Chapter Nine

[Admin]

SAINTY did not think it necessary to go home for the covert shooting, and it is doubtful if he was much missed. Young Traffords and Montgomeries came as usual, Lord Firth brought an older man or two, and Arthur acted as host, not without a few skirmishes with his uncle, who had been accustomed to appear in that capacity on such occasions. Arthur was now at a crammer's preparing for the army, but he had none of Sainty's objection to breaking in on his studies for a little sport, and every one thought it quite right and natural that he should do so. It might be all very necessary that he should help to slaughter his fellow-men by and by, but the immediate duty was the destruction of pheasants; and whatever might be the shortcomings of the absent lord of the mansion, Arthur and the guests assembled at Belchamber had a proper sense of their responsibilities in this respect.

Sainty only wished that his brother would take his other duties in life as seriously; there was permanently at the back of his mind an anxiety about Arthur, which, like some latent poison in the blood, might lie dormant for months, but was liable to stir up and give pain at any moment. A certain sense that his own existence, unreasonably prolonged, was, as it were, keeping his brother out of his inheritance, added poignancy to all Sainty's feelings about him. But for the unfortunate accident of his own eighteen months' seniority, Arthur would have stepped naturally into his appropriate position, and found congenial occupations, duties, pleasures, ready to his hand. He felt that anything that might go wrong with his brother before his own death made tardy restitution, would be almost his fault. It did not occur to his morbid apprehension that with superior means at his command all Arthur's vicious tendencies would have increased a hundredfold; he only saw the boy who had no aptitude for study obliged by circumstances to work that he might pass examinations, and driven from healthy and innocent recreations at Belchamber into a world of dangerous companions and temptations which he lacked self-control to resist. Sainty appeared to himself as an unwilling Jacob, who by no act or fraud of his own stood possessed of the birthright which was only a burthen to him, and who yet had no appetite for the pottage for which a younger Esau's full red mouth watered so hungrily. As in the nursery days when he had decided to die young that his brother might succeed him, he still cherished an undefined feeling that he was only occupying for a time. He would never marry; all must eventually go to Arthur and to Arthur's children; but he was possessed of an ever-growing terror lest meanwhile, before this desirable end should be reached, his brother might steer the frail bark of his good behaviour to some irreparable shipwreck, commit himself irrevocably in some way that should disqualify him for the position ere it should come to him.

Sainty mused much on abdications, on men who had cast aside rank and wealth for the peace and seclusion of the cloister; the monastic calm of his beloved courts drew him like a spell; had he been born in the turbulent times of his fighting ancestors he would probably have been violently dispossessed and immured in some convent of holy monks. He began to wonder whether in spite of all the boasted progress of the centuries they had not managed things in a simpler and more effectual manner in the middle ages. He even went so far as secretly to consult a solicitor as to whether a peer could legally renounce his title and estates in favour of the next heir entail, with the discouraging result that he learned that while he lived no act of his, short of high treason, could make him other than Marquis of Belchamber in the eye of the law, or bestow that title on any other human being.

"It seems hard," he said to Newby one day, "that a man can be born into a position with no act or consent of his own and bound in it for life; struggle as he will he cannot free himself."

"Are we not all alike in that respect?" asked Gerald. "Are not circumstances, as they are called, the fetters that each man wears? We delude ourselves with a phantom of free-will, but I suspect that men are really born as irrevocably parsons, doctors, politicians, as you are a peer. Who shall free himself from the bonds of fate?"

"You are strangely inconsistent, Gerald. I can fancy no one less of a fatalist than yourself."

"The doctor varies his medicines according to the disease of the patient," said Newby sententiously. "When men come prating to me of fatality as an excuse from all effort and responsibility, I have a very different word to say to them; but in your case, when you complain of being fettered by your position, I wonder whether some of those who perhaps think they would like their path thus plainly marked for them, may not really, by inherited tendencies and a hundred other intangible threads, be as truly constrained in their life choice as yourself."

