CHAPTER VII
DOUBTFUL POSITION AT WORSTED SKEYNES
When George’s answer came at last, the flags were in full bloom round the Scotch garden at Worsted Skeynes. They grew in masses and of all shades, from deep purple to pale grey, and their scent, very penetrating, very delicate, floated on the wind.
While waiting for that answer, it had become Mr. Pendyce’s habit to promenade between these beds, his hand to his back, for he was still a little stiff, followed at a distance of seven paces by the spaniel John, very black, and moving his rubbery nostrils uneasily from side to side.
In this way the two passed every day the hour from twelve to one. Neither could have said why they walked thus, for Mr. Pendyce had a horror of idleness, and the spaniel John disliked the scent of irises; both, in fact, obeyed that part of themselves which is superior to reason. During this hour, too, Mrs. Pendyce, though longing to walk between her flowers, also obeyed that part of her, superior to reason, which told her that it would be better not.
But George’s answer came at last.
“STOICS’ CLUB. “DEAR FATHER,
“Yes, Bellew is bringing a suit. I am taking steps in the matter. As to the promise you ask for, I can give no promise of the sort. You may tell Bellew I will see him d – d first.
“Your affectionate son,
“GEORGE PENDYCE.”
Mr. Pendyce received this at the breakfast-table, and while he read it there was a hush, for all had seen the handwriting on the envelope.
Mr. Pendyce read it through twice, once with his glasses on and once without, and when he had finished the second reading he placed it in his breast pocket. No word escaped him; his eyes, which had sunk a little the last few days, rested angrily on his wife’s white face. Bee and Norah looked down, and, as if they understood, the four dogs were still. Mr. Pendyce pushed his plate back, rose, and left the room.
Norah looked up.
“What’s the matter, Mother?”
Mrs. Pendyce was swaying. She recovered herself in a moment.
“Nothing, dear. It’s very hot this morning, don’t you think? I’ll Just go to my room and take some sal volatile.”
She went out, followed by old Roy, the Skye; the spaniel John, who had been cut off at the door by his master’s abrupt exit, preceded her. Norah and Bee pushed back their plates.
“I can’t eat, Norah,” said Bee. “It’s horrible not to know what’s going on.”
Norah answered
“It’s perfectly brutal not being a man. You might just as well be a dog as a girl, for anything anyone tells you!”
Mrs. Pendyce did not go to her room; she went to the library. Her husband, seated at his table, had George’s letter before him. A pen was in his hand, but he was not writing.
“Horace,” she said softly, “here is poor John!”
Mr. Pendyce did not answer, but put down the hand that did not hold his pen. The spaniel John covered it with kisses.
“Let me see the letter, won’t you?”
Mr. Pendyce handed it to her without a word. She touched his shoulder gratefully, for his unusual silence went to her heart. Mr. Pendyce took no notice, staring at his pen as though surprised that, of its own accord, it did not write his answer; but suddenly he flung it down and looked round, and his look seemed to say: ‘You brought this fellow into the world; now see the result!’
He had had so many days to think and put his finger on the doubtful spots of his son’s character. All that week he had become more and more certain of how, without his wife, George would have been exactly like himself. Words sprang to his lips, and kept on dying there. The doubt whether she would agree with him, the feeling that she sympathised with her son, the certainty that something even in himself responded to those words: “You can tell Bellew I will see him d – d first!” – all this, and the thought, never out of his mind, ‘The name – the estate!’ kept him silent. He turned his head away, and took up his pen again.
Mrs. Pendyce had read the letter now three times, and instinctively had put it in her bosom. It was not hers, but Horace must know it by heart, and in his anger he might tear it up. That letter, for which they had waited so long; told her nothing; she had known all there was to tell. Her hand had fallen from Mr. Pendyce’s shoulder, and she did not put it back, but ran her fingers through and through each other, while the sunlight, traversing the narrow windows, caressed her from her hair down to her knees. Here and there that stream of sunlight formed little pools in her eyes, giving them a touching, anxious brightness; in a curious heart-shaped locket of carved steel, worn by her mother and her grandmother before her, containing now, not locks of their son’s hair, but a curl of George’s; in her diamond rings, and a bracelet of amethyst and pearl which she wore for the love of pretty things. And the warm sunlight disengaged from her a scent of lavender. Through the library door a scratching noise told that the dear dogs knew she was not in her bedroom. Mr. Pendyce, too, caught that scent of lavender, and in some vague way it augmented his discomfort. Her silence, too, distressed him. It did not occur to him that his silence was distressing her. He put down his pen.
