CRUMP FOLK GOING HOMECHAPTER I
CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME
Thecurse of the old place was upon it—sudden death.
The servants crept quietly, starting when the boards creaked, clutching each other at shadows, and looking for ancestors at every turn. Upstairs, mother and betrothed, doctor and lawyer, convoyed “Slinkin’” Lyndesay to his latter end. The butler waited at the door, a curious expression on his face, neither of sorrow nor indifference; possibly the look of one assisting at an interesting experiment.
From the library, the only cheerful room at Crump, Christian de Lyndesay looked down to the river and over the arch of the crumbling bridge to the bay. A bitter, snarling wind had edged every hill and headland, and the cold tide came up, hungry and gray. He shivered suddenly. It was a thankless night to go out—where Slinkin’ Lyndesay was going.
The evening drew on. A flight of rooks came over the park on the fling of the wind, swept against the windows, sank, rose again, and was gone; and the heir wondered, watching them as they swung towardsthe woods, whether they carried the black soul of Slinkin’ Lyndesay with them.
Almost with the thought came the sound of movement overhead, and, shortly after, steps on the shallow stairs. When they reached the hall he recognised them. Nobody but the lawyer walked with one leg and ran with the other. Then came the doctor, less certain of his dignity than usual; after him, the faint, far-off whispering of silk; lastly, a light, firm step, that told nothing. Christian looked longingly at the French window.
The lawyer’s left leg walked in sedately, but was overrun by the right, which almost rushed him into Christian’s arms. The left backed promptly, and bumped him into the doctor, but he was too distracted to apologise. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand, which he shuffled continually like a pack of cards.
“Your step-brother is dead,” said the doctor, switching on the light from the door, so that the oak panelling and the windows went black, and Christian’s fair head stood out sharply like a young saint’s.
He was home barely a couple of hours ago from a long tour abroad, and both doctor and lawyer looked at him curiously, standing as he was on the threshold of a new and unexpected experience. He had not been of much account hitherto, with the master of Crump scarcely turned thirty; but now he was everything. It was astonishing how simple he looked,—and how little one knew of him.
“I know,” Christian answered, thinking of therooks, and stopped. Not that it mattered, for the words reached neither of his companions. Looking from one to the other, he beheld the fingering of a great surprise. The face of the butler returned to him, and he wondered suddenly what Slinkin’ Lyndesay’s death could have had to say to his life.
The silk-whisper along the hall had something cruel in it, and again he looked at the window. An old keeper, passing, halted and spoke, and with a sense of relief he went out quickly into the bleak night. Doctor and lawyer exchanged glances; the former shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly; then their eyes went back to the door.
Alicia de Lyndesay came in very erect, very composed, her hands and face very still. The day’s tragedy had not softened by one whit the set line of her lips. You would never have guessed that she had laid her heart as a broken flower is laid on the breast of the slinkin’ hound upstairs.
The lawyer drew forward a chair, and the doctor surreptitiously pushed a footstool, but neither looked at her for more than a second, and they did not look at all at the girl who followed behind.
Deb entered with her head up, white but tranquil, in full command of herself, to all appearance almost unstirred. The lawyer ventured a chair in her direction also, and she took it with a brief word of thanks, folding her hands and looking straight in front of her.
Mrs. Lyndesay touched the bell and ordered tea,and there was a chilling pause, during which the two men stared uneasily at the carpet; while before the mother’s hidden gaze was nothing but a slinkin’ hound slipping away from her for ever.
“Where is Christian?” she asked at last, looking round. “They told me he had arrived.” There was no need in her voice, only desire for information.
“He was here a moment ago,” the doctor explained hurriedly. “Somebody called him. I do not know where he went.”
She poured the tea with a steady hand.
“He does not care, of course. His brother was nothing to him alive. Dead, his memory will be less than nothing. You will go home to-night, Deborah, I suppose?”
The words framed more command than interrogation, but the girl’s quiet assent was not in the very least submissively acquiescent. Deb might be poor, might have lost everything she had hoped for in the world, but she was a Lyndesay meeting Lyndesay upon equal terms, and the mistress of Crump knew it.
“Christian will go with you. I will have him sent for,” she went on, and, almost as if he had heard, Christian appeared in the doorway. He shook hands with Deborah silently and rather shyly, for they had met but seldom since they were children, and then, still without speaking, laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder, and bent to kiss her. She started violently when he touched her, twisting her head and staring up into the fair, kind face so near her ownwith an expression that made the onlookers catch their breath; and he withdrew his hand slowly, flushing as he stood away from her.
