What Christian first perceived about the duke’s apartments was that they had an odor quite peculiar to themselves. The series of small and badly lighted anterooms through which he followed Lord Julius—rooms with pallet-beds, clothes hung against the walls, and other somewhat squalid signs of domestic occupation—were full of this curiously distinctive smell. It was not so obvious in the larger and better-lighted chamber beyond, which the doctor in residence had converted to his own uses, and where he sat now reading a book, merely rising momentarily to bow as they passed. But in the next room—the big sleeping apartment, with its faded pretensions of stateliness of appointment, and its huge, high-posted bed, canopied by old curtains embroidered with heraldic devices in tarnished gilt threads—the odor was more powerful than ever, despite the fact that a broad window-door was open upon the balcony beyond. The young man’s keen sense was baffled by this pervasive scent—compounded as it seemed to be of all the ancient castle’s mustiness, of sharp medicinal vapors and of something else at once familiar and unknown. He sniffed inquiringly at it, as they neared the window, and apparently Lord Julius heard him, for he remarked over his shoulder:
“It is the dogs that you smell. They’ve practically removed the kennel up here.”
On the stone floor of the balcony outside there were to be seen, indeed, some dozen old hounds, for the most part lying sleepily in the sunshine, with their heads pointed toward a large, half-covered reclining chair placed near the balustrade, and occasionally opening a drowsy eye to regard its occupant. There were a few dogs of other kinds as well, Christian noted upon a second glance, and one of these, a bulky black creature with a broad snout and hair curled tight like astrakhan fur, sat close to the chair and was thrusting its muzzle against a hand at its side.
This hand was what Christian saw first of his grandfather—an immense limp hand, with thick fingers twisted and misshapen, and skin of an almost greenish pallor. The dog’s nose, thrust under it, moved this inert hand about, and the young man felt himself thrill unpleasantly, for some reason, at the spectacle.
At the further end of the balcony two men in livery lounged against the wall, but upon a signal from Lord Julius they went in. The latter, threading his way among the hounds, led Christian round to the side of the chair.
“This is Ambrose’s boy,” he said, bending a little and raising his voice. “He is Christian, too.”
Upon the chair was stretched, in a halfsitting posture, the gigantic frame of a very old man. The grandson looked upon him in silence for a long time, his mind confused with many impressions. The vast shoulders and high, bullet-like head, propped up by pillows in the partial shadow of the hood, seemed vaguely to recall the vision his baby memory had preserved of his own father. But in detail there was no resemblance. Or yes, there were resemblances, but they were blurred almost beyond recognition by the rough touch of time. The face, with its big, harsh features and bushing brows, and its frame of stiff white whiskers under the jaws and chin, had something in it which for an instant the young man seemed to identify; then the unnatural effect of its uniform yellow-clay color drove all thoughts of its human relationships from his mind, and he saw nothing but a meaningless mask. It was as devoid of significance, indeed, as if it had been in a coffin. The eyes were open and they seemed to be fixed upon the distant rolling prospect of hills and forest, but whether they were seeing anything, Christian could not imagine. They certainly had not been turned to include him in their survey. The livid right hand, swaying as the black dog pushed it with its nose, was the only thing about the duke that moved.
“He does not know I am here,” said Christian, at last. He spoke instinctively, with the ceremonious affectation of awe which one puts on in the presence of death. His grandfather hardly impressed him as being alive and still less made any appeal to his sense of kinship. He had expected to be overwhelmed with emotion at the meeting, but he found himself barely interested. His wandering glance chanced to take note of some of the dogs’ faces about the chair. They were all alertly watching him, and the profoundly wise look in their eyes caught his attention. No doubt they were dreadful fools, if the truth could be known, but the suggestion of cultured sagacity in their gaze was extraordinary. He looked back again at his grandfather, and tried to say to himself that he was a great noble, the head of an ancient and proud line, and the actual father ofhisfather—but the effort failed to spur his fancy. He turned to Lord Julius and lifted his brows in wearied interrogation.
“Move round in front of him,” counseled the other. “Get yourself in the range of his eyes.”
Christian obeyed, and, flushing a little with self-consciousness, strove to intercept the aged man’s gaze. There was no change upon the ashen face under the hood to tell him whether he had succeeded or not. The impulse to grimace, to wave his arms about, to compel attention by any wild and violent device, forced him to smile in the midst of his perplexed constraint. He stared for a few moments longer at the gaunt, immovable figure—then shrugged his shoulders, and, stepping over a dog or two, made bold to rejoin Lord Julius.
“I do not see that it is of any use,” he said, with annoyance. “If you wish to go, I am quite ready.”
Lord Julius lifted his brows in turn, and looked at his grand-nephew with curiosity. “I said nothing about going, that I recall,” he began, with an effect of reproof in his tone. But then he seemed to think better of it, and gave an abrupt little laugh. “It isn’t very invigorating, I’m bound to admit,” he confessed, cheerfully enough. “Wait a moment, and I’ll stir him up a bit.”
He bent forward again, with his head at the edge of the hood, and shouted into it: “If you want to see Ambrose’s boy, here he is! If you don’t want to see him, say so, and waste no more of our time!”
