that hung inside a cup-
board, and that as he stirred them moved
with the faint rustle of dried leaves ; " take
my advice, and give some to the house-
6 THE HEIR
keeper ; that'll be of more value to you in
the end than the few pounds you might get
for them. Always get the servants on your
side, is my axiom. However, it's your affair ;
you're the sole heir, and there's nobody to
interfere." He said this with a sarcastic
inflection detected only by himself ; a warn-
ing note under the ostensible deference^ of
his words as though daring Chase to assert
his rights as the heir. " And, anyway," he
concluded, " we're not likely to find any
more papers in here, so we're wasting time
now. Shall we go down ? 5!
" Wait a minute, listen : what's that noise
out in the garden ? "
" Oh, that I one of the peacocks screech-
ing. There are at least fifty of the damned
birds. Your aunt wouldn't have one of them
killed, not one. They ruin a garden. Your
aunt liked the garden, and she liked the pea-
cocks, but she liked the peacocks better than
the garden. Screech, screech you'll soon
do away with them. At least, I should say
you would do away with them if you were
going to live here. I can see you're a man of
sense."
Mr. Chase drew Mr. Nutley and his volu-
bility out on to the landing, closing the door
THE HEIR 7
behind him. The solicitor ruffled the sheaf
of papers he carried in his hand, trying to
peep between the sheets that were fastened
together by an elastic band.
" Well," he said briskly, " if you're agree-
able I think we might go downstairs and find
Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth. You
see, we are trying to save you all the time we
possibly can. What about the old lady ? do
you want anyone sent in to sit with her ? "
" I really don't know," said Chase, " what's
usually done ? you know more about these
things than I do."
" Oh, as to that, I should think I ought
to !" Nutley replied with a little self-satisfied
smirk. " Perhaps you won't believe me, but
most weeks I'm in a house with a corpse.
There are usually relatives, of course, but in
this case if you wanted anyone sent in to sit
with the old lady, we should have to send a
servant. Shall I call Fortune ? "
" Perhaps you had better but I don't
know : Fortune is the butler, isn't he ?
Well, the butler told me all the servants
were very busy."
" Then it might be as well not to disturb
them ? At any rate, the old lady won't run
away," said Mr. Nutley jocosely.
8 THE HEIR
" No, perhaps we needn't disturb them."
Chase was relieved to escape the necessity of
giving an order to a servant.
They went downstairs together.
" Hold on to the banisters, Mr. Chase ;
these polished stairs are very tricky. Fine
old oak ; solid steps too ; but I prefer a
drugget myself. Good gracious, how that
peacock startled me ! Look at it, sitting on
the ledge outside the window. It's pecking
at the panes with its beak. Shoo! you
great gaudy thing." The solicitor flapped
his arms at it, like a skinny crow beating its
wings.
They stopped to look at the peacock,
which, walking the outside ledge with spread
tail, seemed to form part, both in colour and
pattern, of the great heraldic window on
the landing of the staircase. The sunlight
streamed through the colours, and the square
of sunlight on the boards was chequered with
patches of violet, red, and indigo.
" Gaudy ? " said Chase. " It's barbaric.
Like jewels. Astonishing."
Mr. Nutley glanced at him with a faint
contempt. Chase was a sandy, weakly-
looking little man, with thin reddish hair,
freckles, and washy blue eyes. He wore
THE HEIR 9
an old Norfolk jacket and trousers that did
not match ; Mr. Nutley, in his quick impa-
tient mind, set him aside as reassuringly
insignificant.
" Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth are
in the library, I believe," Nutley suggested.
" Don't forget to introduce me to Colonel
Stanforth," said Chase, dismayed at having
to meet yet another stranger. " He was an
intimate friend of my aunt's, wasn't he ?
Is he the only trustee ? "
" The other one died and was never re-
placed. As for Colonel Stanforth being an
intimate friend of the old lady, he was
indeed ; about the only friend she ever had ;
she frightened everybody else away," said
Nutley, opening the library door.
"Ah, Mr. Chase!" Mr. Farebrother ex-
claimed in a relieved and propitiatory tone.
".We've been through all the drawers,"
Mr. Nutley said, his briskness redoubled in
his partner's presence. " We've got all the
necessary papers they weren't even locked
up so now we can get to business. With
any luck Mr. Chase ought to see himself back
at Wolverhampton within the week, in spite
of the delay over the funeral. I've told Mr.
Chase that it isn't strictly correct to open
10 THE HEIR
the papers before the funeral is over, but
that, having regard to his affairs in Wolver-
hampton, and in view of the fact that there
are no other relatives whose susceptibilities
we might offend, we are setting to work at
once." He was bending over the table,
sorting out the papers as he talked, but now
he looked up and saw Chase still standing
in embarrassment near the door. "Dear me,
I was forgetting. Mr. Chase, you don't know
Colonel Stanforth, your trustee, I think?
Colonel Stanforth has lived outside the park
gates all his life, and I wager he knows every
acre of your estate better than you ever will
yourself, Mr. Chase."
Mr. Farebrother, a round little rosy man
in large spectacles, smiled benignly as Chase
and Stanforth shook hands. He liked bring-
ing the heir and the trustee together, but his
pleasure was clouded by Nutley's last remark,
suggesting as it did that Chase would never
have the opportunity of learning his estate ;
he felt this remark to be in poor taste.
"Oh, come! I hope we shall have Mr.
Chase with us for some time," he said pleas-
antly, " although," he added, recollecting
himself, " under such melancholy circum-
stances." He had never been known to
THE HEIR 11
make any more direct allusion to death than
that contained in this or similarly consecrated
phrases. Mr. Nutley pounced instantly upon
the evasion.
" After all, Farebrother, Chase never knew
the old lady, remember. The melancholy
part of it, to my mind, is the muddle the
estate is in. Mortgaged up to the last
shilling, and over-run with peacocks. Won't
you come and sit at the table, Mr. Chase ?
Here's a pencil in case you want to make any
notes."
Colonel Stanforth came up to the table at
the same time. Chase shied away, and went
to sit on the window-seat. Mr. Farebrother
began a little preamble.
" We sent for you immediately, Mr. Chase ;
that is to say, Colonel Stanforth, who was on
the spot at the moment of the regrettable
event, communicated with us and with you
simultaneously. We should like to welcome
you, with all the sobriety required by the
cloud which must hang over this occasion,
to the estate which has been in the possession
of your family for the past five hundred
years. We should like to express our infinite
regret at the embarrassments under which
the estate will be found to labour. We
8
12 THE HEIR
should like to assure you I am speaking
now for my partner and myself that our
firm has been in no way responsible for the
management of the estate. Miss Chase,
your aunt, whom I immensely revered, was
a lady of determined character and charitable
impulses. . . ."
" You mean, she was an obstinate old
sentimentalist," said Mr. Nutley, losing his
patience.
Mr. Farebrother looked gently pained.
" Charitable impulses," he repeated,
" which she was always loth to modify.
Colonel Stanforth will tell you that he has had
many a discussion. . . ." (" I should just
think so," said Colonel Stanforth, "you
could argue the hind leg off a donkey, but
you couldn't budge Phillida Chase,") " there
were questions of undesirable tenants and
what not I confess it saddens me to think
of Blackboys so much encumbered. . . ."
" Encumbered! My good man, the place
will be in the market as soon as I can get it
there," said Mr. Nutley, interrupting again,
and tapping his pencil on the table.
" It would have been so pleasant," said
Mr. Farebrother sighing, "if matters had been
in an entirely satisfactory condition, and our
THE HEIR 13
duty towards Mr. Chase would have been so
joyfully fulfilled. Your family, Mr. Chase,
were Lords of the Manor of Blackboys long
before any house was built upon this site.
The snapping of such a chain of tradition,
55
" Out of date, out of date, my good man,"
said Nutley, full of contempt and surprisingly
spiteful.
" Let's get on to the will," suggested Stan-
forth.
Mr. Nutley produced it with alacrity.
" Dear, dear," said Mr. Far ebr other, wiping
his spectacles. The reading of a will was to
him always a painful proceeding. It was
indeed an unkind fate which had cast one of
his amiable and conciliatory nature into the
melancholy regions of the law.
"It's very short," said Nutley, and read it
aloud.
After providing for a legacy of five hundred
pounds to the butler, John Fortune, in recog-
nition of his long and devoted service, and for
a legacy of two hundred and fifty pounds to
her friend Edward Stanforth " in anticipa-
tion of services to be rendered after my death,"
the testator devised the Manor of Blackboys
and the whole of the Blackboys Estate and
14 THE HEIR
all other messuages tenements hereditaments
and premises situate in the counties of Kent
and Sussex and elsewhere and all other es-
tates and effects whatsoever and wheresoever
both real and personal to her nephew Pere-
grine Chase at present of Wolverhampton.
" Sensible woman she got a solicitor to
draw up her will," said Mr. Nutley as he
ended ; "no side-tracks, no ambiguities, no
bother. Sensible woman. Now we can
get to work."
"Ah, dear!" said Mr. Farebrother in
wistful reminiscence, " how well I remember
the day Miss Chase sent for me to assist her
in the making of that will ; it was just such
a day as this, and after I had been waiting a
little while she came into the room, a black
lace cap on her white hair, and her beautiful
hands leaning on the top of her stick she had
very beautiful hands, your aunt, Mr. Chase,
beautiful cool ivory hands and I remember
she was singularly gracious, singularly gra-
cious ; a great lady of the old school, and she
was pleased to twit me about my reluctance
to admit that some day even she . . . ah,
well, will-making is a painful matter ; but
I remember her, gallant as ever. ..."
" That's all rubbish, Farebrother," said
THE HEIR 15
Mr. Nutley rudely, as his partner showed
signs of meandering indefinitely on ; " gra-
cious, indeed ! When you know she terrified
you nearly out of your life. You always
get mawkish like this about people once
they're dead."
Mr. Farebrother blinked mildly, and Nut-
ley continued without taking any further
notice of him.
" You haven't done so well out of this as
John Fortune," he said to Stanforth, " and
you'll have a deal more trouble."
" I take it," said Stanforth, getting up and
striding about the room, " that in the matter
of this estate there are a great many liabilities
and no assets to speak of, except the estate
itself? To start with, there's a twenty-
thousand-pound mortgage. What's the in-
come from the farms ? "
" A bare two thousand a year."
" So you start the year with a deficit,
having paid off your income tax and the
interest on the mortgage. Disgusting," said
Stanforth. " One thing, at any rate, is
clear : the place must go. One could just
manage to keep the house, of course, but I
don't see how anyone could afford to live
in it, having kept it. The land isn't worth
16 THE HEIR
over much, but luckily we've got the house
and gardens. What figure, Nutley ? Thirty
thousand ? Forty ? "
Mr. Nutley whistled.
" You're optimistic. The house isn't so
very large, and it's inconvenient, no bath-
rooms, no electric light, no garage, no central
heating. The buyer would have all that on
his hands, and the moat ought to be cleaned
out too. It's insanitary."
" Still, the house is historical," said Stan-
forth ; "I think we can safely say thirty
thousand for the house. It's a perfect speci-
men of Elizabethan, so I've always been told,
and has the Tudor moat and outbuildings
into the bargain. Thirty thousand for the
house," he noted on a piece of paper.
" I wouldn't care for it myself," said Mr.
Nutley, looking round, " low rooms, dark
passages, a stinking moat, and a slippery
staircase. If that's Tudor, you're welcome
to it." His voice had a peculiarly malignant
intonation. " Still, it's a gentleman's place,
I don't deny, and ought to make an interest-
ing item under the hammer." He passed the
tip of his tongue over his lips, a gesture
horridly voluptuous in one so sharp and
meagre.
THE HEIR 17
" Then we have the furniture and the tapes-
tries and the pictures," Stanforth went on.
" I think we might reckon another twenty
thousand for them. Americans, you know
or the buyer of the house might care for some
of the furniture. The pictures aren't of much
value, so I understand, save as of family
interest. Twenty thousand. That clears off
the mortgage. What about the farmstand
the land ? "
" You could split some of the park up into
building lots," said Mr. Nutley.
Mr. Farebrother gave a little exclamation.
" The park it's a pretty park, Nutley."
" Very pretty, and any builder who chose
to run up half a dozen villas would be a sen-
sible chap," Mr. Nutley replied, wilfully mis-
understanding him. " I should suggest a site
at the top of the hill, where you get the view.
What do you think, Colonel Stanforth?"
" I think the buyer of the house should be
given the option of buying in the whole of the
park, that section being reserved at the price
of accommodation land, if he chooses to pay
for it."
Mr. Nutley nodded. He approved of
Colonel Stanforth as an adequately shrewd
business man.
18 THE HEIR
"There remain the farm lands," he said,
referring to his papers. " Two thousand
acres, roughly ; three good farm houses ;
and a score of cottages. It's a little difficult
to price. Say, taking one thing in with
another, twenty pounds an acre, including
the buildings a good deal of the land is
worth less. Forty thousand. We've dis-
posed now of all the assets. We shall be
lucky if we can clear the death-duties
and mortgage out of the proceeds of the
sale, and let Mr. Chase go with whatever
amount the house itself fetches to bring
him in a few hundreds a year for the rest
of his life."
They stared across at Chase, whose
concern with the affair they appeared
hitherto to have forgotten. Mr. Fare-
brother alone kept his eyes bent down, as
very meticulously he sharpened the point
of his pencil.
" It's an unsatisfactory situation," said
Mr. Nutley ; " if I were Chase I should resent
being dragged away from my ordinary busi-
ness on such an unprofitable affair. He'll be
lucky, as you say, if he clears the actual value
of the house for himself after everything is
settled up. Now, are we to try for auction
THE HEIR 19
or private treaty ? Personally I think the
house at any rate will go by private
treaty. The present tenants will probably
buy in their own farms. But the house, if
it's reasonably well advertised, ought to
attract a number of private buyers. We
must have a decent caretaker to show people
over the place. I suggest the present butler?
He was in Miss Chase's service for thirty
years." He looked round for approval ;
Chase and Stanforth both nodded, though
Chase felt so much of an outsider that he
wondered whether Nutley would consider
him justified in nodding. " Ring the bell,
Farebrother, will you ? It's just behind you.
Look at the bell, gentlemen! what an anti-
quated arrangement ! There's no doubt, the
house is terribly inconvenient."
Fortune, the butler, came in, a thin grizzled
man in decent black.
" Perhaps you had better give your instruc-
tions, Nutley," Chase said from the window-
seat as the solicitor glanced at him with
conventional hesitation.
" I'm speaking for Mr. Chase, Fortune,"
said Mr. Nutley. "Your late mistress's will
unfortunately isn't very satisfactory, and
Blackboys will be in the market before very
20 THE HEIR
long. We want you to stay on until then,
with such help as you need, and you must tell
the other servants they have all a month's
notice. By the way, you inherit five hundred
pounds under the will, but it'll be some time
before you get it."
" Blackboys in the market ? " Fortune
began.
" Oh, my good man, don't start lamenting
again here," exclaimed Mr. Nutley hurriedly ;
" think of those five hundred pounds a very
nice little sum of which we should all be glad,
I'm sure."
" Dear me, dear me," said Mr. Farebrother,
much distressed, and he got up and patted
Fortune on the shoulder.
Nutley was collecting the papers again into
a neat packet, boxing them together on the
table as though they had been a pack of
cards. He glanced up to say,
" That settled, Fortune ? Then we needn't
keep you any longer ; thanks. Well, Mr.
Chase, if there's anything we can do for you
to-morrow, you have only to ring me up or
Farebrother oh, I forgot, of course, you
aren't on the telephone here."
Chase, who had been thinking to himself
that Nutley was a splendid man really
THE HEIR 21
efficient, a first-class man, was suddenly
aware that he resented the implied criticism.
" I can go to the post-office if I want to
telephone," he said coldly.
Mr. Farebrother noticed the coldness in
his tone, and thought regretfully, " Dear me,
Nutley has offended him ignored him com-
pletely all the time. I ought to have put that
right very remiss of me."
He said aloud,
" If Mr. Chase would prefer not to sleep
in the house, I should be very glad to offer
him hospitality. ..."
" Afraid of the old lady's ghost, Chase ? "
said Mr. Nutley with a laugh that concealed a
sneer.
They all laughed, with exception of Mr.
Farebrother, who was pained.
Chase was tired ; he wished they would go ;
he wanted to be alone.
II
HE was alone ; they had gone, Stanforth
striding off across the park in his rather osten-
tatious suit of large checks and baggy knicker-
bockers, the two solicitors, with their black
leather hand-bags, trundling down the avenue
22 THE HEIR
in the station cab. They had gone, they
and their talk of mortgages, rents, acreage,
tenants, possible buyers, building lots, and
sales by auction or private treaty! Chase
stood on the bridge above the moat, watching
their departure. He was still a little con-
fused in his mind, not having had time to
turn round and think since Stanforth's tele-
gram had summoned him that morning.
Arrived at Blackboys, he had been imme-
diately commandeered by Nutley, had had
wishes and opinions put into his mouth, and
had found a complete set of intentions ready-
made for him to assume as his own. That
had all saved him a lot of trouble, undoubt-
edly ; but nevertheless he was glad of a
breathing-space; there were things he wanted
to think over ; ideas he wanted to get used
to. ...
He was poor ; and hard-working in a
cheerless fashion ; he managed a branch of a
small insurance company in Wolverhampton,
and expected nothing further of life. Not
very robust, his days in an office left him with
little energy after he had conscientiously
carried out his business. He lived in lodg-
ings in Wolverhampton, smoking rather
too much and eating rather too little. He
THE HEIR 23
had neither loved nor married. He had
always known that some day, when his sur-
viving aunt was dead, he would inherit
Blackboys, but Blackboys was only a name
to him, and he had gauged that the inheritance
would mean for him nothing but trouble and
interruption, and that once the whole affair
was wound up he would resume his habitual
existence just where he had dropped it.
His occupations and outlook might thus
be comprehensively summarized.
He turned to look back at the house. Any
man brighter-hearted and more optimistic
might have rejoiced in this enforced expedi-
tion as a holiday, but Chase was neither opti-
mistic nor bright-hearted. He took life with
a dreary and rather petulant seriousness, and,
full of resentment against this whole unpro-
fitable errand, was dwelling now upon the
probable, the almost certain, inefficiencies
of his subordinates in Wolverhampton, be-
cause he had in him an old-maidish trait that
could not endure the thought of other people
interfering with his business or his possessions.
He worried, in his small anaemic mind that
was too restricted to be contemptuous, and
too diffident to be really bad-tempered. . . .
The house looked down at him, grave and
24 THE HEIR
mellow. Its fa$ade of old, plum- coloured
bricks, the inverted V of the two gables, the
rectangles of the windows, and the creamy
stucco of the little colonnade that joined the
two projecting wings, all reflected unbroken
in the green stillness of the moat. It was not
a large house ; it consisted only of the two
wings and the central block, but it was com-
plete and perfect ; so perfect, that Chase,
who knew and cared nothing about architec-
ture, and whose mind was really absent,
worrying, in Wolverhampton, was gradually
softened into a comfortable satisfaction.
The house was indeed small, sweet, and satis-
fying. There was no fault to be found with
the house. It was lovely in colour and de-
sign. It carried off, in its perfect proportions,
the grandeur of its manner with an easy dig-
nity. It was quiet, the evening was quiet,
the country was quiet ; it was part of the
evening and the country. The country was
almost unknown to Chase, whose life had
been spent in towns factory towns. Here
he was on the borders of Kent and Sussex
where the nearest town was a village, a jumble
of cottages round a green, at his own park-
gates. The house seemed to lie at the very
heart of peace.
THE HEIR 25
A little wooden gate, moss-grown and
slightly dilapidated, cut off the bridge from
the gravelled entrance-space ; he shut and
latched it, and stood on the island that the
moat surrounded. Swallows were swooping
along the water, for the air was full of insects
in the golden haze of the May evening.
Faint clouds of haze hung about, blue and
gold, deepening the mystery of the park,
shrouding the recesses of the garden. The
place was veiled. Chase put out his hand as
though to push aside a veil. . . .
He detected himself in the gesture, and
glanced round guiltily to see whether he was
observed. But he was alone ; even the cur-
tains behind the windows were drawn. He
felt a desire to explore the garden, but hesi-
tated, timorous and apologetic. Hitherto
in his life he had explored only other people's
gardens on the rare days when they were
opened to the public ; he remembered with
what pained incredulity he had watched the
public helping itself to the flowers out of the
borders, for he could not help being a great
respecter of property. He prided himself,
of course, on being a Socialist ; that was the
fashion amongst the young men he occasion-
ally frequented in Wolverhampton ; but
26 THE HEIR
unlike them he was a Socialist whose sense of
veneration was deeper and more instinctive
than his socialism. He had thought at the
time that he would be very indignant if he
were the owner of the garden. Now that he
actually was the owner, he hesitated before
entering the garden, with a sense of intrusion.
Had he caught sight of a servant he would
certainly have turned and strolled off in the
opposite direction.
The house lay in the hollow at the bottom
of a ridge of wooded hills that sheltered it
from the north, but the garden was upon the
slope of the hill, in design quite simple : a
central walk divided the square garden into
halves, eased into very flat, shallow steps,
and outlined by a low stone coping. A wall
surrounded the whole garden. To reach the
garden from the house, you crossed a little
footbridge over the moat, at the bottom of
the central walk. This simplicity, so obvious,
yet, like the house, so satisfying, could not
possibly have been otherwise ordered ; it was
married to the lie of the land. It flattered
Chase with the delectable suggestion that he,
a simple fellow, could have conceived and
carried out the scheme as well as had the
architect.
THE HEIR 27
He was bound to admit that a simple fellow
would not have thought of the peacocks.
They were the royal touch that redeemed the
gentle friendliness of the house and garden
from all danger of complacency. He paused
in amazement now at his first real sight of
them. All the way up the low stone wall
on either side of the central walk they sat,
thirty or forty of them, their long tails sweep-
ing down almost to the ground, the delicate
crowns upon their heads erect in a feathery
line of perspective, and the blue of their
breasts rich above the grey stone coping.
Half way up the walk, the coping was broken
by two big stone balls, and upon one of these
a peacock stood with his tail fully spread
behind him, and uttered his discordant cry
as though in the triumph and pride of his
beauty.
Chase paused. He was too shy even to
disturb those regal birds. He imagined the
swirl of colour and the screech of indignation
that would accompany his advance, and be-
fore their arrogance his timidity was abashed.
But he stood there for a very long while,
looking at them, until the garden became
swathed in the shrouds of the blue evening,
very dusky and venerable. He did not pass
28 THE HEIR
over the moat, but stood on the little bridge,
between the house and the garden, while
those shrouds of evening settled with the hush
of vespers round him, and as he looked he
kept saying to himself " Mine ? mine ? "
in a puzzled and deprecatory way.
Ill
WHEN Fortune showed him his room before
dinner he was silent and inclined to scoff.
He had been shown the other rooms by Nut-
ley when he first arrived, and had gazed at
them, accepting them without surprise, much
as he would have gazed at rooms in some
show-place or princely palace that he had
paid a shilling to visit. The hall, the dining
room, the library, the long gallery he
had looked at them all, and had nodded in
reply to the solicitor's comments, but not for
a moment had it entered his head to regard
the rooms as his own. To be left, however,
in this room that resembled all the others,
and to be told that it was his bedroom ; to
realize that he was to sleep inside that bro-
caded four-poster with the ostrich plumes
nodding on the top ; to envisage the trivial
and vulgar functions of his daily dressing
THE HEIR 29
and undressing as taking place within this
room that although so small was yet so
stately- this was a shock that made him
draw in his breath. Left alone, his hand
raised to give a tug at his tie, he stared
round and emitted a soft whistle. The walls
were hung with tapestry, a grey-green land-
scape of tapestry, the borders formed by two
fat twisted columns, looped across with gar-
lands of flowers and fruits, and cherubs with
distended cheeks blew zephyrs across this
woven Arcady. High-backed Stuart chairs
of black and gold. . . . Chase wanted to take
off his boots, but did not venture to sit down
on the tawny cane-work. He moved about
gingerly, afraid of spoiling something. Then
he remembered that everything was his to
spoil if he so chose. Everything waited on
his good pleasure ; the whole house, all
those rooms, the garden ; all those unknown
farms and acres that Nutley and Stanforth
had discussed. The thought produced no
exhilaration in him, but, rather, an extreme
embarrassment and alarm. He was more
than ever dismayed to think that someone,
sooner or later, was certain to come to him
for orders. . . .
He hesitated for an appreciable time before
30 THE HEIR
making up his mind to go down to dinner ;
in fact, even after he had resolutely pushed
open his bedroom door, he still wavered upon
its threshold. The landing, lit by the yellow
flame of a solitary candle stuck into a silver
sconce, was full of shadows : the well of the
staircase gaped black ; and across the great
window red velvet curtains had been drawn,
and now hung from floor to ceiling. Down
the passage, behind one of those mysterious
closed doors, lay the old woman dead in her
pompous bed. So the house must have
drowsed, evening after evening, before Chase
ever came near it, with the only difference
that from one of those doors had emerged
an old lady dressed in black silk, leaning on a
stick, an arbitrary old lady, who had slowly
descended the polished stairs, carefully plac-
ing the rubber ferule of her stick from step
to step, and helping herself on the banisters
with the other hand, instead of the alien
clerk from Wolverhampton, who hesitated
to go downstairs to dinner because he feared
there would be a servant in the room to wait
upon him.
There was. Chase dined miserably, and
was relieved only when he was left alone, port
and madeira set before him, and the four
THE HEIR 31
candles reflected in the shining oak table.
A greyhound, which had joined him at the
foot of the stairs, now sat gravely beside him,
and he gave him bits of biscuit as he had not
dared to do in the presence of the servant.
More at his ease at last, he sat thinking what
he would do with the few hundreds a^ year
Nutley predicted for him. Not such an
unprofitable business after all, perhaps! He
would be able to move from his lodgings in
Wolverhampton ; perhaps he could take a
small villa with a little bit of garden in front.
His imagination did not extend beyond Wol-
verhampton. Perhaps he could keep back
one or two pieces of plate from the sale ; he
would like to have something to remind him
of his connection with Blackboys and with
his family. He cautiously picked up a
porringer that was the only ornament on the
table, and examined it. It gave him a little
shock of familiarity to see that the coat- of -
arms engraved on it was the same as the coat
on his own signet ring, inherited from his
father, and the motto was the same too :
Intabescantque Relictd, and the tiny peregrine
falcon as the crest. Absurd to be surprised!
He ought to remember that he wasn't a
stranger here ; he was Chase, no less than the
32 THE HEIR
old lady had been Chase, no less than all the
portraits upstairs were Chase. He had al-
ready seen that coat-of-arms to-day, in the
heraldic window, but without taking in its
meaning. It gave him a new sense of confi-
dence now, reassuring him that he wasn't the
interloper he felt himself to be.
It was pleasant enough to linger here, with
silence and shadows all round the pool of
candlelight, that lit the polish of the table,
the curves of the silver, and the dark wine in
the round-bellied decanters ; pleasant to
dream of that villa which might now be at-
tainable ; but he had better go, or the servant
would be coming to clear away.
Rising, he went out into the hall, followed
by the dog, who seemed to have adopted him
unquestioningly. As Chase didn't know his
name, he bent down to read the inscription
on the collar, but found only the address :
CHASE, BLACKED YS. That had been the old
lady's address, of course, but it would do for
him too ; he needn't have the collar altered.
CHASE, BLACKBOYS. It was simply handed
on ; no change. It gave him a queer sensa-
tion ; this coming to Blackboys was certainly
a queer experience, interrupting his life. He
scarcely knew where he was as yet, or what
THE HEIR 33
he was doing ; he had to keep reminding
himself with an effort.
In the hall he hesitated, uncertain as to
which was the door of the library, afraid that
if he opened the wrong door he would find
himself in the servants' quarters, perhaps
even open it on them as they sat at supper.
The dog stood in front of one door, wagging
his tail and looking up at Chase, so he tried
the handle ; it was the wrong door, but
instead of leading to the servants' quarters
it opened straight on to the moonlit garden.
The greyhound bounded out and ran about
in the moonlight, a wraith of a dog in the
ghostly garden. Ghostly. . . . Chase wan-
dered out, up the walk to the top of the gar-
den, where he turned to look down upon the
house, folded black in the hollow, the moon-
light gleaming along the moat and winking on
a window. Not a breath ruffled that milky
stillness ; the great cloths of light lay spread
out over the grass, the blocks of shadow were
profound ; above the low-lying park trailed
a faint white mist, and in a vaporous sky
the moon rode calm and sovereign. Chase
felt that on a scene so perfectly set something
ought to happen. A pity that it should all
be wasted. . . . How many such nights
34 THE HEIR
must have been wasted! the prodigal love-
liness of summer nights, lying illusory under
the moon, shamelessly soliciting romance!
But nothing happened ; there was nothing
but Chase looking down on the silent house,
looking for a long time down on the silent
house, and thinking that, on that night so set
for a lovers' meeting, no lovers had met.