“I can’t write with you standing there, Margery!”
Mrs. Pendyce moved out of the sunlight.
“George says he is taking steps. What does that mean, Horace?”
This question, focusing his doubts, broke down the Squire’s dumbness.
“I won’t be treated like this!” he said. “I’ll go up and see him myself!”
He went by the 10.20, saying that he would be down again by the 5.55
Soon after seven the same evening a dogcart driven by a young groom and drawn by a raking chestnut mare with a blaze face, swung into the railway-station at Worsted Skeynes, and drew up before the booking-office. Mr. Pendyce’s brougham, behind a brown horse, coming a little later, was obliged to range itself behind. A minute before the train’s arrival a wagonette and a pair of bays, belonging to Lord Quarryman, wheeled in, and, filing past the other two, took up its place in front. Outside this little row of vehicles the station fly and two farmers’ gigs presented their backs to the station buildings. And in this arrangement there was something harmonious and fitting, as though Providence itself had guided them all and assigned to each its place. And Providence had only made one error – that of placing Captain Bellew’s dogcart precisely opposite the booking-office, instead of Lord Quarryman’s wagonette, with Mr. Pendyce’s brougham next.
Mr. Pendyce came out first; he stared angrily at the dogcart, and moved to his own carriage. Lord Quarryman came out second. His massive sun-burned head – the back of which, sparsely adorned by hairs, ran perfectly straight into his neck – was crowned by a grey top-hat. The skirts of his grey coat were square-shaped, and so were the toes of his boots.
“Hallo, Pendyce!” he called out heartily; “didn’t see you on the platform. How’s your wife?”
Mr. Pendyce, turning to answer, met the little burning eyes of Captain Bellew, who came out third. They failed to salute each other, and Bellow, springing into his cart, wrenched his mare round, circled the farmers’ gigs, and, sitting forward, drove off at a furious pace. His groom, running at full speed, clung to the cart and leaped on to the step behind. Lord Quarryman’s wagonette backed itself into the place left vacant. And the mistake of Providence was rectified.
“Cracked chap, that fellow Bellew. D’you see anything of him?”
Mr. Pendyce answered:
“No; and I want to see less. I wish he’d take himself off!”
His lordship smiled.
“A huntin’ country seems to breed fellows like that; there’s always one of ‘em to every pack of hounds. Where’s his wife now? Good-lookin’ woman; rather warm member, eh?”
It seemed to Mr. Pendyce that Lord Quarryman’s eyes searched his own with a knowing look, and muttering “God knows!” he vanished into his brougham.
Lord Quarryman looked kindly at his horses.
He was not a man who reflected on the whys, the wherefores, the becauses, of this life. The good God had made him Lord Quarryman, had made his eldest son Lord Quantock; the good God had made the Gaddesdon hounds – it was enough!
When Mr. Pendyce reached home he went to his dressing-room. In a corner by the bath the spaniel John lay surrounded by an assortment of his master’s slippers, for it was thus alone that he could soothe in measure the bitterness of separation. His dark brown eye was fixed upon the door, and round it gleamed a crescent moon of white. He came to the Squire fluttering his tail, with a slipper in his mouth, and his eye said plainly: ‘Oh, master, where have you been? Why have you been so long? I have been expecting you ever since half-past ten this morning!’
Mr. Pendyce’s heart opened a moment and closed again. He said “John!” and began to dress for dinner.
Mrs. Pendyce found him tying his white tie. She had plucked the first rosebud from her garden; she had plucked it because she felt sorry for him, and because of the excuse it would give her to go to his dressing-room at once.
“I’ve brought you a buttonhole, Horace. Did you see him?”
“No.”
Of all answers this was the one she dreaded most. She had not believed that anything would come of an interview; she had trembled all day long at the thought of their meeting; but now that they had not met she knew by the sinking in her heart that anything was better than uncertainty. She waited as long as she could, then burst out:
“Tell me something, Horace!”
