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« on: December 10, 2022, 02:58:46 am » |
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WHETHER or not there was truth in what Lady Charmington had said, that no one took so little interest in the festivities of his coming of age as Sainty himself, it certainly came about that hardly any one took so little part in them.
The memory of his birthday remained with him as a shifting phantasmagoria of painful images that partook of the nature of a nightmare. To be the principal figure in any pageant must always have a charm for the imagination of youth, if combined with the ability to play the part becomingly; but it is a very different matter for one conscious in every nerve of his own inadequacy to be set up a butt for disappointment and a peep-show for ridicule.
The day had begun with a message from his mother that she would like to see him before prayers. He found her in her private sitting-room, where the picture of his father which he had worshipped as a child was enthroned on its gilt easel in the corner. Lady Charmington was clean and cool from her morning toilet, her hair even smoother and tighter than usual. She was dressed in her Sunday black silk, and seated in a high-backed chair beside a little table, with the air of a priestess at the altar. Her large, serviceable hands were crossed on the Bible on her lap. They had big knuckles and many rings, some of which, having been her late husband's, were more massive than is usual in a woman's. Sainty's quick eye noticed that a signet she habitually wore was not among them. He also saw that on the table beside her was an imposing pile of ledgers, a small morocco box, and a book which, from its being bound in black with depressing-looking soft flaps folding over the edges of the leaves, he rightly conjectured to be a work of devotion.
Lady Charmington was not a demonstrative woman, and she was a very shy one. She drew her son towards her, and gravely kissed him on the brow, by no means a daily occurrence or matter of course between them; then she plunged rather nervously into a little speech she had prepared for the occasion.
"This is a solemn day for both you and me, Belchamber" (he noticed that she did not call him by the familiar nickname), "and one to which I have long looked forward. I have worked hard," and she glanced at the pile of account-books beside her, "in your interests. God forgive me if it is wrong, but I fear it is not without pride that I come to you to-day to give an account of my stewardship."
Sainty gently pressed his mother's hand, which he still held. "Dearest mother," he said, "I know well how hard you have worked, and all you have done for me. I assure you I appreciate----" But Lady Charmington withdrew her hand, and held it up in deprecation.
"I do not wish to boast or to be thanked," she said, "but I think I may truly say I have spared neither time nor labour. It has been my object to be able to hand over the estate to you free of debt and unencumbered, and I can do so. To-day my stewardship ends."
"But oh, mother!" Sainty broke in, "it mustn't end to-day, nor, I hope, for many days to come. You know how utterly inexperienced I am, and then I have got to go back to Cambridge till I have taken my degree. You won't refuse to go on looking after everything just as you have always done, will you?"
Lady Charmington had lost the thread of her discourse; she looked rather anxiously at her son.
"We have no time to-day to go into accounts," she said; "but some day, when all these people have gone, you must give me an hour or two, and we will go through everything."
"Very well," said Sainty.
"Before we go down," his mother went on, "I must wish you many happy returns, which I haven't done yet, and give you my little presents. The new set of harness for your cart is with the other things; you saw that: Arthur says your old one is a disgrace; but, besides that, here is your father's signet-ring, which I want you to wear," and she produced from the morocco case the ring he had missed from her finger. "And this is a little book I want you to use every morning and evening; you will find it very helpful."
Sainty just touched the ring with his lips before he slipped it on his finger, and glanced with passionate tenderness at the simpering image in the corner. Then he began turning over the leaves of the little book with its limp cover that reminded him of French plums. He was wondering if honesty obliged him to say that he did not use such aids to devotion, did not, in fact, very often pray at all. Finally, he decided that he had not the courage to say anything of the sort, so he accepted the volume without much enthusiasm, and put it in his pocket. Then, detaining his mother as she was preparing to leave the room, "I want to tell you, mother," he said, "that, though I don't say much, I do really value all you have done for me, and been to me, and Uncle Cor too. Between you, you have almost done away with the disadvantage that every boy must be under who has no father."
Lady Charmington was faintly stirred---probably she was pleased.
"There are many things, my son, that I should like different about you," she said, "and especially I wish you stronger. But no one can say you have ever been anything but a good boy." They went downstairs, both a little moved by having performed the operation so difficult to the British race, of displaying feeling.