IV
HE was very glad when the funeral was over,
and he was rid of all the strange neighbours
who had wrung his hand and uttered com-
miserating phrases. He was also glad that
the house should be relieved of the presence
of his aunt, for he could tread henceforth
unrestrained by the idea that the corpse might
rise up and with a pointing finger denounce
his few and timorous orders. He stood now
on the threshold of the library downstairs,
looking at a bowl of coral- coloured tulips
whose transparent delicacy detached itself
brightly in the sober panelled room. He was
grateful to the quietness that slumbered
always over the house, abolishing fret as by a
calm rebuke.
His recollections of the funeral were, he
THE HEIR 35
found to his dismay, principally absurd. Mr.
Farebrother had sidled up to him, when he
thought Nutley was preoccupied elsewhere,
as they returned on foot up the avenue after
the ceremony. " A great pity the place
should have to go," Mr. Farebrother had said,
trotting along beside him, " such a very great
pity." Chase had agreed in a perfunctory
way. " Perhaps it won't come to that,"
said Mr. Farebrother with a vague hopeful-
ness. Chase again murmured something in
the nature of agreement. " I like to think
things will come right until the moment they
actually go wrong," Mr. Farebrother said
with a smile. " Very sad, too, the death of
your aunt," he added. " Yes," said Chase.
" Well, well, perhaps it isn't so bad as we
think," said Mr. Farebrother, causing Chase
to stare at him, thoroughly startled this
time by the extent of the rosy old man's
optimism.
But he was not now dwelling upon the
funeral. To-morrow he must leave Black-
boys. No doubt he would find his affairs in
Wolverhampton in a terrible way. He said
to himself, " Tut-tut," his mind absent, though
his eyes were still upon the tulips ; but his
annoyance over the office in Wolverhampton
36 THE HEIR
was largely superficial. Business had a claim
on him, certainly ; the business of his em-
ployers ; but his own private business had a
claim too, that, moreover, would take up but
a month or two out of his life ; after that
Blackboys would be sold, and would engage
no more of his time away from Wolver-
hampton. Blackboys would pass to other
hands, making no further demands upon
Peregrine Chase. It would be a queer little
incident to look back upon ; his few acquain-
tances in Wolverhampton, with whom he
sometimes played billiards of an evening, or
joined in a whist drive, would stare, derisive
and incredulous, if the story ever leaked out,
at the idea of Chase as a landed proprietor.
As a squire! As the descendant of twenty
generations! Why, no one in Wolverhamp-
ton knew so much as his Christian name ; he
had been careful always to sign his letters
with a discreet initial, so that if they thought
of it at all they probably thought him Percy.
A friend would have nosed it out. There
was a safeguard in friendlessness. Chase was
a reticent little man, as his solicitors had had
occasion to remark. Nutley found this very
convenient : Chase, making no comment,
left him free to manage everything according
THE HEIR 37
to his own ideas. Indeed, Nutley frequently
forgot his very existence. It was most con-
venient.
As for Chase, he wondered sometimes ab-
sently which he disliked least : Farebrother
with his weak sentimentality, or Nutley, who
was so astute, so bent upon getting Blackboys
brilliantly into the market, and whose grudg-
ing respect for old Miss Chase, beneath his
impatience of the tyranny she had imposed
upon him, was so readily divined.
Chase stood looking at the bowl of tulips ;
it seemed to him that he spent his days for
ever looking at something, and deriving from
it that new, quiet satisfaction. He was
revolving in his mind a phrase of Mr. Fare-
brother's, to the effect that he ought to go
the rounds and call upon his tenants. " They'll
expect it, you know," Farebrother had said,
examining Chase over the top of his spectacles.
Chase had gone through a moment of panic,
until he remembered that his departure on
the morrow would postpone this ordeal. But
it remained uncomfortably with him. He
had seen his tenants at the funeral, and had
eyed them surreptitiously when he thought
they were not noticing him. They were all
farmers, big, heavy, kindly men, whose
38 THE HEIR
manner had adopted little Chase into the
shelter of an interested benevolence. He
had liked them ; distinctly he had liked them.
But to call upon them in their homes, to
intrude upon their privacy he who of all
men had a wilting horror of intrusion, that
was another matter.
He enjoyed being alone himself ; he had a
real taste for solitude, and luxuriated now in
his days and particularly his evenings at
Blackboys, when he sat over the fire, stirring
the great heap of soft grey ashes with the
poker, the ashes that were never cleared
away ; he liked the woolly thud when
the poker dropped among them. Those
evenings were pleasant to him ; pleasant and
new, though sometimes he felt that in spite
of their novelty they had been always a
part of his life. Moreover he had a compan-
ion, for Thane, the greyhound, slim and fawn-
coloured, lay by the fire asleep, with his nose
along his paws.
There existed in his mind a curious con-
fusion in regard to his tenants, a confusion
quite childish, but which carried with it a
sort of terror. It dated from the day when,
for want of something better to do, he had
turned over some legal papers left behind by
THE HEIR 39
Nutley, and the dignity of his manor had
disclosed itself to him in all the brocaded
stiffness of its ancient ritual and phraseology.
He had laughed ; he could not help laughing ;
but he had been impressed and even a little
awed. The weight of legend seemed to lie
suddenly heavy upon his shoulders, and he
had gazed at his own hands, as though he
expected to see them mysteriously loaded
with rough hierarchical rings. Vested in
him, all this antiquity and surviving cere-
monial ! He read again the almost incompre-
hensible words that had first caught his eye,
scraps here and there as he turned the pages.
" There are three teams in demesne, 31
villains, with 14 bordars, i.e., the class who
should not pay live heriot. The furrow-long
measures 40 roods, i.e., 40 lengths of the
Ox-goad of 16| feet, a rod just long enough to
lie along the yokes of the first three pair of
Oxen, and let the ploughman thrust with the
point at either flank of either the sod ox or
the sward ox. Such a strip four rods in
width gives an acre." " There is wood of
75 Hogs. The Hogs must be panage Hogs,
one in seven, paid each year for the right to
feed the herd in the Lord of the Manor's
wooded wastes."
40 THE HEIR
What on earth were panage hogs, to
which apparently he was entitled ?
He read again, " The quantum of liberty
of person and alienation originally enjoyed
by those now represented by the Free Ten-
ants of the Manor is a matter of argument for
the theorists. The free tenants were liberi
homines within the statute Quia Emptores
Terrarum, and as such from 1289 could sell
their holdings to whomsoever they would,
without the Lord's licence, still less without
surrender or admittance, saving always the
condition that the feoffee do hold of the same
Lord as feoffor. And the feoffee must hold,
i.e., must acknowledge that he hold. There
must be a tenure in fact and the Lord must
know his new tenant as such. Some privity
must be established. The new tenant must
do fealty and say ' I hold of you, the Lord.'
An alienation without such acknowledge-
ment is not good against the Lord."
He laid down the papers. Could such
things be actualities ? This must be the copy
of some old record he had got hold of. But
no ; he turned back to the first page and
found the date of the previous year. It
appalled him to think that since such things
had happened to his aunt, they were also
THE HEIR 41
liable to happen to him. What would he
do with a panage hog, supposing one were
driven up to the front door ? Still less would
he know what to do if one of those farmers
he had seen at the funeral were to say to him,
" I hold of you, the Lord."
Then he remembered that he had not found
the people in the village alarming. He
remembered a conversation he had had the
day before, with a man and his wife, as he
leaned over the gate that led into their little
garden. On either side of the tiled path
running up to the cottage door were broad
beds filled with a jumble of flowers pansies,
lupins, tulips, honesty, sweet-rocket, and
bright fragile poppies.
" Lovely show of flowers you have there,"
he had said tentatively to a woman in an
apron, who stood inside the gate knitting.
" It's like that all the summer," she replied
" my husband's very proud of his garden, he
is. But we're under notice to quit." She
spoke with an unfamiliar broad accent and
a burr, that had prompted Chase to say,
" You're not from these parts ? "
" No, sir, I'm from Sussex. It's not a
wonderful great matter of distance. I'm
wanting my man to come back with me, and
42 THE HEIR
settle near my old home, but he says he was
born in Kent and in Kent he'll die."
" That's right," approved the man who
had come up. " I don't hold with folk
leaving their own county. It's like sheep
take sheep away from their own parts, and
they don't do near so well. Oxfordshire
don't do on Romney Marsh, and Romney
Marsh don't do in Oxfordshire." He was
ramming tobacco into his pipe, but broke
off to pull a seedling of groundsel out from
among his pinks. He crushed it together
and put it carefully into his pocket. " I
made this garden," he resumed, " carried
the mould home on my back evening after
evening, and sent the kids out with bodges
for road-scrapings, till you couldn't beat my
soil, sir, not in this village, nor my flowers
either. But I'm under notice, and sotfner
than let them pass to a stranger I'll put my
bagginhook through the roots of every plant
amongst them," he said, and spat.
" Twenty-five years we've lived in this
cottage, and brought up ten children," said
the woman.
" The cottage is to come down, and make
room for a building site, so Mr. Nutley told
us," the man continued.
THE HEIR 43
" We'd papered and whitewashed it our-
selves," said the woman.
" I laid them tiles, sir, me and my eldest
boy," said the man, pointing with the stem
of his pipe down at the path; " a rare job it
was. There wasn't no garden, not when I
came here."
" Twenty-five years ago," said the woman.
They both stared mournfully at Chase.
" I'm under notice to quit, too, you know,"
said Chase, rather embarrassed, as though they
had brought a gentle reproof against him,
trying to excuse himself by this joke.
" I know that, sir ; we're sorry," the man
had said instantly.
(Sorry. They had never seen him before,
yet they were sorry.)
" Miss Chase, your aunt, sir, liked my
garden properly," said the man. " She'd
stop here always, in her pony-chaise, and
have a look at my flowers. She'd say to me,
chaffing-like, * You've a better show than me,
Jakes.' But she didn't like peonies. I had
a fine clump of peonies and she made me dig
it up. Lord, she was a tartar saving your
presence, sir. But a good heart, so nobody
took no notice. But peonies no, she
wouldn't have peonies at any price."
D
44 THE HEIR
" There's few folks in this village ever
thought to see Blackboys in other hands than
Chase's," said the woman. " 'Tis the pea-
cocks will be grieved dear! dear! "
" The peacocks ? " Chase had repeated.
" Folks about here do say, the peacocks'll
die off when Blackboys goes from Chase's
hands," said the man. " They be terrible
hard on a garden, though, do be peacocks,"
he had said further, meticulously removing
another weed from among his pinks.
THAT had been an experience to Chase, a
milestone on his road. He was to experience
much the same sensation when his lands
received him. It was a new world to him
new because it was so old ancient and sober
according to the laws of nature. There was
here a rhythm which no flurry could disturb.
The seasons ordained, and men lived close
up against the rulings so prescribed, close
up against the austere laws, at once the mas-
ters and the subjects of the land that served
them and that they as loyally served. Chase
perceived his mistake ; he perceived it with
surprise and a certain reverence. Because
THE HEIR 45
the laws were unalterable they were not
necessarily stagnant. They were of a solemn
order, not arbitrarily framed or admitting of
variation according to the caprice of mankind.
In the place of stagnation, he recognized
stability. And as his vision widened he saw
that the house fused very graciously with the
trees, the meadows, and the hills, grown there
in place no less than they, a part of the secular
tradition. He reconsidered even the pictures,
not as the representation of meaningless ghosts,
but as men and women whose blood had gone
to the making of that now in his own veins.
It was the land, the farms, the rickyards,
the sown, the fallow, that taught him this
wisdom. He learnt it slowly, and without
knowing that he learnt. He absorbed it in
the company of men such he had never pre-
viously known, and who treated him as he
had never before been treated not with
deference only, which would have confused
him, but with a paternal kindliness, a quiet
familiarity, an acquaintance immediately
linked by virtue of tradition. To them he,
the clerk of Wolverhampton, was, quite
simply, Chase of Blackboys. He came to
value the smile in their eyes, when they
looked at him, as a caress.
46 THE HEIR
VI
WHEN Nutley came again, a fortnight after
the funeral, to his surprise he met Chase in
the park with Thane, the greyhound, at his
heels.
" Good gracious," he said, " I thought you
were in Wolverhampton ? "
" So I was. I thought I'd come back to
see how things were going on. I arrived two
days ago."
" But I saw Fortune last week, and he
never mentioned your coming," pursuedlMr.
Nutley, mystified.
" No, I daresay he didn't ; in point of fact,
he knew nothing about it until I turned up
here."
What, you didn't let the servants know?"
No, I didn't," Chase entered suddenly
upon a definite dislike of Mr. Nutley. He felt
a relief as soon as he had realized it ; he felt
more settled and definite in his mind, cleared
of the cobwebs of a vague uneasiness. Nut-
ley was too inquisitorial, too managing alto-
gether. Blackboys was his own to come to,
if he chose. Still his own for another
month.
THE HEIR 47
" What on earth have you got there ? "
said Nutley peering at a crumpled bunch that
Chase carried in his hand.
" Butcher-boys," replied Chase.
" They're wild orchids," said Mr. Nutley,
after peering a little closer. " Why do you
call them butcher-boys ? 5:
" That's what the children call them,"
mumbled Chase, " I don't know them by any
other name. Ugly things, anyhow," he
added, flinging them violently away.
" Soft, soft," said Nutley to himself,
tapping his forehead as he walked on alone.
He proceeded towards the house. Queer
of Chase, to come back like that, without a
word to anyone. What about that business
of his in Wolverhampton ? He seemed to be
less anxious about that now. As though he
couldn't leave matters to Nutley and Fare-
brother, Solicitors and Estate Agents, with-
out slipping back to see to things himself!
Spying, no less. Queer, sly, silent fellow,
mooning about the park, carrying wild
orchids. "Butcher-boys," he had called them.
What children had he been consorting with,
to learn that country name ? There had
been an odd look in his eye, too, when Nutley
had come upon him, as though he were vexed
48 THE HEIR
at being seen, and would have liked to slink
off in the opposite direction. Queer, too,
that he should have made no reference to
the approaching sale. He might at least have
asked whether the estate office had received
any private applications. But Nutley had
already noticed that he took very little inter-
est in the subject of the sale. An unsatis-
factory employer, except in so far as he never
interfered ; it was unsatisfactory never to
know whether one's employer approved of
what was being done or not.
And under his irritability was another
grievance : the suspicion that Chase was a
dark horse. The solicitor had always marked
down Blackboys as a ripe plum to fall into
his hands when old Miss Chase died obsti-
nate, opinionated, old Phillida Chase. He
had never considered the heir at all. It was
almost as though he looked upon himself as
the heir the impatient heir, hostile and vin-
dictive towards the coveted inheritance.
Nutley reached the house, where, his hand
upon the latch of the little wooden gate, he
was checked by a padlock within the hasp.
He was irritated, and shook the latch roughly.
He thought that the quiet house, safe behind
its gate and its sleeping moat, smiled and
THE HEIR 49
mocked him. Then, more sensibly, he pulled
the bell beside the gate, and waited till the
tinkle inside the house brought Fortune
hurrying to open.
" What's this affair, eh, Fortune ? " said
Nutley with false good-humour, pointing to
the padlock.
" The padlock, sir ? That's there by Mr.
Chase's orders," replied Fortune demurely.
" Mr. Chase's orders ? " repeated Mr. Nut-
ley, not believing his own ears.
"Mr. Chase has been very much an-
noyed, sir, by motoring parties coming to
look over the house, and making free of the
place."
" But they may have been intending
purchasers!" Mr. Nutley almost shrieked,
touched upon the raw.
" Yes, sir, they all had orders to view.
All except one party, that is, that came yes-
terday. Mr. Chase turned them away, sir."
" Turned them away ? "
" Yes, sir. They came in a big car. Mr.
Chase talked to them himself, through the
gate. He had the key in his pocket. No, sir,
he wouldn't unlock it. He said that if they
wanted to buy the house they would have the
opportunity of doing so at the auction. Yes,
50 THE HEIR
sir, they seemed considerably annoyed. They
said they had come from London on purpose.
They said they should have thought that if
anyone had a house to sell, he would have
been only too glad to show parties over it,
order or no order. They said, especially if
the house was so unsaleable, two hours by
train from London and not up to date in any
way. Mr. Chase said, very curt-like, that
if they wanted an up-to-date house, Black-
boys was not likely to suit them. He just
lifted his cap, and wished them good-evening,
and came back by himself into the house, with
the key still in his pocket, and the car drove
away. Very insolent sort of people they
were, sir, I must say."
Fortune delivered himself of this recital
in a tone that was a strange compound of
respect, reticence, and a secret relish. During
its telling he had followed Mr. Nutley's
attentive progress into the house, until they
arrived in the panelled library where the
coral-coloured tulips reared themselves so
luminously against the sobriety of the books
and of the oak. Mr. Nutley noticed them,
because it was easier to pass a comment on a
bowl of flowers than upon Chase's inexplic-
able behaviour.
THE HEIR 51
" Yes, sir, very pretty ; Mr. Chase puts
them there," said Fortune, with the satis-
faction of one who adds a final touch to a
suggestive sketch.
" Shouldn't have thought he'd ever looked
at a flower in his life," muttered Nutley.
He deposited his bag on the table, and
turned to the butler.
" Quite between you and me, Fortune,
what you tell me surprises me very much
about the visiting parties, I mean. And
the padlock. Um the padlock. I always
thought Mr. Chase very quiet ; but you don't,
do you, think him soft ? "
Fortune knew that Nutley enjoyed saying
that. He remembered how he had caught
Chase, the day before, studying bumbledories
on the low garden wall ; but he withheld the
bumbledories from Mr. Nutley.
" It wouldn't be unnatural, sir," he sub-
mitted, "if .Mr. Chase had a feeling about
Blackboys being in the market ? "
" Feeling ? pooh! " said Mr. Nutley: He
said " Pooh ! " again to reassure himself,
because he knew that Fortune, stupid, senti-
mental, and shrewd, had hit the nail on the
head. " He'd never set eyes on Blackboys
until three weeks ago. Besides, what could
52 THE HEIR
he do with the place except put it in the mar-
ket ? Tell me that? Absurd!"
He was sorting papers out of his black bag.
Their neat stiffness gave him the reassuring
sense of being here among matters which
he competently understood. This was his
province. He would have said, had he
been asked a day earlier, that it was
Chase's province too. Now he was not so
sure.
" Sentimentality! ' ! he snorted. It was
his most damning criticism.
Chase's pip&^as lying on the table beside
the tulips ; he picked it up and regarded it
with a mixture of reproach and indignation.
It reposed mutely in his hand.
"Ridiculous!" said Nutley, dashing it
down again as though that settled the matter.
" The people round here have taken to
him wonderful," put in Fortune.
Nutley looked sharply at him ; he stood
by the table, demure, grizzled, and perfectly
respectful.
" Why, has he been round talking to the
people ? "
" A good deal, sir, among the tenants like.
Wonderful how he gets on with them, for a
city-bred man. I don't hold with city-
THE HEIR 53
breeding, myself. Will you be staying to
luncheon, sir ? "
" Yes," replied Mr. Nutley, pre-occupied
and profoundly suspicious.
VII
SUSPICIOUS of Chase, though he couldn't
justify his suspicion. Tested even by the
severity of the solicitor's standards, Chase's
behaviour and conversation during luncheon
were irreproachable. No sooner had he
entered the house than he began briskly
talking of business. Yet Nutley continued
to eye him as one who beneath reasonable
words and a bland demeanour nourishes a
secret and a joke ; a silent and deeply-buried
understanding. He talked sedately enough,
keeping to the subject even with a certain
rigour acreage, rents, building possibilities ;
an intelligent interest. Still, Nutley could
have sworn there was irony in it. Irony
from Chase ? Weedy, irritable little man,
Chase. Not to-day, though ; not irritable
to-day. In a good temper. (Ironical ?)
Playing the host, sitting at the head of the
refectory-table while Nutley sat at the side.
Naturally. Very cordial, very open-handed
54 THE HEIR
with the port. Quite at home in the dining-
room, ordering his dog to a corner ; and in
the library too, with his pipes and tobacco
strewn about. How long ago was it, since
Nutley was warning him not to slip on the
polished boards ?
Then a stroll round the garden, Chase with
crumbs in his pocket for the peacocks. When
they saw him, two or three hopped majesti-
cally down from the parapet, and came
stalking towards him. Accustomed to crumbs
evidently. " You haven't had them des-
troyed, then? " said Nutley, eyeing them with
mistrust and disapproval, and Chase laughed
without answering. Up the centre walk of
the garden, and back by the herbaceous
borders along the walls : lilac, wistaria,
patches of tulips, colonies of iris. All the
while Chase never deviated from the topic of
selling. He pointed out the house, folded in
the hollow down the gentle slope of the
garden. " Not bad, for those who like it.
Thirty thousand for the house, I think you
said?" "Then why the devil," Nutley
wanted to say, but refrained from saying,
" do you turn away people who come in a
big car ? >! They strolled down the slope,
Chase breaking from the lilac bushes an arm-
THE HEIR 55
ful of the heavy plumes. He seemed to do it
with an unknowing gesture, as though he
couldn't keep his hands off flowers, and then
to be embarrassed on discovering in his arms
the wealth that he had gathered. It was as
though he had kept an adequate guard over
his tongue while allowing his gestures to
escape him. He took Nutley round to the
entrance, where the station cab was waiting,
and unlocked the gate with the key he carried
in his pocket.
" You go back to Wolverhampton to-
morrow ? " said Mr. Nutley, preparing to
depart.
" That's it," replied Chase. Did he look
sly, or didn't he ?
" All the arrangements will be made by the
end of next week," said Nutley severely.
" That's splendid ! " replied Chase.
Nutley, as he was driven away, had a last
glimpse of him, leaning still against the gate-
post, vaguely holding the lilac.
VIII
CHASE didn't go back to Wolverhampton.
He knew that it was his duty to go, but he
stayed on at Blackboys. Not only that, but
56 THE HEIR
he sent no letter or telegram in explanation
of his continued absence. He simply stayed
where he was, callous, and supremely happy.
By no logic could he have justified his be-
haviour ; by no effort of the imagination
could he, a fortnight earlier, have conceived
such behaviour as proceeding from his well-
ordered creeds. He stayed on, through the
early summer days that throughout all their
hours preserved the clarity of dawn. Like a
child strayed into the realms of delight, he
was stupefied by the enchantment of sun and
shadow. He remained for hours gazing in a
silly beatitude at the large patches of sun-
light that lay on the grass, at the depths of
the shadows that melted into the profundity
of the woods. In the mornings he woke
early, and leaning at the open window gave
himself over to the dews, to the young glint-
ing sunshine, and to the birds. What a
babble of birds! He couldn't distinguish
their notes only to the cuckoo, the wood-
pigeon, and the distant crow of a cock could he
put a name. The fluffy tits, blue and yellow,
hopping among the apple-branches, were to
him as nameless as they were lovely. He
knew, theoretically, that the birds did sing
when day was breaking ; the marvellous
THE HEIR 57
thing was, not that they should be singing,
but that he, Chase, should be awake and in
the country to hear them sing. No one knew
that he was awake, and he had all a shy man's
pleasure in seclusion. No one knew what he
was doing ; no one was spying on him ; he
was quite free and unobserved in this clean-
washed, untenanted, waking world. Down
in the woods only the small animals and the
birds were stirring. There was the rustle of
a mouse under dead leaves. It was too early
for even the farm-people to be about.
Chase and the natural citizens between them
had it all their own way. (Nutley wore a
black coat and carried a black shiny bag, but
Nutley knew nothing of the dawn.) Then
he clothed himself, and, passing out of the
house unperceived with Thane, since there
was no one to perceive them, wandered in
the sparkling fields. There was by now no
angle from which he was not familiar with
the house, whether he considered the dreamy
roofs from the crest of the hill or the huddle
of the murrey-coloured buildings from across
the distance of the surrounding pastures. No
thread of smoke rose slim and wavering from
a chimney but he could trace it down to its
hearthstone. No window glittered but he
58 THE HEIR
could name the room it lit. Nor was there
any tenderness of light whose change he had
not observed, whether of the morning, cool
and fluty ; or of the richer evening, profound
and venerable, that sank upon the ruby
brick-work, the glaucous moat, and the
breasts of the peacocks in the garden ; or of
the ethereal moonlight, a secret that he kept,
inviolate almost from himself, in the shyest
recesses of his soul.
For at the centre of all was always the
house, that mothered the farms and accepted
the homage of the garden. The house was
at the heart of all things ; the cycle of hus-
bandry might revolve tillage to growth,
and growth to harvest more necessary,
more permanent, perhaps, more urgent ; but
like a woman gracious, humorous, and domi-
nant, the house remained quiet at the centre.
To part the house and the lands, or to con-
sider them as separate, would be no less than
parting the soul and the body. The house
was the soul ; did contain and guard the
soul as in a casket ; the lands were England,
Saxon as they could be, and if the house
were at the heart of the land, then the soul
of the house must indeed be at the heart and
root of England, and, onee arrived at the
THE HEIR 59
soul of the house, you might fairly claim to
have pierced to the soul of England. Grave,
gentle, encrusted with tradition, embossed
with legend, simple and proud, ample and
maternal. Not sensational. Not arresting.
There was nothing about the house or the
country to startle ; it was, rather, a charm
that enticed, insidious as a track through a
wood, or a path lying across fields and curv-
ing away from sight over the skyline, leading
the unwary wanderer deeper and deeper into
the bosom of the country.
He knew the sharp smell of cut grass, and
the wash of the dew round his ankles. He
knew the honing of a scythe, the clang of a
forge and the roaring of its bellows, the rasp
of a saw cutting through wood and the resin-
ous scent of the sawdust. He knew the tap
of a woodpecker on a tree-trunk, and the
midday murmur, most amorous, most sleepy,
of the pigeons among the beeches. He knew
the contented buzz of a bee as it closed down
upon a flower, and the bitter shrill of the
grasshopper along the hedgerows. He knew
the squirt of milk jetting into the pails, and
the drowsy stir in the byres. He knew the
marvellous brilliance of a petal in the sun,
its fibrous transparency, like the cornelian-
60 THE HEIR
coloured transparency of a woman's fingers
held over a strong light. He associated these
sights, and the infinitesimal small sounds
composing the recurrent melody, with the
meals prepared for him, the salads and cold
chicken, the draughts of cider, and abund-
ance of fresh humble fruit, until it seemed to
him that all senses were gratified severally
and harmoniously, as well out in the open as
in the cool dusk within the house.
He liked to rap with his stick upon the
door of a farm-house, and to be admitted
with a " Why ! Mr. Chase ! " by a smiling
woman into the passage, smelling of recent
soap and water on the tiles ; to be ushered
into the sitting-room, hideous, pretentious,
and strangely meaningless, furnished always
with the cottage-piano, the Turkey carpet,
and the plant in a bright gilt basket-pot.
The light in these rooms always struck Chase
as being particularly unmerciful. But he
learnt that he must sit patient, while the
farmer was summoned, and the rest of the
household too, and sherry in a decanter and
a couple of glasses were produced from a
sideboard, at whatever hour Chase's visit
might chance to fall, be it even at eight in the
morning, which it very often was, That lusty
THE HEIR 61
hospitality permitted no refusal of the sherry,
though Chase might have preferred, instead
of the burning stuff, a glass of fresh milk
after his walk across the dews. He must sit
and sip the sherry, responding to the social
efforts of the farmer's wife and daughters
(the latter always coy, always would be
up-to-date), while the farmer was content to
leave this indoor portion of the entertainment
to his womenfolk, contributing nothing him-
self but " Another glass, Mr. Chase ? " or
the offer of a cigar, and the creak of his
leather gaiters as he trod across the room.
But presently, Chase knew, when the conver-
sation became really impossibly stilted, he
might without incivility suggest that he
mustn't keep the farmer any longer from his
daily business, and, after shaking hands all
round with the ladies, might take his cap and
follow his host out into the yard, where men
pitchforked the sodden litter out into the
midden in the centre of the yard, and the
slow cattle lurched one behind the other from
the sheds, turning themselves unprompted
in the familiar direction. Here, Chase might
be certain he would not be embarrassed by
having undue notice taken of him. The
farmer here was a greater man than he.
62 THE HEIR
Chase liked to follow round meekly, and the
more he was neglected the better he was
pleased. Then he and the farmer together
would tramp across the acres, silent for the
most part, but inwardly contented, although
when the farmer broke the silence it was only
to grunt out some phrase of complaint,
either at the poverty of that year's yield,
or the dearth or abundance of rabbits, or
to remark, kicking at a clod of loam, " Soggy!
soggy ! the land's not yet forgotten the rains
we had in February," thus endowing the
land with a personality actual and rancor-
ous, more definite to Chase than the person-
alities of the yeomen, whom he could distin-
guish apart by their appearance perhaps, but
certainly not by their opinions, their pre-
occupations, or their gestures. They were
natural features rather than men trees
or boles, endowed with speech and movement
indeed, but preserving the same unity, the
same hodden unwieldiness, that was integral
with the landscape. There was one old
hedger in particular who, maundering over
his business of lop and top, or grubbing among
the ditches, had grown as gnarled and horny
as an ancient root, and was scarcely distin-
guishable till you came right upon him, when
THE HEIR 63
his little brown dog flew out from the hedge
and barked ; and there was another chubby
old man, a dealer in fruit, who drove about
the country, a long ladder swaying out of the
back of his cart. This old man was intimate
with every orchard of the country-side,
whether apple, cherry, damson, or plum,
and could tell you the harvest gathered in
bushel measures for any year within his
memory ; but although all fruits came within
his province, the apples had his especial affec-
tion, and he never referred to them save by
the personal pronouns, " Ah, Winter Queen-
ing," he would say, " she's a grand bearer,"
or " King of the Pippins, he's a fine fellow,"
and for Chase, whom he had taken under his
protection, he would always produce some
choice specimen from his pocket with a con-
fidential air, although, as he never failed to
observe, "May wasn't the time for apples."