Mr. Pendyce gave her an angry glance.
“How can I tell you, when there’s nothing to tell? I went to his club. He’s not living there now. He’s got rooms, nobody knows where. I waited all the afternoon. Left a message at last for him to come down here to-morrow. I’ve sent for Paramor, and told him to come down too. I won’t put up with this sort of thing.”
Mrs. Pendyce looked out of the window, but there was nothing to see save the ha-ha, the coverts, the village spire, the cottage roofs, which for so long had been her world.
“George won’t come down here,” she said.
“George will do what I tell him.”
Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct that she was right.
Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.
“George had better take care,” he said; “he’s entirely dependent on me.”
And as if with those words he had summed up the situation, the philosophy of a system vital to his son, he no longer frowned. On Mrs. Pendyce those words had a strange effect. They stirred within her terror. It was like seeing her son’s back bared to a lifted whip-lash; like seeing the door shut against him on a snowy night. But besides terror they stirred within her a more poignant feeling yet, as though someone had dared to show a whip to herself, had dared to defy that something more precious than life in her soul, that something which was of her blood, so utterly and secretly passed by the centuries into her fibre that no one had ever thought of defying it before. And there flashed before her with ridiculous concreteness the thought: ‘I’ve got three hundred a year of my own!’ Then the whole feeling left her, just as in dreams a mordant sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache, whose cause is forgotten, behind.
“There’s the gong, Horace,” she said. “Cecil Tharp is here to dinner. I asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn’t feel up to it. Of course they are expecting it very soon now. They talk of the 15th of June.”
Mr. Pendyce took from his wife his coat, passing his arms down the satin sleeves.
“If I could get the cottagers to have families like that,” he said, “I shouldn’t have much trouble about labour. They’re a pig-headed lot – do nothing that they’re told. Give me some eau-de-Cologne, Margery.”
Mrs. Pendyce dabbed the wicker flask on her husband’s handkerchief.
“Your eyes look tired,” she said. “Have you a headache, dear?”
CHAPTER VIII
COUNCIL AT WORSTED SKEYNES
It was on the following evening – the evening on which he was expecting his son and Mr. Paramor that the Squire leaned forward over the dining-table and asked:
“What do you say, Barter? I’m speaking to you as a man of the world.”
The Rector bent over his glass of port and moistened his lower lip.
“There’s no excuse for that woman,” he answered. “I always thought she was a bad lot.”
Mr. Pendyce went on:
“We’ve never had a scandal in my family. I find the thought of it hard to bear, Barter – I find it hard to bear – ”
The Rector emitted a low sound. He had come from long usage to have a feeling like affection for his Squire.
Mr. Pendyce pursued his thoughts.
“We’ve gone on,” he said, “father and son for hundreds of years. It’s a blow to me, Barter.”
Again the Rector emitted that low sound.
“What will the village think?” said Mr. Pendyce; “and the farmers – I mind that more than anything. Most of them knew my dear old father – not that he was popular. It’s a bitter thing.”
The Rector said:
“Well, well, Pendyce, perhaps it won’t come to that.”
He looked a little shamefaced, and his light eyes were full of something like contrition.
“How does Mrs. Pendyce take it?”
The Squire looked at him for the first time.
“Ah!” he said; “you never know anything about women. I’d as soon trust a woman to be just as I’d – I’d finish that magnum; it’d give me gout in no time.”
The Rector emptied his glass.
“I’ve sent for George and my solicitor,” pursued the Squire; “they’ll be here directly.”
Mr. Barter pushed his chair back, and raising his right ankle on to his left leg, clasped his hands round his right knee; then, leaning forward, he stared up under his jutting brows at Mr. Pendyce. It was the attitude in which he thought best.
Mr. Pendyce ran on:
“I’ve nursed the estate ever since it came to me; I’ve carried on the tradition as best I could; I’ve not been as good a man, perhaps, as I should have wished, but I’ve always tried to remember my old father’s words: ‘I’m done for, Horry; the estate’s in your hands now.’.rdquo; He cleared his throat.
