II
OF course the one thing I had to avoid was any show of sympathy; she would have resented bitterly such an impertinence. If I knew her at all – and I had been an interested observer of her growth from childhood to woman’s estate – the sympathy of the county, unheard but infallibly divined, was a sore aggravation of her fate. As I read extracts from the documents and explained their effect, freeing them from technicalities, as Sir Thomas had thoughtfully charged me, my impassivity equalled hers. I might have been telling her the price of bloaters at Great Yarmouth that morning, and she considering the purchase of half-a-dozen. In fact, we overdid it between us; we were both grotesquely uninterested in the documents; our artificial calm made a poor contrast to the primitive and disguise-scorning exultation of the pair who had gone riding over the turf in the sunshine. I could not help it; I had to take my cue from her. My old father had loved her; perhaps he would have patted her hand, perhaps he would even have kissed her cheek: what would have happened to her composure then? On the other hand, he would have been much more on Sir Thomas’s side than I was. He used often to quote to me a saying of his uncle’s, the venerable founder of the fine business we enjoyed: “Every other generation, the heir ought to lay an egg and then die.” The long minority which he contemplated as resulting from a family bereavement prima facie so sad would reëstablish the family finances. The Chinese and Japanese, I am told, worship their ancestors. English landed gentry worship their descendants, and of this cult the family lawyer is high priest. My father would have patted Beatrice Gladwin’s cheek, but he would not have invoked a curse on Sir Thomas, as I was doing behind my indifferent face and with the silent end of my drily droning tongue. I was very glad when we got to the end of the documents.
She gave me a nod and a smile, saying, “I quite understand,” then rose and went to the window. I began to tie my papers up in their tapes. The drafts were to go back to be engrossed. She stood looking out on the park. The absurd impulse to say that I was very sorry, but that I really couldn’t help it, assailed me again. I resisted, and tied the tapes in particularly neat bows, admiring the while her straight, slim, flat-shouldered figure. She looked remarkably efficient; I found myself regretting that she was not to have the management of the estate. Was that in her mind, too, as she surveyed it from the window? I do not know, but I do know that the next moment she asked me if Spencer Fullard were ill; she had not seen him about lately. I said that he was, I believed, in robust health, but had been up in town on business. (He had gone to raise a loan, if that’s material.) The subject then dropped. I did not, at the time, see any reason why it had cropped up at all at that particular and somewhat uncomfortable moment.
What had put Spencer Fullard into her head?
Suddenly she spoke again, to herself, in a low voice: “How funny!” She turned to me and beckoned: “Mr Foulkes!”
I left my papers on the table and joined her at the open window; it was just to the right of the hall door and commanded a wide view of the park, which, stretching in gentle undulations, with copses scattered here and there among the turf, gave a fine sense of spaciousness and elbow-room – the best things mere wealth can give, in my humble opinion.
“It must be Nettie,” she said; “but why – why is she riding like that?”
I followed with my eyes the direction in which she pointed.
“And where’s father?”
Still a mile or more away, visible now, but from moment to moment hidden by an intervening copse and once or twice by a deep dip in the ground, a horse came towards us at a gallop – a reckless gallop. The next instant the faintest echo of a cry, its purport indistinguishable, fell on our ears.
“It is Nettie,” said Beatrice Gladwin, her eyes suddenly meeting mine. We stood there for a moment, then she walked quickly into the adjoining hall, and out on to the steps in front of the door. I followed, leaving my papers to look after themselves on the table. When I came up to her she said nothing, but caught my wrist with her left hand and held it tightly.
Now we heard what Nettie’s cry was. The monotonous horror of it never ceased for an instant. “Help! Help! Help!” It was incessant, and now, as she reached the drive, sounded loud and shrill in our ears. The men in the stables heard it; two of them ran out at top speed to meet the galloping horse. But horse and rider were close up to us by now. I broke away from Miss Gladwin, who clung to me with a strong unconscious grip, and sprang forward. I was just in time to catch Nettie as she fell from the saddle, and the grooms brought her horse to a standstill. Even in my arms she still cried shrilly, “Help, help, help!”
No misunderstanding was possible. “Where? Where?” was all I asked, and at last she gasped, “By Toovey’s farm.”
One of the grooms was on her horse in a moment and made off for the spot. Nettie broke away from me, staggering to the steps, stumbling over her habit as she went, and sank down in a heap; she ceased now to cry for help, and began to sob convulsively. Beatrice seemed stunned. She said nothing; she looked at none of us; she stared after the man on horseback who had started for Toovey’s farm. The second groom spoke to me in a low voice: “Where’s the master’s horse?”