Let Mr. Chase only wait till the autumn
he would show him what a Ribston or a
Blenheim ought to be ; " But I shan't be
here in the autumn, Caleb," Chase would
say, and the old man would jerk his head
sagely and reply as he whipped up the pony,
" Trees with old roots isn't so easily thrown
over," and in the parable that he only half
64 THE HEIR
understood Chase found an obscure comfort.
These were his lane-made friendships. He
knew the man who cut withes by the brook ;
he knew the gang and the six great shining
horses that dragged away the chained and
fallen trees upon an enormous wain ; he
knew the boys who went after moorhen's
eggs ; he knew the kingfisher that was always
ambushed somewhere near the bridge ; he
knew the cheery woman who had an idiot
child, and a husband accursed of bees.
" Bees ? no, my husband couldn't never go
near bees. He squashed up too many of
them when he was a lad, and bees never for-
get. Squashed 'em up, so, in his hand. Just
temper. Now if three bees stung him to-
gether he'd die. Oh, surely, Mr. Chase, sir.
We went down into Sussex once, on a holiday,
and the bees there knew him at once and
were after him. Wonderful thing it is, the
sense beasts have got. And memory! Beasts
never forget, beasts don't."
And always there was the reference to the
sale, and the regrets, that were never imper-
tinent and never ruffled so much as the
fringes of Chase's pride. The women were
readier with these regrets than the men ;
they started off with unthinking sympathy,
THE HEIR 65
while the men shuffled and coughed, and
traced with their toe the pattern of the car-
pet, but presently, when alone with Chase,
took advantage of the women's prerogative
in breaking the ice, to revive the subject ;
and always Chase, to get himself out of a
conversation which he felt to be fraught with
awkwardness the awkwardness of reserved
men trespassing upon the grounds of secret
and personal feeling would parry with his
piteous jest of being himself under notice to
quit.
IX
WHEN the inventory men came, Chase suf-
fered. They came with bags, ledgers, pen-
cils ; they were brisk and efficient, and Chase
fled them from room to room. They soon
put him down as oddly peevish, not knowing
that they had committed the extreme offence
of disturbing his dear privacy. In their
eyes, after all, they were there as his em-
ployees, carrying out his orders. The fore-
man even went out of his way to be apprecia-
tive, " Nice lot of stuff you have there, sir,"
he said to Chase, when his glance first
travelled over the dim velvets and gilt of the
66 THE HEIR
furniture in the Long Gallery ; " should do
well under the hammer." Chase stood be-
side him, seeing the upholstered depths of
velvets and damasks, like ripe fruits, heavily
fringed and tasselled ; the plaster- work of the
diapered ceiling ; the fairy-tale background
of the tapestry, and the reflections of the
cloudy mirrors. Into this room also he had
put bowls of flowers, not knowing that the
inventory men were coming so soon. " Nice
lot of stuff you have here, sir," said the
foreman.
Chase remembered how often, representing
his insurance company, he had run a casual
and assessing eye over other people's posses-
sions.
The inventory men worked methodically
through the house. Ground floor, staircase,
landing, passage, first floor. Everything was
ticketed and checked. Chase miserably
avoided their hearty communicativeness. He
skulked in the sitting-room downstairs, or,
when he was driven out of that, took his cap
and walked away from the house that sur-
rounded him now with the grief of a wistful
reproach. He knew that he would be well-
advised to leave, yet he delayed from day to
day ; he suffered, but he stayed on, impo-
THE HEIR 67
tently watching the humbling and the dese-
cration of the house. Then he took to going
amongst the men when they were at their
work, " What might be the value of a thing
like this ? " he would ask, tapping picture,
cabinet, or chair with a contemptuous finger ;
and, when told, he would express surprise
that anyone could be fool enough to pay such
a price for an object so unserviceable, worm-
eaten, or insecure. He would stand by,
derisively sucking the top of his cane, while
clerk and foreman checked and inscribed.
Sometimes he would pick up some object just
entered, a blue porcelain bowl, or whatever
it might be, turn it over between his hands,
examine it, and set it back on the window
ledge with a shrug of the shoulders. There
were no flowers in the rooms now, nor did he
leave his pipes and tobacco littering the tables,
but kept them hidden away in a drawer.
There had been places, intimate to him,
where he had grown accustomed to put his
things, knowing he would find them there on
his return ; but he now broke himself of this
weakness with a wrench. It hurt, and he
was grim about it. In the evenings he sat
solitary in a stiff room, without the compan-
ionship of those familiar things in their
68 THE HEIR
familiar niches. Towards Fortune his man-
ner changed, and he appeared to take a
pleasure in speaking callously, even harshly,
of the forthcoming sale ; but the old servant
saw through him. When people came now
to visit the house, he took them over every
corner of it himself, deploring its lack of
convenience, pointing out the easy reme-
dy, and vaunting the advantage of its archi-
tectural perfection, " Quoted in every book
on the subject," he would say, " a perfect
specimen of domestic Elizabethan " (this
phrase he had picked up from an article in
an architectural journal), " complete in every
detail, down to the window-fastenings ; you
wouldn't find another like it, in the length
and breadth of England." The people to
whom he said these things looked at him
curiously ; he spoke in a shrill, eager voice,
and they thought he must be very anxious
to sell. " Hard-up, no doubt," they said as
they went away. Others said, " He probably
belongs to a distant branch of the family, and
doesn't care."
THE HEIR 69
X
AFTER the inventory men, the dealers. Cigars,
paunches, check- waistcoats, signet-rings. In-
solent plump hands thumbing the velvets ;
shiny lips pushed out in disparagement, while
small eyes twinkled with concupiscence.
Chase grew to know them well. Yet he
taught himself to banter even with the dealers,
to pretend his excessive boredom with the
whole uncongenial business. He advertised
his contempt for the possessions that circum-
stances had thrust on him ; they could and
should, he let it be understood, affect him
solely through their marketable value. The
house itself he quoted Nutley, to the dealers
not to the people who came to view " Small
rooms, dark passages, no bath-rooms, no
electric light." He said these things often
and loudly, and laughed after he had said
them as though he had uttered a witticism.
The dealers laughed with him, politely, but
they thought him a little wild, and from time
to time cast at him a glance of slight surprise.
All this while he sent no letter to Wolver-
hampton.
He got one letter from his office, a type-
70 THE HEIR
written letter, considerate and long-suffering,
addressed to P. Chase, Esq., at the foot (he
was accustomed to seeing himself referred to
as " our Mr. Chase " by his firm anyhow
they hadn't ferreted out the Peregrine), sug-
gesting that, although they quite understood
that private affairs of importance were de-
taining him, he might perhaps for their
guidance indicate an approximate date for his
return. He reflected vaguely that they were
treating him very decently ; and dropped the
letter into the wastepaper basket.
XI
HE saw, however, that he would soon have to
go. He clung on, but the sale was imminent ;
red and black posters appeared on all the
cottages ; and larger, redder, and blacker
posters announced the sale, "By order of
Peregrine Chase, Esq.," of " the unique col-
lection of antique furniture, tapestries, pic-
tures, and contents of the mansion," and in
types of varying size detailed these contents,
so that Chase could see, flaunting upon walls,
trees, and gate-posts, when he wandered out,
the soulless dates and the auctioneer's bom-
THE HEIR 71
bast that advertised for others the quality of
his possessions.
An illustrated booklet was likewise pub-
lished. Nutley gave him a copy. " This
quite unique sixteenth century residence";
" the original panelling and plasterwork " ;
" the moat and contemporary outbuildings" ;
" the old-world garden " Chase fluttered
over the pages, and rage seized him by the
throat. " Nicely got up, don't you think ? "
Nutley said complacently.
Chase took the booklet away with him,
up into the gallery. He always liked the
gallery, because it was long, low, deserted,
and so glowingly ornate ; and more peaceful
than any of the other rooms in the whole
peaceful house. When he went there with
the booklet in his hand that evening, he sat
quite still for a time while the hush that his
entrance had disturbed settled down again
upon the room and its motionless occupant.
A latticed rectangle of deep gold lay across
the boards, the last sunlight of the day.
Chase turned over the leaves of the book.
" The Oak Parlour, an apartment 20 ft. by
25 ft., partially panelled in linen-fold in a
state of the finest preservation," was that his
library ? it couldn't be, so accurate, so
72 THE HEIR
precise ? Why, the room was living ! through
the windows one saw up the garden, and saw
the peacocks perched on the low wall, one
heard their cry as they flew up into the cedars
for the night ; and in the evening, in that
room, the fir-cones crackled on the hearth,
the dry wood kindled, and the room began to
smell ever so slightly of the clean, acrid wood-
smoke that never quite left it, but remained
clinging even when the next day the windows
were open and the warm breeze fanned into
the room. He had known all that about it,
although he hadn't known it was twenty foot
by twenty-five. He hadn't known that the
panelling against which he had been accus-
tomed to set his bowl of coral tulips was
called linen-fold.
He was an ignorant fellow ; he hadn't
known ; he didn't know anything even now ;
the sooner he went back to Wolverhampton
the better.
He turned over another page of the booklet.
" The Great Staircase and Armorial Window,
(cir. 1584) with coats-of-arms of the families
of Chase, Dacre, Medlicott, and Cullinbroke,"
the window whose gaudiness always seemed
to attract a peacock to parade in rivalry on
the outer ledge, like the first day he had come
THE HEIR 73
to Blackboys ; but why had they given every-
thing such high-sounding names ? the " Great
Staircase," for instance ; it was never called
that, but only " the staircase," nor was it
particularly great, only wide and polished and
leisurely. He supposed Nutley was respon-
sible, or was it Farebrother ? Farebrother
who was so kindly, and might have wanted
to salve Chase's feelings by appealing to
his vanity through the splendour of his
property ?
What a fool he was ; of course, neither
Nutley nor Farebrother gave a thought to his
feelings, but only to the expediency of selling
the house.
He turned the pages further. " The Long
Gallery," here, at least, they had not tried
to improve upon the usual name " a spa-
cious apartment running the whole length of
the upper floor, 100 ft. by 30 ft. wide, sump-
tuously ornamented in the Italian style of the
sixteenth century, with mullioned heraldic
windows, overmantel of sculptured marble,
rich plastered ceiling," here he raised his eyes
and let them stray down the length of the
gallery ; the rectangle of sunlight had grown
deeper and more luminous ; the blocks of
shadow in the corners had spread, the velvet
74 THE HEIR
chairs against the tapestry had merged and
become yet more fruity ; they were like split
figs, like plums, like ripe mulberries ; the
colour of the room was as luxuriant as the
spilling out of a cornucopia.
Chase became aware that Fortune was
standing beside him.
" Mr. Nutley asked me to tell you, sir,
that he couldn't wait any longer, but that
he'll be here again to-morrow."
Chase blushed and stammered, as he
always did when someone took him by sur-
prise, and as he more particularly did when
that someone happened to be one of his own
servants. Then he saw tears standing in the
old butler's eyes. He thought angrily to
himself that the man was as soft-hearted as
an old woman.
"Seen this little book, Fortune?" he
inquired, holding it out towards him.
" Oh, sir!" exclaimed the butler, turning
aside.
"Well, what's the matter? what's the
matter ? " said Chase, in his most irritable
tone.
He got up and moved away. He went out
into the garden, troubled and disquieted by
the excessive tumult in his soul. He gazed
THE HEIR 75
down upon the mellow roofs and chimneys,
veiled in a haze of blue smoke ; upon all the
beauty that had given him peace and con-
tent ; but far from deriving comfort now he
felt himself provoked by a fresh anguish,
impotent and yet rebellious, a weak fury, an
irresolute insubordination. Schemes, that
his practical sense told him were fantastically
futile, kept dashing across his mind. He
would tell Fortune to shut the door in every-
body's face, more especially Nutley's. He
would destroy the bridge across the moat.
He would sulk inside his house, admitting no
one ; he and his house, alone, allied against
rapacity. Fortune and the few other ser-
vants might desert him if they chose ; he
would cook for himself, he would dust, he
would think it an honour to dust ; and
suddenly the contrast between the picture
of himself with a duster in his hand, and of
himself striking at the bridge with a pickaxe,
caused him to laugh out loud, a laugh bitter
and tormented, that could never have issued
from his throat in the Wolverhampton days.
He wished that he were back in those days,
again the conscientious drudge, earning
enough to keep himself in decent lodgings
(not among brocades and fringes, or plumed
76 THE HEIR
and canopied beds ! not in the midst of this
midsummer loveliness, that laid hands more
gentle and more detaining than the hands of
any woman about his heart! not this old
dignity that touched his pride!), and he
stared down upon the roofs of the house
lying cupped in its hollow, resentful of the
vision that had thus opened out as though
by treachery at a turning of his drab exist-
ence, yet unable to sustain a truly resentful
or angry thought, by reason of the tenderness
that melted him, and the mute plea of his
inheritance, that, scorning any device more
theatrical, quietly relied upon its simple
beauty as its only mediator.
XII
MR. NUTLEY was considerably relieved when
he heard that Chase had gone back to Wol-
verhampton. From being negligible, Chase
had lately become a slightly inconvenient
presence at Blackboys ; not that he ever
criticized or interfered with the arrangements
that Nutley made, but Nutley felt vaguely
that he watched everything and registered
internal comments ; yes, although not a
very sensitive chap, perhaps he hadn't time
THE HEIR 77
for that Nutley had become aware that very
little eluded Chase's observation. It was
odd, and rather annoying, that in spite of
his taciturnity and his shy manner, Chase
should so contrive to make himself felt. Any
of the people on the estate, who had spoken
with him more than once or twice, had a
liking and a respect for him. Perhaps,
Nutley consoled himself, it was thanks to
tradition quite as much as to Chase's per-
sonality, and he permitted himself a little
outburst against the tradition he hated,
envied, and scorned.
Now that Chase had gone back to Wolver-
hampton, Nutley arrived more aggressively
at Blackboys, rang the bell louder, made
more demands on Fortune, and bustled
everybody about the place.
The first time he came there in the owner's
absence the dog met him in the hall, stretch-
ing himself as though just awakened from
sleep, coming forward with his nails clicking
on the boards.
" He misses his master," said Fortune
compassionately.
Nutley thought, with discomfort, that the
whole place missed Chase. There were traces
of him everywhere the obverse of his hand-
78 THE HEIR
writing on the pad of blotting-paper in the
library, his stick in the hall, and some of his
clothes in a pile on the bed in his bedroom.
" Yes, Mr. Chase left a good many of his
things behind," said Fortune when consulted.
" When does he think he's coming back ?
the sale takes place next week," grumbled
Nutley.
It was nearly midsummer ; the heat-haze
wickered above the ground, and the garden
was tumultuous with butterflies and flowers.
" It seems a pity to think of Mr. Chase
missing all this fine weather," Fortune re-
marked.
Nutley had no affection whatever for
Fortune ; he possessed the knack of making
remarks to which he could not reasonably
take exception, but which contrived slightly
to irritate him.
" I daresay he's getting the fine weather
where he is," he replied curtly.
" Ah, but in towns it isn't the same thing ;
when he's got his own garden here, and all,"
said Fortune, not yielding to Nutley, who
merely shrugged, and started talking about
the sale in a sharp voice.
He was in his element, Chase once dis-
missed from his mind. He came up to Black-
THE HEIR 79
boys nearly every day, quite unnecessarily,
giving every detail his attention, fawning
upon anyone who seemed a likely purchaser
for the house, gossiping with the dealers who
now came in large numbers, and accepting
their cigars with a " Well, I don't mind if I
do bit of a strain, you know, all this the
responsibility, and so on." He had the
acquisitiveness of a magpie, for scraps of
sale-room gossip. Dealers ticking off items
in their catalogues, men in green baize
aprons shifting furniture, the front door
standing permanently open to all comers,
were all a source of real gratification to him ;
while in the number of motors that waited
under the shade of the trees he took a per-
sonal pride. He rubbed his hands with
pleasure over the coming and going, and at
the crunch of fresh wheels on the gravel.
Chase's ridiculous little padlock on the
wooden gate there wasn't much trace of
that now! Front door and back door were
open, the summer breeze wandering gently
between them and winnowing the shreds of
straw that trailed about the hall, and in the
passage beyond ; and anyone who had
finished inspecting the house might pass into
the garden by the back door, to stroll up the
80 THE HEIR
central walk, till Nutley, looking out of an
upper floor window, taking upon himself the
whole credit, and full of a complacent satis-
faction, thought that the place had the
appearance of a garden party.
A country sale ! It was one that would set
two counties talking, one that would attract
all the biggest swells from London (Wert-
heimer, Durlacher, Duveen, Partridge, they
had all been already, taking notes), such a
collection didn't often come under the ham-
mer no, by jove, it didn't ! and Nutley,
reading for the fiftieth time the name
" Nutley, Farebrother and Co., Estate Agents
and Solicitors," at the foot of the poster,
reflected how that name would gain in fame
and lustre by the association. Not that
Farebrother, not that Co., had been allowed
many fingers in the pie ; he, Nutley, had
done it all ; it was his show, his ewe-lamb ;
he would have snapped the head off anyone
who had dared to claim a share, or scorned
them with a single glance.
He wondered to whom the house itself
would ultimately fall. He had received several
offers for it, but none of them had reached
the reserve figure of thirty thousand. The
dealers, of course, would make a ring for the
THE HEIR 81
furniture, the tapestries, and the pictures,
and would doubtless resell them to its new
owner of the house at an outrageous profit.
Nutley had his eye on a Brazilian as a very
probable purchaser ; not only had he called
at the estate office himself for all possible
particulars, but on a second occasion he had
brought his son and his daughter with him,
exotic birds brilliantly descending upon the
country solicitor's office. They had come
in a white Rolls-Royce, which had imme-
diately compelled Nutley's disapproving re-
spect ; it had a negro chauffeur on the box,
the silver statuette of a nymph with stream-
ing hair on the bonnet, and a spray of orchids
in a silver and crystal vase inside. The
Brazilian himself was an unpretentious cattle
magnate, with a quick, clipped manner, and
a wrinkled face the colour of a coffee-bean ;
he might be the purveyor of dollars, but he
wasn't the showy one ; the ostentation of
the family had passed into the children.
These were in their early twenties, spoilt and
fretful ; the tyrants of their widowed father,
who listened to all their remarks with an
indulgent smile. Nutley, who had never in
the whole of his life seen anything like them,
tried to make himself believe that he couldn't
82 THE HEIR
decide which was the more offensive, but,
secretly, he was much impressed. " Plenty
of bounce, anyway," he reflected, observing
the son, his pearl-grey suit over admirably
waisted stays, his black hair swept back
from his brow, and shining like the flanks of
a wet seal, his lean hands weighted with fat
platinum rings, his walk that slightly swayed,
as though the syncopated rhythm of the
plantations had passed for ever into his
blood ; and, observing him, the strangest
shadow of envy passed across the shabby
little solicitor in the presence of such lacka-
daisical youth. . . . The daughter, more
languid and more subtly insolent, so plump
that she seemed everywhere cushioned : her
tiny hands had no knuckles, but only dimples,
and everything about her was round, from
the single pearls on her fingers to the toe-
caps of her patent leather shoes. Clearly the
father had offered Blackboys to the pair as
an additional toy. They were as taken with
it as their deliberately unenthusiastic manner
would permit them to betray ; and Nutley
guessed that sufficient sulks on the part of
the daughter would quickly induce the
widower to increase his offer of twenty-five
thousand by the necessary five. Up to the
THE HEIR 83
present he had held iirm, a business con-
vention which Nutley was ready tacitly to
accept. He had reported the visit to Chase,
but Chase (the unaccountable) hadn't taken
much interest. Since then he had seen the
brother and sister several times wandering
over the house and garden, and this he took
to be a promising sign. The father he hadn't
seen again, but that didn't distress him : the
insolent pair were the ones who counted.
XIII
ONLY two days remained. Chase had sent
for his clothes, and had enclosed a note for
Nutley in his letter to Fortune : " Press of
business " prevented him from returning to
Blackboys, but he was content to leave
everything in Nutley 's hands, etc. Polite
enough. Nutley read the note, standing in
the gallery which had been cleared in pre-
paration for the sale. (It was, he thought, a
stroke of genius to hold the sale in the house
itself to display the furniture in its own
surroundings, instead of in the dreary frame
of an auction room. That would make very
little difference to the dealers, of course, who
knew the intrinsic value ; but from the stray
84 THE HEIR
buyers, the amateurs who would be after the
less important things, it might mean any-
thing up to an extra 25 per cent.). He was
alone in the gallery, for it was not yet ten
o'clock, and he maliciously wondered what
Chase's feelings would be if he could see the
room now, the baize-covered tables on trestle
legs, the auctioneer's desk and high chair,
the rows of cane chairs arranged as though
in a theatre, the choicest pieces of furniture
grouped behind cords at the further end of
the room, like animals awaiting slaughter in
a pen. The little solicitor was from time to
time startled by the stab of malice that
thought of Chase evoked ; he was startled
now. He clapped his hand over his mouth
to suppress an ejaculation, or a grin? and
glanced round the gallery. It was empty
but for the lean dog, who sat with his tail
curled like a whip-lash round his haunches,
and who might have come down out of the
tapestry, gravely regarding Nutley. The
lean dog, scenting disruption, had trailed
about the house for days like a haunted soul,
and Nutley had fallen into the habit of
saying to him, with a jocularity oddly
peppered by venom, " I'll put you into the
sale as an extra item, spindle-shanks."
THE HEIR 85
Dimly, it gratified him to insult Chase
through Chase's dog.
People began to filter in. They wandered
about, looking at things and consulting their
catalogues ; Nutley, who examined them
stealthily and with as much self- consciousness
as if he had been the owner, discriminated
nicely between the bona fide buyers and
those who came out of idle curiosity. (Chase
had already recognized the mentality that
seizes upon any pretext for penetrating into
another man's house ; if as far as his bed-
room, so much the better.) Nutley might as
well have returned to his office since here
there was no longer anything for him to do,
but he lingered, with the satisfaction of an
impresario. Could he but have stood at the
front door, to receive the people as the cars
rolled up at intervals! Hospitable and wel-
coming phrases came springing to his lips,
and his hands spread themselves urbanely,
the palms outwards. No sharpness in his
manner! none of the chilblained acerbity
that kept him always on the defensive ! noth-
ing but honey and suavity! "Walk in,
walk in, ladies and gentlemen ! No entrance
fee in my peep show. Twenty years I had
to wait for the old woman to die ; I fixed my
86 THE HEIR
eye on her when she was sixty, but she clung
on till she was over eighty ; then she went.
It's all in my hands now. Walk in, walk in,
ladies and gentlemen ; walk upstairs ; the
show's going to begin."
It was very warm. Really an exceptional
summer. If the weather held for another
two days, it would improve the attendance
at the sale. London people would come
(Nutley had the sudden idea of running a
special). Even now, picnic parties were
dotted about, under the trees beside their
motors. No wonder that they were glad to
exchange burning pavements against fresh
grass for a day. Chase Chase wouldn't
like the litter they left. Bits of paper, bottles
and tins. He wouldn't say anything ; he
never did ; that was exactly what made him
so disconcerting ; but he would look, and
his nose would curl. But Chase was safely
away, while the picnics took place under his
trees, and women in their light summer
dresses strolled about in his garden and
pointed with their parasols at his house.
Nutley saw them from the windows. For
the first time since he remembered the place,
the parapet of the central walk was bare of
peacocks ; they had taken refuge indignantly
THE HEIR 87
in the cedars, where they could be heard
screeching. He remembered Chase, feeding
them with bits of bread from his pocket. He
remembered old Miss Chase, wagging her
finger at him, and saying " Ah, Nutley "
(she had always called him by his surname,
like a man), " you want to deprive an old
maid of her children ; it's too bad of you! "
But the Chases were gone, both of them,
and no Chases remained, but those who stared
sadly from their frames, where they stood
propped against the wall ready to be carried
into the sale room.
XIV
JUNE the twenty-first. The day of the sale.
Midsummer day. Nutley's day. He arrived
early at the house, and met at the door
Colonel Stanforth, who had walked across
the park, and who considered the solicitor's
umbrella with amusement. " Afraid it will
rain, Nutley ? Look at that blue sky, not a
cloud, not even a white one." They entered
the house together, Stanforth rubicund and
large, Nutley noticeably spare in the black
coat that enveloped him like a sheath.
" Might be an undertaker's mute," Stanforth
88 THE HEIR
commented inwardly. " Isn't Farebrother
coming up to-day ? " he asked aloud. " Oh,
yes, I daresay he'll look in later," Nutley
answered, implying as clearly as possible by
his tone that it was not of the slightest
importance whether his partner looked in
or not.
" Well, there aren't many people about
yet," said Stanforth, rubbing his hands
vigorously together. " What about your
Brazilians, eh ? Are they going to put in an
appearance ? Chase, I hear, is still in Wolver-
hampton."
" Yes," answered Nutley, " we shan't see
much of him."
" Of course, there was no necessity for him
to come, but it's odd of him to take so little
interest, don't you think ? Odd, I mean, as
he seemed to like staying in the place, and
to have got on so remarkably well with all
the people around. Not that I saw anything
of him when he was here. An unneigh-
bourly sort of fellow, I should think. But
to hear some of the people talk about him,
by Gad, I was quite sorry he couldn't settle
down here as squire."
" As you say, there was no necessity for
him to come to the sale," said Nutley, frigidly
THE HEIR 89
ignoring the remainder of Stanforth's remarks.
" No, but if I'd been he, I don't think I
could have kept away, all the same."
Nutley went off, saying he had things to see
to. On the landing he met the butler with
Thane slouching disconsolately after him.
" You'll see that that dog's shut up,
Fortune," he snapped at him.
An air of suspense hung over everything.
The sale was announced to begin at midday,
because the London train arrived shortly
after eleven, but before then the local atten-
dance poured in, and many people drove up
who had not previously been seen at the
house, their business being with the lands or
the farms : farmers in their gigs, tip-toeing
awkwardly and apologetically on the polished
boards of the hall while their horses were led
away into the stable-yard, and there were
many of the gentry too, who came in waggon-
ettes or pony-traps. Nutley, watching and
prying everywhere, observed the arrival of
the latter with mixed feelings. On the one
hand their presence increased the crush, but
on the other hand he did not for a moment
suppose they had come to buy. They came
in families, shy and inclined to giggle and to
herd together, squire and lady dressed almost
90 THE HEIR
similarly in tweed, and not differing much as
to figure either, the sons very tall and slim,
and slightly ashamed, the daughters rather
taller and slimmer, in light muslins and large
hats, all whispering together, half propitia-
tory, half on the defensive, and casting sus-
picious glances at everyone else. Amongst
these groups Nutley discerned the young
Brazilian, graceful as an antelope amongst
cattle, and, going to the window, he saw
the white Rolls-Royce silently manoeuvring
amongst the gigs and the waggonettes.
" Regular bean-feast, ain't it ? " said
Stanforth's voice behind him. " You ought
to have had a merry-go-round and a gipsy
booth, Nutley."
Nutley uncovered his teeth in a nervously
polite smile. He looked at his watch, and
decided that it was time the London motors
began to arrive. Also the train was due.
Most of those who came by train would have
to walk from the station ; it wasn't far
across the village and down the avenue to
the house. He could see the advance guard
already, walking in batches of two and three.
And there was Farebrother ; silly old Fare-
brother, with his rosy face, and his big
spectacles, and his woolly white curls under
THE HEIR 91
the broad hat. Not long to wait now. The
auctioneer's men were at their posts ; most
of the chairs in the gallery were occupied,
only the front rows being left empty owing to
diffidence ; the auctioneer himself, Mr. Webb,
had arrived and stood talking to Colonel
Stanforth, with an air of unconcern, on any
topic other than the sale.
The farms and outlying portions were to
be dealt with first, then the house and the
contents of the house, then the park, and the
building lots that had been carved out of the
park and that were especially dear to Nutley.
It would be a long sale, and probably an
exciting one. He hoped there would be
competition over the house. He knew that
several agencies were after it, but thought
that he would place his money on the Brazi-
lian.
A continuous stir of movement and con-
versation filled the gallery. People came up
to Nutley and asked him questions in whis-
pers, and some of the big dealers nodded to
him. Nearly all the men had their cata-
logues and pencils ready ; some were reading
the booklet. The Brazilian slipped into a
prominent seat, accompanied by his solicitor.
A quarter to twelve. The garden was de-
G
92 THE HEIR
serted now, for everyone had crowded into
the house. Five minutes to twelve. Mr.
Webb climbed up into his high chair, adjusted
his glasses, and began turning over some
papers on the desk before him.
A message was brought to Nutley : Mr.