For a full minute there was no sound save the ticking of the clock. Then the spaniel John, coming silently from under the sideboard, fell heavily down against his master’s leg with a lengthy snore of satisfaction. Mr. Pendyce looked down.
“This fellow of mine,” he muttered, “is getting fat.”
It was evident from the tone of his voice that he desired his emotion to be forgotten. Something very deep in Mr. Barter respected that desire.
“It’s a first-rate magnum,” he said.
Mr. Pendyce filled his Rector’s glass.
“I forget if you knew Paramor. He was before your time. He was at Harrow with me.”
The Rector took a prolonged sip.
“I shall be in the way,” he said. “I’ll take myself off’.”
The Squire put out his hand affectionately.
“No, no, Barter, don’t you go. It’s all safe with you. I mean to act. I can’t stand this uncertainty. My wife’s cousin Vigil is coming too – he’s her guardian. I wired for him. You know Vigil? He was about your time.”
The Rector turned crimson, and set his underlip. Having scented his enemy, nothing would now persuade him to withdraw; and the conviction that he had only done his duty, a little shaken by the Squire’s confidence, returned as though by magic.
“Yes, I know him.”
“We’ll have it all out here,” muttered Mr. Pendyce, “over this port. There’s the carriage. Get up, John.”
The spaniel John rose heavily, looked sardonically at Mr. Barter, and again flopped down against his master’s leg.
“Get up, John,” said Mr. Pendyce again. The spaniel John snored.
‘If I move, you’ll move too, and uncertainty will begin for me again,’ he seemed to say.
Mr. Pendyce disengaged his leg, rose, and went to the door. Before reaching it he turned and came back to the table.
“Barter,” he said, “I’m not thinking of myself – I’m not thinking of myself – we’ve been here for generations – it’s the principle.” His face had the least twist to one side, as though conforming to a kink in his philosophy; his eyes looked sad and restless.
And the Rector, watching the door for the sight of his enemy, also thought:
‘I’m not thinking of myself – I’m satisfied that I did right – I’m Rector of this parish it’s the principle.’
The spaniel John gave three short barks, one for each of the persons who entered the room. They were Mrs. Pendyce, Mr. Paramor, and Gregory Vigil.
“Where’s George?” asked the Squire, but no one answered him.
The Rector, who had resumed his seat, stared at a little gold cross which he had taken out of his waistcoat pocket. Mr. Paramor lifted a vase and sniffed at the rose it contained; Gregory walked to the window.
When Mr. Pendyce realised that his son had not come, he went to the door and held it open.
“Be good enough to take John out, Margery,” he said. “John!”
The spaniel John, seeing what lay before him, rolled over on his back.
Mrs. Pendyce fixed her eyes on her husband, and in those eyes she put all the words which the nature of a lady did not suffer her to speak.
‘I claim to be here. Let me stay; it is my right. Don’t send me away.’ So her eyes spoke, and so those of the spaniel John, lying on his back, in which attitude he knew that he was hard to move.
Mr. Pendyce turned him over with his foot.
“Get up, John! Be good enough to take John out, Margery.”
Mrs. Pendyce flushed, but did not move.
“John,” said Mr. Pendyce, “go with your mistress.” The spaniel John fluttered a drooping tail. Mr. Pendyce pressed his foot to it.
“This is not a subject for women.”
Mrs. Pendyce bent down.
“Come, John,” she said. The spaniel John, showing the whites of his eyes, and trying to back through his collar, was assisted from the room. Mr. Pendyce closed the door behind them.
“Have a glass of port, Vigil; it’s the ‘47. My father laid it down in ‘56, the year before he died. Can’t drink it myself – I’ve had to put down two hogsheads of the Jubilee wine. Paramor, fill your glass. Take that chair next to Paramor, Vigil. You know Barter?”
Both Gregory’s face and the Rector’s were very red.
“We’re all Harrow men here,” went on Mr. Pendyce. And suddenly turning to Mr. Paramor, he said: “Well?”
Just as round the hereditary principle are grouped the State, the Church, Law, and Philanthropy, so round the dining-table at Worsted Skeynes sat the Squire, the Rector, Mr. Paramor, and Gregory Vigil, and none of them wished to be the first to speak. At last Mr. Paramor, taking from his pocket Bellew’s note and George’s answer, which were pinned in strange alliance, returned them to the Squire.