“Sit down!” she said coldly. “We can dispense with that sort of thing, you and I. Why were you not here to meet us?”
“Old Brathay called me,” he replied, taking a seat quietly, and handing Deborah a plate which she refused with a gesture. “One of the puppies is ill. I ought to have been here, of course. I am sorry.”
“I suppose you know your brother is dead?” she went on, in the same lifeless tone. “You would not have cared to see him, I am aware, and he did not ask for you. But before he died he gave us news of importance.”
“Of importance—to me,” Deb put in on her own account, with curious ease. “We were to have been married this year, as I believe you know. And now, it seems, he was married already.”
The elder men did look at her then—at the aloof face, and the straight, slim figure with its loosely-clasped hands; and from her to the rigid mother and Christian’s dropped eyes. It was said the Lyndesays always wore a mask.
“That alters things,” Christian observed thoughtfully, with no sign of perturbation in his quiet voice. “Slinker was always good at surprises. I suppose hounds are probably some other chap’s, now?”
“You need not be afraid!” Mrs. Lyndesay brokein sharply. “He married beneath him—one of those people who do not exist except in the eyes of Government—but at least we are spared—that!”
“He married a horse-dealer’s daughter,” the lawyer explained hastily and uncomfortably—“three years ago—a horse-dealer’s daughter in Witham. The father has been dead some time, and since she left her husband she has been living with a married sister in Canada. Mr. Lyndesay did not offer us any explanation of his extraordinary—proceedings.”
“I used to know quite a human sort of horse-dealer in Witham,” said Christian. “Gave me rides when I was a youngster, and told me tales by the hour—an interesting character, in his way. And I remember he had an uncommonly nice daughter——” he checked apologetically—“it’s a very wild night.”
Deb laughed queerly, and stood up, and Mrs. Lyndesay rang and ordered the brougham.
The departing guest did not offer her hostess a hand.
“Good-bye,” she said. “You will be glad to say good-bye. You have never been kind to me, and you will be pleased to be rid of me. We might have been friends, perhaps, for Stanley’s sake, but it seems we are not to have the chance. You need not be afraid that I shall ever trouble you again, though I shall not go away, as no doubt you expect. The county must get used to seeing me about as usual, and in time you will forget that I still live at your gates.”
“Be thankful things are no worse!” Mrs.Lyndesay’s voice, grown suddenly strident, arrested her at the door. “Be thankful you have been spared what you deserve—you who would have married my son for his property and his position, grasping at him with both hands, though caring no more for him than for his shadow on the wall!”
After the shocked hush, lawyer and doctor stood up simultaneously, saying “Madam!” in the same breath. It was a poor attempt, and she ignored it.
“You never cared! He was Lyndesay of Crump to you—no more. Lyndesay of Crump, with his money and his name and his fine old place. The man was nothing to you—you miserable parasite on a proud old house! You would have married Christian here on the same terms—isn’t that true? Answer me! Can you deny it?”
Doctor and lawyer made a desperate bid for the French window, shocked to the depths of their ceremonious souls, but in spite of their haste they could not escape Deb’s voice, the voice of a prisoner at the bar.
“It is true!” she heard herself saying, facing the hard eyes of Slinker’s mother; and then Christian slid a hand through her arm, and drew her out.
“Old Brathay’s in the kitchen with the puppy, worrying the cook out of her wits,” he informed her, as they crossed the hall. “Let’s get down to Kilne as quick as we can. I’ve always heard that your father was no end of a hand at hounds.”
Footmen hurried them into wraps. An obsequiousbutler all but lifted them into the carriage. The lamps flashed a moment on the wide hall as the smooth wheels bore them away. Deb cast one glance at the dark pile of the house as they passed; then sat back, silent. Crump blinds had dropped on more than a dead master.
“It’s an unforgiving sort of night!” Christian said dreamily from his corner, as they rolled down the last of the avenue, the great trees clashing overhead. “On nights like this I believe Westmorland breaks her heart for some old sin of long ago. She beats at the heavens, and they are brass. God does not hear. Brathay is like an old hen with hounds, isn’t he?”
She sat up, trying to see his face in the pale light over the river.
“You must let me tell you,” she said quickly and tensely. “I spoke the truth. I did not love your brother. But at least I loved no one else. And he was good to me.”
Christian nodded comprehendingly.
“Slinker had his moments, I suppose,” he said. “The rest of the time he was—Slinker. I’m glad he was good to you.”
They plunged into the shadow of the bridge, where other maddened giants were at strife. The full tide had swung the river far up its banks, and they could hear the weir above the shout of the wind. Deb leaned back, a growing sense of quiet upon her. Christian’s was a presence that asked nothing, took nothing, least of all sought for your miserable hiddensecrets. He accepted you as you were, and, in some utterly unreasoned way, made you feel that he was glad of you. She rested a little in his shadow.