At breakfast the question had arisen of which of the party would attend the service at Great Charmington parish church. This part of the proceedings did not seem to find favour among most of the company, and Lady Charmington's brow grew dark as one after another excused himself. The duchess was of course out of the question, as she seldom appeared before lunch, her elaborate construction being a thing of time and caution. To Lord Nonsuch, communion after breakfast was nothing short of sacrilege; he was a leading light in the High Church party, and this was his first appearance at Belchamber since a memorable occasion many years before, when he had said Lady Charmington was an Erastian, and she had called him a Jesuit.
"I should love it, dear Sarah," said Lady Eva, "but a poor literary hack's time is not her own. I must work this morning, to be free this afternoon."
"What has your mother got to do?" asked Cissy of Claude. "Is she writing a book?"
"Didn't you know mamma was 'Maidie,' who does 'the girls' tea-table' in the Looking-glass? She has very nearly got the sack because she never gets her article ready in time; but she takes herself very seriously as a journalist, I assure you."
The Dalsanies were Roman Catholics, and Lady Deans nothing in particular; and Gerald Newby, when he found that the people of higher rank were shirking, discovered that he had letters to write which could not be put off; but the climax of Lady Charmington's displeasure was reached when Arthur announced he would rather stay at home and play lawn-tennis with Parsons. Lord Firth had not intended to go, but he sacrificed himself to mollify his sister. His religion was of that comfortable, rational kind in which there is more state than church, and which is first cousin to agnosticism, but infinitely more respectable. He took a great interest in the distribution of bishoprics and the proper conduct of the service, which, however, he rarely felt called on to attend, except in such cathedrals and college chapels as gratified his fastidious taste and fondness for sacred music.
Finally, a dozen people had been got together, and made a sufficiently imposing appearance. Old Lady Firth, Mrs. de Lissac and the girls, and Lady Eccleston went as a matter of course. Claude went to please his aunt, Cissy because Claude did, Johnson because Cissy did, and Tommy because his mother told him to. "I never have any trouble about church with my boys," Lady Eccleston said. "I never have made them go, even when they were little. I let them play tennis or do whatever they like, till the time comes; if I've time I play with them. Then I just cheerfully say 'Now, boys, who's for church?' and they nearly always say, 'All right, mother, we'll go,' unless they're ill."
Lady Charmington, sore over Arthur's defection, was in no mood to admire the success of this plan. "Do you mean to say you play lawn-tennis on Sunday?" she asked frigidly; and Lady Eccleston discovered she "must fly and put her bonnet on, or she'd be late."
Through the service in the church, and the subsequent ceremony of presenting him with a silver salver and an address from the tradesmen of Great Charmington, the headache with which Sainty had most inopportunely begun the day grew steadily worse. The thought of all these poor men putting their hard-earned pounds together to give a great, ugly, useless thing to him, who had already so much more than he wanted, unmanned him; the tears were in his eyes as he tried to thank them. Nor was he less cruelly embarrassed by the discovery that the guests in the house had all thought it necessary to come laden with gifts. In his life no one but his mother and uncle had ever given him anything; he was not accustomed to presents, and received them with an awkward sense of obligation.
Belchamber being peculiarly rich in beautiful old plate, Arthur presented him with a huge heraldic claret-jug of monumental hideousness, for which long afterwards he paid the bill, when settling his brother's debts. The duchess gave him a cabinet inlaid after the manner of Sheraton, in which a whole army of tumblers and soda-water-bottles, lemon-squeezers, spirit-cases, and cigar-boxes rose and sank and manœuvred with incredible ingenuity on innumerable springs. Down to Lady Eccleston, who brought the latest fashionable invention for tearing the leaves of his beloved books, no one was missing from the list; even Lady Deans and the Dalsanies contributed their tale of paper-knives and cigarette-cases.
The only person whose gift showed any care or knowledge of Sainty's tastes and wants was Claude, who had taken the trouble to get from Paris a really beautiful cane, a true Malacca, strong enough to be a support, with tortoiseshell crutch encrusted with little gold stars, and an indiarubber shoe to prevent its slipping on the floors of the house. Sainty flushed with pleasure at sight of the charming thing, which seemed to adorn his lameness with a certain elegance. He wondered why his cousin, who was full of such pretty little cares and tendernesses, should be so wanting in moral sense. His heart yearned over him. "Ah Claude," he said, and could say no more.