“I understand the position to be that George refuses to give her up; at the same time he is prepared to defend the suit and deny everything. Those are his instructions to me.” Taking up the vase again, he sniffed long and deep at the rose.
Mr. Pendyce broke the silence.
“As a gentleman,” he said in a voice sharpened by the bitterness of his feelings, “I suppose he’s obliged – ”
Gregory, smiling painfully, added:
“To tell lies.”
Mr. Pendyce turned on him at once.
“I’ve nothing to say about that, Vigil. George has behaved abominably. I don’t uphold him; but if the woman wishes the suit defended he can’t play the cur – that’s what I was brought up to believe.”
Gregory leaned his forehead on his hand.
“The whole system is odious – ” he was beginning.
Mr. Paramor chimed in.
“Let us keep to the facts; without the system.”
The Rector spoke for the first time.
“I don’t know what you mean about the system; both this man and this woman are guilty – ”
Gregory said in a voice that quivered with rage:
“Be so kind as not to use the expression, ‘this woman.’.rdquo;
The Rector glowered.
“What expression then – ”
Mr. Pendyce’s voice, to which the intimate trouble of his thoughts lent a certain dignity, broke in:
“Gentlemen, this is a question concerning the honour of my house.”
There was another and a longer silence, during which Mr. Paramor’s eyes haunted from face to face, while beyond the rose a smile writhed on his lips.
“I suppose you have brought me down here, Pendyce, to give you my opinion,” he said at last. “Well; don’t let these matters come into court. If there is anything you can do to prevent it, do it. If your pride stands in the way, put it in your pocket. If your sense of truth stands in the way, forget it. Between personal delicacy and our law of divorce there is no relation; between absolute truth and our law of divorce there is no relation. I repeat, don’t let these matters come into court. Innocent and guilty, you will all suffer; the innocent will suffer more than the guilty, and nobody will benefit. I have come to this conclusion deliberately. There are cases in which I should give the opposite opinion. But in this case, I repeat, there’s nothing to be gained by it. Once more, then, don’t let these matters come into court. Don’t give people’s tongues a chance. Take my advice, appeal to George again to give you that promise. If he refuses, well, we must try and bluff Bellew out of it.”
Mr. Pendyce had listened, as he had formed the habit of listening to Edmund Paramor, in silence. He now looked up and said:
“It’s all that red-haired ruffian’s spite. I don’t know what you were about to stir things up, Vigil. You must have put him on the scent.” He looked moodily at Gregory. Mr. Barter, too, looked at Gregory with a sort of half-ashamed defiance.
Gregory, who had been staring at his untouched wineglass, turned his face, very flushed, and began speaking in a voice that emotion and anger caused to tremble. He avoided looking at the Rector, and addressed himself to Mr. Paramor.
“George can’t give up the woman who has trusted herself to him; that would be playing the cur, if you like. Let them go and live together honestly until they can be married. Why do you all speak as if it were the man who mattered? It is the woman that we should protect!”
The Rector first recovered speech.
“You’re talking rank immorality,” he said almost good-humouredly.
Mr. Pendyce rose.
“Marry her!” he cried. “What on earth – that’s worse than all – the very thing we’re trying to prevent! We’ve been here, father and son – father and son – for generations!”
“All the more shame,” burst out Gregory, “if you can’t stand by a woman at the end of them – !”
Mr. Paramor made a gesture of reproof.
“There’s moderation in all things,” he said. “Are you sure that Mrs. Bellew requires protection? If you are right, I agree; but are you right?”
“I will answer for it,” said Gregory.
Mr. Paramor paused a full minute with his head resting on his hand.
“I am sorry,” he said at last, “I must trust to my own judgment.”
The Squire looked up.
“If the worst comes to the worst, can I cut the entail, Paramor?”
“No.”
“What? But that’s all wrong – that’s – ”
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Mr. Paramor.
The Squire looked at him dubiously, then blurted out:
“If I choose to leave him nothing but the estate, he’ll soon find himself a beggar. I beg your pardon, gentlemen; fill your glasses! I’m forgetting everything!”
The Rector filled his glass.
