CHAPTER XVII
Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was a large, short woman, genial and comfortable, always anxious to give pleasure and make herself popular. Her husband had made a great deal of money some years since in ways that were characterized by his friends as energetic, and by his enemies as shady. However, nothing very definite had ever been said against him, so that the charitable could avail themselves, uncontaminated, of his wealth, and make a merit of their willingness to tolerate its owner. In himself, he was a quiet and obscure littleman, who left the ordering of daily existence entirely in the hands of his wife; and she, without vulgarity or snobbishness, had a passion for being liked, for being surrounded by pleased, approving people. In the neighbourhood of Brakelond she had already achieved general favour; she was everywhere hailed as a ‘dear good woman’; the lavish appointments of the house, the excellence of the cook and cellar, accomplished only less than her own real kindliness, and the surrounding families all ended by accepting the new-comer with a good grace, until at last only Brakelond held itself aloof. And now even Brakelond was about to surrender. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright, however devoid of sycophantic feelings, could not but feel that the occasion was a great one. Lady Gundred Darnley, virtual Duchess of March and Brakelond, was very much the sovereign of the county, no less by position than by choice, and her first ceremonial appearance at the Hoope-Arkwright’s board was beyond question an event of the highest importance. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright had ordered her best dinner, donned her best gown and her heartiest smile; she was genuinely happy, and meant that the festival should be a complete success. Gundred, at this moment driving towards the house in a blessed glow of conscious benevolence, could not feel the favour of her visit more than did Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright.
‘Joe dear,’ said the gratified hostess to her husband, as they stood together in the empty drawing-room before the arrival of their guests—‘Joe dear, you will take Lady Gundred, of course. Remember what an interest she has in the schools and Church bazaars. And don’t talk about the Duke, whatever you do. She does not like it. There is nothing—well, positively wrong with the poor Duke, but still, one says as little about him as one can.’
Mr. Hoope-Arkwright promised obedience. His wife looked around her with complacency, surveying all the rich perfections of the room. ‘I do think she will find the place improved,’ she remarked.
The Hoope-Arkwrights’ treatment of the old house that they had bought from the ruined Restormels had been drastic, though reverent. They had altered everything, and sternly pretended to have altered nothing, after the habit of new-comers who have passed from the first crude stage, of destruction, unto the second crude stage, of imitation. All the old quaintnesses and beauties had been left, but they had all been elaborated, done up, polished, painted, exaggerated, until they hardly knew themselves, and wore the uneasy look of things that had been put up yesterday for effect. The old house was now like the stage-setting of an old house; everything wore the painful flamboyancy, the assertive archaism of the theatre, neat, shining, obtrusive as a new pin. The armoured figures on the stairs and in the long oaken hall now carried electric lamps in their mailed fists, and this combination of practical modern contrivance with respect for antiquity was not only typical of all the other improvements but also a ceaseless matter of pride to the new owners of Restormel. Their complacence and their contrivance were equally characteristic. The same spirit pervaded the house and made it spick and span, bristling with expensive conveniences from attic to cellar. The long parlour in which Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright now stood in expectation of her guests was a great low room panelled in oak, with leaded casements of dim glass. At least, this is what it had been. Now it had Art-Nouveau windows with cushioned seats, and a broad white cornice, behind whose rim lurked electric lights in plutocratic abundance, shedding a pale, diffused glare, as of a ghostly day. Thescene they shone on was no longer ancient, but ‘antique.’
Everything was overdone; everything was in that strenuous good taste which is the worst taste of all. The oaken settles, so carved, so polished, were blatantly unconvincing in their very eagerness to convince; oaken tables here and there carried silver photograph-frames and silver bowls of roses. In their devout attempt to preserve inviolate the antiquity of the house, the Hoope-Arkwrights had scorned the introduction of a carpet, and the expanse of the floor was now an artificial skating-rink of parquet, so new and glossy that it might have served as a mirror, over whose surface were scattered a few desolate islets of rug that slid treacherously away beneath unwary feet, carrying their victim in a helpless slide across the room. Under the tables sat monstrous great green china cats, painted all over with little roses in patterns and ribbons. Their emerald eyes of glass glared grimly forth from each lair, and their presence added a neat note of modern art to the pristine simplicity of the other decorations.
As Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright gazed approvingly around, the door opened, and two young men came in. One was short and pleasant and plump—clearly the son of the house; the other was slender, tall, and dark, of remarkable beauty, both of feature and build. His hostess welcomed him warmly.
‘I do hope you are not tired after that long walk, Mr. Restormel,’ she said; ‘I am sure you will be glad of your dinner. The air does give one an appetite, doesn’t it? I have only walked as far as the garden to-day, but I declare I feel as famished as a wolf.’
The kind lady screwed up her comfortable features into fanciful imitation of a famished wolf. The young man smiled.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t often get tired with walking. And then think what I had to look forward to at the end of it.’
Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright looked conscious for a moment.
‘Ah yes,’ she replied with some feeling. ‘I am afraid we are dreadfully thoughtless, Mr. Restormel. It must be dreadful for you to come back here and find a lot of new people kicking about in your own house, as it were; I do hope you’ll try not to think about it. When Jack told me how he had met you at Oxford, and who you were, and all about you, I declare I felt quite shy and uncomfortable at the thought of asking you to pay us a visit. And to arrive just to-night, too, when we have got a sort of little dinner-party too. I am sure you must find it very trying.’
The handsome boy smiled down at her again. She was evidently in anxiety that he should be happy and set at his ease, though her methods lacked subtlety. He accepted her sympathy, but diverted her conversation.
‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘we come and go, all of us, and it never does to bother about what one cannot help. Anyhow, I am sure Restormel never had jollier, kinder people in it than it has now. Tell me, Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright, who is coming to dinner to-night?’
‘What, has not Jack told you?’ cried the hostess, with a little inflection of pride, turning to her son. ‘Well, there are Sir Nigel Pope and his new second wife, and the Martin Massingers with two sisters, and the Archdeacon and Mrs. Widge, who are staying with them, and the Lemmingtons, and the Goddards, and the Pooles—yes, and the Darnleys—from Brakelond, you know, Lady Gundred and her husband.’
‘Oh, Lady Gundred. Of course I have heard allabout them. My mother used to see a good deal of her at one time, before the place was sold.’
‘Oh yes, how stupid I am! I am always forgetting that you know all the people about far better than we do, though only by hearsay, most of them. Yes, of course you know about dear Lady Gundred. You will be next her at dinner, on the other side from my husband. What a comfort! You will be able to talk to her about old times. I am afraid you will be in starvation corner, by the way, Mr. Restormel, but I thought—even before I remembered that you knew her—that you would not mind that if you were next to dear Lady Gundred.’
‘You must remember,’ answered young Restormel, ‘that the place was sold when I was only six months old, so I cannot feel that I have any very intimate acquaintance with Lady Gundred. Tell me some more about her; what is she like?’
‘The sweetest and best of women, Mr. Restormel. And so pretty. Quite extraordinary, for she must be—what?—well over thirty, certainly, and yet she looks quite like a young girl still. Fair, you know, with a delightful complexion and lovely golden hair, and that kind of beautiful little figure which never alters. Yes, she must certainly be over thirty. She has got a son who can’t be less than fifteen. Jack, surely Jim Darnley is quite fifteen?’
Young Hoope-Arkwright glanced up from the photograph-book with which he was beguiling the time.
‘What, Jim Darnley? Oh yes, fifteen, at least.’
‘There you are. And his mother looks like his sister still. He is the dearest boy, Jim Darnley—the simplest, most unaffected creature. And, of course, he will be Duke of March and Brakelond one of these days, when his grandfather dies. They are sure to revive the title for him. But he might be just anybody,and his mother the same. I have always wondered why she does not make her husband take her own name. But no; she is such a really good woman that she thinks a wife ought always to stick to her husband’s name. That shows you what she is. And such a worker of all good kind works, indefatigable among the poor and the sick—for ever sending out soup and boots and blankets, you know. Her life is quite made up of kindnesses. They very, very seldom dine out, the Darnleys, in the country, so that you are lucky to meet them here like this to-night. Her husband is a very nice man too. I am sure you will like them both immensely. But of course she is the most interesting of the two.’