Webb would be much obliged if he would
remain at hand to answer any point that
might be raised. Nutley was only too glad.
He went and leant against the auctioneer's
chair, at the back, and from there surveyed
the whole length of the room. Rows of
expectant people. People leaning against
the walls and in the doorways. The gaitered
farmers. The gentry. The dealers. The
clerks and small fry. The men in green
baize aprons. Such a crowd as the gallery
had never seen.
" Lot 1, gentlemen. . . ."
The sharp rap of the auctioneer's little
ivory hammer, and the buzz in the room was
stilled ; throats were cleared, heads raised.
" Lot 1, gentlemen. Three cottages ad-
joining the station, with one acre of ground ;
coloured green on plan. What bids, gentle-
men ? Anyone start the bidding ? Five
hundred guineas ? four hundred ? Come,
come, gentlemen, please," admonishing them,
THE HEIR 93
" we have a great deal to get through. I ask
your kind co-operation."
Knocked down at seven hundred and fifty
guineas. Nutley noted the sum in the margin
of his catalogue. Webb was a capital auc-
tioneer : he bustled folk, he chaffed them, he
got them into a good temper, he made them
laugh so that their purses laughed wide in
company. He had a jolly round face, a
twinkling eye, and a rose-bud in his button-
hole. Five hundred and fifty for the next
lot, two cottages ; so far, so good.
" Now, gentlemen, we come to something
a little more interesting : the farm-house and
lands known as Orchards. An excellent
house, and a particularly fine brew of ale
kept there, too, as I happen to know though
that doesn't go with the house." (The
audience laughed; it appreciated that kind
of pleasantry.) " What offers, gentlemen ?
Two hundred acres of fine pasture and arable,
ten acres of shaw, twenty acres of first-class
fruit-trees. . . ." "That's so, sir," from
Chase's old apple- dealer friend at the back
of the room, and heads were turned smilingly
towards him. " There spoke the best author-
ity in the county," cried the auctioneer,
catching on to this, " as nice a little property
94 THE HEIR
as you could wish. I've a good mind to
start the bidding myself. Fifty guineas
I'll put up fifty guineas. Who'll go one
better ? " The audience laughed again ; Mr.
Webb had a great reputation as a wag. Nut-
ley caught sight of Far ebr other's full- moon
face at the back of the room, perfunctorily
smiling.
The tenant began bidding for his own
farm ; he had been to Nutley to see whether
a mortgage could be arranged, and Nutley
knew the extent of his finances. The voice
of the auctioneer followed the bidding mono-
tonously up, " Two thousand guineas . . .
two thousand two hundred . . . come, gen-
tlemen, we're wasting time . . . two thou-
sand five hundred. . . ."
Knocked down to the farmer at three
thousand five hundred guineas. A wink
passed between Nutley and the purchaser :
the place had not sold very well, but Nutley 's
firm would get the commission on the mort-
gage.
Lot 4. Jakes' cottage. Nutley remem-
bered that Chase had once commented on
Jakes' garden, and he remembered also that
old Miss Chase used to favour Jakes and his
flowers ; he supposed sarcastically that it
THE HEIR 95
was hereditary among the Chases to favour
Jakes. That same stab of malice came back
to him, and this time it included Jakes : the
man made himself ridiculous over his garden,
carrying (as he boasted) soil and leaf-mould
home for it for miles upon his back ; that was
all over now, and his cottage would first be
sold as a building site and then pulled down.
He caught sight of Jakes, standing near a
window, his every-day corduroy trousers
tied as usual with string round the knees ; he
looked terribly embarrassed, and was swallow-
ing hard ; the Adam's apple in his throat
moved visibly above his collar. He stood
twisting his cap between his hands. Nutley
derisively watched him, saying to himself
that the fellow might be on the point of
making a speech. Surely he wasn't going
to bid! a working-man on perhaps forty
shillings a week! Nutley was taken up and
entertained by this idea, when a stir at the
door distracted his attention ; he glanced to
see who the late-comer was, and perceived
Chase.
96 THE HEIR
XV
CHASE entered hurriedly, and asked a ques-
tion of a man standing by ; he looked haggard
and ill, but the answer to his question ap-
peared to reassure him, and he slipped
quietly to the chair that somebody offered
him. Several people recognized him, and
pointed him out to one another. Nutley
stared, incredulous and indignant. Just like
his sly ways again ! Why take the trouble to
write and say he was detained by press of
business, when he had every intention of
coming ? Sly. Well, might he enjoy him-
self, listening to the sale of his house ; Nutley,
with an angry shrug, wished him joy.
Meanwhile Mr. Webb's voice, above him,
continued to advocate Jakes' cottage,
" either as a building site or as a tea-room,
gentlemen ; I needn't point out to you the
advantages of either in the heart of a
picturesque village on a well-frequented
motor route. The garden's only a quarter
of an acre, but you have seen it to-day on
your way from the station ; a perfect
picture. What offers ? Come ! We're dis-
posed to let this lot go cheap as the cottage
THE HEIR 97
is in need of repair. It's a real chance for
somebody."
" One hundred guineas," called out a fat
man, known to Nutley as the proprietor of
an hotel in Eastbourne.
" And fifty," said Jakes in a trembling
voice.
Nutley suppressed a cackle of laughter.
" And seventy- five," said the fat man,
after glaring at Jakes.
" Two hundred," said Jakes.
Chase sat on the edge of his chair, twisting
his fingers together and keeping his eyes
fixed on Jakes. So the man was trying to
save his garden ! and the flowers, through
whose roots he said he would put a baggin-
hook sooner than let them pass to a stranger.
Where did he imagine he could get the
money ? poor fool. The fat man was after
the cottage for some commercial enterprise.
What had the auctioneer suggested ? a tea-
room ? That was it, without a doubt a tea-
room! A painted sign-board hanging out
to attract motorists ; little tin tables in the
garden, perhaps, on summer evenings.
The fat man ran Jakes up to two hundred
and fifty before Jakes began to falter.
Something in the near region of two hundred
98 THE HEIR
and fifty was the limit, Chase guessed, to
which his secret and inscrutable financial
preparations would run. What plans had
he made before coming, poor chap ; what
plans, full of a lamentable pathos, to meet
the rivalry of those who might possibly have
designs upon his tenement ? Surely not very
crafty plans, or very adequate ? They had
reached two hundred and seventy-five. Jakes
was distressed ; and to Nutley, scornfully
watching, as to Chase, compassionately
watching, and as to the auctioneer, impar-
tially watching, it was clear that neither con-
science nor prudence counselled him to go
any further.
" Two hundred and seventy-five guineas
are bid," said the voice of the auctioneer ;
"two hundred and seventy-five guineas,"
pause " going, going . . ."
" Three hundred," brought out Jakes,
upon whose forehead sweat was standing.
" And ten," said the fat man remorselessly.
Jakes shook his head as the auctioneer
looked at him in inquiry.
" Three hundred and ten guineas are bid,"
said the acutioneer, " three hundred and ten
guineas," his voice rising and trailing, " no
more ?- a little more, sir, come! " in persua-
THE HEIR 99
sion to Jakes, who shook his head again.
" Lot 4, gentlemen, going for the sum of
three hundred and ten guineas, going, going,
gone." The hammer came down with a
sharp tap, and Mr. Webb leant across his
desk to take the name and address of the
purchaser.
Jakes began making his way out of the
room. He had the shameful air of one who
has failed before all men in the single audacity
of his life-time. For him, Lot 4 had been
the lot that must rivefr everyone's attention ;
it had been not an episode but the apex.
Chase saw him slink out, burdened by dis-
grace. It would be several hours before he
regained the spirit to put the bagginhook
through the flowers.
" Lot 5 ..." Callous as Roman sports
proceeding on the retreat of the conquered
gladiator. Scatter sand on the blood ! Chase
sat on, dumbly listening, the auctioneer's
voice and the rap of the hammer twanging,
metallic, across the chords of his bursting
head. He had surely been mad to come,
to expose himself to this pain, madder than
poor Jakes, who at least came with a certain
hope. What had brought him his body felt
curiously light ; he knew only that he had
100 THE HEIR
slipped out of his lodgings at six that morn-
ing, had found his way into trains, his limbs
performing the necessary actions for him,
while his mind continued remote and fixed
only upon the distant object towards which
he was being rapidly carried. His house
during this miserable week in Wolverhamp-
ton, what had they been doing to his
house ? perpetrating what infamy ? Sitting
in the train his mind glazed into that one
concentration Blackboys ; he had won-
dered dimly whether he would indeed find
the place where he had left it, among the
trees, or whether he had dreamt it, under an
enchantment ; whether life in Wolverhamp-
ton his office, his ledgers, his clerks, his
lodgings were not the only reality ? Still
his limbs, intelligent servants, had carried
him over the difficulties of the cross-country
journey, rendering him at the familiar sta-
tion a miracle. As he crossed the stile at
the bend of the footpath for he had taken
the short cut across the fields from the
station ^he had come upon the house, he
had heard his breath sob in his throat, and
he had repressed the impulse to stretch out
both his hands. . . . With his eagerness his
steps had quickened. It was the house,
THE HEIR 101
though not as he knew it. Not slumbrous.
Not secluded. Carriages and motors under
the trees, grooms and chauffeurs strolling
about, idly staring. The house unveiled,
prostituted ; yes, it was like seeing one's
mistress in a slave-market. He had bounded
up the steps into the hall, where a handful of
loafing men had quizzed him impertinently.
The garden door opposite, stood open, and
he could see right up the garden ; was
puzzled, in passing, because he missed the
peacocks parading the blazon of their
spread tails. The familiarity of the pro-
portions closed instantly round him. Wol-
verhampton receded ; this was reality ; this
was home.
He had gone up the staircase, his head
reeling with anger when he saw that the
pictures had been taken down from their
places, and stood propped along the walls of
the upper passage, ticketed and numbered.
He had madly resented this interference with
his property. Then he-h^;d g'oiie iiitp -the
gallery, sick and blind, dazzled by the sight
that met him there, as. though fte<had ; come
suddenly into too strong a light. He had
assured himself at once that they had not
yet reached the selling of the house. Still
102 THE HEIR
his and he stumbled into a chair and
assisted at the demolition of Jakes.
The windows were wide open ; bees
blundered in and out ; the tops of the woods
appeared, huge green pillows ; above them
the cloudless sky ; Midsummer day. Where,
then, was the sweet harmony of the house
and garden that waited upon the lazy hours
of such a day ? driven out by dust and
strangers, the Long Gallery made dingy by
rows of chairs, robbed of its own mellow
furnishing, robbed of its silence by sharp
voices ; the violation of sanctuary. Chase
sat with his fingers knotted together between
his knees. Perhaps a score of people in that
room knew him by sight ; to the others he
was an onlooker ; to the ones who knew
him, an owner hoping for a good price. They
must know he was poor the park fence was
lichen-covered and broken down in many
places ; the road up to the house was over-
grown with weeds. Poor obliged to sell ;
the place, for &li its beauty, betrayed its
poverty, , Qnly the farmers looked pros-
perous; (Those, farmers must have prospered
better than they ever admitted, for here was
one of them buying-in at a most respectable
figure the house and lands he rented.) His
THE HEIR 103
over-excited senses quietening down a little,
he paid attention to the progress of the sale,
finding there nothing but the same intolerable
pain ; the warmth of his secret memory
stirred by the chill probe of the words he
heard pronounced from the auctioneer's
desk " ten acres of fallow, known as Ten-
Acre Field, with five acres, three roods, and
two perches of wood, including a quantity of
fine standing timber to the value of two
hundred and fifty pounds " he knew that
wood ; it was free of undergrowth, and the
bare tree-trunks rose like columns straight
out of a sea of bluebells : two hundred and
fifty pounds' worth of standing timber. Walk-
ing in Ten-Acre Field outside the edge of
that wood he had scared many a rabbit that
vanished into the wood with a frisk of white
tail, and had startled the rusty pheasants up
into heavy flight.
Knocked down to the farmer who had just
bought-in his farm.
He didn't much resent the fields and woods
going to the farmers. If anyone other than
himself must have them, let it be the yeomen
by whom they were worked and understood.
But the house there was the rub, the
anguish. Nutley had mentioned a Brazilian
104 THE HEIR
(Nutley's most casual word about the house,
or a buyer for the house, had remained in-
delibly stamped on Chase's mind). He
looked about now, for the first time since he
had come into the room, and discovered
Nutley leaning against the auctioneer's high
chair, then he discovered the young man who
must certainly be the Brazilian in question,
and all the dread which had been hitherto,
so to speak, staved off, now smote him with
its imminence as his eyes lighted on the un-
familiar, insouciant face.
The new owner, lounging there, insuffer-
able, graceful, waiting without impatience,
so insultingly unperturbed! Cool as a
cucumber, that young man, accustomed to
find life full of a persevering amiability.
Chase made a movement to rise ; he wanted
to fly the room, to escape an ordeal that
appalled his soul, but his shyness held him
down : he could not create a sensation
before so many people. Enraged as he was
by the absurd weakness that caught him
thus, and prevented him from saving himself
while there was still time, he yet submitted,
pinned to his chair, enduring such misery as
made all his previous grief sink to the level
of mere discomfort. He yearned even after
THE HEIR 105
hours that lay in the past, and that at the
time of their being had seemed to him, in all
truth, sufficiently weighted ; the hours he
had spent standing beside the dealers during
their minute examination of his possessions,
while he wrung out his pitiable flippancies ;
then, in those days, he had known that
ultimately they would take their leave, and
that he would be left to turn back alone into
his house, greeted by the dog beating his tail
against the legs of the furniture, as pleased
as his master ; or the hour when, sitting in
this very gallery (how different then!), he
had read through Nutley's offensive booklet,
and had not known whether it was chiefly
anger or pain that drove extravagant ideas
of revolt across his mind ; those hours by
comparison now appeared to him elysian
he had tasted then but the froth on the cup
of bitterness of which he now reached the
dregs.
God! how quickly they were getting
through the lots! Lot 14 was already
reached, and 16 was the house. Surely no
soul could withstand such pressure, but must
crumble like a crushed shell ? When they
actually reached Lot 16, when he heard the
auctioneer start off with his " Now, gentle-
106 THE HEIR
men . . ." what would he do then ? how
would he behave ? It was no longer shyness
that held him, but fascination, and a physical
sickness that made his body clammy and
moist although he was shivering with cold.
Fear must be like this, and from his heart he
pitied all those who were mortally afraid.
He noticed that several people were looking
at him, amongst others Nutley, and he
thought that he must be losing control of his
reason, for it seemed to him that Nutley's
face was yellow and pointed, and was
grinning at him with a squinting male-
volence, an oblique derision, altogether fan-
tastic, and pushed up quite close to him,
although in reality Nutley was some way off.
He put up his hand to his forehead, and one
or two people made an anxious movement
towards him, as though they thought he was
going to faint. He rejected them with a
vague gesture, and at that moment heard
the auctioneer say, " Lot 16, gentlemen . . ."
XVI
THERE was a general stir in the room, of
chairs being shifted, and legs uncrossed and
recrossed. Mr. Webb gave a little cough,
THE HEIR 107
while he laid aside his catalogue in favour of
the more elaborate booklet, which he opened
on the desk in front of him, flattening down
the pages with a precise hand. He drew him-
self up, took off his glasses, and tapped the
booklet with them, surveying his audience.
" As you know, ladies and gentlemen as, in
fact, this monograph, which you have all had
in your hands, will have told you if you did
not know it before we have in Blackboys
one of the most perfect examples of the
Elizabethan manor-house in England. I
don't think I need take up your time and
my own by enlarging upon that, or by
pointing out the historical and artistic value
of the property about to be disposed of; I
can safely leave the ancient building, and
the monograph so ably prepared by my
friend Mr. Nutley, to speak for themselves.
It only remains for me to beg those intending
to bid, to second my efforts in putting the
sale through as quickly as possible, for we
still have a large portion of the catalogue to
deal with, and to bear in mind that a reserve
figure of reasonable proportions has been
placed upon the manor-house and surround-
ing grounds. Lot 16, the manor-house
known as Blackboys Priory, the pleasure-
H
108 THE HEIR
grounds of eight acres, and one hundred and
twenty-five acres of park land adjoining."
A short silence succeeded Mr. Webb's
little speech. The Brazilian and his solicitor
whispered together. The representatives of
the various agencies looked at one another
to see who would take the first step. Finally
a voice said, " Eight thousand guineas."
" Come, come," smiled Mr. Webb.
" Nine thousand," said another voice.
" I told you, gentlemen, that a reasonable
reserve had been placed upon this lot," said
the auctioneer in a tone of restrained im-
patience, " and you must all of you be
sufficiently acquainted with the standard of
sale-room prices to know that nine thousand
guineas comes nowhere near a reasonable
figure for a property such as the one we have
now under consideration."
Thus rebuked, the man who had first
spoken said, " All right twelve thousand."
" And five hundred," said the second man.
" Sticky, sticky," murmured Nutley, shak-
ing his head.
Still neither the Brazilian nor his solicitor
made any sign. The agents were evidently
unwilling to show their hands ; then a little
man began to bid on behalf of an American
THE HEIR 109
standing at his elbow : " Thirteen thousand
guineas."
This stirred the agents, and between them
all the bidding crackled up to eighteen thou-
sand. Mr. Webb, judging that the American
was probably good for twenty or twenty-five,
and wishing to entice the Brazilian into com-
petition, said in the same resigned tone, " I
am unwilling to withdraw this lot, but I am
afraid we cannot afford to waste time in
this fashion."
" Make it twenty, sir," called out the
American, " and let's get a move on."
" Thank you, sir," said Mr. Webb, in the
midst of a laugh. " I am bid twenty thou-
sand guineas for Lot 16, twenty thousand
guineas are bid. . . and five hundred on
my right . . . twenty- one thousand on my
left . . . thank you again, sir : twenty-two
thousand guineas. Twenty-two thousand
guineas. Surely no one wishes to see this
lot withdrawn ? Twenty-two thousand gui-
neas. And five hundred. And two hun-
dred and fifty more. Twenty-two thousand
seven hundred and fifty guineas. . . ."
" Twenty-three thousand," said the solici-
tor who had come with the Brazilian.
People craned forward now to see and to
110 THE HEIR
hear. The Brazilian had been generally
pointed out as the most likely buyer, and
until he or his man took up the bidding it
could be disregarded as preliminary. The
small fry of the agents served to run it up
into workable figures, after which it would
certainly pass beyond them. The duel, it
was guessed, would lie between the American
and the Brazilian.
" Twenty-four thousand," called out one
of the agents in a sort of dying flourish.
"And five hundred," said another, not to
be outdone.
" Twenty-five thousand," said the Brazi-
lian's solicitor.
" Twenty-five thousand guineas are bid,"
said the auctioneer. " Twenty-five thousand
guineas. I am authorised by Mr. Nutley,
the solicitor acting for this estate, to tell
you. . . ." he glanced down at Nutley,
who nodded, "... to tell you that this sum
had already been offered, and refused, at the
estate office. If, therefore, no gentleman is
willing to pass beyond twenty-five thousand
guineas, I shall be compelled . . . and five
hundred, thank you, sir. Twenty-five thou-
sand five hundred guineas."
Most people present supposed that this
THE HEIR 111
sum came very near to being adequate, and
a murmur to this effect passed up and down
the room. People looked at Chase, who was
as white as death and sat with his eye fixed
upon the floor. The American, good-hu-
mouredly enough, was trying to take the
measure of the unruffled young man ;
judging from the slight shrug he gave, he
did not think he stood much chance, but
nevertheless he called, " Keep the ball rolling.
Two hundred and fifty more."
The room began to take sides, most pre-
ferring the straight forward vulgarity of the
jolly American to the outlandishness of the
young man, which baffled and put them ill
at their ease. (Nutley found time to think
that the youth of the neighbourhood would
need some time before it recovered from the
influence of that young man, even if he were
to pass away with the day.) Those who had
the habit of sale-rooms thought Chase lucky
in having two men, both keen, against one
another to run up a high price. They bent
forward with their elbows on their knees and
their chins in their hands, to listen.
" And two hundred and fifty more," capped
the solicitor.
" Twenty-six thousand guineas are bid,"
112 THE HEIR
said Mr. Webb, who by now was leaning well
over his desk and whose glances kept travel-
ling sharply between the rivals. He was
sure that the Brazilian intended, if necessary,
to go to thirty thousand.
" Twenty-seven," said the American, reck-
lessly.
" Twenty-eight," said the solicitor after
a word with his employer.
The American shook his head ; he was
very jovial and friendly, and bore no malice.
He laughed, but he shook his head.
" If that is your last word, gentlemen, I
regret to say that the lot must be withdrawn,
as the reserve has not been reached," said Mr.
Webb. " I am sure that Mr. Nutley will
pardon me the slight irregularity in giving
you this information, under the exceptional
circumstances. . . ." Nutley assented ; he
greatly enjoyed being referred to, especially
now in Chase's presence. ... "I only do
so in order to give you the chance of continu-
ing should you wish. . . ."
" All right, anything to make a running,"
said the American, who was certainly the
favourite of the excited and eager audience ;
" two hundred and fifty better than the last
bid."
THE HEIR 113
The auctioneer caught the Brazilian's nod.
" I am bid twenty-eight thousand five
hundred guineas. . . . twenty-nine thou-
sand," he added, as the American nodded to
him.
" Thirty," said the Brazilian quietly.
He had not spoken before, and every gaze
was turned upon him as, perfectly cool, he
stood leaning against the wall in the bay of
a window. He was undisturbed, from the
sleekness of his head down to his immaculate
shoes. He had all the assurance of one who
is certain of having spoken the last word.
" I'm out of this," said the American.
" Thirty thousand guineas are bid," said
the auctioneer ; "for Lot 16 thirty thousand
guineas. THIRTY THOUSAND GUINEAS," he
enunciated ; " going, for the sum of thirty
thousand guineas, going, going, ..."
Chase tottered to his feet.
" Thirty-one thousand," he cried in a
strangled voice, " thirty- one thousand!"
XVII
OF all the astonished people in that room,
perhaps not the least astonished was the
auctioneer. He had never seen Chase before,
114 THE HEIR
and naturally thought that he had to deal
with an entirely new candidate. He ad-
justed his glasses to stare at the solitary figure
upright among the rows of seated people,
standing with a trembling hand still out-
stretched. He had just time to notice with
concern that Chase was deathly pale, his
face carved and hollowed, before habit re-
asserted itself, and he checked the " gone! "
that had almost left his lips, to resume his
chronicle of the bidding with " Thirty-one
thousand guineas . . . any advance on thirty-
one thousand guineas ? " and cocked his eye
at the Brazilian.
The Brazilian, equally surprised, had never
before seen Chase either. What was this
fierce little man, who had shot up out of the
ground so turbulently to dispute his prize ?
He had not supposed that it would be neces-
sary to go beyond the thirty-thousand ;
nevertheless he was prepared to do so, and
to make his determination clear he continued
with the bidding himself instead of leaving
it to his solicitor. " And five hundred," he
said.
" Thirty-five thousand," said Chase.
The sensation he would have created by
escaping from the room half an hour earlier
THE HEIR 115
was nothing to the sensation he was creating
now. But he was exalted far beyond shyness
or false shame. He never noticed the excited
flutter all over the room, or the extraordinary
agitation of Nutley, who was saying " He's
mad! he's mad ! " while frantically trying
to attract the auctioneer's attention. Chase
was oblivious to all this. He stood, feeling
himself inspired by some divine breath, the
room a blur before him, and a current of
power, quite indomitable, surging through
his veins. Infatuation. Genius. They must
be like this. This certainty. This unmis-
takable purpose. This sudden clearing away
of all irrelevant preoccupations. Vistas
opened down into all the obscurities that had
always shadowed and confused his brain :
the secret was to find oneself, to know what
one really wanted, what one really cared for,
and to go for it straight. Wolverhampton ?
moonshine! He was no longer pale, nor did
he keep his eyes shamefully bent upon the
ground ; he was flushed, embattled ; his
nostrils dilated and working.
But everyone else thought him crazy,
people sober watching the vaingloriousness
of a man drunk. Even the auctioneer
allowed an expression of surprise to cross his
116 THE HEIR
face, and varied his formula by saying suave-
ly, " Did I understand you to say thirty-five
thousand, sir ? Thirty-five thousand guineas
are bid."
Drunk. As a man drunk. Everything
appeared smothered to his senses ; intense,
yet remote. His head light and swimming.
Everything at a great distance. The crowd
around him, stirring, murmurous, but mean-
ingless. The auctioneer, perched up there,
a diminutive figure, miles away. Voices,
muffled but enormously significant, convey-
ing threats, conveying combat. All leagued
against him. This was battle ; all the faces
were hostile. Or so he imagined. He was
glad of it. Fighting for his house ? no, no!
more, far more than that : fighting for the
thing he loved. Fighting to shield from rape
the thing he loved. Fighting alone ; come
to his senses in the very nick of time. Even
at this moment, when he needed every wit
he had ever had at his command, he found
time for a deep inward thankfulness that the
illumination had not come too late or alto-
gether passed him by. In the nick of time it
had come, and he had recognized it ; recog-
nized it for what it was, and seized hold of
it, and now, triumphantly, drunkenly, was
THE HEIR 117
holding his own in the face of all this dismay
and opposition. Moreover, they could not
defeat him. Bidding in these outrageous
sums that need never be paid over, he was
possessed of an inexhaustible fortune. Unde-
featable what confidence that gave him!
The more hands turned against him the bet-
ter. He challenged everybody ; he hardly
knew what he was saying, only that he leapt
up in thousands, and that in spite of their
astonishment and fury they were powerless
against him : there was nothing criminal or
even illegal in his buying-in his own house if
he wanted to.
And then the end, that came before he
knew that it was imminent ; the collapse of
the Brazilian, whose expression had at last
changed from deliberate indifference to real
bad temper ; the voice of the auctioneer,
suavely asking for his name and his address ;
and his own voice, giving his name as though
for the first time in his life he were not ashamed
of it. And then Nutley, struggling across
the room to him, snarling and yapping at
him like a little enraged cur, quite vague and
deprived of significance, but withal noisy,
tiresome, and briefly perplexing ; a Nutley
disproportionately enraged, furiously gesti-
118 THE HEIR
culating, spluttering at him, " Are you going
to play this damned fool game with the
rest of the sale ? " and his answer he sup-
posed he had given an answer, because of
the announcement from the auctioneer's
desk, which hushed the noisy room into sud-
den silence, " I have to inform you, gentle-
men, that Lot 16, and the succeeding lots,
which include the contents of the mansion,
also the surrounding park, have been bought
in, and that the sale is therefore at an end.
And, in the midst of his bewilderment, the
sensation of having his hand sought for and
wrung, while he gazed down into Mr. Fare-
brother's old rosy face and heard him say,
half inarticulate with emotion, " I'm so glad,
Mr. Chase, I congratulate you, I'm so glad,
I'm so glad."
XVIII
FINALLY, the blessed peace and solitude, when
the last stranger with the curious stare that
was now common to them all had quitted the
house, and the last motor had rolled away.
Chase, leaning against a column of the porch,
thought that thus must married lovers feel
when after the confusion of their wedding they
THE HEIR 119
are at length left alone together. Certainly
with a wry twist to his lip the events of
the sale had tried him as sorely as any
wedding. But here he was, having won, in
possession, having driven away all that
rabble ; here he was in the warmth, and in
the hush that sank back upon everything
after the ceasing of all that hubbub ; here
he was left alone upon the field after that
reckless victory. Poor ? yes ! but he could
work, he would manage ; his poverty would
not be bitter, it would be sweet. He sud-
denly stretched out his hands and passion-
ately laid them, palms flattened, against the
bricks ; bricks warm as their own rosiness
with the sun they had drunk since morning.
Midsummer day. Swallows skimming after
the insects above the moat. Their level
wings almost grazed the water as they
swooped. Midsummer day. All the mellow-
ness of Blackboys, all the blood of the Chases,
to culminate in this midsummer day. A
marvellous summer. A persistently mar-
vellous summer. He remembered the pro-
cession of days, the dawns and the dusks and
the moon-bathed nights, that had hallowed
his romance. He was inclined to believe that
neither hatred nor its ugly kin could any
120 THE HEIR
longer find any place in his heart, which had
been so uplifted and had seen so radiantly
the flare of so many beacons lighting up the
fields of wisdom. To cast off the slavery of
the Wolverhamptons of this world. To
know what one really wanted, what one really
cared for, and to go for it straight. Wasn't
that a good enough and simple enough work-
ing wisdom for a man to have attained ?
Simple enough, when it did nobody any
harm yet so few seemed to learn it.
Blackboys! Wolverhampton ! what was
Wolverhampton beside Blackboys ? What
was the promise of that mediocre ease beside
the certainty of these exquisite privations ?
What was that drudgery beside this beauty,
this pride, this Quixotism ?
Thane gambolled out, fawning and leaping
round Chase, as Fortune opened the door of
the house.
" Will you be having dinner, sir," he asked
demurely, " in the dining-room or in the
garden this evening ? "
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
To A.