“I’ve said nothing so far,” he began; “I don’t feel that it’s my business. My conviction is that there’s far too much divorce nowadays. Let this woman go back to her husband, and let him show her where she’s to blame” – his voice and his eyes hardened – “then let them forgive each other like Christians. You talk,” he said to Gregory, “about standing up for the woman. I’ve no patience with that; it’s the way immorality’s fostered in these days. I raise my voice against this sentimentalism. I always have, and I always shall!”
Gregory jumped to his feet.
“I’ve told you once before,” he said, “that you were indelicate; I tell you so again.”
Mr. Barter got up, and stood bending over the table, crimson in the face, staring at Gregory, and unable to speak.
“Either you or I,” he said at last, stammering with passion, “must leave this room!”
Gregory tried to speak; then turning abruptly, he stepped out on to the terrace, and passed from the view of those within.
The Rector said:
“Good-night, Pendyce; I’m going, too!”
The Squire shook the hand held out to him with a face perplexed to sadness. There was silence when Mr. Barter had left the room.
The Squire broke it with a sigh.
“I wish we were back at Oxenham’s, Paramor. This serves me right for deserting the old house. What on earth made me send George to Eton?”
Mr. Paramor buried his nose in the vase. In this saying of his old schoolfellow was the whole of the Squire’s creed:
‘I believe in my father, and his father, and his father’s father, the makers and keepers of my estate; and I believe in myself and my son and my son’s son. And I believe that we have made the country, and shall keep the country what it is. And I believe in the Public Schools, and especially the Public School that I was at. And I believe in my social equals and the country house, and in things as they are, for ever and ever. Amen.’
Mr. Pendyce went on:
“I’m not a Puritan, Paramor; I dare say there are allowances to be made for George. I don’t even object to the woman herself; she may be too good for Bellew; she must be too good for a fellow like that! But for George to marry her would be ruination. Look at Lady Rose’s case! Anyone but a star-gazing fellow like Vigil must see that! It’s taboo! It’s sheer taboo! And think – think of my – my grandson! No, no, Paramor; no, no, by God!”
The Squire covered his eyes with his hand.
Mr. Paramor, who had no son himself, answered with feeling:
“Now, now, old fellow; it won’t come to that!”
“God knows what it will come to, Paramor! My nerve’s shaken! You know yourself that if there’s a divorce he’ll be bound to marry her!”
To this Mr. Paramor made no reply, but pressed his lips together.
“There’s your poor dog whining,” he said.
And without waiting for permission he opened the door. Mrs. Pendyce and the spaniel John came in. The Squire looked up and frowned. The spaniel John, panting with delight, rubbed against him. ‘I have been through torment, master,’ he seemed to say. ‘A second separation at present is not possible for me!’
Mrs. Pendyce stood waiting silently, and Mr. Paramor addressed himself to her.
“You can do more than any of us, Mrs. Pendyce, both with George and with this man Bellew – and, if I am not mistaken, with his wife.”
The Squire broke in:
“Don’t think that I’ll have any humble pie eaten to that fellow Bellew!”
The look Mr. Paramor gave him at those words, was like that of a doctor diagnosing a disease. Yet there was nothing in the expression of the Squire’s face with its thin grey whiskers and moustache, its twist to the left, its swan-like eyes, decided jaw, and sloping brow, different from what this idea might bring on the face of any country gentleman.
Mrs. Pendyce said eagerly
“Oh, Mr. Paramor, if I could only see George!”
She longed so for a sight of her son that her thoughts carried her no further.
“See him!” cried the Squire. “You’ll go on spoiling him till he’s disgraced us all!”
Mrs. Pendyce turned from her husband to his solicitor. Excitement had fixed an unwonted colour in her cheeks; her lips twitched as if she wished to speak.
Mr. Paramor answered for her:
“No, Pendyce; if George is spoilt, the system is to blame.”
“System!” said the Squire. “I’ve never had a system for him. I’m no believer in systems! I don’t know what you’re talking of. I have another son, thank God!”
Mrs. Pendyce took a step forward.
“Horace,” she said, “you would never – ”
Mr. Pendyce turned from his wife, and said sharply:
“Paramor, are you sure I can’t cut the entail?”
“As sure,” said Mr. Paramor, “as I sit here!”