"'All men are born free,'" quoted Sainty. "There never was a more deplorable fallacy; for my part, I feel like the ghost in Dickens's story, who had to drag that chain of cash-boxes and keys and deposit-safes wherever he went. Perhaps it is my lameness which accentuates this sense of being hobbled. I can't take a step without feeling the pull of the whole Belchamber estate; it is hung round my neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross."

"You certainly have a most deplorable trick of mixing your metaphors," said Newby. "But," he added, with the mild awe of which Sainty had been so disagreeably sensible at Belchamber, "yours is certainly a great position, a grave responsibility."

"If I might have gone in for a scholarship, like you, and stayed and got work in the college till I could try for a fellowship!" Sainty sighed. "The life would have suited me down to the ground."

"There are many leading that life who would be glad to change with you," Gerald answered with conviction.

"That is just what my uncle says, 'many people would be glad to change with you.' It is the old saying of our nursery days---'Many a poor man in the street would be glad of that nice pudding.' Do you think it makes unpalatable food more savoury to feel that one is keeping what one does not like from some one to whom it would perhaps be an escape from starvation? It is the strangest doctrine."

"Nevertheless Lord Firth is a very sensible man," said Newby; "and I don't feel disposed to pity you overmuch."

"I don't think I want pity," said Sainty, "I want help. It seems too deplorable that there should be no way out of an undesirable position. I think it is this sense of being shut in that drives men to suicide far more than great grief. Is any situation really hopeless, unalterable by human effort? If any one were once persuaded of that, he must go mad. I suppose the pistol or the overdose of chloral is the last supreme refusal to accept such a belief. 'What!' you say, 'no way out of this impasse? Well, there is always this.'"

"How theatrical!" said Newby. "You are talking claptrap. Who ever heard of a man committing suicide to avoid a marquisate and £50,000 a year?" and he resolutely led the talk into other channels.

Arthur hadn't been a month at his crammer's before he began to justify his brother's anxiety. Of course he broke all the rules of the establishment, came and went as he pleased, drove tandem, and hunted several days a week. Then there were complications about dogs, of which he kept a perfect kennel of all sorts and sizes, which raided the reverend gentleman's poultry-yard, killed his cat and his children's pet rabbits, and harried his wife's old pig. Sainty had always wanted a dog, but had never been able to have one because Arthur's perpetually changing menagerie had kept Lady Charmington's powers of endurance stretched to their easily reached limit.

In the Christmas vacation Arthur had already stigmatised the establishment to his brother as a "damned hole," where a gentleman couldn't live, and obliged him with graphic accounts of his many differences of opinion with its principal.

"But doesn't he mind your setting your dogs on his pig?" Sainty asked.

"Mind? of course he minds; it makes him wild. But you should see the old woman; she gets twice as mad as he does. She's always telling us we are 'no gentlemen,' and that we shouldn't do the things at home, and why don't we treat her as we would any other lady."

"And why don't you?" asked Sainty, with delicate irony.

"What, her!" with fine contempt; "the fellows say she was the old man's cook, and that he had to marry her, 'cos he'd got her into trouble. You should see her in the evening in a greasy old black satin and a sham diamond locket; she's awfully particular about our dressing for dinner, so Wood came in the other evening in muddy shooting boots. She asked if he wanted to insult her, but he said he was awfully sorry but he couldn't find his pumps, and glanced significantly at her toes that were sticking out of her gown: she has enormous beetle-crushers, and had sported a brand-new pair of patent-leather shoes. She fairly cried with rage."

Sainty saw the futility of trying to suggest the poor lady's side of the question; Arthur was never very quick at seeing other people's point of view.

"I just don't pay 'em any attention," he said; "the old 'un is always at me about not working. Says I shall never pass my prelim., and objects to my hunting. I tell him it's necessary for my health."

"And how often do you hunt?"

"Oh, well, not more than two days a week mostly, never more than three. You see, I've only got two hunters there; it's so infernally expensive keeping 'em at livery, and I have to pay for the man's keep too. It runs into a devil of a lot of money."