Nettie heard him. She raised her eyes to his – the blue eyes a little while ago so radiant, now so full of horror. “They neither of them moved,” she said.
So it was. They were found together under the hedgerow; the horse was alive, though its back was broken, and a shot the only mercy. Sir Thomas was quite dead.
That night I carried my papers back to the office, and satisfied myself, as my duty was, that the existing will lay in its place in the office safe; since the morning that document had, so to say, gone up in the world very much. So had Miss Gladwin. She was mistress of all.
III
AS may be imagined, the situation evoked a great deal of sympathy and occasioned an even greater quantity of talk. Killed four days before his wedding! The poor little bride! She had lost so much more than merely Sir Thomas! The general opinion of the Bittleton Club, which may be taken as representative of the views of the county, was that Miss Gladwin ought to “do something” for Miss Tyler. There was much difference as to the extent of this suggested generosity: almost every figure between five thousand and fifty thousand pounds had its supporters. I think that of the entire roll of members only two had no proposal to submit (hypothetically) to Miss Gladwin. One was myself, tongue-tied by my position as her lawyer; the other was Spencer Fullard, who did nothing but smoke and tap his leg with his walking-stick while the question was under discussion. I remembered his summary of the lady – “hard, but a sportsman.” The hard side might indicate that she would leave the situation as fate had made it. What did the sportsman in her say? I found myself wondering what Captain Fullard’s views were, supposing he had taken the trouble – which, however, seemed to be a pleasure to his fellow-members – to arrive at any.
To tell the truth, I resented the gossip about her all the more because I could not stifle an inward feeling that if they had known her as well as I did – or, perhaps I should say, had seen her as often as I had (which is a safer way of putting it when a woman’s in the case) – they would have gossiped not less, but more. She was strange, and, I suppose, hard, in her total ignoring of the idea that there was any such question at all as that which kept the Bittleton clubmen – and of course their wives – so much on the gog. Nettie Tyler did not leave Worldstone Park. It may be assumed that her bills were paid, and probably she had pocket-money. There the facts of the case came to a sudden stop. Had Beatrice Gladwin turned her into a “companion”? Anybody who chose to put it in that light was, on the apparent facts, extremely hard to contradict or to blame, but, as I felt, not at all hard to be annoyed at. Well, I had always hated the Tyler project.
Meanwhile Miss Gladwin was exhibiting, as I had foreseen she would, extraordinary efficiency; and her efficiency gave me plenty of work, besides the routine and not small business incident on the transmission of so considerable an estate as Sir Thomas’s. She was going in for building as soon as the death duties were out of the way; meanwhile she gathered the reins of her affairs into her own hands and regulated every detail very carefully. Sir Thomas, like many men successful in large concerns, had been easy-going about his private interests. I was constantly at Worldstone Park, often spending from Saturday to Monday there, and devoting the Sunday, less church time, to its mistress’s service. She was good enough to treat me with great candour, and discussed all things very openly – except Miss Nettie Tyler.
And what of Miss Nettie Tyler? I do not consider – and I speak with no favourable prejudice – that that young lady’s behaviour was open to very serious criticism. It surprised me favourably. I admit that she was meek; now and then I thought her rather obtrusively meek. But then she might naturally have been crushed; she might well have been an insupportably mournful companion. She was neither. I could not call her helpful, because she was one of the helpless so far as practical affairs go. But she was reasonably cheerful, and she put forward no claim of any sort whatsoever. She did not appear to think that Beatrice ought to “do anything” for her beyond what she was doing; and that, to my certain knowledge, did not include the gift of even the smallest of all the various sums suggested at the Bittleton Club. All you could say was that the lady who was to have been mistress of Worldstone Park still lived there, and made for the moment remarkably little difference. When one comes to think it over, this was really immensely to her credit. She might have made life there impossible. Or did she know that in such a case Miss Gladwin would send her away quite calmly? Let us give credit where credit is possible, and adopt the more favourable interpretation. Things went very well indeed in a very difficult situation – till Spencer Fullard made his entry on the stage.
His coming made a difference from the very first. I think that the two girls had been living in a kind of numbness which prevented them from feeling as acutely as they naturally might the position in which the freak of fate had placed them. Each lived in thought till he came – in the thought of what had been and would have been; to neither had the actual become the truly real. There had been a barrier between them. Nettie’s excellent behaviour and Beatrice’s remarkable efficiency had alike been masks, worn unconsciously, but none the less and by no less sufficient disguises. They had lived in the shadow of the death. Fullard brought back life – which is to say, he brought back conflict.