THE street door opened straight into the
shop. The shop went back a long way, and
was very dark and crowded with objects ;
everything seemed to have something else
super-imposed upon it, either set down or
hanging ; thus against the walls dangled
bunches of masks, like bunches of bananas,
weapons of all kinds, shields and breast-
plates, swags of tinsel jewellery, wigs ; upon
the tops of the cupboards stood ewers, gob-
lets, candelabra, all in sham gold plate ; and
the counters themselves were strewn with a
miscellany of smaller theatrical necessities.
It was only little by little that the glance,
growing accustomed to the obscurity of the
shop, began to disentangle object from object
in this assortment. Everything was very
dusty, with the exception of the shields and
stray pieces of armour, which were brightly
furbished and detached themselves like
mirrors in their places on the walls, giving
a distorted reflection in miniature of the
124 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
recesses of the shop. There were stuffed ani-
mals, particularly dusty, with glass eyes and
red open mouths showing two rows of teeth.
There were grotesque cardboard heads, four
times life-size, for giants. There was the
figure of a knight in a complete suit of armour,
with a faded blue cloak embroidered with the
lilies of France hanging from his shoulders,
and a closed helmet from which sprang a
tuft of plumes that had once been white, but
that were now grey with dust and age. This
knight stood on the lowest step of the stair-
case that started in the middle of the shop
and led to the upper floors of the house. A
door across the top of the flight shut off the
secrets of the upper storey from the observa-
tion of customers in the shop on the ground
floor.
On the upper floors the house was old and
rambling. It straggled up and down on
different levels, along dark passages and into
irregular little rooms, badly lit by small
windows, and, like the shop, encumbered
with objects ; not only by the furniture, which
was much too bulky for the size of the rooms,
but also by properties which belonged to the
shop, and which at various times had been
huddled upstairs in the course of a clearance
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 125
below. There were rows of dresses hanging on
hooks, halberts and muskets propped up in the
corners, albums of photographs for reference
lying on the tables, pairs of boots and buskins
thrust away behind the curtains and under
the valences. You felt convinced that every
drawer was packed so that it could only just
be induced to shut, and that if you opened
the door of a cupboard a crowd of imprisoned
articles would come tumbling out helter-
skelter. Everything was old and fusty ;
tawdry, and pretentious under its grime.
Outside, the snow had gathered in tiny drifts
along the leadwork of the latticed windows,
making the rooms darker than they already
were, and had heaped itself against the panes
two or three inches above the window-sills.
In the mornings the frost left fern-frond
patterns on the panes ; but although it was
thus rendered almost impossible to see out,
the bright frost and snow were a not unpleas-
ant relief, for they were something clean and
fresh, something of quite recent arrival and
of certain departure, in contrast to the con-
tents of the house, which had lain there accu-
mulating for so many years, and which offered
no promise of a disturbing hand in the years
to come.
126 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
II
OVER the shop door, on to the street, gold
letters on a black ground said : LYDIA
PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-
maker. Lydia was not the name by which
the proprietress of the shop had been bap-
tized, neither was Protheroe the name of her
parents ; her husband's name it could not
be for she had never had a husband. What
her real name was she had long since pre-
ferred to forget, and it was not difficult to do
so, for as Lydia Protheroe she had made her
fame, and in the town where she had come as
a stranger there was no one to know her as
anything else. The fame and the business
she had built up together, amorously, jeal-
ously. It had taken her forty years. Some-
where back in the eighties she saw herself,
young, determined, deaf to the outcry of her
family ; a young woman in a bombazine
gown, with smooth bands of hair like Chris-
tina Rossetti, and arms folded, each hand
clasping the opposite elbow ; she saw herself
thus, standing up, surveying the circle of
her relations as they expostulated around her.
They were outraged, they were aggrieved ;
they were respectable people who naturally
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 127
disapproved of the stage ; and here was
Lydia only to them she had not been Lydia,
but Alice announcing her intention of set-
ting up a business which would engage her
inevitably in theatrical circles. That a
young woman should think of setting up
business on her own account was bad enough,
but such a business was an affront beyond
discussion. She would bring shame upon
them (here the personality of Lydia Pro-
theroe first brilliantly germinated in Alice's
mind). They threw up their hands. Alice,
who might enjoy all the advantages of a
gentlewoman ; Alice, who might reasonably
have looked for a husband, a home, a family,
of her own ; Alice, who up to the age of
twenty-one had given them scarcely any
anxiety, who had been so very genteel, all
things considered in spite of a certain ele-
ment of Puckishness in her which had peeped
out so very rarely, a certain disrespect of
their ideals a mere trifle, a mere indication,
had they but had the wit to read, of what was
brewing beneath.
And what did she reply to their remon-
strance ? In what phrase, maddening be-
cause irrefutable, did she finally take refuge ?
That she was of age.
128 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
It was true. She was twenty-one, and she
had a thousand pounds left her by her grand-
father. She could snap her fingers at them
all if she chose. She did not literally snap
her fingers ; she was gentle and regretful,
she said she did not wish to cut herself adrift
from her family, and saw no reason why they
should cut themselves adrift from her. She
would not bring their name into disrepute.
She would trade under another name ; she
would cease to be Alice Jennings, she would
become Lydia Protheroe. Secretly she was
elated to escape from a name of whose
homeliness she had always been ashamed,
but this she was careful not to betray to her
family ; to her family she made the announce-
ment with an air of sacrifice. Since they
were humiliated by her, and by the trade
she had chosen, she would go away ; she
would conceal her identity in a distant town.
No ; she shook her smooth head in answer to
their protestations ; what she had declared
she would carry out ; they should never say
they had cause to blush whenever they opened
a theatre programme. " Wigs by Jennings."
That should not offend their eyes. " Wigs
by Protheroe," and they could sit snugly in
their stalls, being Jennings, looking Jennings ;
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 129
connected with the stage in any way ? oh
dear, no! Let them only think kindly of
her in her lonely and distant yes, distant
struggles. No doubt Miss Protheroe would
find it hard at first, unfriended and unsup-
ported ; but armed with her thousand pounds
she would survive the first reverses ; and
adversity was good for the character. Indeed,
as she talked, always gentle and regretful,
but perfectly obdurate, she felt her character
stiffening under the test of this first adversity.
The Presbyterian that was in her, as it was in
all her relatives, welcomed in its austere and
cheerless fashion this trial that made a de-
mand upon her endurance. She enjoyed the
self-satisfaction of the martyr. And yet,
secretly, all the while, a little voice gibed at
hor " Hypocrite! " She knew her hypocrisy
because, in spite of her affectation of martyr-
dom, she was rejoicing in her new isolation.
She knew that she would embark on her
adventure with a greater gusto since she was
not to embark on it with the approval of her
family. It was all very well for her to appeal
to their sympathy with poor Miss Protheroe,
unfriended and unsupported ; the phrase
sounded well, but the truth was that she
wanted neither their friendship nor their
130 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
support. " I want to get away from all this,"
she cried suddenly and despairingly. She
wanted independence ; she wanted the fight.
She would have been defrauded of both, by
the lap of a comfortable middle-class family
spread out behind her to receive her if she
fell. Backed up by her family, she would
have felt herself backed up by the whole of
the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in
the consciousness of its homogeneity and
resources, an enormous family of Jennings,
swarming in every town and with its place of
assembly in every town-hall, inimical to the
exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of
the conventions that were as cement to its
masonry ; a class sagacious and shrewd,
nicely knowing safety from danger, and
knowing, above all, its own mind, since noth-
ing was ever admitted to that mind to which
it could not immediately affix a label. This
was the class to whose protection Alice
Jennings had the birthright now rejected
by Lydia Protheroe. She marvelled how she
could have endured it for so many years.
She made a gesture as she finally rejected it ;
the hands that had been clasping the elbows
were unloosed, and the right hand tossed up
in a gesture definitely histrionic, as one who
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 131
tosses a feather to the wind. Her family had
almost groaned when they saw it, for they
recognized it as a defiance, a symbol and an
enemy. She stood there, in their midst,
a slim revolutionary, not visibly tremulous,
and although her hair still lay in those sleek
bands plastered down on her forehead, they
felt that the moment was near at hand when
they would cease to be sleek and would be-
come rumpled ; even curly ; even puffed
out ; and that the snuff-coloured bombazine
of her gown would become metamorphosed
into some gaudy intolerable fustian. They
looked at her as though they were looking
their last. They uttered a preliminary cau-
tion ; she smiled. Seeing her smile, they
ceased the expostulations which had been
wrung from them in their first dismay ; they
gathered themselves up in dignity and sor-
row ; they said that since nothing would turn
her from this reckless, this unbecoming, this
... in short, this idea, and that since she
was of age, as she had not scrupled to remind
them, she must, they supposed, be allowed
to follow her own course. But let her not
expect to return to them when the conse-
quences of her folly were heavy upon her.
Let her not (it was her father who enunciated
132 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
this figure of speech, shaking his finger solemn-
ly at her), let her not hope to exchange for
the glare of the lamplight the oil-lamp of the
warm parlour of home. Once an outcast
she should remain an outcast for ever. She
had a sudden attack of panic as these im-
pressive words boomed upon her ears. She
saw herself alone in a deserted theatre, the
holland covers over the stalls, the lights
turned out, and the great pit of the stage
yawning at her in front of the gaunt skeleton
of the scenery ; and simultaneously she saw
the circle of her family who were, after all,
familiar, even if not particularly enlivening
seated at their snug evening tasks in the glow
of that oil-lamp of which her father had
reminded her. She came near to weakening ;
she knew that if she held out her hands to
them, even now, they would receive her again
into their bosom but how they would cackle
over her ! they would pat her kindly ; they
would talk of her having come to her senses,
of being once more their little Alice ; and
this her pride would not endure. She dis-
covered that she could tolerate patronage
even less than security ; and for the rest of
her days, if she capitulated now, she would
be at the mercy of her family. She would
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 133
be among them on sufferance. Sooner any
loneliness, any quandary, sooner even starva-
tion, than shelter on such terms. Inclining
her head, she accepted her ostracism without
a protest. As soon as she had accepted
it as soon, that is, as the worst had been
definitely spoken and she had definitely sur-
vived it she* felt the sense of her liberty
flooding over her. Her very name dropped
from her like a piece of old skin. She be-
came that unique being, the person who has
no relations. Alice Jennings had had rela-
tions, Lydia Protheroe had none, Lydia
Protheroe had never even had a mother.
Independence could scarcely go further. She
swept one last slow look around their circle,
and passed out of the room.
Ill
AFTER she had left them for she had gone
then and there, in her own phrase, " out into
the night" they had uttered, when they
recovered a little from their consternation,
all the things they might have been expected
to utter. They were very hot and angry.
Her father, a stout man, had blown out his
cheeks, tugged at his whiskers and pro-
134 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
nounced, " No daughter of mine." It was
an excommunication. " The ingratitude. To
think that ever . . ." her mother had whim-
pered. Her aunt, who was elderly, frail, and
timorous, had bleated, " Oh, and to think
of all the horrible men in the world." Her
brother, a severely good young man, had
said, " All I ask, father, and you, too, mother,
is that I may NEVER hear her name again,"
and his wife, who was like a little brown wren,
his mere echo, had said, " Oh, dear, it does
seem hard, doesn't it? but Bertie is always
right about these things."
Her sister, who was engaged, summed up
their main unspoken thought as she said
fretfully and anxiously, " But what are we to
say to people ? "
IV
LYDIA PROTHEROE, whose mind worked
instinctively in terms of drama, always saw
herself afterwards, in retrospect, standing
alone in the rain on the pavement outside
her father's house wondering where she should
go. She had not expected events to be so
rapid or so complete. She had foreseen long
weeks of argument, during which her family
would slowly be worn down to some reluctant
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 135
compromise, and although this had not been
much to her satisfaction as a prospect, she had
resigned herself to hope for nothing more.
She found herself now, triumphant indeed,
but a little disconcerted, with no luggage and
too much pride to slip into the house again
in order to pack. No doubt they counted
on her doing so ; no doubt their ultimatum
had been but bluff. Probably they were
even now sitting expectant, waiting to hear
her key in the door, waiting to rush out and
overwhelm her in the passage, and to pull her
in with cries of " Alice, dear, we didn't mean
it ! " Let them wait ! She started down the
wet street, where the gas-lamps shone reflec-
ted in the roadway, and as she went she turned
up the collar of the overcoat she had snatched
off the row of hooks in the passage, for the
rain was dripping into her neck. It then
occurred to her that the overcoat was not
her own. She had taken her own hat, cram-
ming it down as far as her eyebrows ; but she
had got the wrong coat. She investigated it :
it was her brother's Bertie's. This seemed
to her to be an extremely good joke and
Bertie, too, was always so particular about
his things. She felt quite disproportionately
heartened by this occurrence, and as she thrust
136 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
her hands into the pockets to keep them dry
she pretended to herself that she was a man,
to give herself additional courage ; she even
affected a masculine stride, and whispered to
herself, "Lydia Pr other oe . . . Richard Pro-
theroe . . . who am I ? " and she skipped
two or three paces in her excitement and
trepidation. There was a pipe in the pocket
of the coat ; she curved her fingers round its
little friendly bowl, and for a minute she
even took it out and stuck it in her mouth,
sucking at it as she had seen Bertie do, but
almost immediately she slipped it back again
with a guilty air and the sense of having done
something inordinately daring, grotesque,
and improper. The extravagance of her
adventure was indeed going to her head.
She had been for so long enveloped in the
cotton- wool of her family that to be free of
it was, simply, incredible. No father, no
mother, no Bertie, to madden her with their
injunctions and their restrictions. She skip-
ped again, another two or three paces. But
in the meantime she had no idea of where she
was going or of what she meant to do. This
irresponsibility was all very well, this release
very delightful, but from Lydia Protheroe
masquerading down a dark wet street in her
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 137
brother's overcoat, to Lydia Pr other oe the
proprietress of a flourishing theatrical busi-
ness, with her name over the door and fat
ledgers on her desk, was a far cry ; and she
had nowhere to sleep that night.
She turned towards the station. Where
did the next train go to ? There would she
go, even if it carried her to Wick or Thurso.
Since she had abjured all the common pru-
dences, she would allow fate to decide for
her hap-hazard : fate was a Bohemian, if
ever there was one, overthrowing careful
plans and disregarding probabilities a ran-
dom deity which must henceforth be her guide.
Before very long, she reflected, scoffing, though
a little uncertainly, at herself meanwhile, she
would be ordering her life by the spin of a
coin or the conjunction of the planets, since
here she was already, with not ten minutes
of liberty behind her, resigning her destina-
tion into the keeping of Bradshaw. She
hurried on towards the station, huddled
inside the coat that was much too big for
her, frightened but indomitable : still pre-
tending to herself that she was a man a
boy, rather, and such phrases as " He ran
away to sea " kept flitting through her mind,
inconsequent but vaguely inspiriting and
138 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
although she was thereby transporting her-
self into a world of pretence, she could not
help feeling, with exultation, that she had
discarded for ever the world of true pretence,
of casuistry and circumspection, growing
richer, more emancipated by the exchange.
Presently she stood upon the railway bridge,
looking down upon the station, an etching
in silver-point never by her forgotten. The
rails were lines of polished silver, the low
black sheds of the station were spanned by
girders against a black and silver sky. Only
a few yellow lights gave colour ; and, high
up, the light of a signal, like a high and
isolated ruby, burned deep upon the wrack
of the silver-rifted clouds.
THE difficulties of life had not sobered her.
On the contrary, as she disencumbered
herself more and more from the oppression
of the traditions in which she had been
brought up, her mettle had risen with pro-
portionate buoyancy. She soared, as the
weights dropped from her. She fled from
these realities with increasing determination
into the realms of make-believe. In her
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 139
worst moments for there had been bad mo-
ments, hours in her career which would have
seemed to anyone else unpromisingly dark,
hours when dishonesty saddened and failure
discouraged her she could always say to
herself, " I don't exist at all. There's no
such person as Lydia Protheroe." And she
thought of all the parish ledgers, serious and
civic, in which the birth, baptism, and other
fails et gestes of Lydia Protheroe ought pro-
perly to be recorded, and from which Lydia
Protheroe was so gratifyingly absent. This
habit of mind grew upon her, until every
suggestion of her actual existence as a citizen
and a ratepayer was enough to throw her
into a state of indignation. Who was Lydia
Protheroe, that unsubstantial and fantastic
being, that she should be bound down to the
orthodoxy of an urban district council form
for the payment of property-tax or house-
duty ? that she should be asked to account
for her income and to contribute a shilling
in the pound towards the upkeep of her
country ? she who had no country, no
status ? she who was so impudently and
audaciously a myth ? It was manifestly
impossible to induce the tax-collectors to take
this view. It would have entailed, moreover,
K
140 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
the betrayal of Lydia Protheroe's secret, and
the asking of questions leading inevitably to
the resurrection of Alice Jennings. She
consoled herself, therefore, in the midst of her
mortification as she filled in her forms (never
until " third application " glared across the
top of the paper), by reflecting that she was
playing a trick on the authorities with her
tongue well thrust into her cheek. But
there was nothing she would not do to evade
the census returns, when they came round in
1891, and again in 1901, and again in 1911.
VI
HER family had been quite wrong when they
predicted a change in her appearance. The
sleek brown bands remained the same, the
snuff-coloured gown, though of necessity
every few years it had to be replaced by a
successor, to outward appearance was unal-
tered. Lydia Protheroe, inheriting an odd
and incongruous remnant of Presbyterianism
from the late Alice Jennings, considered
freedom of the spirit of more consequence
than eccentricity of garb. Therefore, her
external sobriety gave no hint of her internal
flamboyance. People used to remark that
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 141
the only thing in the shop devoid of all fan-
tasy was the proprietor behind the counter.
" Proper Pr other oe " they called her, and
similar names. But they had to admit her
supremacy on all questions of travesty. She
had more than the mere technical, the mere
historical, knowledge ; she had a flair and
an imagination which surprised and con-
vinced, unarguably. Without a trace of
enthusiasm she issued her directions, coldly
pointing with a ladylike forefinger, and when
the finger was not in use she resumed that
characteristic, tight little attitude, which had
remained with her, of clasping her elbows
with the opposite hand, while she watched
her directions slavishly carried out. Her
customers wondered whether she was ever
gratified by her complete success. If so,
she never betrayed it. The utmost approval
that she was known to bestow, was a chilly
" That will do." And yet, after her forty
years of labour, she was a recognized author-
ity in her profession ; hidden away in her
provincial town, she was the court of appeal
in all problems connected with her trade, an
arbitrator to whom even London had recourse.
People said that as time went on she became
grimmer and more intimidating. Certainly
142 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
she became more self-contained, and none
knew what passed beneath the sleek brown
bands in their ^invariable neatness, or behind
the gown that buttoned, like a uniform,
down the front. Something of a legend
grew up around the personality of Lydia
Protheroe. It became the fashion for stran-
gers in the town to pay a visit to the shop,
buying a box of powder or a stick of lip-salve
to provide themselves with an excuse, while
they covertly observed the ambiguous gentle-
woman. The legend gradually became en-
hanced by scraps of gossip that crept into
circulation about Lydia Protheroe. It was
known in the town that she no longer allowed
her solitary servant to sleep in the house, but
that at six o'clock punctually, when the staff
of the shop, consisting of three, left the pre-
mises, the servant-girl went with them. The
bell over the door would tinkle for the last
time of the day, the three assistants, turning
up their collars or burying their hands in their
muffs, would issue out one by one into the
street, the servant-girl bringing up the rear ;
three "Good-night, Miss Protheroe "'s
would be rapped out, and one " Good-night,
miss," from the servant, always scared and
never in the least devoted ; and the door
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 143
would be shut behind them, and there would
be the sound of the key turning in the lock.
VII
DARKNESS and silence then descended on the
house. In one of the upper rooms a light
would appear behind the blind ; a light which
sometimes moved from room to room, as
though someone were carrying it about ; and
it had been seen, also, in the shop through
the chinks of the shutters. But, although
the curious had often lingered round the door,
no one had ever been seen to emerge after
dark.
The face of the house and the closed door
kept their counsel as to whatever might be
enacted behind them. All that the town
ever knew was that evening after evening
Lydia Protheroe was undisturbed at her own
occupations, and although it was improbable
to imagine that occupations otherwise than
innocent could engage the leisure of so decent
and correct a lady, there grew up, neverthe-
less, an impression of some mischievous back-
ground to the frontage of honest trade which
everyone was allowed to see.
Why did she remain in this insignificant
144 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
town, she who both by wealth and repute
was amply justified to move herself and her
chattels to London? Why had she chosen
this ancient house, with its latticed windows
and overhanging gables in a narrow side-
street, rather than one of the new buildings
in the main street, where were the other
shops that, unashamed, did not have to tuck
themselves away ? Why did she sleep there
alone at nights, among her oddments that
were enough, when the mystery of dusk began
to shroud them, to give an ordinary Christian
the shivers ? Why did she hold herself so
frigidly aloof from the conviviality of the
town? Perfectly civil always, they would
say that much for her ; and quite the lady,
they would say that too. And good to the
poor ; oh, absurdly ! That was only another
one of the grievances they had against her :
she spoilt the market for everybody else.
But why the questions would begin again.
There was a mutter of innuendo ; and yet,
when they were pinned down to it, there was
not one of her fellow townsmen who could
say that she was otherwise than harmless.
And they were all afraid of her, although she
never said a - sharp word ; and they all
respected her, grudgingly, and admitted her
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 145
rigid integrity. But when these admissions
had been extracted from them, the questions
and the mutter would begin again.
Nobody knew whether she herself was
aware of them ; if she was, then she treated
them with complete indifference. In point
of fact, her mental isolation was such that she
had long since ceased to bother her head about
what people might say or might leave unsaid ;
she imagined herself encased in armour like
the knight who stood eternally on the lowest
step of her stair. She was happy. If she
was forbidding, it was because she wanted
no intimacy ; she wanted to keep her happi-
ness to herself. There were moments when
she even resented the intrusion of customers
into her shop, and the presence of the three
assistants and the servant, but she tried to
be severe with herself over this crotchet.
Generally her severity was successful ; but
sometimes her resentment gained the upper
hand, and on those occasions she would
observe her hirelings with real dislike, angry
with them because they, poor souls, went
innocently on with their business, turning
over the wares in the course of serving cus-
tomers, until Miss Protheroe, unable longer
to endure the sight of their hands fumbling
146 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
among the objects got together by her and so
dear to her heart, descended upon them from
behind the counting- desk and brushed them
aside, not rudely, for Miss Protheroe was
never rude, but with a thin disdain that was
twice as humiliating. For years she was
deeply ashamed after these manifestations;
then she grew to be less ashamed, and
they increased in frequency. She became,
coldly, more autocratic ; would not have
anything touched without her permission ;
received any comment with a scornful
disapproval that would not permit her
to answer. She was happy, but she was
only truly and completely happy after six
o'clock, when she had turned the key in the
lock and was left alone in the house.
And yet she had a weakness, an inconsis-
tency ; she fretted over the defection of her
family.
It was absurd. She wanted independence,
and she had got it, full measure, pressed down
and running over. She had been glad. She
had been unobserved, left alone to do the
little daring, extravagant things which bub-
bled up so surprisingly from beneath that
ladylike exterior, little things like pretending
she was a boy in her brother's overcoat, and
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 147
drawing his pipe from the pocket to put it
between her teeth. She had always done
them surreptitiously, even though she knew
she was quite alone. Sometimes she had
made up her face with her own grease-paints,
and, to the light of her candle, minced round
the shop in a wig and a bustle. These were
not things she would have had the courage
to do with her family in the neighbourhood.
She had believed that she would shed her
family quite lightly, blissfully, and for some
time she had even deluded herself into the
conviction that this was so. Then she was
forced to the realization that their conduct
had, in fact, sunk very deeply into the tender
parts of her being. This realization took a
long time to come. She had her first mis-
givings when she found that she could not
think of them without a surge of anger
uneasily allied to a surge of pain. Their
silence had surprised her extremely. Daily
she had expected to have some news of them ;
she had expected that they would trace her
out nothing easier and many times in her
mind she rehearsed the scene when one of
their number, probably Bertie, would appear
in the doorway of the room, and turn by
turn, menacing, cajoling, and alarmed, would
148 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
try to persuade her to return. These per-
suasions she would reject ; of that she had
been fully determined. It was not that she
hankered after forgiveness and the evening
circle round the lamp ; it was not that she
had desired the role of the prodigal child,
picturesque and doubly precious after her
escapade ; no, it was not that she had wanted
her family, but rather that she had wanted
her family to want her. And not that alone.
It was not, as she told herself plaintively,
merely the petty, personal grievance that
had hurt her. It was a wider, deeper
injury. She despised them she was com-
pelled to despise them because of their
miserable cautiousness, their rejection of
her, who was of their own blood, when she
became a danger to their respectability. How
politic they had been! how sage! She
hated them because they had made her
ashamed of them. They had become, to her,
symbolic of that wary, chary majority whose
enemy she was.
For the appearance of Bertie, however,
she had waited in vain. They had made no
attempt to retrieve her, nothing to show that
they cared whether she lived or died, starved
or prospered. Her expectation had turned
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 149
to surprise, surprise to indignation. When
it had finally become quite clear that they
intended to take no steps towards getting
her back, she accepted their indifference with
a shrug that she tried to make equally
indifferent. But the sore had remained ;
more, it had eaten its way down into her.
There was no affection left now ; but before
she died she would be even with them. It
was not a sore that impaired her happiness.
Rather she nursed it, as she nursed all the
secrets of her inner life ; and it provided an
incentive, if she had needed one, a sort of
aim and raison ffetre. Not a day passed
but she wondered whether they heard the
name of the celebrated Lydia Protheroe,
and connected it with that of the little
Alice they had so improvidently driven from
their midst. She hoped so ; spitefully she
hoped so. She even contemplated going to
London, where her reputation would widen
with more chance of reaching their ears ;
but she could not uproot herself from her old
clandestine house. She loved it, for the
sake of six o'clock and the turning of the key
in the lock.
So she lived with her two passionate se-
crets side by side : her vindictiveness and her
150 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
absorption in the unreality of her own exis-
tence.
The one intensified the other. An outcast
from the auspices of middle-class propriety,
she was driven into the refuge of her queer
fantastic world. She sought that refuge
fanatically, it was a facet of her vindictiveness.
From out of that world of shadows she should,
some day, thrust the rapier of mischief into
the paunch of their gross solidity. It was all
a little confused in her mind. But she felt
that she owned, by right of citizenship
unshared citizenship, and consequent sove-
reignty, a sovereignty like that of Adam in
Eden she felt that she owned those privi-
leges which had always given to the hero of
mythical combat an advantage so prepon-
deratingly unfair and so divine : the cap
of invisibility, the armour that no sword
could pierce, the sword that could pierce all
armour, the winged shoes, the nightingale for
counsellor, the philtre of oblivion, the mirror
of prophecy. And at night, flitting round
her house or down into her shop, to the echo
of her own low laughter, now masked, now
sandalled, now casqued within a head incon-
gruous to the body and more incongruous to
the feet, like the unfolding in a game of
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 151
drawing Consequences, she knew herself
elusive, evanescent, protean.
But no one must know, no one must sus-
pect.
VIII
IT was on an evening in December that
Bertie's letter came. She was alone in the
shop when she heard the click of the letter-
box, and, getting the letter out, she instantly
recognized the writing, and her heart, for a
second, ceased to beat. She stood holding
the letter, incredulous, and strangely afraid.
Without knowing in exactly what way the
opportunity would come to her, she had
never for one instant doubted that somehow
or other it would come. She tore the flap
and read :
" MY DEAR ALICE,
"It is now some forty years since that
terrible and painful scene which ended in
our separation, and I think you will agree
with me that so many years should have
sufficed to heal our differences. We are
both, my dear sister, past the prime of our
life, and it is my earnest wish (as I trust it
may be yours also) that a reconciliation
should sweeten the advent of old age. I
152 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
write, therefore, to propose that we take
advantage of this season of good- will to bury
the feud which has so long severed us. Our
father and mother, as you must be well aware,
have long since gone to their rest ; but I
remain (an old fellow now), and my dear wife
and Emily and her husband. Would you
give us a welcome if we came to visit you this
Christmas-tide ? I will add no entreaty, but
leave the rest to the dictates of your heart.
Your brother, " ALBERT."
She recognized Bertie's style ; he had al-
ways been partial to books. She was con-
vulsed by an inward laughter. So they had
got wind of her riches! So they had an eye
on her will! So her prosperity might sanc-
tion, at last, her discreditable trade ! Would
she welcome them, indeed ? They should
see how she would welcome them. Bertie,
his wife, Emily, her husband that would
make four. She would have them all. There
was plenty of room, fortunately, in the old
house upstairs. She would have them on
Christmas-eve. For a clear day, Christmas-
day, she would have them to herself ; all to
herself ! Her mind worked rapidly. She sat
perched on a stool beside the counter, nibbling
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 153
the tips of her fingers and making her plans.
Her excitement was such that she found it
difficult to keep the plans in her head conse-
cutive ; but she knew it was urgent that she
should do so ; she grabbed back her inten-
tions as they tried to evade her. The enve-
lope Bertie had addressed her as " Miss
Lydia Protheroe." He must have winced
as he saw himself confronted by the necessity
of writing that name. Bertie must be sixty-
five now ; Emily must be fifty-nine. So
Emily had married the little sister ; she
had always been a sly, mercenary little thing.