After several such conversations, Sainty was not altogether surprised to hear from his mother that a three days' absence without leave to attend a race meeting had brought matters to a crisis, and that the care of his brother's education had been transferred from the church to the army. Arthur went to this new place with only a pony cart and a bicycle, promising great things; the hunters had been suppressed and the kennel cut down to two fox-terriers and a bob-tailed sheep-dog. Sainty was rather surprised at hearing nothing from him for several weeks--not even the familiar demand for money had broken the silence between them--and the day he came home for the Easter vacation he made haste to ask for news.

He was sitting in Lady Charmington's sitting-room, where she had conceded a cup of tea to his fatigue after a journey, but was rigorously abstaining from refreshment herself. Sainty was drinking his tea and eating cake, while his mother hastily ran through some farm accounts she was going to submit to him.

"How does Arthur get on at Colonel Humby's?" Sainty asked.

Lady Charmington looked up from her ledger with an abstracted air and her mouth full of figures. "Thirty-seven, forty-two, fifty, fifty-six, fifty-six pounds, seven and fourpence halfpenny," she murmured. "Didn't I tell you he'd moved?" and she noted the sum at the bottom of the page and turned over.

"What! again?" cried Sainty in dismay.

"He said he couldn't get on there; he felt he wasn't making any progress, and he didn't seem to like the men there; apparently they weren't a very nice set."

"He'll never pass his exams. if he keeps chopping about like this, a month in one place, a month in another. I'm afraid as long as he's expected to do any work, he'll never find a coach who quite suits his views. Where has he gone now?"

"His friend, young Hunter, who was with him at Oxbourne, had gone to that man in London they say is so wonderful----"

"Mother! you haven't let him go to London?"

"Why not? The boy seemed to think he should do better at Monkton's; it is such a new thing, as you say yourself, for Arthur to want to work, that it seemed a pity to balk his good intentions."

"But surely you must see---London! Dear mother, won't there be many more distractions there for a boy of Arthur's temperament than at a dull place like Hog's Hill?"

"He said that was one trouble with Colonel Humby's place, that it was so dull; there was never anything to do there. If he wanted any amusement, he always had to go away for it, and this broke into his work, interfered terribly with it, in fact."

"And so you think he'll be likely to do more work when the things that break into it are under his hand? Oh! why didn't you ask me before agreeing to this?" cried Sainty in genuine distress.

This being his first day at home, Lady Charmington only smiled indulgently at the suggestion. She was not in the habit of consulting other people before making up her mind, and least of all Sainty. "My dear boy," she said, "you are scarcely older than your brother, and in some ways have really seen less of the world. Why should you think you can settle things for him so much better than he can for himself? or, for that matter, than I, who have been accustomed for years to arrange your lives for both of you?"

Sainty felt despairingly that there was nothing to be done with his mother in that direction. He had come to know the signals, and to recognise Lady Charmington's "no thoroughfare" expression as though it were written on a notice-board. He wondered sometimes if she were really as much at ease about her younger son as she seemed, but he never dared try to find out, for fear of awakening in her heart the uneasiness that oppressed his own. It was incredible that a woman so shrewd and far-seeing in most of the relations of life as his mother, should really feel a restful confidence about Arthur. To be sure, she was ignorant of many things that he knew only too well, such as the younger boy's habit of betting and constant appeals to his elder for money; on the other hand, Arthur took but little pains to conceal his views of life, and occasionally delivered himself in his mother's presence of remarks which, it seemed to Sainty, could not fail to enlighten a much more obtuse intelligence than Lady Charmington's.

When he came to breakfast next morning he found her entrenched behind the zareba of teapots and kettles, under the shelter of which she habitually partook of that meal. She looked up from her letters with a certain air of triumph to say, "I have a letter from Arthur; he is working so hard that he will not even come home for Easter; he says he might run down just for the Sunday and Monday, but he thinks it would only break into his work, and that on the whole it is best for him not to come away at all." That was all the voice said, but the eyes said quite plainly, "You see!"