To Christian’s surprise, the duke took instant cognizance of this remark. His large face brightened, or at least altered its aspect, into something like animation; his eyes emerged from their cover of lethargy, and looked alive.
“My back is very bad to-day,” he remarked, in a voice which, though it bore the querulous note of the invalid, was unexpectedly robust in volume. “And I cannot make out whether the numbness is passing down below my knee or not.”
Lord Julius nodded, as if confirming to himself some previous suspicion. “I thought as much,” he commented in an aside to the young man. “It’s merely his endearing little way. Have patience, and we’ll draw the badger yet.”
He bawled once more into the hood, with an added peremptoriness of tone: “I explained it all to you, hours ago, and I’m sure you understand it perfectly. Christian naturally wished to pay his respects to you, but if your back is too bad, why, there’s no more to be said—and we’ll be off. Goodbye to you!”
“Did I know his mother? Who was his mother? I have no recollection of her.” The duke spoke peevishly, twitching his sunken lips in what was plainly an effort to pout them. Christian noted with curiosity that as he surrendered himself to such mental exertion as the talk demanded, the aged man’s face grew disagreeably senile in effect. An infinity of gossamer-like wrinkles showed themselves now, covering the entire countenance in a minute network.
“No, you didn’t know his mother!” replied Lord Julius, with significant curtness. “It is more to the point that you should knowhim, since he is to be your successor. Look at him—and say something to him!”
The duke managed to testify on his stiffened lineaments the reluctance with which he did what he was told, but he shifted his eyes in a sidelong fashion to take a brief survey of the young man. “Cressage could have given you five stone ten,” he said to him, brusquely, and turned his eyes away.
Christian cast a look of bewildered inquiry up at Lord Julius, but encountered only a smile of contemptuous amusement. He summoned the courage to declare, in a voice which he hoped was loud enough: “I am glad to hear, sir, that this is one of your good days. I hope you will have many more of them!”
Of this assurance His Grace seemingly took no note. After a short pause he began speaking again. “There’s a dog up here,” he said, with the gravity befitting a subject to which he had given much thought, “that I’m sure falls asleep, and yelps in her dreams, and disturbs me most damnably, and I believe it’s that old bitch Peggy, and when I mention it the fellows swear that she’s been taken away, but I suspect that she hasn’t.”
“We will look to it,” put in Lord Julius perfunctorily. He added, upon an afterthought, “Did the guns annoy you, this forenoon?”
The duke’s thoughts were upon something else. He turned his eyes again, and apparently spoke to Christian. “A good hearty cut across the face with a whip,” he said, with kindling energy, “is what’d teach-swine like Griffiths their place—and then let ’em summons you and be damned. A farmer who puts up barbed-wire—no gentleman would listen to his evidence for a minute. Treat them like the vermin they are—and they’ll understand that. Cressage had the proper trick with them—a kick in the stomach first and reasons afterward. That’s the only way this country can be hunted. When I got to riding over eighteen stone, and couldn’t take anything, that ruffian Griffiths screwed up his gates and sent me round the turnpike like a damned peddler, and Ambrose—it was Ambrose, wasn’t it?—or am I thinking of Cressage? But they weren’t together—here, Julius! It was you who were speaking of Ambrose! What about him? By God, I wish he had my back!”
Lord Julius, with the smile in his beard hardening toward scorn, took Christian by the arm. “I think you’ve had enough grandfather to go on with,” he said, quietly. “Never mind making your adieux. They would be quite wasted on him.”
Without further words, they turned and moved away through the dogs to the window, and so into the house. The doctor, still at his book, rose once more upon their approach, and this time Lord Julius halted to speak with him.
“His Grace seems to ramble in his mind a good deal more than he did before luncheon. Do you see a change in this respect—say week by week?”
“It is not observable in gradations, Lord Julius,” answered the physician, a stout, sandy young man, who assumed his air of deference with considerable awkwardness; “sometimes he recovers a very decided lucidity after what had seemed to be a prolonged lapse in the other direction. But on the whole I should say there was a perceptible—well, loss of faculty. He knows the dogs, however, quite as well as ever—distinguishes them apparently by touch, remembers all their names, and recalls anecdotes about them, and, very often, about their mothers too. Fletcher tells me His Grace hasn’t once miscalled a hound.”
“They make an abominable atmosphere up here,” commented the other.
The doctor smiled lugubriously. “I can’t deny that, Lord Julius,” he replied, “but all the same they are the most important part of the treatment. If we took them away, His Grace would die within the week.”
“Unhappy dogs!” mused Lord Julius, partly to himself, and walked on. It was not until they were half-way down the big staircase that Christian felt impelled to speak.
“I should much like to know,” he began, with diffident eagerness—“you have already spoken so plainly about my grandfather—the question will not seem rude to him, I hope—but when he was well, before the paralysis, was he in any respect like what he is now?”
“I should say,” answered Lord Julius, in a reflective way, “that he is at present rather less objectionable than formerly. One can make the excuse of illness for him now—and that covers a multitude of sins. But when he was in health—and he had the superb—what shall I say?—riotous health of a whale—he was very hard to bear. You have seen him and you have observed his mental and moral elevation. He remembers his dogs more distinctly than he does his children. In the Almanach de Gotha he is classed among princes, but what he dwells upon most fondly among his public duties is the kicking of tenant-farmers in the stomach when they try to save their crops from being ruined by the hunt. I may tell you, I was in two minds about taking you to him at all, and now I think I regret having done so.”