At this point the other guests began to arrive, and Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was forced to abandon her dialogue with young Restormel. She introduced him rather perfunctorily to one or two of the new arrivals, taking pains to slur over his name until she should have the opportunity of explaining his identity quietly to them at dinner or afterwards; then she turned to her hospitable duties, and Jack Hoope-Arkwright carried off his friend into one of the windows, where they stood laughing and talking together while the guests gradually gathered. Then, after a few moments, Ivor Restormel and his host came back towards the hearth to look at some photograph or ornament that stood on the primitive oak table that stood close by, and thus it was that they were once more close at the hostess’s side when at last, in a significant pause, the butler re-entered. His appearance suggested an archbishop of sporting tendencies, and he evidently cultivated a nice sense of drama. His voice boomed sonorous as he announced:
‘Mr. and Lady Gundred Darnley.’
Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright moved forward a step or two.
Minute but majestic, the Lady Gundred Darnley proceeded up the room, panoplied in perfections, and giving exactly the proper amount of smiles, of exactly the proper kind, in exactly the proper way, to all the proper people. At her heels came Kingston, but nobody cared to look twice at him. Lady Gundred was the star of the evening; as she entered, she had the double consciousness of not only conferring great pleasure, but of conferring it in the handsomest and most ungrudging manner. For in the plenitude of her generosity she had decided that it was her duty not to fob off poor, kind Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s dinner with one of her second-best frocks; and now she reaped the reward of her efforts in the general gaze of delight that greeted her appearance in one of her smartest gowns, looking incredibly crisp and young in a beautifully-built harmony of pale blue and pale gold. The frock set the crown upon the favour of her coming. It was, indeed, very rarely that the Darnleys dined out in the neighbourhood of Brakelond, and therefore Gundred was the more ready to emphasize the approval that her coming was to bestow on Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright in the eyes of all the county. Dear woman, how good she had been about that bazaar! how loyally she had turned away her Liberal gardeners! She well deserved not only to be dined with, but to be dined with in one of one’s decent gowns. And then one might ask her to tea at Brakelond, and show her the pictures. Gundred showed herself sweet and kind in the highest degree, as Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright made her welcome. Her manner always had a tranquil friendliness and a grace so instinct with placidity that only the most discerning could have discerned her underlying pride, in her demeanour’s very negation of pride. Here and there, perhaps, an acute onlooker might guess that her gentleness was founded on anintense arrogance unsuspected even by its possessor, on a self-esteem so tremendous as to have passed beyond all hint of self-assertion into a Nirvana of apparent unself-consciousness. An ingenious friend in London, indeed, had once said that, though Gundred’s manner and signature unfailingly wore the proper style of ‘Gundred Darnley,’ yet that, reading between the lines, both of manner and signature, one could always see that it really ran, ‘Gundred March and Brakelond.’ However, her pride was far too cardinal a point of doctrine to be made the theme of declamation; Gundred never obtruded it, never lowered its dignity by insisting on it, never allowed it to make her offensive, except in minute and subtle ways. Now, as she pressed Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s hand and commended her kindness, the hostess felt that never had she met anyone so pleasant and cordial and delightfully unaffected.
Then Gundred raised her eyes and looked round her to see who else might be in the room. She saw Sir Nigel, saw the Lemmingtons, saw the Archdeacon and his wife; she was glad that Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright had chosen such unexceptionable people to be witnesses of Brakelond’s condescension. Then her gaze moved on. The next moment she saw somebody whom instantly, inexplicably, she disliked as she had never before disliked anyone at first sight. Cool and gracious, Gundred was the last person in the world to feel unusual emotions; but now, as she looked at a tall dark young man—a boy of about twenty, he seemed, remarkably beautiful and attractive—her soul started proudly away in a flurry of instinctive repulsion. He was unpleasant, that good-looking youth, altogether unpleasant and odious. She had no notion why this feeling swept so completely across her mood; it took entire possession of her. Quickly sheaverted her eyes, and glanced round the uneventful circle of the other guests. They, for their part, quite unsuspicious of Lady Gundred’s sudden outburst of dislike, were concentrating their admiration on the calm grace of her manner, so exquisitely civilized and concise. Passions must always be very far from that serene