Sainty said nothing. He went and peeped into the dishes on the sideboard, and picked himself out a poached egg, with no great appetite. This habit of his of saying nothing when he had nothing to say was called "rudeness" by some people, by others "pride" or "indifference." If he had spoken out his real thought to his mother she would have told him he was suspicious and could never believe any good of his brother, and would probably have exhorted him to watch against such an unamiable disposition.

The breakfast, the day, the weeks passed in this silence between the two, a silence eloquent of disagreement, yet broken only by a few words on indifferent subjects, except when the presence of guests made necessary some form of conversational rattling of peas in a bladder.

Whether it was duty or pleasure that kept Arthur away, the house seemed strangely empty and silent without him, even when some of the inevitable family party were gathered together in it---perhaps most so then, for though Arthur put himself out for no man, the mere fact that his pursuits were those of the normal young Englishman made him an important help in the entertainment of cousins. Sainty took endless trouble, but sent the men after rabbits who were secretly pining for the last meet of the season, and mounted the only Trafford who hated horses and had come down burning to throw the first fly of spring. Claude made things easier when he arrived a little later, but now that he was the duke's private secretary, his presence was generally required at one of his grace's numerous country-houses on the festivals of the Church, so that he was much less at Belchamber than formerly.

"I'm worried about Arthur," Sainty said to him the first time they were alone. "You know he's left the second place he went to, and my mother has let him go to London to read at Monkton's. They don't even board there, you know; he has rooms somewhere near."

Claude's eyebrows arched themselves, and he gave vent to a low but expressive whistle.

"Yes," said Sainty, "that's what I think; I feel sure he must be in mischief, he's keeping so quiet. He wouldn't even come home for Easter; it's incredible that a woman of mother's cleverness should really believe that it springs from excessive devotion to work."

"Have you told your mother what you think?"

"I've tried, but there's the difficulty. She thinks it is only my base jealousy and suspicion. I wonder why she so readily believes all good of him, and never gives me credit for even decent feelings. I've tried all my life to please her, studied her, thought what she'd like, and I don't believe Arthur has ever done or given up one single thing for her sake; yet she cares more for his little finger than for my whole body."

"Oh, the secret of Arthur's favour is not hard to guess. In the first place, he's got nothing, and you've got everything. On the face of it, that seems like an injustice to him; so, with true woman's logic, she takes it out by being thoroughly unjust to you."

"Got everything! Heavens! Do you suppose I wouldn't rather be tall and strong and straight like Arthur, be liked by men and admired by women, than own half England and be fifty Lord Belchambers?"

"Very likely; though a woman of my aunt Sarah's respect for 'plenishing'' is not likely to appreciate that point of view. But the real reason of her partiality is that Arthur is just the one person in the world who isn't afraid of her. Oh yes, you are afraid of her; it's not the least use your saying you're not, and so am I, and so's every one about the place. Whereas Arthur doesn't care a damn what she thinks; he does jolly well what he pleases, and, maîtresse femme as she is, she can't help admiring him for it."

"Well, never mind about that; I didn't mean to complain; that any one should prefer Arthur to me is not a phenomenon that needs explanation. I only deplore this particular result of her devotion to him for his sake. What am I to do about it?"

"It's a good thing you mentioned it to me; I must see what I can do. Perhaps I shall be able to keep an eye on Master Arthur to a certain extent."

It is true that his cousin's influence had hitherto been unmixedly bad, yet he seemed so sympathetic, so anxious to help, so entirely at one with him in his desire to keep Arthur from making an ass of himself, that Sainty went back to Cambridge vaguely consoled, and with a feeling that Claude, being on the spot, might really perhaps be able to exercise some kind of check on the object of their common solicitude.