“No-o,” said Christian, thoughtfully. “It is better as it is. I am glad to have seen him, and to have you tell me about him, frankly, as you have done. It all helps me to understand the position—and it seems that there is a great deal that needs to be understood. I can see already that there is strange blood in the Torrs.” He paused on the bottom step as he spoke, and turned to his companion with a wistful smile. “There is an even bolder question I should like to ask—how does it happen thatyouare so different? How do you account for yourself?”
Lord Julius laughed. “Oh, that is a long story,” he said, “but I can put it into a word for you. I was made by my wife. I married a woman so noble and clever and wise and strong that I couldn’t help becoming a decent sort of fellow in spite of myself. But I am going to talk to you about all that, later on. It is better worth talking about than anything else under the sun. Oh—Barlow, please!”
The old butler had passed from one door to another in the hall, and turned now as he was called, with a hand behind him upon the knob. Lord Julius, approaching, exchanged some words with him upon the subject of his afternoon’s plans.
Christian, watching this venerable servant with curiosity, as a type novel to his experience, discovered suddenly that his scrutiny was being returned. Barlow, while listening attentively and with decorously slow nods of comprehension to what was being said to him, had his eyes fixed aslant, beyond his interlocutor’s shoulder, upon the young stranger. Christian encountered this gaze, and saw it waver and flutter aside, as from force of polite habit, and then creep back again. This happened more than once, and Christian began to feel that it had some meaning. He observed that the butler inclined his head at last and whispered something—his pale, wan old face showed it to be an inquiry—into the other’s ear. The action explained itself so perfectly that Christian was in no way surprised to see Lord Julius turn smilingly, and nod toward himself.
“Yes, he is Ambrose’s son,” he said. “He has come to take his place. I know you for one won’t be sorry—eh, Barlow?”
It was clear to the young man’s perceptions that Lord Julius spoke as to one who was a friend as well as a servant. The note of patriarchal kindness in the tone appealed gratefully to him, and the affectionate mention of his father’s name was sweet in his ears. A strange thrill of emotion, a kind of aimless yet profound yearning, possessed him as he moved forward. On the instant he realized that this was how he had expected to feel in the presence of his grandfather. The fact that the tenderness within him was appealed to instead by this gentle, sad-eyed old family dependant seemed to him to have something beautiful and very touching in it. Tears came into his eyes.
“You remember my father, then,” he said, and the breaking of his voice carried him into the heart of this sudden new mood of self-abandonment. “You would have known him as a little child—yes?—and you—you—” he paused, to dash away the tears with his hand, and strive to regain some control over his facial muscles—“you will have in your memory the good things about him—the boyish, pleasant things—and you loved him for them, did you not?”
Old Barlow, trembling greatly, and with a faint flush upon his white cheeks, stared confusedly at the young man as he advanced. “I held him on his first pony, sir,” he stammered forth, and then shook his head in token that he could utter no more. His glistening eyes said the rest.
Christian flung his arms round the surprised old man’s neck, and kissed him on both cheeks, and then, with head bowed upon his shoulder, sobbed aloud.
The music of a spirited and tireless band of robins helped Christian to wake next morning. The character of their cheerful racket defined itself very slowly to his drowsy consciousness. He lay for a long time with closed eyes, listening to it, and letting his mind drift quite at random among the thoughts which it suggested. He knew they were robins because his hostess had said he would hear them; he lazily pictured to himself the tiny red-breasts gathered in the shrubbery outside, in obedience to some mysterious signal of hers, and singing to order thus briskly and unwearyingly to make good her promise.
In what gay, high spirits the little fellow sang! The sun must be shining, to account for so much happiness. He accepted the idea with a sense of profound pleasure, and appropriated it to his own wonderful case.
For him, it was as if happiness had never existed before.
“‘Wilt thou have music? Hark! Apollo plays,
And twenty cagéd nightingales do sing.’”
He murmured the lines in indolent reverie, then opened his eyes, and smiled to think where he was, and what he had become a part of. Lifting himself on his elbow, he looked about him. The beauties of the apartment had not been lost upon him the previous evening. He had carried them with him in vague processional magnificence on his devious march through dreamland; he surveyed them again now in the morning light, rising after a while to pull aside the curtains, and bring in the full sunshine.
The room was, he said over and over to himself, ‘the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. The ruling color was of some blue which could almost be thought a green, and which, embraced as complementary decoration many shades of ocher and soft yellowish browns in woodwork, and in the thick, fleecy rugs underfoot. Around the four sides, at the level of his eyes, ran a continuous band of portraits—the English drawings of Holbein reproduced in the dominant tint of the room, set solidly into the wall, and separated from one another only by thin strips of the same tawny oak which framed them at top and bottom. The hooded, high-bosomed ladies, the cavaliers in hats and plumes and pointed beards, the smoothfaced, shrewd-eyed prelates and statesmen in their caps and fur, all knew him this morning for one of their own, as he went along, still in his nightshirt, and inspected them afresh. They appeared to greet him, and he beamed at them in response.