Emily, Bertie, Bertie's wife they all rushed
back to her in their old familiarity. Bertie
must have grown very like his father ; she
hated the implication of continuance. Natura
il fece, e poi roppe la stampa ; that was not
the case with people like her father and Ber-
tie. They were always the same. Their
moral timidity extended itself into physical
plagiarisnl. What would Emily's husband
be like ? All sugar to the rich sister-in-law,
well-primed by the rest of the family. She
let out a shrill of laughter. She would get
them all into the house. She would put up the
shutters and turn the key, and her Christmas
entertainment would begin.
154 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
IX
THEY arrived in response to her invitation,
on Christmas-eve, all four of them, driving
up in the station fly, Bertie on the box.
She stood on the doorway, awaiting them, and
" LYDIA PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier
and Wig-maker," flaunted over her head in
the gilt lettering on the black ground. She
was conscious of her exquisite disparity with
this description. Sleek bands, and snuff-
coloured gown ; Bertie and Emily should
find her as they had left her ; the difference
should only by degrees dawn upon them.
She was glad now that she should have
rejected the alteration in her appearance
which, to a less subtle mind, would have been
so blatantly indicated. There was nothing
blatant about Lydia Protheroe ; oh no ! it
was all very surreptitious, very delicate ;
she was an artist ; everybody said so ; her
touch very light, but very certain. She was
a rapier to Bertie's bludgeon. Bertie : he
had descended from the fly, he had taken
both her hands in his, he had grown whiskers
like his father's, his father's watch-chain (she
recognized it) spanned his stomach, he was
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 155
pressing her hands and looking into her eyes
with what she was sure he inwardly phrased
as " a world of tenderness and forgiveness,"
while simultaneously he tried to scan out of
the corner of his eye the wares displayed in
her shop-window the dragon's head, the
waxen figure of a fairy,the crowns and harps
and she saw him wince, but at the same time,
she saw his determination to ignore all this,
or to accept it, if he was forced to, in a spirit
of jovial resignation ; and now Emily was
kissing her, Emily with those same thin
ungenerous lips and pointed nose, so like her
own features and yet so different, because of
a recklessness in Lydia's eyes which was not
in Emily's subtle again and now Bertie's
wife enveloped her in a soft, fat little hug ;
and there was Emily's husband, whom they
called Fred, and who was a pink-faced little
man in a bowler hat and, for some reason, an
evening tie, pushed forward to embrace his
sister-in-law with a reluctance he tried to turn
into enthusiasm.
Lydia brought the brood into the shop ;
it gave her a strange pang to see them cross
her threshold, succeeded by an exaltation
to have got them safely there. She did not
talk much ; she let them do the talking while
156 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
she surveyed them. Bertie was voluble ;
he had a lot of information to give her, mixed
in with small outbursts of sentimentality. He
had grown portly, and he was most anxious
to conciliate her ; she took the measure of
Bertie in a moment. The others, clearly,
were in his charge. His wife, as ever,
watched him for her cues with little twink-
ling, admiring eyes. Emily produced a sour
and unconvincing smile whenever Lydia's
eyes rested on her. As for Fred, he smiled
nervously the whole time, and looked as
though he felt himself very much of a
stranger.
X
SHE had got them all into their rooms for the
night. She relished the feeling that she had
got them all safely shut in, and as she stood
at the top of the stairs looking first to left
and then to right along the dim passage, she
felt the jailer of all those four people behind
the closed doors. She would have liked a
bunch of keys dangling from her belt.
Squeezing her hands tightly together, she
swayed backwards and forwards as she con-
trolled her laughter, A single gas-jet, turned
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 157
low, lit the passage. She wandered away.
She wandered down into the shop, where the
polished shields on the walls threw back the
sharp flame of her candle, and the indistinct,
peopled obscurity of the shop. She thought
vaguely that the shop was too full had
always been too full she must have a
clearance but there was no longer any room
upstairs she ought to scrap half her things
but no, they were too precious. She wandered
away again, up into the attic. She peered
round, thrusting the candle into the dark
corners. A rat scurried past. Old trunks,
too full to shut ; velvet and damask and
leather protruded ; too full. Like life ; too
full. Like her head ; too full. She wandered
back to the dim passage. Closed doors. The
gas-jet. She could turn off the gas at the
main ; that would put the house in darkness.
They would not understand what had hap-
pened. They would run out of their rooms,
and up and down the house, looking for light ;
rinding none ; blundering against objects in
the dark. She would hear their footsteps,
running ; their hands, perhaps, beating at
last upon the shutters. She had seen clearly
enough that they already thought her strange.
She had accompanied Bertie and his wife to
158 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
their rooms, and under her scrutiny they had
continued their talk ; they had drawn a
picture of the social life in their town ; they
had spoken of nice little parties. " Not so
nice as the little party I'm giving now,"
Lydia had cried, and left them.
Husband and wife indeed thought her very
odd ; the wife was puzzled and uneasy. All
through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very
silent, from her place at the head of the table
where she sat surveying her guests, only
occasionally she had given vent to some such
outburst, which she had at once restrained ;
and the dining-room had been odd too, a
room at the back of the shop, full of queer
theatrical things, and a great figure of a
Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet
high, with a bearded yellow mask under his
helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top
of the spear he held in his hand. Bertie's
wife thought this a novel and unpleasing
method of lighting a room. She had begun
to wish they had never come. For the rest,
there had been a barbaric flavour about the
meal, unsuitable to one so obviously an
English spinster ; they had eaten off the
sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the
sham gold goblets ; the sham gold cande-
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 159
labra had flared in the middle of the table
with its eight or ten candles, above a great
golden bowl of artificial fruit.
It was difficult to believe that that setting
was the invention of Lydia, sitting there so
prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine.
It was as disconcerting an indication as if
Lydia had gotten up and danced.
Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before
Emily's door. If she despised Bertie, she
fairly hated Emily. Not one of Emily's
childish sneakings and whinings was forgot-
ten ; and Emily was unchanged : she had
been dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie,
tempted by the pictures Bertie drew of
Lydia' s wealth ; unable to resist that, she
had come, but she was bitter and ungracious,
wringing out that thin, sour little smile
whenever Lydia looked at her. That sup-
posed wealth, now become one of Lydia's
dearest jokes! They wouldn't find much
the vultures they would find that Lydia
hadn't hoarded, hadn't kept back more than
the little necessary to her own livelihood, so
long as charity had stretched out to her its
piteous hands. It was not part of Lydia's
creed to feast while others went hungry. Not
for that had she broken away from her
160 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
traditions and her family. She would have
liked now to sham dead just for the sake of
seeing their faces and hearing their comments.
She wasted no time on Emily ; she needed
no sight of Emily's face in order to whet her
vindictiveness. She knew well enough what
was going on behind all those closed doors.
Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly accompani-
ment of the calculation of Lydia's prosperity,
oh, she knew, she knew ! Mean souls !
mean, prudent souls ! They had thrown her
out when she was poor ; they fawned on her
now that they thought her rich. Well, she
would teach them a lesson ; she would give
them twenty-four hours' entertainment which
they would not be likely to forget.
She crept away, down the dark stairs into
her shop. At home again, among her fanci-
ful and extravagant confederates ! She held
out her arms towards her shop, as though to
embrace it. They were allies, she and it,
the world of illusion against the world of fact.
She set to work.
XI
NEXT morning her guests came down to
breakfast with white faces. They shot doubt-
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 161
ful glances at Lydia when she blandly wished
them a happy Christmas. There were par-
cels put ready for them beside all their plates,
and Lydia observed with sarcasm their re-
viving spirits as they opened them in optimis-
tic expectancy, and their consternation as
they discovered the contents : a big, pink
turned-up nose for Bertie, a blue wig for
Bertie's wife, a pair of ears for Fred, and a
black moustache for Emily. Led by Bertie,
they tried at first to disguise their vexation
under good-humour :
"Ha! ha! very funny, my dear," said
Bertie, putting on the nose and poking it
facetiously into his wife's face.
" But you must all put them on," said Miss
Protheroe, without a smile.
They looked at her : she was perfectly
serious and even compelling. They began to
be a little afraid, though they were even more
afraid of showing it. They tried to expostu-
late, still good-humour edly, but, " If you
don't like my presents, you can't eat my
breakfast," said Miss Protheroe.
They had to comply. Lydia presided
gravely, while the four sat round the table,
eating kippers, tricked out in their respective
presents. Emily, whose black moustache
162 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
worked up and down as she ate, was controlled
only by the beseeching gaze of Bertie's eyes
over the top of the enormous nose ; Bertie's
wife shed silent tears which fell into her plate.
" Shall you expect us, my dear," Bertie
said towards the end of that grim meal,
feeling that it was becoming urgent to break
the silence, " to go to church like this ? "
" Church ? you aren't going to church,"
replied Lydia.
There was a chorus : Not go to church on
Christmas-day ?
"No," said Lydia; "but," she added
suddenly, " you can give me your offertory,
and I'll see that it reaches the proper quarter.
Charity at Christmas time! Turn out your
pockets."
" Look here, Alice," said Bertie, standing
up, " this is going beyond a joke. Be very
careful, or we shall be obliged to leave your
house."
" You can't," said Miss Protheroe. " The
doors are locked, the shutters are locked and
barred, and you stay here for as long as I
choose to keep you. You are my guests
see? And I've waited for you, for forty
years. I shan't let you go now."
They heard her words ; they stared at one
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 163
another with a sudden horror leaping in their
eyes.
XII
Bertie's wife began to weep, loudly and
helplessly.
" Oh, let me get out of this," she cried ;
" why did we ever come ? Bertie, it was
your fault. Oh, why didn't you leave her
alone ? the wicked, mad woman ? Think of
the noises in the night. The house haunted,
and Alice mad! For God's sake let's clear
out."
" She's in league with the Devil," said
Emily in the black moustache.
They had all forgotten, by now, about the
appearance they variously presented, and all
stared at each other fearfully, grotesque,
ridiculous, but unheeding.
" Christmas morning! " cried Bertie's wife,
and wept more bitterly than before.
" Here, I've nothing to do with this /
never turned you out," said Fred to Lydia,
speaking for the first time.
"You haven't given me your offertory yet,"
said Lydia. " Now then," she said, " out
with it! Bertie, you used to be a church-
164 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
warden at home ; you take round the plate."
Bertie's wife screamed when she saw a
revolver in Lydia's hand.
"Keep quiet, you women!" said Bertie,
playing the male ; " if she's mad, we must
humour her. Where's your money ? "
They fumbled, the two men in their pock-
ets, the two women in their bags, not one of
them daring to take their eyes off Lydia for
an instant.
"Is that all you've got?" asked Lydia,
when the plate presented by Bertie was filled
with silver, copper, and notes ; " turn out
the linings." They obeyed. " You may go
to your rooms now, if you like," she added,
" but don't be late for dinner ; we'll have it
at one. And mind you come down as you are
now. You're no more disguised like that,
let me tell you, than you are with your every-
day faces. There's no such thing as truth
in you, so one disguise is no more of a dis-
guise than any other. Your shams are just
as much shams as my shams. And that's
one of the things you can learn while you're
here."
They filed out of the room, past the tall
figure of Lydia, who, like a grim grenadier,
watched them go, still perfectly grave, but
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 165
with an awful mockery in her eyes. She
savoured to the full the absurdity of their
appearance. There was no detail of incon-
gruity which escaped her glance. When
they had all got out of the room, and she had
heard them scurrying, frightened rabbits, up
the stairs, she sat down again in her chair and
laughed and laughed. But it was not quite
the wholesome laugh of one who plays a
successful practical joke ; it was, rather, a
cackle of real malevolence, the malevolence
that has waited and brooded and been pa-
tient, that has dammed up its impulse for
many years. She sat and laughed at the
head of her table, with the debris of the
brown paper parcels strewn beside every
plate.
XIII
DOWN to dinner under the threat of the
revolver. She was intolerant now of the
smallest resistance. She got them sitting
there in the same travesty, forced them to
eat, forced them to entertain her with their
conversation. "No glum faces!" she said
sharply. It was hard enough to look glum
under those additions to nature; Bertie's nose
166 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
especially had a convivial air, it imposed upon
him a gross jollity he was very far from feeling.
They ate turkey and plum-pudding, un-
willingly, choking back, according to their
natures, their fury or their tears. Lydia
had not stinted their fare ; but then, she had
never been niggardly. There was a lavish-
ness in her providing ; there were raisins,
almonds, brandy ; and she urged the appe-
tites of her guests with an ironical though
genuine hospitality. " Christmas dinner, you
know," she said to them as she heaped the
food upon their plates. They protested ;
she nearly laughed at the piteous protest in
their eyes shining out through their ridiculous
trappings. But she remembered the forty
years, and the laughter died unborn.
Forty years and she had got them to
herself. She would let them off nothing.
XIV
AFTER dinner they huddled all four together
in the same room. They could not lock
themselves in, because Lydia had removed all
the keys.
They whispered together a good deal,
running up and down the scale from apathy
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 167
to indignation. They had even moments of
curiosity, when they ferreted among the
hotch-potch of things they found stuffed
away in the cupboards and drawers, and
under the bed ; and speculated marvelling
on the queerness of Alice's existence among
these things : forty years of masquerade !
But for the most part they sat gloomy, or
wandered aimlessly about the room, dwelling
in their own minds upon their several appre-
hensions. Bertie's wife said, " It's all so
vague only hints, so to speak," and a
background of shadows leapt into being.
Steps prowled past in the passage ; they
prowled up and down. The four in the room
looked at one another. There was a faint
cry outside, and a laugh.
" Two people, or one ? " they whispered.
There was no telling how many people the
house might conceal. The resources of the
shop alone could transform Lydia into a
hundred different characters. She would
change her personality with each one. They
could not contemplate this idea. It credited
her with uncanny powers. Their imagina-
tions, which had never in their lives been set
to work before, now gaped, pits full of possi-
bilities.
168 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
They peeped and were afraid.
Towards four o'clock it grew dark and they
lit the gas, but after an hour or so it suddenly
went out. They could not find any matches,
hunting round in the dark. " Is there no
light ? " said their voices. Somebody found
the door, opened it, and fled out : it was Fred.
They heard him running down the passage,
and his steps upon the stair. He would get
down into the shop ; he must look after
himself. They sat down in the dark, pressed
together to listen and to wait.
XV
IT was the silence in the house, all that
afternoon and evening, which frightened them.
They were left to themselves, there was no
sign of Lydia; there was no sound in the house
but the sounds they made themselves.
Now and then one of them would get up and
go restlessly over to the window : but though
they debated whether they should hail a
passer-by in the street they feared too greatly
the consequences of the scandal. Whatever
happened, this thing must remain a secret
for ever ; on that point they were agreed and
decided. This consideration kept them from
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 169
the violence they might otherwise have at-
tempted. No one must know . . . poor
Lydia . . . her shame was their shame . . .
madness in the family. ... So they kept
silent ; meekness was the only prudence.
Weary, they realized that they were old,
and looked at one another with a kind of
pity. They spoke very little. Their lives
stretched out behind them, enviable in their
secure monotony. Never had they envisaged
the grotesque as a possible element. The
only grotesque that had had a place in their
minds, was death ; and that, by virtue of much
precedent, was sanctioned into conformity.
" She's got the better of us," said Emily once.
" No, no, no," said Bertie with sudden
energy; he could not admit it. "No, no,"
he said again, getting up and walking about.
66 .No," he said, striking with his fist into the
palm of the other hand.
They waited till the evil hours should have
passed and the normal be reasserted.
XVI
THERE remained the evening and the night.
Lydia had said Christmas-day, and for some
reason they took for granted that after
170 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
Christmas-day was passed all would be over
one way or the other. The shutters would
be unbarred, the shop reopened, and life
would return to the cloistered house. Still
the evening and the night. What a Christ-
mas-tide ! And they were old ; too old for
such pranks. Bertie was sixty-five. Old,
too old. They were tired of the strain of the
silent day. Hungry, too, although they had
not noticed it. They went downstairs meekly
when Lydia summoned them to supper.
Nose, ears, moustache, blue wig ; no attempt
at rebellion. They sat round the table,
waiting to be given their food and drink.
They had half hoped that Lydia would pre-
sent some unexpected appearance ; if she was
mad, she ought to look mad ; that would be
less terrifying. It was horrible to be so mad
and to continue to look so sane. She might
have been an old family governess ; a strict
one. Whereas they were condemned to sit
there, so ludicrous ; knowing, moreover,
that she lost none of the full savour of the
paradox.
" You shall drink my health," she said,
at the opening of the meal.
They drank it, in neat spirit. She plied
them with more.
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 171
" I never touch anything," said Emily
feebly.
" No, but this is an exception." She
poured freely into Emily's glass, drinking
nothing herself.
The Javanese warrior holding the lantern
on his spear grinned down at them with his
yellow mask. The candles flickered in the
great sham candelabras. The spirit was
tawny in the shining glasses.
64 Drink ! it's our last evening together."
Emily looked at Lydia, they were sisters ;
had the same features ; were not unlike one
another.
" We shared a bedroom, Alice, didn't we ?
I got into your bed once, when I was frigh-
tened at night. There was a box made of
shells on the dressing-table, do you remember ?
Mother gave it to us at the seaside."
She laughed ; her laugh was almost tender.
" I used to pull your hair, Alice," said
Bertie.
They were suddenly confident that Alice
would do them no harm.
"Forty years," said Lydia, looking down
the table at them.
"A waste of time," said Bertie, "when we
were brother and sisters together. But
M
172 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
you've paid us out, Alice, you've paid us out."
" Not yet," said Lydia, " not fully."
" I daresay I should have done the same
myself," said Bertie's wife, surprisingly.
" After all, it was a joke, Alice ; why not
take Alice's joke in good part ? 3: She looked
round, as though she had made a discovery.
" If you prefer," said Lydia, unmoved.
" Ha, ha ! " said Fred, and was suddenly
silent.
They began to eat what Lydia had given
them. Beyond the open door of the dining-
room the shop was dark and jumbled. Lydia
ate primly, and the little black revolver lay
beside her plate. The light glinted along its
barrels. They viewed it without apprehen-
sion. This was their last evening ; they
were confusedly sorry ; Alice, hospitable if
eccentric ; and what, indeed, was eccentri-
city ? She was giving them champagne now ;
it was wrong to begin with spirits, and to
go on to champagne ; but what matter ?
Alice was well-meaning ; generous. That
little revolver : like a little black, shining
bull-terrier, squat, bulbous. They heard
themselves laughing and making jokes. Alice
seemed pleased, she was smiling ; up to the
present she had not smiled at all ; but now
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 173
the smile was constant on her face as she
watched them. They exerted themselves to
entertain her. Their efforts were successful ;
she watched them with evident approval,
swaying a little, backwards and forwards,
as she sat. They ventured more ; still
she smiled, and her hand poured generously,
though she did not empty her own glass.
They had forgotten that they were old.
Looking at one another, they laughed very
heartily over the trappings Alice had pro-
vided for them. " Christmas! " said Bertie,
tapping his nose. Emily leant back in her
chair ; she was sleepy and happy. She
roused herself to accept the sweets which
Lydia offered her. " Sleepy," she mur-
mured, smiling at Bertie's wife ; " your
hair ..." she toppled off to sleep in the
midst of her sentence. Fred wanted to prop
her up. " Let her be," said Lydia benignly.
"All happy," said Bertie. They pulled
crackers, and put the paper caps on their
heads ; the table under the candelabra was
littered with the coloured paper off the crack-
ers, and there was a discord produced by the
whistles and small trumpets that came out
of them. Bertie was on his feet, trying all
these toy instruments in turn ; he swayed
174 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
round the table, collecting them, and reading
out the mottoes. He paused to look at his
wife, who had fallen forward with her arms
on the table and her head on her arms.
" Asleep," he said, with a puzzled expression.
Lydia still sat bolt upright at the head of the
table, letting them all have their way as it
seemed best to them, whether in sleep or
hilarity ; with her hands she clasped her
elbows, and the bands of hair lay undisturbed
upon her brows. She examined her guests
in turn ; Emily, who slept, slipped sideway
in her chair, the moustache still stuck on her
upper lip ; Bertie's wife, who slept likewise,
her face hidden, the blue wig uppermost ;
Fred, who between the ears stared vaguely
before him ; and Bertie, who, portly and ir-
responsible, wandered round the table search-
ing among the litter of the crackers. Lydia
at last, having scrutinized them all, gave out
a sudden creaking laugh. Her party was to
her satisfaction. "Forty years!" she said,
nodding at Bertie, "forty years!" When
she laughed he looked at her, dimly startled
through his confusion. " Christmas," he
replied, blinking ; he intended it to be an
expression of good-will, an obliteration of
those forty years. At last, he thought, they
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 175
had found out the right way to treat Alice :
not solemnly, not as though they were afraid
of her, but in a light-hearted and jocund
spirit. " Christmas," he repeated, leaning
up against her chair.
She began to laugh. Her laughter grew ;
it creaked at first, then grew shrill ; she
pointed derisively at them all in turn. Bertie
was not alarmed ; he joined in. He relished
at last the humour of the situation, which
Alice had been relishing now since yesterday.
She had got twenty-four hours' start ahead
of him : an unfair advantage. He made up
for lost time by trying to laugh more heartily
than she did. She observed this with a
dangerous appreciation ; her fingers began
to play with the butt of the revolver. Forty
years. Forty Christmases spent in solitude.
Her sudden rage blackened out the room
before her eyes. She lifted the revolver
uncertainly, then laid it down again. " Subtle,
subtle. Not blatant," she muttered to her-
self, an often-rehearsed lesson, and tapped
her fingers against her teeth. She felt slightly
helpless, as though she were unable to make
the most of her opportunity. She knew
she had had many schemes, but they all
seemed to be slipping away from her. It
176 THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
was difficult to hold on to one's thoughts,
difficult to concentrate them ; they scattered
as one came up to them, like a lot of sparrows.
A pity she must make an effort because
the opportunity would not come again.
Just then she heard the front- door bell
ring sharply through the house.
A little dazed, she got up to answer it. A
messenger from outside ? Perhaps an unex-
pected help in her emergency ? She left
the dining-room, where Bertie fumbled and
tried to detain her ; she passed through the
shop, and, moving like a sleep-walker, un-
locked and undid the many fastenings of the
door. Outside in the street stood a group of
men, carrying lanterns ; the snow sparkled
on the ground ; the narrow street was like
an illustration of old-fashioned Christmas.
She stood holding the door open. She recog-
nized many of her fellow-tradesmen ; she
heard their words, " Your well-known charity,
Miss Protheroe . . . never turn away an
appeal unanswered. . . . Christmas-time . . .
trust we don't intrude. . . ." and heard the
rattle of coin, and saw the collecting-boxes
in their hands.
" You don't intrude," she said. " Come in."
Inwardly she knew they wanted an excuse
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY 177
to find out how Miss Protheroe spent her
Christmas. They should see. They came in,
removing their hats, from which the melting
snow began to drip, and scraping the snow
from their boots on the wire mat ; their
faces were red and jovial. She led them
through the jumbled shop, through into the
dining-room, where Bertie leant up against
the littered table, and the two women slept,
and Fred gaped stupidly.
They were at a loss to say anything;
checked in their joke of routing out old Miss
Protheroe, they gazed uncomprehending at
the scene before them. Their eyes turned
again towards Miss Protheroe ; she stood
erect and prim, her hands clasping her elbows.
" You don't know my relations," she said,
and, indicating them, " my sister, my brother-
in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother." She
effected the introduction with irreproachable
gravity.
" She's mad," cried Bertie suddenly, reason
flooding him, and he pointed at her with a
denouncing hand.
They stared, first at those four crazy
figures, and then at the stiff correctness of
Miss Protheroe as they always knew her.
PATIENCE
HE had only to seclude his mind in order to
imagine himself in the train again, to hear
its steady beat, and to sway monotonously
with its rocking. As soon as he had isolated
himself in this day-dream, he was impervious
to the sights and sounds that washed round
on the outskirts of his consciousness. He
was safely withdrawn. He sat staring, not
at the green baize of the card-table, where
his wife, with white, plump, be-ringed hands,
under the strong light thrown down by the
shaded lamp, set out the neat rows of shiny
cards for her Patience ; he sat staring,
sheltered within the friendly shadows, not
at this evening security of his home, but out
through the rectangular windows of the
train, that framed the hard blaze of the
southern country, the red rocks and the blue
sea ; the train curving in and out of tunnels,
round the sharp promontories, disclosing the
secrets of little bays, the pine-trees among
181
182 PATIENCE
the boulders, and the blackened scrub that
betokened a previous hillside fire.
Opposite him, she slept, curled up in the
corner of the seat, very young and very
fragile under the big collar of soft fur of her
coat thrown over her to keep off the dust.
He had wished that she would look out of
the window with him ; he knew how she
would sit up, and the quick impatient
gesture by which she would dash the hair
out of her eyes, but she slept so peacefully,
so like a child, that he would not wake her.
He bent forward, knocking the ash of his
cigarette off against the window-ledge, to
get a better view out of the window ; and
every little creek, as the curving train took
it out of view, he pursued with regretful
eyes, knowing that he would not pass that
way again. This forlorn and beautiful coast,
whose every accident was so faithfully fol-
lowed by the train, this coast, every bit of
it, was a party to his happiness, and he had
been reluctant to let it go.
\ : How his heart ached! Perhaps it was not
wholesome to have trained his mind to enter
so readily, so completely, into that world of
recollections ? He dragged himself out :
" Patience going well ? 5:
PATIENCE 183
"Not very well to-night."
He drifted away again, before he well knew
that he had drifted. Not to the train this
time his memories were illimitably various.
(The time had been when he could not trust
himself to dip into them, those memories
that were now perpetually his refuge, his
solace, and his pain.) An hotel bedroom.
What hotel? it didn't matter. All hotel
bedrooms were alike ; all Paradise, so long
as they had contained her. In what spot ?
that didn't matter, either ; somewhere warm
and gaudy ; all their escapades had been in
southern places. Somewhere with bougain-
villaea ramping over creamy houses, some-
where with gay irresponsible negroes selling
oranges out of immense baskets at the street
corners. She had never tired of the gash of
their white teeth in their black faces as they
grinned. She would stop to buy their
oranges just to get the grin. And some of
them could juggle with oranges, which made
her laugh and turn to him in delight and clap
her hands. He clenched his fingers together,
out of sight, as he lounged in the depths of
his arm-chair. That hotel bedroom! Her
clothes . . . He used to kneel on the floor
beside her open dressing-case, lifting out her
184 PATIENCE
clothes for her, because she was too lazy to
unpack for herself. She watched him through
her eye-lashes, amused at his complaints
which so ill concealed his joy in her posses-
sions ; then she would catch his head and
strain it hungrily against her. They were
always violent, irresistible, surprising, those
rare demonstrations of hers, and left him
dizzy and abashed. That hotel bedroom!
Always the same furniture ; the iron bed-
stead under the draped mosquito curtains
that were so oddly bridal ; the combined
wash-stand and chest of drawers (the
drawers incorrigibly half-open and spilling
the disorder of her garments, her ribbons,
and her laces), the hanging wardrobe with
the long looking-glass door, the dressing-
table littered with her brushes, her powder,
and her scent bottles. The evenings he
would come noiselessly into her room while
she lingered at her mirror, in her long silk
nightgown, her gleaming arms lifted to take
the pins out of her hair ; and after standing
in the door-way to watch her, he would
switch off the electric light, so that the open
window and the dark blue sky suddenly
leapt up, deep, luminous, and spangled with
gold stars behind her. Then the coo of her
PATIENCE 185
voice, never startled, never hasty : a coo of
laughter and remonstrance, rather than of
displeasure ; and he would go to her and
draw her out on to the balcony, from where,
his arm flung round her shoulders and her
suppleness yielding contentedly to his pres-
sure, they watched the yellow moon mount
up above the sheaves of the palm-trees, and
glint upon a shield of distant water.
And there were other nights : so many, he
might take his choice amongst them. Carni-
val nights, when she fled away from him and
became a spirit, an incarnation of carnival,
and the sweep of her dancing eyes over his
face was vague and rapid, as though he were
a stranger she had never seen before. He
used to feel a small despair, thinking that
any domino who whirled her away possessed
her in closer affinity than he. And when he
had at last thankfully brought her back into
her room at the hotel, with confetti scattered
over the floor, fallen from her carnival
clothes, whose tawdry satin and tinsel lay
thrown across a chair, then, although he
could not have wished her sweeter, she still
kept that will-o'-the-wisp remoteness, that
air of one who has strayed and been with
difficulty recaptured, which made him wonder
186 PATIENCE
whether he or anyone else would ever truly
touch the secret of her shy and fugitive
heart.
" How funny you are, Paul. You haven't
turned over a page of your book for at least
twenty minutes." Not a rebuke merely a
placid comment. Another set of Patience
nicely dealt out.
After that he turned the pages assiduously,
it wouldn't do to be caught dreaming. Then
came the relapse . . .