pleasantness of demeanour. And meanwhile Gundred was busy thinking how displeasing that young man was, while with soft smiles she responded to Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s compliments. But suddenly the hostess became conscious of someone at her side. She turned towards the handsome dark boy, and before Gundred could see what was to happen, had brought him forward. ‘Let me introduce you to Lady Gundred Darnley,’ she said. The young man made a motion as if to put out his hand. Gundred instantly responded by taking that cruel revenge which is always in a woman’s power on such occasions. She ignored the hand, gave a glacial little smile and a glacial little bow. The young man seemed slightly astonished at this chill, and his eyes met hers for a moment. They were splendid eyes, those of his—cool, deep, grey, kindly. They glanced with wonder into the ice of Gundred’s stare, and in that moment she felt his gaze intolerable, saw things that she mysteriously hated and dreaded in those grey depths. For once in her life Gundred’s composure was faintly ruffled. She dropped her glance, and faintly blushed with annoyance. This is what one got by being generous and dining with presumptuous people like the Hoope-Arkwrights. Under her calm, imperturbably smiling exterior Gundred was gravely annoyed. She moved backwards, away from this unwelcome introduction. Her movement produced a change in the arrangement of the crowd. Kingston stepped forward, and came into sight of the tall, slender figure with which his wifehad seemed to be talking. Already he had had a strong conviction that he knew the back; now that he saw the face, he recognised the wayfarer whom he had passed on his road that afternoon. And once again, tyrannous, overwhelming, came the certainty of old acquaintance. Before, however, he could start a conversation, dinner was announced, and Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright began to marshal her guests in procession. Gundred hailed the release with joy, and passed out with gentle majesty at the head of the cortège.
What, then, was her indignation when, having settled herself at her host’s right, delicately removed her gloves, unfolded her napkin, untied the little bundle of pastry faggots that lay before her knotted up with blue ribbon, she turned towards her other neighbour, and discovered that he was no other than the strange, beautiful young man for whom she had conceived so unusually sudden a dislike. She hated strong emotions, and very rarely indulged them, but this one was beyond her control—a matter of instinct. In the first flash of revelation, she felt convinced that this beautiful boy was a corrupter of youth, a contemner of religion, everything that was bad and horrible; she plumed herself immediately on the nice discernment that enabled a Christian woman to divine such things, and made a virtue of the hostility she harboured. Talk to such a creature she would not. She turned quickly upon her host, and initiated the usual introductory conversation on the beauty of the table decorations.
The dinner-table was of a piece with the rest of the restored house. It was so aggressively old as to be obviously new. It was of that ancient oak which is for ever modern; and, in deference to primitive simplicity, it wore no cloth. Glass and silver gleamed down its long narrow stretch, and in the middle ranged a hedge of roses and orchids embowered inferns. Electric light was not permitted to mar its harmony with any suggestion of modernity. Candles in plain old silver candlesticks illuminated the table and its guests, shedding a soft and discreet glamour of pink from beneath their shades of crimson paper. Gundred commented amiably on the beautiful effect attained.
Mr. Hoope-Arkwright, who left such details to his wife and the decorators, made what reply he could, and the conversation flowed placidly along the lines that Gundred loved, developing in the way that showed her social aptitudes at their best.
‘My wife says that electric light does not do for a dinner-table,’ explained Mr. Hoope-Arkwright. ‘Too harsh a light it sheds, she tells me. I don’t understand such things myself, but everyone says the candles and their pink shades are very becoming.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Gundred; ‘one always likes a soft gentle light. And so clever of dear Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright not to have a tablecloth. All the glass and silver shows up so well. Such wonderful taste she has.’
‘Well, I always like a tablecloth myself, you know—seems cleaner, somehow; but Maggie says it is not the thing in a house like this.’
‘Such a delightful house—yes? And I do think you and dear Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright have been so tactful about it—altering nothing, as it were, and yet improving everything, and making it so comfortable. It was very different in the poor Restormels’ time. I can remember what it was like then.’
Mr. Hoope-Arkwright saw that she had not grasped her other neighbour’s identity, and as personal explanations are not easy unless one has the tact to shout them, so that their object may have no suspicion who is meant, he preferred to turn the conversation into other channels. ‘Are you fond of flowers, Lady Gundred?’ he asked.