A dim impression of the earlier morning, which had seemed a shadowy passing phase of his dreams, revealed itself now to him as a substantial fact. Some onehadbeen in the room, moving noiselessly about, and had spread forth for his use a great variety of articles of clothing and of the toilet, most of which he beheld for the first time. Overnight, his cousin Emanuel’s insistence upon his regarding everything in the house as his own for the time being, had had no definite significance to his mind. He looked now through the array of silks and fine cloths, of trinkets in ivory and silver and polished metals, and began dressing himself with a long sigh of delight.
Recollections of the leave-taking at Caermere straggled into his thoughts as he pursued the task. He had seen Lady Cressage again in the conservatory, where she wore another dress, and had her beautiful hair carefully arranged as if in his honor, and poured out tea for him and Lord Julius in wonderful little cups which his great-grandfather, a sailor, had brought from China. Of her conversation he recalled little, and still less of the talk of the other lady, the actress-person, Mrs. Edward, who had joined the party, but whose composed pretty face had been too obviously a mask for anguish not to dampen everybody’s spirits. He wondered now, as he plied his razor on the strap, what had become of her husband, and of that poor-spirited brother of his. Had they joined the pheasant-shooters, after their interview with him? The temptation to fire upon themselves instead of the birds must have sorely beset them.
But it was pleasanter to begin the retrospect some hours later, when the rough country of the Marches, and even Bristol, had been left behind. Lord Julius had explained to him then, as darkness settled upon the low, pasture-land levels they were swinging along past, that Somerset was also a county of the Torrs; two of their three titles were derived from it, indeed, and Somerset marriages had brought into the family, in the days following the downfall of the monasteries, some of the most important of its estates. If the dukes had turned their backs on Caermere two centuries ago, and made their principal seat here in this gentler and more equable land, perhaps the family history might have been different. Christian had absorbed the spirit rather than the letter of his companion’s remarks. English counties were all one to him, but intuitively he had felt that he was getting into a kindlier and more congenial atmosphere. Although it was a black night, he had stared a good deal at the window, trying to discern some tokens of this change in the dimly lighted, empty stations they glided through, or paused reluctantly in.
When they had finally quitted the train at Bridgewater, and had got under way inside the carriage waiting for them there, Christian had asked whether it was not true that the railway servants here were more courteously obliging than they had been in other parts.
Lord Julius had lightly remarked that it might be so; very likely, however, it was some indirect effect of the general psychical change the family underwent in shifting its territorial base. Then he had gone on more gravely, alluding for the first time to the episode of the butler.
“You must be prepared to find everything very different, here,” he had said. “There is such a thing as having too much past—especially when it is of the wrong sort. Caermere is as tenacious of its memories as a prison—and they are as unpleasant. It forces upon you its air of never forgetting a single one of its miseries and injuries—and you feel that it cannot remember any compensating joys. I could see how the effect of it got into your blood, and broke your nerve. Under ordinary circumstances men do not kiss their butlers, or even sob on their bosoms. But I understood perfectly how old Barlow appealed to you. As you beheld him he might have stood as model for a statue of the Family Grief, choking down its yearning to wail over the generations gone to the bad. It was all right, what you did. For that matter, I was precious near raising a howl of lamentation myself. One is always alternating between tears and curses in that criminal old coalmine of a castle. But now you are over a hundred miles away from it all—and if it was a thousand the difference couldn’t be greater. You will find nothing whatever to cry about down here. Nobody has any bad dreams. There isn’t a cupboard that ever sheltered a skeleton even overnight. In these parts, remarkable as it may seem, the Torrs are actually regarded with admiration—quite the salt of the earth—a trifle eccentric, perhaps, but splendid landlords, capable organizers, uncommonly good masters—and above all, happy people who insist that everybody about them shall be happy too. It was important to show you the other side first—at least that was what we decided upon, but you are done with that now—and we’ll give you something to take the taste out of your mouth.”
Christian recalled these assurances, now, with a delicious sense of being already enfolded and upheld by the processes of their fulfillment. The details of his reception at the broad, hospitably lighted door of Emanuel’s house crowded in upon his memory, and merged themselves with other recollections of the later evening hours—the supper, the long, calm, sweetly intimate talk before the fire, the honest, wise, frankly affectionate faces into which he had looked to say “good-night”—it almost overwhelmed him with its weight of unimagined happiness. He had hardly guessed before what other men might mean when they gave a loving sound to the word “home.” Yet now the doors of such a home as he could never have dreamed of had opened to him—to him, the homeless, lonely one! and he was nestled securely in the warm heart of its welcome. He could have groaned aloud under the burden of his rapture at the thought.
At last he went downstairs, his misgivings about the hour not quite allayed by recollection of the parting injunction to sleep his fill and get up when he liked. There were beautiful things to note and linger over on every side as he made his way—pictures and armor and wonderful inlaid work and tapestries, all subordinating themselves with distinguished good breeding to the fact that they were in a home and not a museum—but he moved along in rather conscience-stricken haste toward the part of the house which had seemed to him the previous night to be the center of domestic life. He formed a sudden resolution, as he explored the lower hallway, that when he got some money his first purchase should be of a watch.