This was his ninth and last term, the term of his tripos exam. and his degree, and he was so busy that he had but little time for thinking of his brother. Lady Charmington mentioned him but rarely in her letters, beyond a casual observation that Arthur was as hard at work as ever. Arthur himself wrote even less than usual, but he did vouchsafe a few brief notes, saying he was "all right," and "sapping like the devil," and ending with the usual demands. In spite of his close attention to business, London seemed by no means an economical place of residence. "His landlady robbed him shamefully; he was told they all did; and though he was sure of the fact, he knew too little about such things to be able to spot her."

One day Sainty showed one of these epistles to Newby, and hinted at his uneasiness. "You remember my brother Arthur?" he added, seeing Gerald look a little vague.

"Remember him? of course I do. A nice lad, a very jolly lad; an awfully charming type of healthy English boyhood."

"Oh yes, he's all that," Sainty assented; "but I wish he wasn't knocking about in lodgings in London by himself. He's very young, and awfully fond of pleasure, and hasn't a great deal of self-control."

"Let him alone, my dear boy," returned Newby airily. "He must sow his wild oats, like another; but he won't go far astray. Bon sang ne peut mentir."

"Oh, can't it?" groaned Sainty; but his friend wouldn't hear of any danger.

"That kind of healthy, well-bred English lad always comes out all right in the end," he said. "You can't ride a thoroughbred with a curb."

"Dear me, how sporting you've become; you're as horsey as Ned Parsons when he talked to Lady Rugby."

"Talking of Ned, have you heard about his book?"

"No---what book?"

"Why, he's written a book which they say is going to be the success of the year; it ought to be out by now. I saw some of the proofs, and thought it deplorably flippant and vulgar, as anything by him was sure to be, but undeniably clever in a way."

"Is it a novel?"

"Yes, a novel of society---as if Ned knew anything about society!"

"How came you to see the proofs? Did he show them to you?"

Newby's pale cheek took on a faint flush. "Well, some one told me he had put me into it; there is a young don in the story, and of course some one who wanted to be clever immediately decided it was meant for me, so I just taxed Parsons with it the first time I met him. 'I hear you've been putting me into your book,' I said."

"And what did he say?"

"At first I thought he looked a little queer, then he laughed one of those irritating, insolent laughs of his and said he'd send me the proof-sheets of the chapter where his young don was described, and I could judge for myself."

"Well?"

"Oh, of course, as soon as he offered to show it to me I knew it must be all right, and directly I saw it I found as I expected the character wasn't the least like me. The fellow was a most egregious prig, and not only that, but a snob; and whatever my faults, that's a thing my worst enemy couldn't say I was, could he?"

"I'm glad it was all right," said Sainty. "It would have been too caddish of him to return all your kindness in that way, and somehow I don't think Ned's a bad sort at bottom."

As the tripos drew nearer Sainty had less and less time for anything outside his work. It may be said at once that he took a very good degree. In country rectories and cheerful middle-class households from which the clever son of the family had been sent to college at the cost of some privation and not a little grumbling, a place among the first six in the Classical Tripos would have been acclaimed with grateful pride and rejoicing. In Sainty it was accounted an innocent eccentricity to care what degree he took, or whether he took one at all. Lord Firth, who was the most understanding among his kinsfolk, wrote a kind little note of congratulation. Lady Charmington was mildly gratified to find that her boy had brains and the grit to work for a desired end, but she frankly acknowledged that she could see no use his first class would be to him in after life, nor how it would help him to manage his estates. Arthur said "his brother was the rummest devil he ever came across, he was hanged if he could understand him." They would all have been infinitely better pleased had Sainty taken his uncle's advice, bought a gun and gone shooting in some form of movable go-cart. It was the more remarkable that he should do so well, as he was always more and more preoccupied about Arthur. Once the examination was over, and his mind at ease on that score, the old anxieties came crowding back upon him, and he decided to go to London and try and find out for himself what his brother was about. He would come up again for his degree. Meanwhile, his work was done and he had kept his term, so there was no difficulty about getting an exeat for a day or two, and he wrote to his uncle to ask if he could put him up.