In such temperate dialogues Gundred particularly shone. She was especially valuable in London for her power of flowing endlessly and amiably on about matters which could never possibly interest or stimulate anybody, or arouse difficulties of any sort. She was felt to be a thoroughly safe guest. So Mr. Hoope-Arkwright’s question gave her a most favourable opportunity for the display of her favourite qualities, and she seized upon the topic with joy.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered; ‘I have always been devoted to flowers. Such a comfort they are—yes? Quiet friends, I always say. One could not live without them.’
‘Roses, now—do you care particularly for roses?’ pursued Mr. Hoope-Arkwright.
‘Oh, the queen of flowers,’ she made haste to reply. ‘But, do you know, I can never quite care for a rose that has no scent. There is something unnatural about it—no? But these of yours are perfectly lovely, and how sweet! Do you find the soil good for them here?’
‘Well, as to that I can hardly tell you. I leave such matters to my wife and the gardener. But they are fine fellows, as you say.’
‘Quite like little pink cabbages—yes? Only so very, very beautiful, of course. How one loves a rose! And they go so well with the orchids too. So nice to be able to grow orchids.’
‘Yes, they do run into money, orchids do. You would be astonished at the prices some of them fetch.’
Gundred thought this a vulgar ostentation, and assumed her mildly pious air. ‘And I dare say, after all, not half so beautiful as many a dear little flower of the hedgerows?’ she replied. ‘Money means so little—yes? I often feel that one’s greatest pleasures are those which cost us least. The lovely lights on thehills, the roseate hues of early dawn—these are the joys which no money can buy. How thankful one ought to be to Heaven for giving us all these healthy pleasures—yes?’
Neither Mr. Hoope-Arkwright nor Gundred herself had any exhaustive experience of early dawn and its roseate hues. But the sentiment was improving and laudable. The host, however, was inclined to be prosaic.
‘Well,’ he answered, ‘one need not sniff at money, either, Lady Gundred. Where would one be without it?’
‘Ah, where indeed?’ sighed Gundred; ‘and yet one never has enough. But one always likes to feel that there is something higher than money, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright—yes? Money can give you all these beautiful flowers, and this delightful house, but can money give happiness, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright?’
‘Anyway, money can give us most of the things that make up happiness.’
‘Not a tender, loving heart, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright. Not a childlike faith and simplicity,’ replied Gundred pathetically. ‘And without these what is life? Our only real happiness lies in doing what one can for others. And that, I always feel, is the most real and precious use of money—yes?’
Mr. Hoope-Arkwright’s most characteristic activities had hitherto lain rather in doing others than in doing things for them. Also, he had very different views on the use of money from those so correctly enunciated by Gundred. So he preserved a discreet silence on the point, and listened unprotesting while she proceeded to enlarge on the more idyllically beautiful possibilities of life. He inserted ‘Ah yes,’ and ‘Ah no,’ at intervals into the interstices of her remarks, and cast about for an early opportunity of taking refuge withhis other neighbour. Mr. Hoope-Arkwright did not really share his wife’s hospitable instincts, and he did not care two straws about Lady Gundred Darnley—or, for that matter, about Lady Anybody Anything. ‘To do the civil’ he saw to be his duty, but the moment that dinner was half over and his duty duly discharged, he meant to indemnify himself for his endurance of this dull, pretty woman and her boring platitudes by having a good time with his other partner, Sir Nigel Pope’s second wife, a young woman of a gay and kindred spirit. Accordingly, when the roast peacock had arrived, he seized his moment with great promptitude.
‘Now, that is what I call quite poetic,’ he exclaimed, when Gundred had finished by saying that she thought a good, useful life was like some fragrant flower. ‘What do you think, Lady Pope?’