After looking into a couple of rooms which were clearly not what he sought, Christian opened the right door, and confronted a breakfast-table, shining in its snowy attractiveness midway between a window full of sunlight and a brightly tiled chimney-place, with a fire on the hearth. There was no one in the room, and he stood for some minutes looking about him, liking very much the fresh, light-hued cheerfulness of everything, but still wishing that some one would come to pour his coffee. By degrees, he assimilated the idea that the ingredients of breakfast were all here to hand. There were dishes beside the fire, and this was apparently the coffee-pot on the table—a covered urn, with a thin spirit-flame trembling beneath it. He had reached the point of deciding to help himself—or should he ring the bell instead?—when the door opened and the lady of the house came bustling in.
Mrs. Emanuel, as he styled her in his thoughts, looked the very spirit of breakfast—buoyant, gay-hearted and full of the zest of life. Last night, to the young man’s diffident though strenuous inspection, she had seemed the embodiment of tender hospitality in general. Though his glances were more confident now, in the brilliant morning light, she still gave the impression of personifying the influences which she made felt about her, rather than exhibiting a specific personal image. She was not tall, nor yet short; her face pleased the eye without suggesting prettiness; she had the dark, clear skin and rounded substance of figure which the mind associates with sedate movements and even languor, but she herself moved, thought, spoke with alert vivacity. Above all things, a mellow motherliness in her had struck the forlorn youth the previous evening. Now it seemed much more like the sweet playfulness of a fond elder sister.
“You took me at my word; that’s right,” she said to him, as they shook hands. “I was afraid the man might disturb you, or give you the idea you were expected to get up. And do you feel perfectly rested now? A day or two more will do it, at all events. If I’d known how they were dragging you about, by night and by day! But your Uncle Julius has no knowledge of even the meaning of the word fatigue. Sit here, won’t you—and now here’s bacon for you, and here’s fish taken this very morning, and eggs I’ll ring for to be done as you like them, and how much sugar to your coffee? You mustn’t think this has been boiling ever since morning. It was made when you were heard moving about in your room.”
“I should be so sorry to have kept anybody waiting,” he began, in shy comment upon the discovery that he was eating alone.
She laughed at him with cordial frankness. “Waiting?” she echoed merrily. “Why, it’s about three o’clock. Lord Julius is nearly in London by this time, and the rest of us have not only breakfasted, but lunched.”
“Lord Julius gone?” he asked with wide-open eyes.
She nodded, and raised a reassuring hand. “It’s nothing but business. Telegrams came early this morning which took him away by the first train. He would have gone later in the day in any case. He left the most fatherly adieux for you—and of course you’ll be seeing him soon in London.”
Christian was puzzled. “But this is his home here, is it not?” he asked.
“Not at all—more’s the pity,” she replied. “We wish for nothing so much as that he might make it so—but he elects instead to be the slave of the family, and to work like a bank-clerk in Brighton instead of cutting himself free and living his own life like the rest of us, in God’s fresh air. But he comes often to us—whenever the rural mood seizes him.” She seemed to comprehend the doubtful expression on the youth’s face, for she added smilingly: “And you mustn’t be frightened to be left alone with us. You’re as much our blood as you are his—and—”
“Oh, don’t think that!” he pleaded impulsively. “I was never so glad to be anywhere in my life as I am to be here.”
Her gray eyes regarded him with kindly softness. He saw that they were only in part gray eyes—that they were both blues and browns in their beautiful coloring, and that the outer edge of the iris deepened in tint almost to the black of the splendid lashes. He returned her look, and held it with a tentative smile, that he might the longer observe the remarkable eyes. All at once it flashed upon him that there was a resemblance.
“Your eyes are like my mother’s,” he said, as if in defensive explanation of his scrutiny.
“Tell me about your mother,” she rejoined, putting her arms on the table and resting her chin upon a finger. “I do not think I ever heard her name.”
“It was Coppinger—Mary Coppinger. I never saw the name anywhere else.” He added hesitatingly: “My brother told me that her father was a soldier—an officer—who became in his old age very poor, and was at last a gardener for some rich man at Malta, and my mother gave lessons as a governess to support herself, and it was there she met my father.”
The lady seemed most interested in the name. “Coppinger, is it!” she exclaimed, nodding her head at him. “No wonder my heart warmed at the sight of you. Why, now, to look at you—of course you’re County Cork. You’re our slender dark type to perfection.”
“I am afraid I do not understand,” he murmured.
“Why, she could not have that name and be anything but a County Cork woman. Who ever heard of a Coppinger anywhere else? Only it is pronounced with a soft ‘g,’ not hard, as you speak it. I wonder—but that can wait; her father will be easily enough traced. And so you are an Irishman, too!”
Christian looked abashed at the confusing suggestion. “I think I am all English,” he said vaguely.
She laughed again. “Are you turning your back on us? Did you not know it? I also am Irish. No doubt I am some sort of cousin of yours on my own account, as well as on Emanuel’s. There are Coppingers in my own family, and in most of those that we have intermarried with. Your mother was a Protestant, of course.”