She had flitted away from him ; yes, the
day had come when she had flitted. He had
known, always, somewhere within himself,
that it would come. To whom had she
gone ? he didn't know ; he hadn't tried to
find out, perhaps to no one; and, anyway,
the fate of her body, passionately as he had
loved it, didn't seem so vital a matter ; what
mattered was the flame within her ; he
couldn't bear to think that she should have
given anyone that. Not that he was fatuous
enough to suppose that he had ever had it.
Oh, no ! he was far too humble, too diffident
in his mind. He had worshipped her all the
more because he knew there was something
in her withdrawn, the eternal pilgrim, the
incorrigible truant. He knew that he could
PATIENCE 187
never have loved any woman who hadn't
that element in her, and since he had only
found it once, quite logically he had nver
loved but once. (He had been young then.
It had been easy enough for his relations to
pick holes in her : " Flighty," they had said,
and, snorting, " She takes the best years of
his life and then throws him aside," and to all
their comments he had never answered once,
but had looked at them with deeply wounded
eyes, so that they wondered uneasily what
thoughts were locked in his heart. Nor had
they ever got any information out of him ;
all their version of the story had been pieced
together from bits of gossip and rumour ;
correct in the main as to facts, but utterly at
sea as to essentials. But as he disdained to set
them right, they were never any the wiser.)
Never loved but once ; and here he was,
fifty, prosperous, even envied by other men,
going daily about his affairs, dining well,
talking rationally, a certain portliness in his
manner which his figure had escaped. . . .
He and his wife, a commendable couple ; a
couple that made one disbelieve in anarchy,
wild oats, or wild animals. People smiled
with the satisfaction of approval when they
came into a room ; here were security,
N
188 PATIENCE
decorum ; here were civilization and polite-
ness ; here was a member of the civic cor-
poration, a burgher to admire and to respect.
He had a grave, courtly manner, slightly
indulgent towards women, which they found
not unattractive, although they knew that
he varied it towards none of them, whether
plain or pretty, staid or skittish. There was
always the same grave smile on his lips,
always the same sustained, controlled interest
in his eyes ; attention, perhaps, rather than
interest ; the line was a difficult one to draw.
The type of man who made other men say,
" Wish we had more fellows like him," and
of whom the women said amongst themselves,
" A puzzling man, somehow, isn't he ? So
quiet. One never knows what he is really
thinking, or whether he isn't laughing at us
all. Do you suppose, though, that he has
ever really felt ? "
The madcap things she did! He recalled
that evening at the railway station, when
under the glare of the arc-lights she had
danced up to a ticket-collector she in her
little travelling hat and her furs and the soft
luxury that always seemed to surround her :
" When does the next train start ? " " Where
for, miss ? " " Oh, it doesn't matter where
PATIENCE 189
for just the next train ? ' : And they had
gone to Stroud.
" This Patience never seems to come out,"
said the voice proceeding from under the
lamp.
" No, dear ? "
" No. I think I shall have to give it up
for an easier one. It's so irritating when
things won't go right."
" I should try an easier one to-morrow."
" To-morrow ? Oh, I see, you want to go
to bed. I must say, I should rather have
liked to try it this evening, but if you want
to go to bed . . ."
" No, dear, of course not ; try your
Patience by all means."
" No, dear ; I wouldn't dream of it, as you
want to go to bed. Besides, to-morrow will
do just as well. You will go round, won't
you, and see that everything is properly
locked up ? "
" But I am dragging you to bed when you
don't want to go."
" Not a bit, Paul, I assure you ; it is
quite all right. I am really quite sleepy
myself. I should have liked to try the
Patience, perhaps, but to-morrow will do
just as well,"
190 PATIENCE
He held the door open gravely for her, but
there were several things she must attend to
before leaving the room : the fire must be
poked down so that no spark could be spat
out on to the hearth-rug ; the drawer of her
writing-table must be locked so that the
housemaid should not read her letters or
examine her bills when dusting the room
before breakfast on the following morning ;
and the book which she had been reading
must be replaced in the bookcase. He en-
dured all this ritual without betraying any
irritation, watching even the final pats which
she gave to the cushions of his chair.
" It's quite all right, Paul, dear ; of course
one can't help crumpling cushions when one
sits on them, and what are they there for but
to be sat on ? "
She bustled out of the room, calling back
to him as she mounted the stairs : " You
won't forget to lock up, will you ? "
He had remembered to lock up now for
twenty years. He went methodically about
the business, looking behind curtains to see
whether the shutters were closed, testing the
chain on the front door. All that parapher-
nalia of security ! He felt sometimes that the
cold, the poor, and the hungry were welcome
PATIENCE 191
to the embers of his drawing-room fire, to the
silver off his sideboard, and to the remains of
the wine in his decanters. And as he stood
for a moment at the garden door, looking up
the gravel path of his trim little garden, and
felt the biting cold beneath the slip of new
moon, he wondered with a sort of anguish
where she was, whether she was sheltered and
cared for, or whether in her gay improvident
way she had gone down and under, until on
such a winter's night as this there remained
no comfort for her but such as she might
find among the mirrors and garish lights of a
bar, in such fortuitous company as she might
charm with a vivacious manner and an
affectation of laughter. She had from time
to time been haunted by a premonition of
such things, he remembered ; a mocking
wistfulness had come into her voice when she
said, " You'll always be all right, Paul, you
were born prosperous ; but as for me, I'll
end my days among the dregs of the world
I know it, so think of me sometimes when you
sit over your Madeira and your cigar, won't
you? and wonder whether my nose isn't
pushed against your window in the hopes
that the smell of your cooking might drift
out to me," and when she had said these
192 PATIENCE
things he had put his hand over her mouth
to stop the words he couldn't bear to hear,
and she had laughed and had repeated,
66 Well, well, we'll see."
He shut the door carefully and shot the
bolt into its socket. Very cold it was silly
of him to stand at the open door like that
hoped he hadn't got a chill. Lighting his
candle in the hall, he switched off all the
electric lights and climbed the stairs to bed ;
a nice fire warmed his dressing-room, and his
pyjamas were put out for him over the back
of a chair in front of the fire ; he undressed,
thinking that he was glad he wasn't a poor
devil out in the cold. His wife was already
in bed, and by the light of her reading-lamp
he saw the curlers that framed her forehead,
and the feather-stitching in white floss-silk
round the collar of her flannel nightgown.
" What a long time you've been, Paul. I
was just thinking, I shan't be able to try that
Patience to-morrow evening, because we've
got the Howard-Ellises coming to dinner."
" So we have. I'd quite forgotten. We
must give them champagne," he said
mechanically ; " they'll expect it."
He got into bed, turned out the lamp, and
lay down beside his wife, staring into the dark.
HER SON
To H. M.
SHE awoke that morning earlier than was
her wont, emerging from a delicious sleep into
a waking no less pleasant. Lazily she slipped
her hand under her pillows there were a
lot of pillows, all very downy, into which her
head and shoulders sank as into a nest ; she
liked a lot of pillows ; that was one of her
little luxuries, and she was in the habit of
saying, what was one's own house if not a
place where one's little luxuries could be
indulged ? lazily she slipped her hand under
the pillows, feeling about, and having found
what she wanted, pressed the spring of the
repeater watch lying there tucked away. Its
tiny, melodious chime came to her, muffled
but distinct. Seven clear little bells ; then
two chimes for the half-hour ; then five
quick busy strokes ; five-and-twenty minutes
to eight. Five-and-twenty minutes still
before she would be called. She lay con-
tentedly on her back, with her arms folded
beneath her head, watching the daylight
195
196 HER SON
increase through the short chintz curtains of
her windows opposite. The chintz, a shiny
one, was lined with pink ; the light came
through it, pink and tempered. She lay
wondering whether she should get up to pull
the curtains aside, but she was so comfortable,
so softly warm, and in so pleasant a frame of
mind, that she would not break the hour by
moving. She had a little world inside her
head to-day making her independent of the
world outside. And besides, she knew so
well what she would see, even did she make
the effort and get up to pull the curtains ;
she would see what she had seen every day
for forty years, the barn with the orange
lichen on the roof, the church tower, the
jumbled roofs of the village, the bare beauti-
ful limbs of the distant Downs ; she knew it
all, knew it with the knowledge of love ; and
yet, in spite of this intimate knowledge, she
was frequently heard to remark that the
country had always some new surprise, some
gradation of light one had never seen before,
so that one was always on the look-out and
one's interest kept alive from day to day.
The seasons in themselves constituted a
surprise to which, in her five-and- sixty years
of life, she had never grown accustomed ;
HER SON 197
she forgot each beauty as it became replaced
by a newer beauty ; in the delight of spring
she forgot the etched austerity of winter, and
in winter she forgot the flowers of spring, so
it was always with a naive astonishment that
she recognized the arrival of a new season,
and each one as it became established seemed
to her the best. A discovery took some time
before it settled itself into its place in the
working of her mind, but, once there, it held
with a gentle obstinacy, and, because there
were not very many of these discoveries, none
of them were very far away from the circling
current of her thoughts. Nor was she eager
for fresh acquaintances among her thoughts,
any more than for fresh acquisitions among her
friends ; just as she liked faces to be familiar,
so she liked ideas to be well-tested and proven
before she admitted them to the privilege of
her intimacy; the presence of strangers was an
inconvenience ; good manners forbade little
jokes from which strangers were excluded,
little allusive or reminiscent smiles in which
they could not share. It followed, logically
enough although she enjoyed the small,
carefully-chosen dinner parties she gave once
a fortnight on summer evenings that she
was really happiest alone with her house and
198 HER SON
garden, because, as she said, one never knows
anybody so well as one knows oneself, and
even one's most approved friends are apt to
contradict or to disagree, or to advance
unforeseen opinions ; to disconcert, in fact, in
a variety of ways impossible to the silent
acquiescence of plants or furniture ; and
the one person whose constant companion-
ship she would have chosen, had hitherto
been absent.
She was perfectly happy now as she lay
waiting for eight o'clock and the beginning of
the day, agreeable anticipations floating in
her mind as her eyes wandered over the
comfort of her room, from the chintz curtains
to the bright stoppered bottles and silver on
her dressing-table, from the small bookcase
full of nicely-bound books to the row of
photographs on the mantelpiece. All was
very still. One of the curtains bellied out a
little in front of an open window. From time
to time a smile hovered over her lips, and
once she gave a sigh, and moved slightly in
her bed, as though the very perfection of her
thoughts were giving her a deliciously uneasy
rapture. But she never allowed herself to
indulge for long in reveries which, however
pleasant they might be, led to nothing prac-
HER SON 199
tical. She knew that she had a great deal
to see to that morning ; and if all were not
done in an orderly way, something would be
forgotten. She stretched out her hand and
took from off the table by her bed a memoran-
dum book, fitted with a pencil and bound in
green leather, across which was written in
gilt lettering, " While I remember it"
With the pencil poised above the first fair
page, she paused. Would it be better to
execute her business in the village first, or to
do what she had to do about the house ? The
village first, by all means ; if any of the trades-
men made a mistake, there would be the more
time to rectify their blunder. She began,
in her mind, her journey up the village street,
stopping at the stationer's, the grocer's, the
fishmonger's.
How difficult it was to cater for the wants
of a man ! So long since she had done it ;
she had lost the habit. What would he
want ? The Times. She noted " Times"
and added, after a long concentration, " The
Field" Then she remembered that he liked
J pens ; she herself always used Relief ;
how lucky that she had thought of that.
There was nothing else from the stationer's ;
of all the ordinary requirements, writing-
200 HER SON
paper, blotting-paper, ink, pencils, gummed
labels, elastic bands, envelopes of assorted
sizes, she kept in her cupboard an exhaustive
store. The grocer next ; and she had already,
a long way back, when she first heard that
Henry was coming, made a note that he liked
preserved ginger. She renewed this note,
neatly, under the proper heading in her list :
Ginger, Brazil nuts, a small Stilton, anchovies
he would want a savoury for dinner, and
he should have it chutney. She could not
think of anything else, but once she was in
the shop she could look round and perhaps see
something that he would like. She passed
on to the fishmonger's, and with a delighted
smile wrote down, " Herring roes " and
" Kippers." How amused and pleased he
would be when he realized how well she had
remembered all his tastes! Not the taste
he had when he was a little boy, and which she
might have remembered out of sentiment ;
no, he should see that she had kept pace with
his years, and remembered his preferences as
a man up to five years ago, when she had last
seen him.
She had finished now with the village,
for all the more staple requirements had, of
course, been ordered at the beginning of the
HER SON 201
week, and these were only the extras which
she had treasured up to do herself on the last
morning. There was more to be seen to at
home. Flowers no, she need not make a
note of that ; she would not forget to do the
flowers. But there were other things which,
unless noted, might slip her memory :
" Order the motor ; eggs (brown) for
breakfast ; honey ; fire in his room ; put
out the port ; put out the cigars ; early
morning tea."
At that moment she heard the church
clock beginning to strike eight, and with a
knock on the door her maid came in, carrying
a little tray in one hand and a can of hot
water in the other. There were a few letters
slipped under the edge of the saucer on the
tray, and Mrs. Martin read them while she
drank her tea, but they were not very inter-
esting, only the annual appeal from the local
gardeners' society she thought it unthrifty
to send that by post, when it could so easily
have been left by hand a couple of bills, a
bulb catalogue from Holland (" Early every
morning will be seen dozens of parties of men,
women and children tramping up the moun-
tains between France and Spain, singing the
popular song of Harry Lauder, c We're all
202 HER SON
going the same way, we've all gone down the
hills.' Now perhaps you will ask me why
I tell this in a Bulb Catalogue, and here I
will give you the answer : In the valleys of
those beautiful Pyrenees mountains live nu-
merous daffodils, which are the richest flow-
ering of these garden-friends I ever meeted.
Will you not try a couple of hundred from
our stock ? and you will be convinced to
have invested fife bob on the good horse."),
and a letter from her sister in Devon which
she put aside to read later on. The maid
moved about the room, putting everything
ready very quietly and skilfully. The cur-
tains were drawn back now, and from her bed
Mrs. Martin could see the wide autumn sky,
gold-brown behind the scarlet trail of splay-
leaved Virginia creeper that hung down out-
side the window. She was glad that it was
neither raining nor windy. She would have
the motor opened before it started for the
station.
The day had really begun.
A rising tide of excitement made her want
very much to talk to Williams, but this was
against her principles, and she restrained
herself. She kept glancing at Williams when-
ever the maid's back was turned, or her head
HER SON 203
bent over the linen in the tidy drawers, and
opening her lips to speak, but the remark
faded away each time into a nervous smile,
which she concealed by drinking again from
her cup of tea. But when Williams came
and stood by her bed to say, " The bath is
quite ready, ma'am," she could not prevent
herself from speaking ; she wanted to say,
" You know, it's to-day, Williams, to-day! ' :
but instead of that she said, with detachment,
"Is it a fine morning, Williams ? " and
Williams replied, respectful as ever, " A
beautiful morning, ma'am," but Mrs. Martin,
as she got out of bed and slid her feet into the
warmed bedroom slippers that were waiting
for her, felt that between herself and Williams
a perfectly satisfactory understanding existed.
II
SHE came downstairs in due course, dressed
in a brown holland dress with a big black
straw hat tied with black ribbons under her
chin. Her fresh old face looked soft and
powdered, her white hair escaped in puffs
from under her hat, on her nose she wore a
pair of round horn spectacles, and on her
hands a pair of big brown leather gauntlets,
o
204 HER SON
Over her arm she carried a garden basket, a
pair of garden scissors dangling by a ribbon
from the handle. She was going to do the
flowers first ; one never knew, at this time of
year, whether a sudden shower might not
come down and dash their beauty.
In the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, the
grandfather clock ticked quietly. The doors
all stood open ; looking to the left she could
see into the sitting-room, with its deep,
chintz-covered chairs and sofas; looking to
the right, down the passage, into the dining-
room, where presently luncheon would be
laid for two ; and straight ahead of her, facing
the stairs, was the front-door, which opened
on to the little forecourt and the flagged path
leading up to the porch. She went out.
Some white pigeons were sunning themselves
on the roof of the great barn ; its doors were
propped open, and a farm-hand came out,
followed by two farm horses, their hoofs
going clop-clop after him, their harness
clanking loosely, and their blinkers and the
high peaks of their collars studded with
shining brass nails. Their tails and manes
were plaited up with straw and red braid.
Mrs. Martin nodded to the man, as he touched
his cap to her, and stood looking after the
HER SON 205
horses lumbering their way out towards the
lane. She liked having the farm so close at
hand, and had never thought of putting the
barn, although it stood so near the house,
forming one side of the forecourt, to any other
than farm uses. She went across the court
now, and looked into it. A smell of dust and
sacking ; gold motes in a shaft of sunlight ;
two farm waggons with red and blue wheels ;
a pile of yellow straw, and some trusses of
hay. She was very well content. Behind
the barn stood the rickyard, and here were
the garnered stacks, pointed like witches'
hats, a double row of them : the farm was
doing well. When the time came, she would
have a prosperous inheritance to bequeath
to her son.
She turned away from the shadows of the
barn, and went through the door in the wall
that led into the garden. It was quite warm ;
the ground steamed slightly, so that a faint
mist hung low, and everything was wet, with
but a dangerously narrow margin between
the last splendour of autumn and its first
sodden decay. She walked slowly up the
garden path, looking at the bronze, red, yellow
and orange flowers that were bent down to-
wards the ground by the moisture ; she
206 HER SON
walked up to the path, swinging her scissors,
till she came to the clump of Scotch firs at
the top of the garden, and stood surveying
the country that swept down to the valley,
rising to the Downs beyond, the woods in the
valley golden through the mist, and blue
smoke hanging above the deep violet pools of
shadow, between the woods and the hills;
all unstirred by any breath ; rust-colour and
blue in every shade from the pale tan of the
stubble to the fire of the woods, from the
wreathing smoke-blue to the depths of ame-
thyst driven like wedges into the flanks of
the Downs. Below the clump of Scotch firs
the ground fell away rapidly ; in the valley
gleamed a sudden silver twist of the river.
The river was Mrs. Martin's boundary, the
natural frontier to her eight hundred acres.
They had not always been eight hundred
acres. Once they had only been five hundred,
and only thanks to stringent frugality and
a certain astuteness on Mrs. Martin's part had
they been extended to that natural frontier
which was the river. She could not think
of that astuteness now without a measure of
discomfort. Had she been quite as fair as she
might have been quite as scrupulous ? Would
she ever have persuaded Mr. Thistlethwaite
HER SON 207
to part with the required three hundred if
she hadn't canvassed for him quite so enthu-
siastically before the poll ? Was she quite
sure that she agreed with all his political
convictions ? Was she even sure that she
understood them ? She dismissed these
qualms, hurriedly and furtively, when they
nudged her. Anyway, the three hundred
acres were hers, and whatever she had done,
she had done it for her son ; let that be her
defence in everything. She would bring
him out here after luncheon, and he would
stand looking over the valley, and possibly
he would say, as he had said once before,
years ago, " I wish our land went down as far
as the river, don't you ? " And then in a
great moment she would reply " It does! ' :
For she had never told him about the extra
three hundred acres ; she had kept that
secret out of the long weekly letter she had
written to him overseas during all the five
years of his absence. There was no detail of
her life that she hadn't told him ; she had
told him, separately, about each of her dinner
parties ; about the work on the farm, and
about the agricultural experiments that she
and Lynes, the bailiff, were making, their
failure or their success ; she had kept him
208 HER SON
informed of all the events in the village ; but
the three hundred acres she had hugged to
herself as a secret and a surprise. Lynes was
her accomplice ; she had had to warn him
that he must never let out the secret should
he have occasion to write to Mr. Henry. It
had created a great link between herself and
Lynes. There had, of course, been the danger
that somebody or other in the district would
be writing to Henry on other matters, and
would mention his mother's purchase ; but
up to the present it was clear from Henry's
letters that no one had done so. He had
written to her with fair regularity, though
not so often as she could have wished ; but
then she would have liked a letter by every
mail, as he received from her, and that was
unreasonable ; and though sometimes his
letters were brief, and clearly written in a
hurry, she was too loyal to ask herself what he
could possibly have to do with his evenings
on a ranch where work would be finished by
dusk.
She turned back along the path, and began
cutting flowers wherewith she filled her bas-
ket. She cut very carefully where it would
not show. No one else was allowed to cut
the flowers. She was especially proud of this,
HER SON 209
her autumn border. On either side of the
path, until it was brought up short at the end
by the grey walls of the manor-house, it
smouldered in broad bands that repeated the
colours of the autumn woods. Orange snap-
dragon, marigold, and mimulus flowing for-
ward on to the flagged path ; then the bronze
of coreopsis and helenium, stabbed by the
lance-like spires of red-hot poker ; and be-
hind them the almost incredible brilliance of
dahlias reared against the background of
dark yew hedge. The border streamed away
like a flaming tongue from the cool grey of
the house. She had worked very hard and
studied much to bring it to its present per-
fection ; ten years of labour had at last been
rewarded. Behind the yew hedges, to either
side, were squares of old orchard, and the
bright red apples nodded over the hedges like
so many bright eyes peeping at the borders.
In the grass under the apple-trees the bulbs
lay dormant, that in the spring speckled the
orchards with grape-hyacinths, anemones,
and narcissi ; but Mrs. Martin had forgotten
about the spring. She was thinking, as she
cut sheaves from the coreopsis and, more
sparingly, from the snapdragons, that the
autumn border was really the finest sight of
210 HER SON
the year, and that she was glad Henry should
be coming now, and at no other time.
In the house, where she had everything
conveniently arranged in the garden-room
a sink, taps, cloths for wiping the glasses,
and a cupboard full of flower-vases she
proceeded leisurely to do the flowers. No
one had ever known Mrs. Martin be anything
but leisurely ; she always had plenty to
occupy her time, but she was never hurried
or ruffled. It was one of her greatest charms.
She selected the flower vases with nice care;
some were of rough pottery, but those now
stood on one side, for she consecrated them to
the spring flowers and to the roses ; others
were of glass, like green bubbles, glaucous
and irridescent, light to the hand for Mrs.
Martin could not bear glasses that were not
delicately blown, and as no one ever touched
them except herself, they never got broken.
She had a genius for handling fragility,
quick and deft, and curiously tender. She
was now wondering whether Henry's wife
would some day stand in her place at the sink
in the garden-room. She often wondered
this, for Henry's wife was a personage she had
long since absorbed into her thoughts. She
thought of her without bitterness or jealousy,
HER SON 211
simply as a part of Henry, and consequently
as another person to whom she would, in due
course, have to hand over the house, the
garden, and the estate to render an account
of her stewardship. Mrs. Martin was think-
ing about her as she snipped the ends off
stalks that were too long, and lifted the vases
that were already filled on to the tray stand-
ing ready to receive them. It made no differ-
ence that Henry should not yet have come
across his wife ; she was not thereby entitled,
in Mrs. Martin's eyes, to any separate exis-
tence of her own. She was Henry's wife ; the
future mistress, when Mrs. Martin was dead,
of the house and all it contained. It had
taken a very long time for Mrs. Martin's mind
to grow accustomed to this idea, but now
that it was there she accepted it quite placidly,
and it came up in its turn for examination
amongst the other ideas, or was taken out
when she wanted something to think about.
She had even got into the way of saying to
Lynes, or to the gardener, " I'm sure that
Mrs. Henry would approve of that," and if, at
first, they had been a little surprised, they
had quickly come to take Mrs. Henry quite
for granted. She had even an affection for
Henry's wife. She liked to think of them
212 HER SON
living here together in the country, so far
away from London the country that was
England although London forgot about it
and of Henry tramping over the eight hun-
dred acres with a gun and a spaniel, while his
wife stooped over the flowers in the walled
garden, and she never doubted that they
would frequently recall her, who had made
the place what it was ; recall her with a sort
of grudging tenderness she was too humanly
wise a woman to expect more than that and
say, " The old lady ought to rest quietly in
her grave. ..." She carried the tray of
flowers into the hall, and from there distri-
buted them ; a big vase of coreopsis on each
window sill in the sitting-room, a bowl of
marigolds on the table where the light of the
lamp would fall straight on to them in the
evening, a bowl of snapdragons in the centre
of the hall, red and yellow nasturtiums on the
dining-room table. There remained two little
pots of snapdragon, which she took upstairs
and put on the dressing-table in his bedroom.
She came down again. The bronze of the
flowers, she thought, suited the house, with
its bits of oak panelling, the polished stairs
of a golden-brown, and the pile carpet of
mouse-brown in the sitting-room. She
HER SON 213
was pleased with her survey, though a
little tired. She heaved the sigh of happy
tiredness. Five years alone here, alone ex-
cept for the neighbours ; and although she
liked being alone, and was quite content
between Lynes and her garden in the day-
time, and her books in the evening, she was
very glad that Henry who was really her
unseen and constant companion, at the back
of her mind in everything she did should be
coming back to her at last.
m (
SHE watched the motor as it drove off to the
station. She had had it opened, and had
sent a number of coats and rugs with it lest
Henry should be cold. By this time she was
completely tired out, having pursued her
self-imposed business down to its minutest
detail, but the consciousness that she had
done everything she had to do buoyed her
up with the pleasure of virtue. Although
she knew that she could not expect the motor
back for at least half-an-hour, she enveloped
herself in an old brown cape and went to
sit on the little bench in the porch. The
mist had by now been completely dispersed
214 HER SON
by the sun, which had rolled it away in curls
and shavings of vapour, that clung about the
trees as though reluctant to go, and finally
melted away, leaving a day full of damp gold,
with the pheasants calling in the distance
along the margins of the fields nearest to
the coppices. Mrs. Martin sat in the porch
with her feet propped up on the opposite
bench. She rested contentedly, folding her
old brown cloak round her, and letting her
head nod under its big black straw hat as she
dozed. She looked like some old shepherd
nodding after his dinner hour. The pigeons
came and pecked about under her feet for
stray grains of maize, and were joined by
some chickens from the farmyard that came
scurrying across the court, the big Rhode
Island Reds and the white Wyandottes with
their bright yellow legs prinking round and
squawking as all their heads met in a rush
over the same grain. Mrs. Martin smiled
as she dozed, like a mother smiling indulgently
at the squabble of her children. The sun-
light fell in a sharp line across the flag- stone
of the porch. Little bright drops of moisture
formed on the hairy tweed of Mrs. Martin's
cloak where her gentle and regular breathing
blew down the front of it. She had not meant
HER SON 215
to go to sleep. She would not have believed
that she could go to sleep while she was
actually waiting for the arrival of Henry.
Five years and then, at the end of it, to
sleep! But she was old, and she had been
busy all the morning, and she was tired.
She slept on, with the pigeons and chickens
still pecking, quietly now, under her feet.
IV
HENRY was there ; he arrived cheerful and
full of good-will. If, coming down in the
train three hours ; how could anyone, good
Lord, so bury themselves in the country
when they weren't obliged to ? if, coming
down in the train, he had drilled himself
rather deliberately into the suitable frame of
mind, at the actual moment of his arrival he
found himself unexpectedly invaded by a
rush of genuine pleasure. He had been
touched by the sudden sight of his mother
asleep in the porch, wrapped in the same old
cloak which he well remembered ; her cheek,
when he kissed it, had been so cool and soft
and naturally scented ; and her confusion
and delight had both been so sweet and so
candid. They went into the house together,
216 HER SON
eagerly ; he put down his hat and coat on the
same coffer which was in its unaltered place,
and still the warmth of homecoming had not
deserted him. She took his arm and led him
towards the sitting-room, " Not much change,
you see, Henry ; I had to have new covers
for the chairs and the sofa, and I thought it
would be nice to have them a little different,
but everything else is just the same. Now I
expect you'd like to go to your room and wash :
I've had some hot water put there for you ;
and luncheon will be ready in five minutes."
He splashed over his basin, looking round
his room meanwhile and thinking how clean
and fresh it was, and how jolly the view out
of the window with the river shining down
in the valley, washing his hands with an
energy that brought the soap up into an
instant lather, and as he dried them on the
soft huckaback of the fringed towel he smiled
to himself, for he remembered the old joke
of his mother's niceness over such things as
linen. He unpacked his brushes and brushed
his hair vigorously ; it was sleek and black,
and he brushed it till it shone like a top-hat.
He ran downstairs, jumping the last six steps
and shouting out to his mother. He felt
quite boyish. He put his hand through her
HER SON 217
arm and drew her out to the porch, where
they stood while they waited for luncheon.
He held her arm close to his side in a posses-
sive way. They were both very gay, and
rather tremulous.
" How well you look, Henry ! and so brown ;
why, you might be twenty instead of nearly
thirty. Now what do you want to drink ?
claret, beer, cider. . . . Try a little of our
cider, it's home-made, last season's brew,
and I think we have got in exactly the right
measure of wheat. It is so easy to make a
mistake to put in too little or too much
but I think last autumn we got it just right."
But Henry did not care for cider ; he
preferred whisky and soda.
" Have what you like, of course, dear boy.
Here are my keys, Sandford ; get the bottle
of whisky out of my cupboard, please, and
bring it for Mr. Henry, and let me have the
keys back. Dear me, Henry, we both have so
much to say to one another that it makes us
quite silent. I scarcely know where to begin.
Never mind, it will all come out little by little,
and we have plenty of time before us. I
218 HER SON
have made a great plan of all I want to show
you this afternoon; you must come round to
the farm after luncheon and speak to Lynes,
and I daresay he will like to have a whole day
with you, going over things, to-morrow or the
day after that. ..."