Lady Pope made a prompt, flashing reply, and in another moment was engaged in a warm duologue with her host; Gundred was left out in the cold. She felt a certain annoyance at being dropped like this. Her self-complacence would not, of course, let her know that she had been dropped. She knew that she had been giving poor dear Mr. Hoope-Arkwright one of the pleasantest half-hours of his life—a little uplifting talk with a really refined woman—but still it was just a trifle tiresome that he should have so very keen a sense of duty. Evidently it was only the strictest sense of duty that had made him change partners so precisely at the halfway house of the meal; but Gundred would have been better pleased if he had not allowed his sense of duty to be quite so minute and intrusive. Very proper and right, of course, yet almost too scrupulously right and proper to be altogether tactful. Then it suddenly occurred to her that she in turn ought to talk to her horror on the otherside. No, that she would not. Duty and right themselves should not compel her. She stared stonily before her, eating the peacock with wrathful and mincing precision. She would hear no preliminaries on her right. She gazed straight out across the table. Far off she saw her husband looking at her. Watchful interest and curiosity filled his expression as he glanced from her neighbour to herself. Perhaps he was wondering why she was not talking to him. Duty clearly commanded her to. But for once in her life correct, decorous Gundred would be deaf to the call which she usually heard and obeyed so sedulously. She nibbled at a pastry faggot, and kept a stern silence. Her neighbour made two attempts at conversation, but she answered so coldly as to nip them both in the bud. Then, abruptly, her attention was caught and riveted. The pink candle-shade in front of her was tilting to one side, threatening every moment to take fire. She looked anxiously round to her host for help, but he was by now far too deeply engaged with Lady Pope. Gundred gazed in annoyance at the paper shade. Surely it was beginning to smoulder? Ever since the catastrophe at Brakelond Gundred had disliked fire hardly less than the burned child, and now her untutored desires would have prompted her to get up and move away. But she had the martyr-like courage of her breeding and conventions. She sat there in suspense, smiling, calm, and altogether smooth to look at. However, there was no need, after all, to feel so helpless. She must inevitably appeal to the young man on her right. Speech had become a necessity, though always a distasteful one. Besides, after all, how absurd to let even so strong an instinct make one uncivil! Gundred fought down her reluctance bravely, and turned to her neighbour.
‘Do you think,’ she asked firmly, though in a low,rather strained voice, ‘that you could lower that shade a little? Do you see, I believe it will catch fire in a moment—yes?’
No answer followed her appeal. In astonishment she repeated it, and raised her eyes to her enemy’s face. She was astounded by what she saw there. She herself had been put out, even alarmed for a minute by the imminent fate of the candle-shade; but her neighbour’s gaze was fixed on the point of peril in a set white pallor of pure terror. Never in her life had she seen such an agony of dread on any human countenance. The young man, so beautiful, so lithe, so strong, was a monstrous coward. His face was rigid with fear, his eyes staring horribly. The sight was indecent in its nude revelation of weakness. In an instant all Gundred’s courage came back to her, and at the same moment her hatred for her neighbour was mitigated by a cold ferocity of contempt. He was still evil and hateful, but now he was contemptible also. He, a man, to be so terrified of a little burning candle-shade! At that same moment the shade tilted further, caught, and flamed. Gundred was conscious that her neighbour’s hands clenched upon his chair in a convulsive jerk of fright. Calmly, firmly she reached forth her arm, and crushed the blazing paper into a blackened flake. Servants came running to sweep up the ashes, and Mr. Hoope-Arkwright confounded himself in apologies for his neglect. Gundred showed herself perfectly amiable to her host, but on her other neighbour she would have no mercy.
‘I saw it was going to catch,’ she said gently, ‘and I asked Mr.—this gentleman, to put it out. But he cannot have heard me, I think.’ She included both men in her remarks, and spoke in soft, far-reaching tones that could not escape their attention. Mr. Hoope-Arkwright made some polite rejoinder, gaveher a few compliments, then went back to his dialogue with Lady Pope. Gundred, reinstated in her own self-esteem, turned to see what effect her cut had had upon the coward. Had he winced beneath the lash? Yes, evidently he had. Gundred was justly pleased. Heaven had made her the instrument of his well-merited punishment. And now he was trying to make excuses. She would listen, so as the better to slight them. She offered a coldly acquiescent air as he began to speak.
‘I am sorry,’ he said in a slow, hesitating voice, hardly yet restored to equanimity. ‘I am afraid I heard you perfectly.’
Gundred would see no courage in the confession. It was mere effrontery. ‘Yes?’ she replied. There was a pause. ‘Yes?’ repeated Gundred cruelly, demanding an answer.
The young man went on, speaking with difficulty. Gundred felt a keen joy in thus dragging the coward through a confession of his cowardice. To be a man and a coward—that was not punishment enough. He should also know what a woman thought of him.
‘I ... well, the long and the short of it is, I can’t face fire,’ continued the hesitating, painful voice.
‘You would not make a good soldier—no?’ rejoined Gundred, with a pinched little smile.