He shook his head apprehensively, as if fearful that his answer must give pain. “No, she went to mass like other people, and I was sent to the Brothers of the Christian School. But she was not in any degree adévotée, and for that matter,” he added in a more confident tone, “I myself am still lessdévot.”
“Ah!” was her only comment, and he quite failed to gather from it any clue to her sentiments on the subject. “Well,” she began again, “I’ll not put you through any more of your catechism now. Are you finished? Then come with me and we will find Emanuel, and incidentally you will see the place—or portions of it. It will take you a long time to see it all. Do you want to smoke? Put some of these cigars in your pocket—or here are cigarettes if you prefer them. Oh, we smoke everywhere. There is nothing on earth that we want to do that we don’t do—and there’s nothing we don’t want to do that any mortal power can make us do. There you have the sum of our philosophy.”
He had followed her into the hallway, where the doors were open wide to the mellow autumn afternoon. He put on the soft shapeless hat she gave him from a collection on the antlers, and was inspired to select a stick for himself out of the big standful at the door.
“Now I shall walk about,” he said, gaily, “quite as if I had never been out of England in my life. Is your husband—perhaps-shooting?”
She seemed always to laugh at him. Her visible merriment at his question dashed his spirits for an instant. Then he saw how genial and honest was her mirth, and smiled himself in spontaneous sympathy with it.
“Don’t dream of suggesting it to him!” she adjured the young man, with mock solemnity. “He has a horror of the idea of killing living creatures. He does not even fish for sport—though I confess I hardly follow him to that length. And don’t speak of him in that roundabout way, but call him Emanuel, and call me Kathleen or Kit—whichever comes easiest. Merely because Thom’s directory swears we’re forty years old, we’re not to be made venerable people by you. All happy folk belong to the same generation, no matter when they were born—and—but here is Emanuel now.
“I have been telling Christian,” she continued, addressing her husband as he paused at the foot of the steps, “that he is to be happy here, even in spite of himself.”
Emanuel shook hands with his cousin, and nodded pleased approval of his wife’s remark. His smile, however, was of a fleeting sort. “Nothing has come of the Onothera experiments,” he announced to her in a serious tone. “I’m afraid we must give up the idea of the yellow fuchsia.”
Emanuel Torr, at the age of forty, was felt by those who knew and loved him almost to have justified the very highest of the high hopes which his youth had encouraged. This intimate circle of appreciation was rendered a small one by the circumstances of his temperament and choice of career; but beyond this his name was familiar to many who had never seen him, or who remembered him at best as a stripling, yet who habitually thought and spoke of him as an example and model to his generation.
At Oxford, twenty years before, he had attracted attention of a sort rather peculiar to himself. Those who took note of him saw foreshadowed the promise, not so much of great achievements as of the development and consolidation of a great influence. He was not specially distinguished in his work at the University, and he made no mark at the Union, where there happened at the time to be glittering a quite exceptional galaxy of future front bench men, judges and bishops. In Emanuel’s case, the interest he aroused was perhaps more sentimental than intellectual. His mind was seen to be of a fine order, but his character was even more attractive to the observant eye. The facts that he was half Jewish in blood, and that in time he would be the possessor of enormous wealth, no doubt lent an added suggestion of romance to the picture of delicate, somewhat coldly modeled features, of ivory skin and serious, musing dark eyes, and of a rare smile of wonderful sweetness, which Oxford men of the mid-seventies still associate with his name. It was in the days when Disraeli’s remarkable individuality was a part of England’s current history, and when the English imagination, in part from the stimulus of this fact, dwelt upon the possibilities of a new Semitic wave of inspiration and ethical impetus. The dreams, the aspirations, the mysterious “perhaps” of Daniel Deronda were in men’s minds, and Johannesburg had not been so much as heard of.
What the University recognized in the youth standing upon the threshold of manhood, had been an article of faith within his home since his childhood. It is as well to recount at this place the brief story of that home.
At the age of twenty-five Lord Julius Torr, engaged in the listless pursuit of that least elusive of careers, called diplomacy, found himself at The Hague, and yawned his way about its brightly scrubbed solitudes for some months, until, upon the eve of his resolve to have done with the whole business, and buy a commission in a line regiment, he encountered a young woman who profoundly altered all his plans in life. It was by the merest and unlikeliest of accidents that he came to know the Ascarels, father and daughter, and at the outset his condescension had seemed to him to be involved as well. They were of an old family in the Netherlands, Jewish in race but now for some generations estranged from, the synagogue, and reputed to be extraordinarily wealthy. It was said of them too that they were sternly exclusive, but to the brother of an English duke this had not appeared to possess much meaning. He had previously been of some official service to the father, in a matter wherein Dutch and English interests touched each other at Sumatra; from this he came to meet the daughter. He had been told by the proud father that she was of the blood of the immortal Spinoza, and had been so little impressed that he had not gone to the trouble of finding out who Spinoza was.