Nothing was further from his original idea. Like Sir Thomas, he was a descendant-worshipper – born to it, moreover, which Sir Thomas had not been. I was his high priest, so, of course, I knew what he was about. He came to woo the rich Miss Gladwin, picking up his wooing (he had excellently easy manners) just at the spot where he had dropped it when Sir Thomas Gladwin announced his engagement to Miss Nettie Tyler. “Dropped” is a word too definite. “Suspended” might do, or even “attenuated.” He was a captain – let us say that he had called a halt to reconnoitre his ground, but had not ordered a retreat. Events had cleared the way for him. He advanced again.
Should I blame him? My father would have blessed him, though he might have advised him to lay an egg and die. No; Worldstone was rich enough to warrant his living, but of Gatworth there was left an annual income of hardly eight hundred pounds. But three hundred years in the county behind it! Three hundred years since the cadet branch migrated from Gloucestershire, where the Fullards had been since the Flood! It was my duty to bless his suit, and I did. It was no concern of mine that he had, in confidence, called Miss Gladwin “hard.” He had called her a “sportsman,” too. Set one off against the other, remembering his position and his cult.
Sir Thomas had been dead a year when Fullard and I first spent a Sunday together at Worldstone Park. He had been there before; so had I: but we had not chanced to coincide. It was May, and spring rioted about us. The girls, too, had doffed some of their funereal weeds; Nettie wore white and black, Beatrice black and white. Life was stirring in the place again. Nettie was almost gay, Beatrice no longer merely efficient. For the first time I found it possible to slip a dram of pleasure into the cup of a business visit. Curiously enough, the one person who was, as I supposed, there on the pleasantest errand, wore the most perturbed aspect. The fate of lovers? I am not sure. I have met men who took the position with the utmost serenity. But if one were uncertain to whom one was making love? The notion was a shock at first.
The girls went to church in the morning; Fullard and I walked round and round the garden, smoking our pipes. I expatiated on Miss Gladwin’s remarkable efficiency. “A splendid head!” I said with enthusiasm.
“A good-looking pair in their different ways,” was his somewhat unexpected reply.
“I meant intellectually,” I explained, with a laugh.
“Miss Tyler’s no fool, mind you,” remarked the captain.
I realised that his thoughts had not been with my conversation. Where had they been? In my capacity of high priest, I went on commending Miss Gladwin. He recalled himself to listen, but the sense of duty was obvious. Suddenly I recollected that he had not met Nettie Tyler before Sir Thomas died. He had been on service during the two years she had lived in Worldstone village.
IV
AFTER lunch we all sat together on the lawn. Yes, life was there, and the instinct for life, and for new life. Poor Sir Thomas’s brooding ghost had taken its departure. I was glad, but the evidence of my eyes made me also uneasy. The situation was not developing on easy lines.
With his ears Fullard listened to Beatrice Gladwin; with his eyes he watched the girl who was to have been her all-powerful stepmother, who was now her most humble dependant. I saw it – I, a man. Were the girls themselves unconscious? The idea is absurd. If anybody were unconscious, it was Fullard himself; or, at least, he thought his predicament undetected. I suggested to Nettie that she and I might take a walk: a high priest has occasionally to do things like that when there is no chaperon about. She refused, not meekly now, but almost pertly. Beatrice raised her eyes for a moment, looked at her, and coloured ever so slightly. I think we may date the declaration of war from that glance. The captain did not see it: he was lighting a cigarette. None the less, the next moment he rose and proposed to accompany me himself. That did almost as well – how far I had got into the situation! – and I gladly acquiesced. We left the two ladies together, or, to be precise, just separating; they both, it appeared, had letters to write.
I should say at once that Spencer Fullard was one of the most honest men I have ever known (besides being one of the best-looking). If he came fortune-hunting, it was because he believed that pursuit to be his duty – duty to self, to ancestors, and, above all, to descendants. But, in truth, when he came first, it had not been in unwilling obedience to duty’s spur. He had liked Miss Gladwin very much; he had paid her attentions, even flirted with her; and, in the end, he liked her very much still. But there is a thing different from liking – a thing violent, sudden, and obliterating. It makes liking cease to count.
We talked little on our visit to the home farm. I took occasion once more to point out Miss Gladwin’s efficiency. Fullard fidgeted: he did not care about efficiency in women – that seemed plain. I ventured to observe that her investment of money on the estate was likely to pay well; he seemed positively uncomfortable. After these conversational failures, I waited for him. We were on our way back before he accepted the opening.
“I say, Foulkes,” he broke out suddenly, “do you suppose Miss Tyler’s going to stay here permanently?”
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t she?”
He swished at the nettles as he made his next contribution to our meagre conversation. “But Beatrice Gladwin will marry some day soon, I expect.”
“Well?”