"Dear old boy," said Claude, pressing his hand, "what do I not owe you? There is nothing that a pauper like me can give to you; but such as it is my little present brings real affection and heartfelt wishes for your happiness."
Sainty's head was by this time aching cruelly, his temples throbbing like sledge-hammers; he was feeling worn out mentally and physically, ravaged by conflicting emotions. Having what was very rare with him, a slight flush, he looked less ill than usual, and nobody thought of his being tired; but it was at the tenants' dinner that he set the seal on the ignominy of his failure.
In consideration of the fact that this was a long and crowded day for one who was not robust, it had been settled that he should not preside at the meal, but merely come in and take the chair for the healths and speeches, when the solid business of feeding had been satisfactorily disposed of. It was between three and four o'clock, the hottest part of the afternoon; and though the sides of the tent had been opened here and there, the atmosphere was stifling, heavy with the odours of meat and drink and the acrid exhalations of humanity. Sainty almost reeled on entering, and had to steady himself by Arthur's arm. There were some seventy or eighty men present of all ages and degrees of stoutness, all very hot, and mostly somewhat red in the face. Many of them were intimately known to Arthur, who stopped several times in the progress up the tables to shake hands right and left. He met them at the covert-side, he shot over their farms, he played in cricket matches with them. Sainty would have given anything for a touch of that happy graciousness, that power of being hail-fellow-well-met. Circumstances had combined to make him almost a stranger to the men who were on such friendly terms with his younger brother. He knew that in his heart he had far more real brotherhood with these sons of the soil, a much more jealous respect for their manhood and independence; but his very sense of equality made him feel the falseness of his position, whereas Arthur's easy familiarity sprang from a firm conviction of his own unquestionable superiority. Sainty was only too well aware, as he took his seat in gloomy silence, that his grave bow in answer to their friendly greetings, would be set down to pride by most of the people present. When, after loyally drinking the Queen's health, the guests were once more seated and their glasses filled, the oldest tenant rose to propose the toast of the occasion. He began by complimenting the young man on attaining his majority, spoke shortly of his attachment to the place and the family, and at great length on the badness of times and the difficulties of the agriculturist, which he seemed in some mysterious way to attribute to Mr. Gladstone. The voice went droning on, monotonous by reason of its very emphasis, until Sainty felt almost hypnotised by it and by the buzzing of the numberless wasps and flies that were hovering over the remnants of food and drops of beer on the table-cloths. Sainty had quite ceased to attach any meaning to the sounds, when suddenly the voice stopped; the old man was sitting down; the audience, which had been dozing, shook itself and sat up alert, and all eyes were turned on the hero of the occasion. For weeks past Sainty had given anxious thought to what he should say to his tenants. He had never before had to make a speech, and he had rehearsed many alternative utterances in the privacy of his chamber. He had felt somehow that this was going to be his opportunity, the electrical moment when he was to make himself known to those for whom it was of such importance what manner of man he was. He would let them see that he was not an indifferent invalid, still less a selfish pleasure-seeker, a careless eater of the produce and neglecter of the producer; he would tell them how much he had their welfare at heart. In carefully prepared sentences he would allude to his great obligations (which incidentally were theirs also), to his mother's long, laborious stewardship, his uncle's enlightened economic teaching. He had devoted hours to the consideration of just how much it would be well to hint at his political convictions; sometimes he had been pleased to fancy himself electrifying his hearers by a militant profession of faith, but in calmer moments more moderate counsels prevailed.
Now the time so anxiously anticipated had actually arrived. With a great shuffling of feet the company got to its legs; some one started "For he's a jolly good fellow" rather shakily, which was promptly taken up and cheerfully shouted in a great variety of keys, and then all settled down to await the answering speech.
Sainty rose unsteadily and passed his hand across his forehead; for a second he stood silent, while the guests greeted his rising by drumming on the tables with their knife-handles. Then it seemed as though a crushing weight descended through the top of his head to his brain, the hum of the insects swelled to an organ roar in his ears, the hundred faces before him seemed to float and swim in a mist, and with a kind of gasping cry he sank back unconscious in Lord Firth's arms.