She beamed at him where he sat opposite
to her, at the end of the table, and he smiled
back at her ; she thought how nice-looking
he was, with his lean, brown face and black
hair. He had the look of hard health ; she
remembered how well he had always looked
in the saddle. It had, indeed, been a great
incentive to have this son to work for ; to
guard his interests, to build up the perfect
little estate for him to inherit. The studious
evenings she had spent had not been wasted ;
all that she had learnt, conscientiously for
she would never trust wholly to Lynes'
experience about manures, the rotation of
crops, the value of luzerne, the advantage of
fat stock over dairy-produce, all that labor-
iously acquired knowledge, in the service of
such a son, had not been useless. It wasn't
in the nature of women, she had decided long
ago, to work solely for the sake of the work ;
and this was one of the things she often said,
particularly when the subject of women's
HER SON 219
emancipation was mentioned. How impressed
he would be, after luncheon, when she took
him out! He would expect her to know
about the garden ; the garden had always
been her speciality ; but he should find that
she wasn't a docile ignoramus about the
farm, a mere writer of cheques to Lynes'
dictation. She beamed at him again, hug-
ging her satisfaction to herself. She was
glad that she had not been born a man, to
work for work's own cold, ungrateful sake,
but a woman, to work for the warm appre-
ciation in a fellow-being's eyes.
And Henry was charming her, as she had
expected to be charmed. He chaffed her a
little, and she fell into a little confusion, not
knowing whether to take him seriously, until
she perceived that he was laughing and then
she reproached him for teasing an old woman
and they laughed happily together. He saw
that he was being a success, and expanded
under the flattery. He teased her about her
old cloak ; she found an exquisite thrill in
the proprietary intimacy with which this
man, who was like a stranger to her, was treat-
ing her. She blushed and bridled ; and the
more she bridled the more fondly he teased.
His eyes were narrowed into laughing slits ;
220 HER SON
he leant over to her as he might have leant,
confidentially, over to any woman with whom
he happened to be lunching. She thought,
with a queer envy, of the future Mrs. Henry ;
and the thought made her ask, abruptly,
" You've nothing to tell me about yourself ?
You're not engaged, I mean, or thinking of
it?"
Henry looked taken aback by the question;
then he threw back his head and laughed.
" Good Lord, who to ? You forget I've
been in the heart of the Argentine for five
years."
" Oh no, I don't forget," she said softly,
thinking how little she had forgotten, " but
one finds old friends in London. ... I
don't know. . . ."
For a moment he seemed embarrassed ; it
passed.
" I've not been in London forty-eight hours
and I had plenty of other things to do there."
He said it glibly, hoping she would not
wonder what he had done with his evenings.
She did not wonder, her imagination not
readily extending to restaurants or dancing
places, or the bare shoulders of women under
a slipping opera cloak. She had forgotten
about those things ; it was so long since they
HER SON 221
had come her way, even remotely. And in
spite of her benevolence towards Mrs. Henry
she was conscious of a fugitive relief.
" Then I needn't feel selfish about keeping
you here," she said, " and it will be a nice
rest for you after your journey and all the
business you had to do in London. Now if
you have quite finished, we might go out ?
It gets dark so quickly." They went out ;
already the fresh beauty of the day was
passing, it was colder, and there was more
grey and less gold between the trees. " Let
us go up to the top of the garden," said Mrs.
Martin, who felt she could not bear to keep the
secret of the three hundred acres to herself a
moment longer.
VI
THEY went slowly up the garden path be-
tween the flaming borders, that flamed less
now that the sun was no longer on them.
She noted the difference, and was sorry they
should not be showing themselves off at their
best. Nevertheless Henry said, " How jolly
your flowers are, mother," and she was satis-
fied. She had taken his arm ; from her other
hand swung her inseparable companion, the
222 HER SON
garden basket, and from sheer habit she kept
a sharp look out for a possible weed. Even
though Henry was there. She knew now
now that he was there how lonely had been
her wanderings up that garden path, and how
hollow, really, had been her gardening
triumphs since there was no one to admire
them and to share. Not that she had ever
faced the fact ; for it was not her habit to
face facts. But now, since it had become a
fact only in the past, she could allow herself
to turn round and wave it a little belated,
valedictory gesture of recognition. She
pressed Henry's arm ever so slightly against
her side. Not enough for him to notice ;
only enough to give herself assurance and
comfort. Stupid of her not to have realized
how much she wanted Henry. He had been
always in the background, of course, and she
had trained herself to think that that was
enough ; perhaps it was fortunate, rather
than stupid ; she would have wanted him too
much, if once she had let herself begin to
think about it. It was pleasant to have the
physical support of his arm to lean on ; it
was surprisingly pleasant to have the moral
support of his presence. She had had to
carry all the responsibility herself for so long,
HER SON 223
the responsibility of decisions, all the loneli-
ness of command ; and although she was
quite well aware of her own efficiency she felt
that she was growing a little tired, and would
be happy to let some of the responsibility
slide off on to Henry's shoulders. When
Lynes was obstinate, as he sometimes was,
it would be a comfort to reply that he must
discuss the matter with Mr. Henry. At the
end of this train of thought she said confi-
dently to Henry, " You won't be going back
to the Argentine any more, dear, will you ? "
Henry emerged startled from a parallel
train of thought that he had been following.
The first warm excitement of his homecoming
had passed, and he was beginning to wonder
what he should do, when once his mother had
had her fill of showing him all which she had
vaguely threatened to show, and which he
did not particularly want to see. Already,
with reaction, things were a little flat. But
he answered, without any perceptible pause,
" No, no more Argentine for me. I'm fed
up with the place." He was ; the solitude,
the rough life, had not been to his taste ; he
had grown to hate the plains, and the stupid,
ubiquitous cattle, and the endless cattle-talk.
No more Argentine for him ; he had had the
224 HER SON
experience, he had made the money he wanted
to make, now he wanted the pleasure to
which he thought he was entitled.
" That's nice," said Mrs. Martin comfort-
ably ; "it will be nice for me to have you at
home in my old age."
Henry let this remark pass ; he hated
inflicting disappointment, and there would
be plenty of time in which to make his plans
clear to his mother. In the meantime she
was so obviously happy ; a pity to throw a
shadow over her first day.
They reached the top of the path and the
clump of firs. Mrs. Martin's heart was
beating hard, and a little pink flush had
appeared on her cheeks. It was not, after
all, every day that one reached a moment one
had anticipated for nearly five years. She
wished she had had the strength of mind to
wait until the following morning before
bringing Henry here, for the country was
lovelier under the morning mists than now in
the cruder light of the afternoon ; but she had
been too much excited, too impatient. They
stood there looking down over the valley,
across it to the Downs. She let him look his
fill.
" Better than the Argentine, Henry ? "
HER SON 225
" By Jove, yes, I should think so : better
than the Argentine."
She gave a chuckle of happiness. She
dealt her secret out to him in small doses, like
the old Epicurean she was.
" Isn't it nice to think, Henry, that those
fields and woods belong to you ? "
" But they don't," he said, " they belong
to you."
" Well doesn't that amount to the same
thing ? "
" Oh, no," he said, " not at all the same
thing," and the difference in his mind was
that whereas she loved and wanted the fields
and woods, their possession would have
bored him.
" Dear Henry, that is just an evasion. You
know that it amounts to the same thing really.
Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that
they belong to us both."
" All right," he said, humouring her.
" Do you remember," she went on, " we
used to say, how nice it would be if our pro-
perty went down as far as the river ? "
"Did we? Doesn't it ? No, I don't
remember," he said absently.
" But, Henry ! Think, darling! Well, it
does now : right down to the river."
226 HER SON
"How splendid!" he replied, feeling that
hejwas expected to say something of the sort.
" But didn't it always ? "
VII
SHE went into no explanation ; she did not
remind him of the three hundred acres re-
quired to round off the estate, nor did she
make the confession which she had been
saving up, like a guilty child, of how she had
got round the obstinacy of Mr. Thistle-
thwaite. She made some quiet reply to his
last remark, and went on talking of other
things. He was perfectly oblivious to the
moment that had come and gone. And she,
in her mind, was already making excuses for
him ; he had been away for so long, he had
grown accustomed to such vast districts
where three hundred acres must seem paltry
indeed! When they had looked sufficiently
at the view, she returned down the path
beside him, her hand still slipped into the
crook of his arm, without the slightest resent-
ment. Henry ! she could never harbour
resentment against Henry.
But a little of the eagerness was gone ; not
much ; only the first edge taken off. She
HER SON 227
struggled to restore it ; she had an uneasy
feeling of disloyalty towards Henry. And
^really he had been so very charming ; noth-
ing could have been more charming or more
to her taste than his manner towards her
from the very first moment when he had bent
to kiss her in the porch, fond but deferential,
intimate but courteous. Henry was the
sort of man who would always be courteous
towards women, even when the woman hap-
pened to be his own mother. Mrs. Martin
greatly appreciated courtesy. She often said
that it was becoming rarer and more rare.
Certainly, Henry's manner had been perfect
in every respect, and she was seized with
remorse that she could have directed against
him so much as the criticism of a passing
disappointment. She must not admit to
herself that the edge of her eagerness was
blunted ; and she began forcing herself
to talk of Lynes and the farm, and presently,
because Henry listened with so much atten-
tion and interest, she found her eagerness
creeping back. They went round to the
rickyard together, where Lynes, in his
breeches and leather gaiters, was talking to
the carter, but broke off to come towards
Henry, who shook hands with him while Mrs.
228 HER SON
Martin stood by, beaming upon their meeting.
She was enchanted with Henry ; he asked
Lynes questions about the cattle, and followed
him into the door of the shed where the after-
noon's milking was in progress. Mrs. Martin
waited for them near the ricks, because she
did not like the dirty cobbles of the farmyard ;
she was perfectly happy again ; this was
what she had always foreseen, and she liked
things to turn out exactly according to the
picture she had been in the habit of making
in advance in her own mind ; she was only
disconcerted when they fell out differently.
How good was Henry's manner with Lynes!
she watched the two men as they stood in the
doorway of the cowshed ; Henry had said
something and Lynes was laughing; he
pushed back his cap off his forehead and
scratched his head, and she heard him say,
" That's right, sir, that's just about the
size of it." Her heart swelled with pride in
Henry. He was getting on with Lynes ;
Lynes approved of him, that was obvious,
and Lynes' approval was not easily won. He
was a scornful man, not always very tract-
able either, and very contemptuous of most
people's knowledge of .agriculture ; but here
he was approving of Henry. Her own esteem
HER SON 229
of Henry rose in proportion as she saw Lynes'
esteem. She felt that a little of the credit
belonged to her for being Henry's mother.
They came towards her, walking slowly and
talking, across the soft ground of the rick-
yard, where the cartwheels had cut deep ruts
and the wisps of straw were sodden into the
black earth. It was a great satisfaction to
her to see Henry and Lynes thus together.
She was the impresario exhibiting them to
one another. The afternoon was drawing
very gently to a close. A little cold, perhaps,
a little grey, but still tender ; a dove-like
grey, hovering over the trees, over the ricks,
and over the barn with the yellow lichen on
the roof. A tang of damp farmyard was,
not unpleasantly, on the air.
" We'll go in now, shall we, Henry ? It's
getting chilly," said Mrs. Martin, wrapping
herself more closely in her brown cloak, and
nodding and smiling to Lynes.
As they went towards the house, Henry
said, looking down at her in that confidential
way he had, " Well, that's a great duty
accomplished, isn't it ? ' :
" Duty, Henry ? "
" Yes. Talking to Lynes, I mean."
" Oh ! talking to Lynes. To be sure
230 HER SON
You were so nice to him, dear boy ; thank
you."
Duty the word gave her a small chill.
She bent over the fire in the sitting-room,
poking it into a blaze ; the logs fell apart and
shot up into flame.
" I do like a wood fire," said Mrs. Martin.
She held out her hands towards it ; they
were cold. She had not known, until that
moment, how cold she had been.
VIII
THEY were at dinner. How nice Henry
looked in his evening clothes ; she liked his
lean brown hands, and the gesture with which
he smoothed back his hair. She smiled
fondly as she thought how attractive all
women must find Henry. Life on a ranch
had not coarsened him ; far from it. He
was sensitive and masculine both, an ideal
combination.
" Dear Henry ! " she murmured.
He leant over and patted her hand, but
there was an absent look in his eyes, and his
manner was slightly more perfunctory than
it had been at luncheon. Anyone but Mrs.
Martin would have suspected that he could
HER SON 231
assume that manner at will had, in fact,
assumed it often, towards many women who
had misinterpreted it, and whom he had for-
gotten as soon as they were out of sight. They
had reproached him sometimes ; there was a
fair echo of reproaches in Henry's life. He
had always felt aggrieved when they re-
proached him ; couldn't they understand
that he was kind-hearted really ? that he
only wanted to please ? To make life agree-
able ? He hated saying anything disagree-
able to anybody, but greatly preferred enrol-
ling them among the victims of his charm
which he could turn on, at a moment's notice,
like turning on a tap and if they misunder-
stood him, he did not consider that he had
been to blame. Not that he remained to
argue the matter out. It was far easier, in
most cases, simply to go right away instead,
without giving any explanation, right away
to where the clamour that was sure to arise
would not reach his ears at all. And some-
times, when he had not managed so skilfully
as usual, and things had been, briefly, tire-
some, he would criticize himself to the extent
of thinking that he was a damned fool to
have, incorrigibly, so little foresight of where
the easy path was leading him.
232 HER SON
Yet he was not quite right about this, for
he was perfectly well able to recognize the
progress of his own drifting ; but he recog-
nized it as though it applied to some other
person, in whose affairs he was himself unable
to interfere. He watched himself as he
might have watched another man, thinking
meanwhile, with an amused contempt and a
certain compassion, " How the dickens is
he going to get himself out of this ? "
IX
HE could, if he had been so inclined, have
observed the process at work after dinner,
when, his mother seated with knitting in an
arm-chair on the one side of the fire, and
he with a cigar in another arm-chair on the
other side of the fire, his legs stretched out
straight to the blaze, they talked inter-
mittently, a conversation in which the future
played more part than the past. Henry
found that his mother had definite ideas
about the future, ideas which she took for
granted that he would share. He knew
that he ought to say at once that he did not
share them ; but that would entail disap-
pointing his mother, and this he was reluctant
HER SON 233
to do at any rate on the first day. Poor
old lady let her be happy. What was the
good of sending her to bed worried ? In a
day or two he would give her a hint. He
remembered that she was not usually slow
at taking a hint. He hoped she would not
make a fuss. Really, it would be unreason-
able if she made a fuss ; she could not
seriously expect him to spend his life in
talking to Lynes! But for the present,
let her keep her illusions ; she seemed so
greatly to enjoy telling him about her
farm, and he needn't listen ; he could say
" Yes," and " Fancy," from time to time,
since that seemed to satisfy her, and, mean-
while, he could think about Isabel. He had
promised Isabel that he would not be away
for more than three days at the outside. He
hoped he would not find it too difficult to
get away back to London at the end of three
days ; there would be a fuss if he went, but
on the other hand Isabel would make a far
worse fuss if he stayed. Isabel was not as
easy-going as he could have wished, though
her flares of temper, when they were not so
prolonged as to become inconvenient, amused
him and constituted part of the attraction
she had for him. He rendered to Isabel the
234 HER SON
homage that she attracted him just as much
now as five years ago, before he left for
the Argentine. She had even improved in
the interval ; improved with experience, he
told himself cynically, not resenting the
experience in the least ; she had improved in
appearance too, having found her type ; and
he recalled the shock of delight with which he
had seen her again : the curious pale eyes,
and the hard line of the clubbed black hair,
cut square across her brows ; certainly Isabel
had attraction, and was as wild as she could
be, not a woman one could neglect with
impunity, if one didn't want her to be off and
away. . . . No. There was a flick and a
spirit about Isabel ; that was what he liked.
How his mother would disapprove of Isabel !
he sent out, to disguise a little chuckle, a
long stream of smoke, and the thought of his
mother's disapproval tickled him much. His
mother, rambling on about foot-and-mouth
disease, and about how afraid they had been,
last year, that it would come across into
Gloucestershire, while Isabel, probably, was
at some supper-party sitting on a table and
singing to her guitar those Moorish songs in
her husky, seductive voice. He was not
irritated with his mother for her difference ;
HER SON 235
at another moment he might have been
irritated ; but at present he was too comfort-
able, too warm, too full of a good dinner, to
find her unconsciousness anything but divert-
ing ; and, as the contrast appeared to him
more and more as a good joke, he encouraged
her with sympathetic comments and with
the compliment of his grave attention, so that
she put behind her finally and entirely the
disappointment she had had over the three
hundred acres, and expounded to him all her
dearest schemes, leaning forward tapping him
on the knee with her long knitting-needle to
enforce her points, enlisting his sympathy in
all her difficulties with Lynes and Lynes 5
obstinacy, exactly as she had planned to do,
and as, up to the present, she had not secured
a very good opportunity of doing. This was
ideal : to sit by the fireside after dinner with
Henry, long, slender, nodding gravely, his
eyes on the fire intent with concentration, and
to pour out to him all the little grievances
of years, and the satisfactions too, for she
did not believe in dwelling only upon what
went wrong, but also upon that which went
right.
" And so you see, dear boy, I have really
been able to make both ends meet ; it was a
9
236 HER SON
little difficult at times, I own, but now I am
bound to say the farm is paying very nicely.
Lynes could show you the account-books,
any time ; I think perhaps you ought to
run your eye over them. You must have
picked up a lot of useful knowledge, out
there ? "
" Oh yes," said Henry, broadly.
" Well, it will all come in very useful here,
won't it ? although I daresay English prac-
tice is different in many ways. I could see
that Lynes very quickly discovered that you
knew what you were talking about. It will
be a great thing for me, Henry, a very great
thing, to have your support and advice in
future."
Henry made an attempt ; he said, " But
if I don't happen to be on the spot ? "
" Oh, well, you won't be very far away,"
said Mrs. Martin comfortably. " Even if you
do like to have rooms in London I could
always get you at a moment's notice."
Henry found great consolation in this
remark ; it offered a loophole, and he readily
placed his faith in loopholes. He was also
relieved, because he considered, his mother
having said that, there was no necessity now
for him to say anything. Let her prattle
HER SON 237
about the estate, and about the use he was
going to be to her ; there would always be,
now, those rooms in London in which he could
take refuge. " Why, you suggested it your-
self," he could say, raising aggrieved eye-
brows, if any discussion arose in the future.
It was true that her next observations dimin-
ished the value of his loophole, but he chose to
ignore that ; what was said, was said. Rooms
in London, Christmas with his mother, and
perhaps a week-end in the summer, and a
couple of days' shooting in the autumn ; he
wouldn't mind a little rough shooting, and
had already ascertained from Lynes that there
were a good many partridges and a few
pheasants ; and he could always take back
some birds to Isabel. He saw himself, on
the station platform, with his flat gun-case
and cartridge bag, and the heavy bundle of
limp game, rabbits, partridges, and pheasants
tied together by the legs. He would go out
to-morrow, and see what he could pick up
for Isabel. His mother would never object ;
she would think the game was for his own
use, in those rooms she, thank goodness, so
conveniently visualized. And if it wasn't
for Isabel, in future years, well, no doubt it
would be for somebody else.
238 HER SON
He awoke from these plans to what his
mother was saying.
" I don't think it would be good for you
to live entirely in the country. So I shall
drive you away, Henry dear, whenever you
show signs of becoming a vegetable. I shall
be able to carry on perfectly well without
jjpu, as I have done all these years. You
need never worry about that. Besides, you
must go to London to look for Mrs. Henry."
" What ? " said Henry, genuinely startled.
His mother, said, smiling, that some day
he would have to marry. She would like to
know her grandchildren before she died.
There was the long attic at the top of the house
which they could have as a playroom.
" Sure there is no one? " she questioned him
again, more urgently, more archly this time,
and he denied it laughing, to reassure her ;
and suddenly the laughter which he had
affected, became hearty, for he had thought
of Isabel, Isabel whom he would never dream
of marrying, and who would never dream of
marrying him; Isabel, insolent, lackadaisical,
exasperating, with the end of a cigarette a
fag, she called it smouldering between her
lips; Isabel with her hands stuck in the
pockets of her velveteen jacket, and her short
HER SON 239
black hair; Isabel holding forth, perched on
the corner of a table, contradicting him,
getting angry, pushing him away when he
tried to catch hold of her and kiss her " Oh,
you think the idea of marrying funny enough
now," said his mother sagely, hearing him
laugh, " but you may be coming to me with
a very different tale in a few months' time."
He was in a thoroughly good temper by
now ; he lounged deeper into his arm-chair
and stirred the logs with his foot. " Good
cigars these, mother," he said, critically
examining the one he took from between his
teeth ; " who advises you about cigars ? "
" Mr. Thistlethwaite recommended those,"
Mrs. Martin replied enchanted.
" Mr. Thistlethwaite ? Who's Mr. Thistle-
thwaite ? " asked Henry.
She had an impulse to tell him, even now,
the story of Mr. Thistlethwaite and the three
hundred acres ; to ask him whether he
thought she had acted very unscrupulously ;
but a funny inexplicable pride held her back.
She said quietly that Mr. Thistlethwaite was
the local M.P. Henry, to her relief, betrayed
no further interest. He continued to stir
the fire absently with the toe of his shoe, and
his mother, watching him, looked down a
240 HER SON
long vista of such evenings, when the lamp-
light would fall on to the bowl of flowers she
placed so skilfully to receive it, and on the
black satin head of Henry.
SHE opened her window before getting into
bed, and looked out upon a clear night and
the low-lying mists of autumn. It was very
still ; the church clock chimed, a dog barked
in the distance, and the breathless silence
spread once more like a lake round the ripple
of those sounds. She looked towards that
bit of England which was sufficient to her,
milky and invisible ; she thought of the ricks
standing in the silent rickyard, and the
sleeping beasts near by in the sheds ; she,
who had been brisk and practical for so many
years, became a little dreamy. Then bestir-
ring herself, she crossed the room to bed.
All was in order : a glass of milk by the bed,
a box of matches, a clean handkerchief, her
big repeater watch. She wound it carefully,
and put it away under the many pillows.
She sank luxuriously into the pillows that
little pleasure which was every night renewed.
She thought to herself that she was really
HER SON 241
almost too happy ; such happiness was a
pain ; there was no means of expressing it ;
she could not shout and sing, so it had to
be bottled up, and the compression was pain,
exquisitely. For about five minutes, during
which she lived, with a swimming head,
through a lifetime of sensations, she lay awake ;
then amongst her pillows she fell asleep.
XI
NEXT morning she was awakened by some
sound she could not at first define, but
which she presently identified as the remote
ringing of the telephone bell. She listened.
The servants would answer it, of course, but
she wondered who could be calling the house
so early in the day. Feeling very wide awake
she slipped into her dressing-gown and slippers
and went to the top of the stairs to listen.
She heard Henry's voice, downstairs in the
hall.
" Yes, yes, hullo. Yes, I'm here. Is that
you, darling ? Sorry to ring you up at this
hour, but later on every word I said would
be overheard. Yes, infernally public." He
laughed softly. " No, I don't suppose anyone
ever uses this telephone for purposes they'd
242 HER SON
rather keep to themselves. Oh, all right,
thanks. Pleased to see me ? Yes, I think
so. Look here, things are going to be deuced
awkward. Well, she expects me to spend
most of my time here Yes, an awful bore
Oh, well, it's natural enough, I suppose. Five
years, and all that, don't you know. Well,
but what am I to say ? Can't be too brutal,
can one ? Oh, bored stiff in two days, of
course, I simply don't know what to do about
it. Besides, I'm dying to get back to you.
Yes, silly, of course. I wish you'd help,
Isabel. Tell me what to say to the old lady.
No, she seems to take it quite for granted.
Oh, all the year round, with an occasional
week in London. I can't say I think it in
the least funny. Well, of course, if I was a
downright brute. . . ."
Mrs. Martin turned and went back into her
bedroom. She shut the door very gently
behind her. Presently she heard Henry
come upstairs and go into his room.
THE PARROT
To H. G. N.
ONCE upon a time there was a small green
parrot, with a coral-coloured head. It should
have lived in Uruguay, but actually it lived
in Pimlico, in a cage, a piece of apple stuck
between the bars at one end of its perch, and
a lump of sugar between the bars at the other.
It was well-cared for ; its drinking water
was fresh every day, the seed in its little
trough was daily renewed, and the cage stood
on a table in the window to get the yellow
sunlight that occasionally penetrated the
muslin curtains. The room, furthermore,
was well-warmed, and all cats and such
dangers kept rigorously away. In spite of
all this, the bird was extremely disagreeable.
If anyone went to stand beside its cage, in
order to admire its beautiful and brilliant
colouring, it took refuge in a corner, buried its
head beneath the seed-trough, and screamed
on a harsh, shrill note like a pig in the sham-
bles. Whenever it believed itself to be unob-
345
246 THE PARROT
served, it returned to the eternal and unavail-
ing occupation of trying to get out of its cage.
In early days, it had had a cage of less
substantial make : being a strong little bird
it had contrived to loosen a bar and to make
its escape once or twice into the room ; but,
consequent on this, a more adequate cage
had been procured, the bars of Vhich merely
twanged like harp-strings under the assault
of the beak, and yielded not at all. Never-
theless the parrot was not discouraged. It
had twenty-four hours out of every day at its
disposal, and three hundred and sixty-five
days out of every year. It worked at the
bars with its beak ; it stuck its feet against
the sides, and tugged at the bar. Once it
discovered how to open the door, after which
the door had to be secured with a piece of
string. The owners of the parrot explained
to it, that, should it make good its escape
from the house, it would surely fall a prey
to a cat, a dog, or a passing motor ; and
if to none of these things, then to the climate
of England, which in no way resembled the
climate of Uruguay. When they stood be-
side its cage giving those explanations, it got
down into the corner, cowered, and screamed.
The parrot was looked after by the under-
THE PARROT 247
housemaid, a slatternly girl of eighteen, with
smudges of coal on her apron, and a smear of
violet eyes in a white sickly face. She used
to talk to the parrot while she was cleaning
out the tray at the bottom of the cage, con-
fiding to it all her perplexities, which she
could safely do without fear of being over-
heard, by reason of the din the parrot main-
tained meanwhile. In spite of its lack of
response, she had for the parrot a passion
which transformed it into a symbol. Its
jade-green and coral seemed to give her a hint
of something marvellously far removed from
Pimlico. Her fifteen minutes with the parrot
every morning remained the one fabulous
excursion of her day ; it was a journey to
Bagdad, a peep into the caves of Aladdin.
" Casting down their golden crowns upon a
glassy sea," she murmured, in a hotch-potch
of religion and romance for the two in her
mind were plaited together into an unex-
plained but beautiful braid, that was a source
of confusion, rapture, and a strange unhappi-
ness.
Apart from the function of cleaning out the
cage, which she performed with efficiency, she
was, considered as a housemaid, a failure.
Perpetually in trouble, she tried to mend her
248 THE PARROT
ways ; would turn energetic, would scrub and
polish ; then, as she relapsed into day-dreams,
the most important part of her work would
be left forgotten. Scolding and exasperation
stormed around her ears. Sometimes she
appeared disheartened and indifferent ; some-
times she gazed in a scared fashion at the
indignant authority and set about her work
with a dazed vehemence. But black-lead
and Brasso remained to her, in spite of her
efforts, of small significance.
Meanwhile the parrot gave up the attempt
to get out of its cage, and spent its days
moping upon the topmost perch.
II
PEACE reigned in the house. The parrot no
longer tore at its bars or screamed, and as
for the under-housemaid, she was a trans-
formed creature : punctual, orderly, compe-
tent, and unobtrusive. The cook said she
didn't know what had come over the bird
and the girl. According to her ideas, the
situation was now most satisfactory. The
two rebels had at last fallen into line with the
quiet conduct of the house, and there was
no longer anything to complain of, either in
THE PARROT 249
the sitting-room or the basement. It would
have been hypercritical to complain that
the girl's quietness was disconcerting. When
her tasks were done, she retired to her bed-
room, where she might be found at any
moment sitting with her hands lying in her
lap, the violet eyes looking out of the window.
Well, if she chose so to spend her time. . . .
The parrot sat huddled on its perch, flaunting
in plumage indeed, for that was beyond its
control, but irreproachable in demeanour. It
appeared almost to apologize by its humility
for the garishness of colour wherewith Nature
had afflicted it.
One morning the cook came down as was
her custom, and found the following note
addressed to her, propped up on the kitchen
dresser :
" Dear Mrs. White, i have gone to wear
the golden crown but i have lit the stok-
hole and laid the brekfast."
Very much annoyed, and wondering what
tricks the girl had been up to, she climbed the
stairs to the girl's bedroom. The room had
been tidied, and the slops emptied away, and
the girl was lying dead upon the bed.
She flew downstairs with the news. In the
250 THE PARROT
sitting-room, where she collided with her
mistress, she noticed the parrot on its back
on the floor of the cage, its two little legs
sticking stiffly up into the air.
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