‘Oh, in that way I hope I should be all right. It is flame and smoke and burning that I cannot face. All my life I have had the fear. I suppose everyone has a secret horror in their lives. Fire is mine. I have suffered from it always. You don’t know what it is. It is something far worse than fear. I am not really afraid of the fire. I knew how ridiculously harmless that little burning shade would be, but it was the fire, the flame that made me—well, made me almost sick with a shrinking—a sort of supernatural repulsion that I cannot explain.’
‘How very unfortunate!’ answered Gundred, deliberately cool and incredulous in tone. ‘It must be so very inconvenient—yes? People are sadly apt to misunderstand, don’t you find?’
The young man, however, was a worm only in his tendency to turn. He flushed, seeing clearly the hard malice of her mood. ‘Very few, thank Heaven,’ he answered, ‘have ever had the opportunity of misunderstanding. You have been especially unlucky, and so have I.’
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ replied Gundred, politely demurring.
‘I must, obviously,’ he went on. ‘You see, one bears one’s secret horror, whatever it may be, quite alone, telling nobody about it. But sometimes, once or twice in one’s life, some cursed accident drags it to the surface, and the horror becomes too bad to bear, and an outsider gets a glimpse of it. I have been unfortunate in the moment of my accident, and in the person who saw it, and there is no more to be said: that is all.’
The young man, the coward, the unmentionable, seemed actually to be snubbing the brave, the serene, the faultless Lady Gundred Darnley. This must instantly be put a stop to.
‘One does not like to believe that any man can have a fear too bad to bear—no?’ inquired Gundred, very gently and softly, as if asking for the sake of information.
The victim had clearly had enough of this persecution. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘when one comes to think of it, I suppose you are yourself more or less responsible for my fears, if anyone is.’
Gundred gave him a blank blue stare.
‘I?’ she questioned in amazement, as if the very suggestion were an insolent piece of irreverence.
The young man was not abashed, however, and proceeded to make his position good.
‘You had a ghastly fire at Brakelond many years ago,’ he answered. ‘Somebody was burnt—a cousin of yours, I think. Well, that fire was a great shock to my mother, and upset her dreadfully. I was the result, and I am the incarnation of her terrors.’
Gundred hesitated in her enmity, and her manner changed.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she said; ‘but I did not quite catch your name before dinner. But from what you have just said, are you—surely you must be——’
‘I am Ivor Restormel,’ said the enemy. ‘I was born about twelve hours after your fire at Brakelond. So you cannot wonder that I carry the traces of it in my life, as it were. And so, you see, I was right: you are in some way responsible for my dread of fire. Wasn’t it a careless servant who set light to the old wooden wing of Brakelond? Well, if it had not been for that careless servant, I should not have had any dread or shrinking from fire.’
‘Really,’ said Gundred, hardly heeding him, ‘this is wonderfully interesting. Then you are poor dear Mary Restormel’s son? I used to know your mother so well in the days before you were born. And then the place was sold, of course, to these Hoope-Arkwrights, and I never saw much of poor dear Mary again. But how very strange to meet you here—yes?’
Gundred was always faithful to her traditions and her memories. The stranger came immediately into the hallowed circle of Gundred’s own class, and no longer suffered the condemnation of the outsider. In her heart of hearts, Gundred, perhaps, would never surmount her first mysterious sense of repulsion; but anger, disdain, reproof must at once be very much modified in the case of a person who now stood revealedas no longer an unhallowed, nameless member of the Hoope-Arkwright world, but as poor dear Mary Restormel’s son, with the right divine to Gundred’s sympathetic loyalty. Her strong and dutifulesprit de corpseven prompted her to something resembling an apology.
‘Of course I had no notion who you were,’ she said. ‘What you tell me is a perfect explanation. How very dreadful for you, though! But I quite understand your feeling—a simple instinct. Yet, of course, until one knew who you were, it did seem a little strange—yes?’
Ivor Restormel had ceased to take much interest in the question.
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘one is always meeting odd things in life. I only wish I had escaped that particular oddity. However, I do all I can to get the better of it, and in a way I have succeeded. I can face flame more than I could, though it still gives me the same supernatural creepy feeling. What I have suffered, too, in seeing women smoke is more than I can express.’