After this there could be no question of his appearing at the monster fête and garden-party which had been organised for the afternoon. The distant braying of a band, the sounds of many voices and laughter, and the scrunching of innumerable wheels upon the gravel were borne to him on the summer breeze, as he lay prostrate upon his bed. He had not yet come back to any sense of shame or distress; for the moment, pure physical pain was almost a relief, a restful half-consciousness that, with no effort of his, a solution had been found, a way out of all difficulties and disagreeables.
Not till late next day did he crawl downstairs, feeling very weak and battered, to receive the hollow sympathy and polite inquiries of his guests, and apologise with what grace he might for having failed so lamentably in his duties as a host.
Arthur had got up a cricket match. "You needn't worry, old man," he said cheerfully, as he carried out his bat and found Sainty among the group of spectators. "You weren't missed a bit. The duke made a speech after dinner, and proposed your health, and I returned thanks for you, and said all sorts of nice things about you, which you never could have said for yourself. I did it much better than you could have done, because I was rather drunk, which you would never have been."
"O Lord Arthur! how can you say Lord Belchamber wasn't missed?" cried Lady Eccleston. "We all missed you dreadfully, didn't we, Cissy? But your brother did do his best to supply your place, and really made a delightful speech; and I do hope your head is better; it was too bad your breaking down, and we were all quite miserable about you."
"I wanted to send you some really wonderful nerve tonic Dr. Haslam gave me," said Lady Firth. "I'm sure it would have done you good, but your mother said you had everything you wanted."
Sainty insisted on showing himself at the "treat" for the children and the labourers; this was the one part of the "rejoicings" in which he took a personal interest; but after a very brief appearance he was forced to go and lie down again till dinner, if he hoped to receive the guests at the great ball which was to wind up the proceedings of the second day.
The ball was a very grand affair indeed; there must have been over five hundred people present. Every woman there had put on her most gorgeous raiment, and the best of her jewellery. The duchess positively shone in white and gold brocade, hung in ropes of pearls, and with a great crown upon her head. Even Lady Charmington had had what she considered a low-necked dress made for the occasion, and had withdrawn the Belchamber emeralds from their twenty years' seclusion at the bank for the pleasure of wearing them before her mother-in-law. Sainty's share in the entertainment was strictly limited to standing by his mother, under the portrait of his great-great-grandfather, leaning with his left hand on the crutch stick which his cousin had given him, while his right was shaken by a long procession of people, who all one after the other said: "I must---er---congratulate you, Lord Belchamber, on this auspicious occasion. Sorry to hear you weren't well yesterday; hope you're all right again." To which he had to reply, "Thanks awfully, very good of you; so glad you could come; you'll find the dancing through that next room, straight on."
By the time he had repeated this phrase between three and four hundred times, and the guests had all defiled before him, he felt so sick and giddy that he had to be helped to bed by his valet, where he lay awake hour after hour, listening to the distant strains of the dance music, and picturing the scene in the great saloon to himself. He thought how nice it would be to be an ordinary, normal, healthy, courageous young man. He did not desire to be exceptionally gifted, strong, or beautiful, only just like any one of a hundred youths who were at that moment whirling in his ballroom, or eating his supper. Surely, he thought, no one had ever got so little fun out of his own coming-of-age ball before. He thought how pretty Cissy Eccleston had looked, all in delicate pale green, with a sort of white butterfly of some shimmering stuff just poised on her bright curls for only ornament---not a jewel on her beautiful neck or arms. He fancied her, aglow with dancing, sitting to rest under the great palms and banana-trees of the winter-garden, and perhaps Claude ensconced beside her in one of those nooks that he had watched his cousin arranging, "for flirtations," as he said.
It was in these sleepless hours of the early morning that he decided to say something to Claude Morland which he had had on his mind for two days, and the first time he got him alone, he put his head down, dug his nails into his palms, and said, "Claude, may I ask you something?"
"Of course; what is it?"
Sainty gulped and was silent. He had made up his mind to speak the first time he got an opportunity, but he had been genuinely relieved by every interruption, and was conscious that he had even purposely avoided being alone with his cousin.