The carriage stopped at the near end of the village, by a creepered house backed by the hill and faced by the river, and Deb, in the road, held out a firm hand.
“You’re not coming in,” she said decidedly. “Brathay knows a hundred times more about hounds than father. This is good-bye between me and Crump—you don’t need telling that. You want to pat me on the head, and I won’t have it—not with all the best intentions in the world! So say good-bye quickly, and go, for there’s quite sufficient anathema in store for me, without Clark adding that I kept his horses out in the rain.”
He dislodged her gently, and opened the gate. Then he took the hand he had ignored.
“Of course I can’t come in if you won’t have me,” he said, “but you shan’t always shut me out. Please remember me very kindly to Mr. Lyndesay. And there’s no good-bye between Kilne and Crump, you know that as well as I do.”
He dismissed the brougham at the turn to the stables, and walked up the steep incline until the avenue had swallowed him whole. Above him the knit branches rocked and wrestled as the wind tore at their crests. It was pitch-dark under their swaying canopy. Now and then a sweep of rain caught him in the face round some monster trunk. He stood still in the narrow, sheathed road, looking up andthinking. How strange it was that Slinker should be gone, and he himself in his place! It was hard luck on Slinker, he thought, to have been cast out of life so soon and so sharply by the stroke of a whirling slate—to have sped his soul on a tempest-night such as this. Slinker was the sort to have crept out of existence unnoticed, leaving the world uneasily doubtful that he might not reappear at any moment. The countryside had not christened him “Slinkin’” Lyndesay for nothing.
Apart, however, from this touch of half-satiric sympathy, he felt little human sorrow for his half-brother. The bond between them had generally been strained to the snapping-point of extreme dislike. He had a hundred times more feeling for his young cousin, Lionel Lyndesay of Arevar, a mile or two over the river, on the far side of Cantacute. Slinker had been unbearable—always. Crump had meant nothing to him but the money it stood for, and the pleasure that ran with the money. He had often gloated over the amount certain fairy woods represented, speculated lightly upon the price of certain farms that he was free to sell. Christian looked through the dark to where Dockerneuk, he knew, lay in the arm of the fell, and thought of the peril that had come so near. It had been within an ace of sale, but it was saved now. Dixon of Dockerneuk, at least, would be glad that Slinker was dead.
Yet the County—(always with a capital)—had approved of Slinker. Slinker had always made apoint of turning up at the right place in the right suit with the right buttonhole. He knew what was due to his position, so Christian had been told—often. Christian himself was supposed to be deficient in this quality—so-called. Christian, home from college, had been the friend of the farmers, made a name in the wrestling-ring, played football and ridden at the shows. “Lakin’” Lyndesay, they called him—the same clear-witted judges who had framed their delicate sobriquet for his brother. Slinker had merely sat on Grand Stands and distributed prizes, clapped hands and crooked an arm for the principal lady present. No wonder the County had thought a lot of Slinker! He had been so careful about his conduct—in public.
Theirs was a race with a shadow on it, cursed and foredoomed, proud with age and old in pride. Their mother came of the Devonshire branch, and had early married Egbert de Lyndesay of Crump, who had died two years later, leaving William, his cousin and former heir, as guardian of his six-weeks child. Within three years William had married the widow, and then Christian was born.
Nominal owner for so long, William never had to face the humiliation of deposition, for he died a few months before Stanley came of age, little thinking that in ten years’ time the young man would have followed him to the grave. But now Stanley, too, was gone, and Christian and his mother were left in the old house to find what other mutual ground they might.
She had always hated him, he reflected, almost unemotionally. The situation was too old for new pain. As an affectionate child he had broken his heart over her attitude, but in the end he had come to accept it. Nor had his father shown much feeling towards him, either. Occasionally he had looked at him with whimsical eyes, as if meditating some advance, but his mother’s presence had always stultified any growth of happy intimacy. He had been sent to school early, and William Lyndesay, to whom life had given most things at second hand except a certain bitter sense of humour, had been content to remain outside his child’s heart, busying himself with ordering the estate of his supplanter. Yes, they had all worn masks, Christian thought: his father, smilingly impersonal and aloof; his mother, obstinately and apparently unreasonably cruel; he, himself, puzzled and hurt but finally acquiescent; while as for Slinker—he laughed rather cynically—it would appear that Slinker had worn as many masks as a troupe of mummers!