After old Lord Firth's death his widow had given up the house in Bryanston Square and retired to Roehampton with an elderly companion, an elderly maid, and an elderly Blenheim spaniel; and the present peer had bachelor quarters somewhere near Whitehall, close to the House of Lords, and with a sidelong squint at the river if you got very close to the windows.

Having arrived and ascertained that his uncle would probably not be in till dinner-time, Sainty went westwards in search of his brother. The educational establishment, familiarly known to candidates for the army as "Monkton's," was situated in the wilds of South Kensington, and in order to be handy for his place of study Arthur had taken rooms in the same respectable region. But neither at the crammer's nor his lodgings did Sainty find trace of him. At the former he heard that his brother had been there in the morning, but had not returned since lunch, and his rooms seemed an even more unlikely place to obtain tidings of the studious youth. "Oh yes!" the maid said who opened the door, "'is lordship 'as rooms 'ere right enough, but 'e isn't often in 'em; 'e generally either calls or sends for 'is letters most days, and once in a way 'e'll sleep 'ere, but it isn't often. Sometimes I don't clap eyes on 'im for days together."

Neither this information nor the fact that his brother's ideas of "sapping like the devil" were consistent with taking the whole afternoon, from lunch on, for amusement, struck Sainty as very reassuring. However, there was nothing to be done except to write on a card a request that Arthur would come and see him at his club on the morrow, and trust that it might be one of the days when "'is lordship called or sent for 'is letters."

As his hansom bore him eastwards again, he could not help having his mind diverted from his anxieties by the rush of London life at five o'clock of a day in the season unrolled before him like a picture-book. The streams of vehicles of all sorts flowing in either direction made progress necessarily slow, and gave ample time for studying their occupants. He was not yet twenty-two, and had hardly ever been in London; the whole pageant was absolutely new to him, and it is small wonder if he found much to interest and amuse him. The great, toppling vans and omnibuses were interspersed with equipages beside which the renovated carriages of Belchamber seemed suddenly rustic and old-fashioned. Little victorias slid past, bearing beings in shining raiment and crowned with improbable headgear. Family landaus containing no less gorgeous matrons, and perhaps a brace of pink-checked, sulky-looking daughters in clouds of blue and white feathers, or small parterres of roses nodding in the summer breeze, made stately progress towards the park, or to fetch papa from his club. One of the prettiest of the passing girls leaned forward in sudden recognition and touched her companion's arm, and Sainty found himself responding to a volley of smiles and bows from Cissy Eccleston and her mother, which at a touch made him part of the great, glittering show, and no longer a mere onlooker and outsider. It occurred to him with a little thrill that it only rested with himself to come in and take his place among all these people, the place that was his by right of birth. Already invitations had poured in, more or less unheeded, on such an eligible young man. Unversed as he was in the ways of the world, he knew enough to be aware that a fatherless peer with a long minority behind him, an unencumbered rent-roll, and one of the show places of England, would not be forced to take the lowest room at the various feasts to which all these votaries of fashion were so eagerly pressing.

But this unusual uplifting of his horn was of brief duration. One glance at the little mirrors on either side of the cab in which he rode, and he would have bartered all his advantages for the health and good looks of the poorest of the well-groomed, broad-shouldered youths in shiny boots who trod the pavement of Piccadilly with floating coat-tails and such a happy insolence. At one point where the throng was thickest, Sainty's attention was arrested by a tall and very showy-looking young person in a smart private hansom going in the opposite direction from his own. She was much dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, and wore what is called a "picture hat" adorned with a great number of nodding plumes. Her charms, deftly enhanced by art, were of the more obvious order, and she scattered smiles broadcast among the throng of young men, where dogskin-covered hands flew up to many a burnished hat as she passed, enjoying a sort of triumphal progress with the western sun shining full on her flashing gems and dazzling complexion. As the two cabs came almost abreast of one another she leaned back to say something to the man beside her, and with a clutch of the heart Sainty recognised in the slim youth leaning lazily back with his hat tipped over his eyes, who looked so distressingly boyish beside all this full-blown beauty, his brother Arthur.