"It is rather a queer question," he said, "and one which you may resent."
Claude was lolling in a deep chair with a book; his hat tilted over his eyes left little of his face visible but his moustache and the soft curve of his chin.
"How could I resent anything from you, old chap?" he said sweetly, but without looking up. "For which of my many sins am I to be taken to task? Fire away."
"I know I've no right to ask such a question, but I wish you would tell me if there is anything between you and Miss Winston."
Claude gave an almost imperceptible start, and sank lower into the deep chair. Sainty was conscious that under his air of supreme nonchalance he was suddenly tensely on his guard. "Between us?" he murmured interrogatively.
If Sainty were going to be indiscreet, his cousin obviously did not intend to make it easy for him.
"I mean, are you in love with each other, or engaged, or anything?" Sainty persisted. Claude gave a little laugh; he was evidently trying to keep a certain relief out of his voice as he answered in his usual soft tones, "I would not be so rude to our dear Aimée as to say I was not in love with her; I have been in love with her any time these two years; as to being engaged, you really do ask the most simple-minded questions. Will you tell me just what you think I have to marry on? Am I in a position to think of marrying, especially another pauper like myself?"
"That's just what I was coming to," said Sainty eagerly. "I didn't ask from mere idle curiosity. But if you are in love with Miss Winston, of course you want to marry her, and you think you ought not to propose, because you are not in a position to support a wife---isn't that so?"
"Well---no, dear boy," answered Claude slowly; "to be honest, I don't exactly know that it is. Aimée and I understand one another perfectly," he added, after a little pause.
"Do you think she does understand? Don't you think you may have given her the impression that you mean more than you do?"
"I am not the first man Miss Winston has met," said Claude, turning rather an ugly grin upon his cousin; "the dear creature was having her little flirtations before I went to Eton."
"Of course, if you don't went to, and you are sure she doesn't want to, there is no more to be said. I only wanted to say that if you were being held back by want of money, perhaps I---perhaps we---you know---I mean, that part might be arranged, don't you know," and Sainty blushed hotly.
Claude reached out a long, white hand, and very gently pressed Sainty's knee. "You really are more kinds of an angel than any one I know," he said, laughing softly, "but you need not worry about Aimée Winston; she has no vocation for matrimony; if she ever makes up her mind to marry it will be some one who can give her a far larger share of this world's goods than even you could spare for my dot. And as for me, if I should ever find myself, either through your kindness or in any other way, in a position to take to myself a wife, she would be a very different person from la belle Aimée; elle n'est pas de celles que l'on épouse"; and Claude turned again to his book in such a way as to intimate that the subject was closed.
By the time that the opportunity for this singularly abortive conversation presented itself the house-party had dwindled sensibly. Those who came to please the duchess, to meet each other, and to lend the support of names well known to the chronicles of fashion, had fled the day after the ball. They had come for an "occasion," and the moment existence at Belchamber threatened to resume a course remotely resembling home life, they departed to other "occasions," with all their baggage and camp-followers. Lord Nonsuch could not spend a Sunday where the services were conducted according to the ideas of Lady Charmington; and by the Monday all had gone except old Lady Firth, the Morlands, the Traffords, and the Ecclestons, who somehow or other contrived to stay on till they should be due at another country house.
Lord Firth, ere he departed for Scotland, had a talk with his nephew. "It has all gone off very well, my boy, on the whole," he said, "considering how new you and your mother were to anything of the sort. Your breakdown was unfortunate, of course, but it couldn't be helped. You had better come up to Fours for a bit next month; it'll do you good; and in November you ought to have another party here, for the covert shooting. You will have to live suitably in the place in future; all these new servants will get lazy and demoralised unless you give them something to do."
"But I shan't be here in November," said Sainty, "I shall be back at Cambridge, you know."
"Your mother and I were thinking that perhaps you wouldn't want to go back to Cambridge now you are of age," said his uncle.
"Not go back to Cambridge!" Sainty interrupted, with unfeigned horror; "not take my degree!"
"Many people don't, you know; and in your case, though it was no doubt right for you to have a little taste of university life, there seem to be claims which call for you more urgently elsewhere."