At last the wind was dropping. He sauntered up to the top of the avenue and out by the top lodge beyond the trees, where a pale moon showed him the land sinking in a vast, watery hollow and then rising again. He thought suddenly of Deb, and wondered how she had ever come to countenance Slinkin’ Lyndesay.
Deb was one of the Kilne Lyndesays—a branch more remote from the parent stem than either that inDevonshire or at Arevar, but in many ways closest of all. Kilne Lyndesays had been Crump stewards for centuries, serving the fine estate from father to son with inherited and increasing devotion, which found in Roger, the last of the list, its most perfect expression and, alas! its culmination, also. For Roger had no son to follow him; only a daughter, to whom the heritage could not pass.
For forty years he had set all his brain, his energy and his love to the prospering of Crump, and under his hands it had touched its highest point of fortune. During Stanley’s long minority he had nursed the estate like a tender, living thing, backed by William Lyndesay in all he did, and handing it over at last with the mingled anguish of pride and pain which only those know who have given themselves whole-heartedly for what is not their own. He had wished to resign at the time, but Mrs. Lyndesay had pressed him to remain in charge, pleading Stanley’s youth and inexperience, and for two years longer he had stayed at his post. But he took badly to the new position, and the reaction of fulfilled work as well as the languor of old age was upon him, so that the end of the two years found the Crump agency gone from his branch for ever. The wrench had been cruel at first, but now the peace of evening had reached him, and his mind dwelt chiefly in the past. And at least the old home was left to him. That had been one of Slinker’s few gracious acts in his short but singularly ungracious life.
Sometime in his fifty-third year, Roger Lyndesay had withdrawn his attention momentarily from the estate, and married a Morton from Appleby, thrown by fate across his path on a visit, a quiet lady who had drifted gently into Kilne, and almost as imperceptibly out of it to her grave on the high fell-side. So Deb had been a lonely little girl in a lonely house,—a rather fierce, intensely reserved little girl, pure Lyndesay and no Morton whatever, a strange little girl who loved the woods and the silent places, and rarely made friends with anybody in her own station. She was bred in awe of Crump, and held aloof from the Lyndesay boys in a mood that was half reverence and half resentment, though for Lionel, to whom these sentiments did not apply, she had her moments of kindly condescension. Her education was represented by a series of battles royal with inadequate daily governesses until she was thirteen, when her solitary Morton aunt descended in wrath, and bore her south for five weary and interminable years. She had come back at last, however, polished and finished, a masked Lyndesay as much as any of them.
She had certainly been difficult to know, Christian reflected, looking back upon the four years since her return, and his own college vacations. He had really seen very little of her, considering the tie between the two houses, and their near situation; and for the last eighteen months he had been abroad, glad to escape from the atmosphere of his home, yet tortured always by the Lyndesay longing for his own soil.
He was in Japan when the news of the engagement reached him, and he had written a couple of congratulatory notes, wondered a little, and let the matter pass. It was fairly easy to understand, after all, whatever you might think of Slinker. She was poor, probably ambitious, and Lyndesay of Crump was the Catch of the County (always with capitals). Any girl might have done it, he had thought—in Japan; but to-night he had seen her with new eyes, and he wondered again. She had not looked that sort of girl, he reflected—not in the least the sort of girl to stand Slinker for a second after she had once really known him.
Of course it was easy for him to sneer, to call her in question. The temptation was not lightly to be despised, a Lyndesay not lightly to be said nay—if only it had been anybody but Slinker! Slinker’s face rose before him with its pale-blue gaze, colourless hair and smooth, guileless smile, and he frowned distressfully. Surely she must have shut the eyes of her soul!
He strolled back through the trees in the faint light filtering on to the muddy road at his feet. The striving arms were growing fitfully still; the land seemed to be curling itself into sleep with a tired sigh. He thought fancifully that his very passing had hushed it to rest. It had risen in storm for the flight of Slinker’s spirit; for the new master it had sunk into peace. He spread his hands over it in a sort of benediction as he came outin front of the house. He would see that it was cherished.
As he went up the steps, the first stroke of the passing bell came to him across the desolate park and the troubled water, and he stood bareheaded while it told its tale of death, each long pause between the heavy notes fraught full with listening souls that had gone home on the same music. He shivered a little as he turned at last to the empty hall. His mother was upstairs—he did not need to ask where. The land was glad of him, but he wanted a more human touch than that. The place was so lonely and yet so full of ghosts! Even Slinker would have been better than nothing. But Slinker was dead, and Christian was Lyndesay of Crump. Looking up at the eyeless windows, he wondered how long it would be before he came to lie where Slinker was lying, shot into eternity by the family fate.