The marriage of young Torr, of the Foreign Office, to some Dutch-Jewish heiress a half-year later, received only a trifle more notice in England than did the news of his retirement from his country’s diplomatic service. The duke had already four sons, and the brother, when it seemed that he intended to live abroad, was not at all missed. Nearly fifteen years elapsed before a mature Lord Julius reappeared in England—a Lord Julius whom scarcely any one found recognizable. He bore small visible relation to the aimless and indolent young attaché whom people, by an effort of memory, were able to recall; still less did he resemble anything else that the Torr family, within recollection, had produced. He took a big old house in Russell Square, and in time it became understood that very learned and intellectual people paid pilgrimages thither to sit at the feet of Lady Julius, and learn of her. Smart London rarely saw this Lady Julius save at a distance—in her carriage or at the opera. The impression it preserved of her was of a short, swarthy woman, increasingly stout as years went on, who peered with near-sighted earnestness through a large pince-nez of unusual form. On her side, it seemed doubtful if she had formed even so succinct an impression as this of smart London. She was content with Bloomsbury to the end of her days; and made no effort whatever to establish relations with the West End. Indeed, tales came to be told of the effectual resistance she offered, in later years, to amiable interested advances from that quarter. It grew to be believed that she had made an eccentric will, and would leave untold millions to Atheist charities. The rumor that she was among the most highly cultivated women of her time, and that the most illustrious scientists and thinkers would quit the society of kings to travel post-haste across Europe at her bidding, did not, it must regretfully be added, seem incompatible with this theory about a crazy will. Finally, when she died in 1885, something was printed by the papers about her philanthropy, and much was said in private speculation about her disposition of her vast fortune, but it did not come out that any will whatever was proved, and London ceased to think of the matter.
The outer world had in truth been wrong from the beginning. Lady Julius was not a deeply learned woman, and the limited circle of friends she gathered about her contained hardly one distinguished figure, in the popular use of the phrase; her opinions were not notably advanced or unconventional; she did not shun society upon philosophic principles, but merely because it failed to attract a nature at once shy and practical; so far from being rich in her own right, she had insisted many years before her death upon transferring every penny of her fortune to her husband.
Inside her own household, this dark, stout little woman with the eye-glasses was revered as a kind of angel. She was plainfaced almost to ugliness in the eyes of strangers. Her husband and her son never doubted that she was beautiful. Now, when she had been a memory for ten years and more, these two talked of her lovingly and with no constraint of gloom, as if she were still the pivot round which their daily life turned.
The elder man particularly delighted in dwelling upon the details of that earlier change in him, under her influence, to which allusion has been made. Emanuel had in his mind, from boyhood, no vision more distinct or familiar than this selfpainted picture of his father—the idle, indifferent, unschooled, paltry-ideaed young gentleman of fashion—meeting all unawares this overpowering new force, and kneeling in awed yet rapturous submission before it. To the boy’s imagination it became a historical scene, as fixed and well known in its lines of composition as that of Nelson’s death in the cockpit. He saw his beardless father in dandified clothes of the Corn-Laws-caricature period, proceeding along the primrose path of dalliance, like some flippant new Laodicean type of Saul of Tarsus—when “suddenly there shined around him a light from heaven.” Lord Julius, indeed, thought and spoke of it in much that same spirit. The recollection that he had not known who Spinoza was tenderly amused him: it was the symbol of his vast oceanic ignorance of all things worth knowing.
“Ah, yes,” the son used to say, “but if you had not had within yourself all the right feelings—only lacking the flash to bring them out—you would not have seen how wonderful she was. You would not have understood at all, but just passed on, and nothing would have happened.”
And the father, smiling in reverie, and stroking his great beard, would answer: “I don’t see that that follows. I remember what I was like quite vividly, and really there was nothing in me to explain the thing at all. I was a young blood about town, positively nothing more. No, Emanuel, we may say what we like, but there are things supernatural—that is, beyond what we can see, and are prepared for, in nature. It was as unaccountable as magic, the effect your mother produced upon me from the beginning. At the end of a few hours, when it was time for me to take my leave, and I turned—there was a gulf in front of me, cutting me off from where I had been before I came to her, that very day. It was so wide, it seemed that I could barely see across it.”
To any listener but Emanuel such language must have been extravagant. To him there were no words for overpraise of his mother. It was not alone that he had never seen her in anger or even vexation; that he had never known her to be in error in any judgment, or suspected in her an uncharitable or unkindly thought. These were mere negations, and the memory of her was full of positive influences, all wise and pure and lofty. Very early in life, when he began to look about the world he found himself in, he learned to marvel that there were no other such women anywhere to be seen. She had been so perfect, with seemingly no effort to herself! Why should other women not even try?
Emanuel had been born some ten years after the marriage of his parents, and they thus came into his baby consciousness as persons of middle age, in appearance and its suggested authority at least, by comparison with the parents of other children he saw about him. Nowhere else, however, either then or in later years, did he see another home so filled from center to circumference with love, and tender gentleness of eye and word and deed. The perception that this environment was unique colored all his boyhood. It became a habit with him to set in contrast his own charmed existence against the unconsidered and uneven experiences of other children, and to ponder the meaning of the difference. As he grew up, the importance of this question expanded in his mind and took possession of it. He was consumed with the longing to make some effective protest against the peevish folly with which humanity mismanaged its brief innings of life. From the cradle to the grave the race swarmed stupidly along, elbowing and jostling in an aimless bustle, hot and ill-tempered through exertions which had no purpose; trampling down all weaker than themselves and cursing those who, in turn, had the strength to push them under; coming wearily at the end to the gate and the outer darkness of extinction, a futile and disappointed mob—having seen nothing, comprehended nothing, profited nothing.