"Don't ask this of me, Uncle Cor," Sainty said earnestly. "You and I have both been workers; in my way I have worked as hard as you. You can understand what it must be to be told when one is in sight of one's goal that one must give it up and not try for it. I gave up the scholarship because I saw that it was a shame to take it from men who needed it; but this is different. I stand no chance with Cook; he deserves to be senior classic, and is safe to be; he has nothing to fear from me, or any one; and if I beat any of the men who come next, well, it won't hurt them; they will have their first class all the same, and it makes no difference to a man if he is second, third, or fourth."
"Do you care as much as all that?" asked Lord Firth.
"Yes, I do," said Sainty.
His uncle appeared to consider. "Well," he said, after a pause, "I don't see, if you want to go back and take your degree, why you shouldn't; but couldn't you come down for a week, say, for the pheasants?"
"Uncle Cor," said Sainty, "why should I come down, just in the middle of my work, and idle away a whole week, in order that other people should shoot pheasants? I don't shoot, myself; I hate the sound and sight of shooting."
"Don't you think you could get to like it? Of course it's out of the question for you to hunt, but you could quite well shoot, with a quiet pony and little cart, or even from a camp-stool, if you couldn't walk."
"I don't want to shoot; I should hate it. And in my case, the one excuse, the tramping, the manly exercise, would be wanting. I should seem to myself a kind of monster, dragged out to the work of slaughter in some form of machine; sitting down to butchery, like Charles IX firing on Huguenots out of a window."
"Well, I only thought it would give you something more in common with your fellow-men, make you more like other people."
"Oh yes, I know; it's the old story, my unlikeness to other people, my hopeless, incurable unfitness for my position in life. I do so hate my position in life."
"Many people would be glad to change with you, my boy," said his uncle gently.
"I wish they could, with all my heart," said Sainty. "Oh, I fully realise, no one more, what an anomaly I am. If only some one of the hundreds of nice, impecunious young men with a public school education and no taste for work could have it all instead of me! Arthur, for instance, would be ideal. He would hunt, shoot, play cricket, captain the Yeomanry, be popular, successful, suitable, and enjoy the whole thing immensely into the bargain."
"My dear boy," said Lord Firth, taking refuge behind Providence with a simple piety worthy of his sister, "does it never occur to you that if it had been intended that Arthur should have your birthright, he would have had it?"
"Oh, if you come to what was 'intended,'" Sainty answered, "I give up. I don't pretend to understand."
"It comes down to the simple old rule that you learned in your catechism," said Firth, in a more natural manner; "'to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.' (I quote from memory.) You can surely understand that?"
"Oh yes," said Sainty, "I can understand that right enough, as a principle; but it is when you come to the question of just what is one's duty that the difficulty comes in. For instance, I don't believe that it is a duty incumbent on me from any religious point of view to sit in a chair and shoot tame pheasants, nor to waste money in expensively feeding a whole tribe of people with whom I have no sympathy whatever."
"We must 'use hospitality,'" quoted Lord Firth a little half-heartedly.
"Oh, if you quote Scripture on that matter," said Sainty, not without malice, "I think you would find I was enjoined to entertain a very different class of person from the duke, or Lady Deans, or the Dalsanies. Indeed, I am not without the highest authority for selling all I have and giving to the poor; I sometimes think it would be the best solution, as it would certainly be the simplest."
"And how about the entail?" asked his uncle.
The wholesale disposal of his property being thus declared out of the question, Belchamber had to try and find some other answer to the riddle of life. For the present he was contented to have carried his point about going back to Cambridge; the terrible coming of age was safely past, and the danger of his university career being cut short averted. As he had not gone up till he was nineteen, he had still a year of happy college life before him, a year of peaceful study, of stimulating discussions, of congenial society, a year of hard work for a definite object. With a sigh of relief he found himself once more in his old rooms, surrounded by the dear familiar shabbinesses, his accommodation a bedroom, sitting-room, and Gyp-closet bounded by a battered "oak"; his establishment the tenth part of an old woman in a sat-upon black bonnet, and a twenty-fifth share in the services of a Gyp, but lord of his own soul, and free to follow his own bent, an undergraduate among undergraduates, and not the slave of a cumbrous estate and an unwieldy palace.
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