I was saying little, but at this point Fullard went one better. He just cocked his eye at me, leaving me to read his meaning as I best could.
“In that case, of course, she’d be sent away,” said I, smiling.
“Kicked out?” He grumbled the question, half under his breath.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Everything would be done kindly, no doubt.”
“Not fair on the chap, either,” he remarked after some moments. I think that my mind supplied the unspoken part of his conversation quite successfully: he was picturing the household à trois; he himself was, in his mind’s eye, “the chap,” and under the circumstances he thought “the chap” ought not to be exposed to temptation. I agreed, but kept my agreement, and my understanding, to myself.
“What appalling bad luck that poor little girl’s had!”
“One of them had to have very bad luck,” I reminded him. “Sir Thomas contrived that.”
He started a little. He had forgotten the exceedingly bad luck which once had threatened Miss Gladwin, the girl he had come to woo. The captain’s state of feeling was, in fact, fairly transparent. I was sorry for him – well, for all of them – because he certainly could not afford to offer his hand to Nettie Tyler.
Somewhere on the way back from the home farm I lost Captain Spencer Fullard. Miss Tyler’s letters must have been concise; there was the gleam of a white frock, dashed here and there with splashes of black, in the park. Fullard said he wanted more exercise, and I arrived alone on the lawn, where my hostess sat beside the tea-table. Feeling guilty for another’s sin, as one often does, I approached shamefacedly.
She gave me tea, and asked, with a businesslike abruptness which I recognised as inherited, “What are they saying about me?”
That was Gladwin all over! To say not a word for twelve months, because for twelve months she had not cared; then to blurt it out! Because she wanted light? Obviously that was the reason – the sole reason. She had not cared before; now something had occurred to make her think, to make her care, to make the question of her dealings with Miss Tyler important. I might have pretended not to understand, but there was a luxury in dealing plainly with so fine a plain-dealer; I told her the truth without shuffling.
“On the whole, it’s considered that you would be doing the handsome thing in giving her something,” I answered, sipping my tea.
She appreciated the line I took. She had expected surprise and fencing; it amused and pleased her to meet with neither. She was in the mood (by the way, we could see the black-dashed white frock and Fullard’s manly figure a quarter of a mile away) to meet frankness with its fellow.
“She never put in a word for me,” she said, smiling. “With father, I mean.”
“She doesn’t understand business,” I pleaded.
“I’ve been expected to sympathise with her bad luck!”
So had I – by the captain, half-an-hour before. But I did not mention it.
“The Bittleton Club thinks I ought to – to do something?”
I laughed at her taking our club as the arbiter. She had infused a pretty irony into her question.
“It does, Miss Gladwin.” My answer maintained the ironical note.
“Then I will,” said she, with a highly delusive appearance of simplicity.
I could not quite make her out, but it came home to me that her secret resentment against Nettie Tyler was very bitter.
She spoke again in a moment: “A word from her would have gone a long way with father.”
“That’s all in the past, isn’t it?” I murmured soothingly.
“The past!” She seemed to throw doubt on the existence of such a thing.
The captain’s manly figure and the neat little shape in white and black were approaching us. The stress of feeling has to be great before it prevents sufferers from turning up to tea. Miss Gladwin glanced toward her advancing guests, smiled, and relighted the spirit-lamp under the kettle. I suppose I was looking thoughtful, for the next moment she said, “Rather late in the day to do anything? Is that what’s in your mind? Will they say that?”
“How can I tell? Your adherents say you’ve been like sisters.”
“I never had a sister younger and prettier than myself,” said she. She waved her hand to the new arrivals, now close on us. “I nearly had a stepmother like that, though,” she added.
I did not like her at that moment; but is anybody attractive when he is fighting hard for his own? Renunciation is so much more picturesque. She was fighting – or preparing to fight. I had suddenly realised the position, for all that the garden was so peaceful, and spring was on us, and Nettie’s new-born laugh rang light across the grass, so different from the cry we once had heard from her lips in that place.
Beatrice Gladwin looked at me with a suddenly visible mockery in her dark eyes. She had read my thoughts, and she was admitting that she had. She was very “hard.” Fullard was perfectly right. Yet I think that if she had been alone at that moment she might have cried. That was just an impression of mine; really she gave no tangible ground for it, save in an odd constraint of her mouth. The next moment she laughed.
“I like a fight to be a fair fight,” she said, and looked steadily at me for a moment. She raised her voice and called to them: “Come along; the tea’s getting cold.” She added to me, “Come to my room at ten to-morrow, please.”
The rest of the evening she was as much like velvet as it was in a Gladwin to be. But I waited. I wanted to know how she meant to arrange her fair fight. She wanted one. A sportsman, after all, you see.