The progress of a generation across the span of life might be made so serene and well-ordered and fruitful an affair! What else had man to concern himself about than this one thing—that “peace on earth, good will to men,” should rule in his time? And how was it that this alone, of all possible problems, received from him no attention at all?
The impulse toward a mission was discernible in the lad; it altogether dominated the young man. His parents, regarding him lovingly and yet with wise inquiry, were fascinated by what they saw. A sense of lofty responsibility in their trusteeship for this beneficent new force formed a fresh bond between them, which grew to absorb within itself all their other ties. They came to regard themselves in no other light than as the parents of Emanuel. To preserve him from vitiating and stunting suggestions; richly to nourish, yet with an anxious avoidance of surfeit, both the soul and the mind within him; to give him strength and means and single-hearted courage adequate to the task he yearned to undertake—they asked nothing better of life than this.
After Oxford, he went abroad for a couple of years, having as a companion a young Fellow of Swithin’s, a trifle older than himself, who shared his moral attitude if not his passionate aspirations. He saw many parts of the world, and scrutinized closely in each the working of those portions of the social mechanism which interested him. Returning with a mass of notes and a mind packed with impressions and theories, he set to work to write a big book. At the end of a year he produced instead a small volume, dealing with one little phase of the huge, complex theme he had at heart. It was a treatise on the relations between parents and children, and it received very favorable reviews indeed. University men felt that it was what they had had the foresight to expect from this serious and high-minded young fellow, who was lucky enough to have the means and leisure for ethical essay-writing. Evidently he was going in for that sort of thing, and they noted with approbation that he had been at great pains with his style. Much to Emanuel’s surprise, only some three hundred copies of the work were sold; upon reflection, he saw that it was no part of his plan to sell books, and he forthwith distributed the remainder of the edition, and another edition as well, among the libraries of the Three Kingdoms. Within the next three years two other brochures went through much the same experiences. They treated respectively of primary education and of public amusements. Again the reviews were extremely cordial; again the men who had always predicted that Torr would do something regarded their prophetic intuition with refreshed complacency; again Emanuel drew considerable checks in favor of his publisher. What had been hinted at rather vaguely heretofore was now, however, announced with confidence in “literary” columns: these small volumes were merely chapters of a vast and comprehensive work to which the author had dedicated his life—the laborious exposition of a whole new philosophy of existence, to be as complete in its way as Herbert Spencer’s noble survey of mankind.
Not long after came the death of Emanuel’s mother—an unlooked-for event which altered everything in the world to the bereaved couple left behind. They went away together in the following month, with a plan of a prolonged tour in the Orient, but came back to England after a few weeks’ absence, having found their proposed distraction intolerable. Lord Julius promptly invented for his own relief the device of taking over upon himself the drudgery of caring for his millions, which heretofore had been divided among a banker, a broker, a solicitor and two secretaries. Emanuel saw his way less directly, but at last he found the will to begin a tentative experiment with some of his theories of life on a Somersetshire farm which his father gave him. The work speedily engrossed him, and expanded under his hands. He became conscious of growth within himself as well. The conviction that life is a thing not to be written about, but to be lived, formulated itself in his mind, and he elaborated this new view in an argument which persuaded his father. The Somersetshire estates of the family, which had been bought by Lord Julius in 1859, when the duke and his son Porlock joined to set aside the entail, were placed now unreservedly at Emanuel’s disposal. What he did with them is to be seen later on.
At the moment, it was of the first importance that he should decide for himself the great question of celibacy v. marriage. The far-reaching projects which possessed his brain would, beyond doubt, be multiplied infinitely in value if precisely the right woman were brought in to share his enthusiasm and devotion. It was no whit less clear that they would dwindle into failure and collapse under the blight of the wrong woman. The dimensions of the risk so impressed him, as he studied them, that for more than two years he believed himself to be irrevocably committed to the cold middle course of bachelorhood.
Then, by a remarkable stroke of good fortune, he met, fell in love with and married the sister of Lord Rosbrin, a young Irish peer whom he had known at Oxford. No one has ever doubted, he least of all, that she was the right woman.
He wrote no more books, in the years following this event, but gradually he became the cause of writing in others. A review article upon the character and aims of his experiment in Somersetshire, written in an appreciative spirit by an economist of position, attracted so much attention that the intrusion of curious strangers and inquisitive reporters threatened to be a nuisance. After this, his name was always mentioned as that of an authority, when sociological problems were discussed. There was even a certain flurry of inquiry for his books, though this did not turn out to have warranted the printing of the new popular edition. Sundry precepts in them became, however, the stock phrases of leader-writers. People of culture grew convinced that they were familiar with his works, and only a few months before the period at which we meet him, his university had conferred upon him an honorary D.C.L., which gratified him more deeply than any other recognition his labors and attainments had ever received.