‘Not at all a nice habit, I think,’ replied Gundred. ‘Somehow, it never seems appropriate or ladylike—no?’
‘Oh, it is notthatI mind, but the possibilities are so horrible. A man wears rough tweeds and things. No spark could settle on them. But think of the innumerable frills and fluffs and films that a woman has floating all round her nowadays. A chance spark, and the dropping of a red cigarette-end, and—ah! it doesn’t bear thinking of.’
He broke off, shuddering, and Gundred could see that at the bare notion of such a catastrophe the old white, shivering terror had laid hold of him. She had heard before of these strange, inherited passions, prenatal, ineradicable, but this was the first instanceshe had ever met with, and it filled her with interest now that she realized that its victim was a man of her own order, and as such, of course, not to be classed in the common rank of cowards. Her subconscious fear and dislike of Ivor Restormel still held their place in her mind, but they had retired to the background of her thought for the moment, leaving room for the curiosity that his identity and his idiosyncrasy aroused.
‘So very dreadful,’ she murmured, ‘for your poor mother. I had not realized that dear Mary had been so much upset by that awful fire. You know, Mr. Restormel, I feel as if we were quite old friends, you and I. As you say, I cannot help feeling, after all, that we have got some of the responsibility to bear for the odd feelings that you have inherited. You have had quite a distressing legacy from those old wooden rooms at Brakelond—yes?’
Laudably, deliberately friendly, Gundred raised her neat smile to meet Ivor Restormel’s gaze. He was looking at her full, with his deep grey eyes, true and honest, and altogether pleasant. Yet, as she met their glance, suddenly the instinctive hostility surged up into Gundred’s mind with redoubled strength. Fear and dislike seized her. She could not bear that glance, could not tolerate her neighbour’s presence. She turned away her head with a sensation of almost terrified hostility. What was this imperious repulsion that now held her—the first emotion that had ever threatened to pass the limits of her self-control? She could not understand it; never before had she felt anything even remotely resembling this blind, paradoxical dislike. Perhaps, years since, her bitter memories of Isabel had been tinged with the same unreasoning horror, but those far-off qualms had been faint and colourless compared with the vehement feeling now aroused in her by this beautiful and harmlessstranger. She stiffened herself to show a firm front; self-contempt began to stir in her. Why, had it come to this, that she, Lady Gundred Darnley, the model of deportment and nice tact, now wished publicly to violate her own code, to be rude and inconsiderate to a person who on all counts, as being unobjectionable, a fellow-guest, and an equal, claimed her consideration and her courtesy? Such a lapse could never be permitted. She must fight down this folly, and be kind to Ivor Restormel through the rest of this nightmare meal. Then she would leave the house as soon as she could, and pray Heaven that she might never set eyes on him again.
Ivor Restormel saw something strange in her manner, but took no heed. He did not in the least care what Lady Gundred Darnley might choose to think of him. He felt confident that he could in no way have offended her; further than that his interest in her attitude did not go. The secret dislikes of one’s acquaintances are incalculable. It is both hopeless and useless to take such things into one’s consideration. One can but watch one’s own behaviour to keep it clear of offence, and then leave the rest to Providence.
‘Brakelond must be wonderfully beautiful,’ continued Ivor Restormel, amiably manufacturing conversation in the pause made by Gundred’s sudden lapse into silence, ‘judging by the view of it from here. I have never seen anything so fairy-like and splendid. I suppose you have rebuilt the burnt part long ago? All wood, you say it was? Yes, I have heard so much of that old wing that I feel as if I knew it well, every step and winding of it. Ugh! what a ghastly death-trap!’ Again he shuddered at his vivid recollections of a place he had never seen.
Any criticism on her family or its possessions always roused Gundred to polite animosity. Now the feelingcame to her rescue, and armed her against this dreadful young man who seemed so pleasant and innocuous.
‘It was very interesting and wonderful,’ she answered reprovingly. ‘We all loved it. But, of course, wood is always rather a peril—yes? Oak panelling is most delightful, but one cannot help feeling it a responsibility.’
‘I hate the very idea of it,’ replied the other with fervour. ‘Why, whenever I think of those wooden rooms at Brakelond, I can smell that horrible cold, old, acrid smell of a burnt-out ruin—the horrible smell of charred wood, which gets into one’s nostrils and one’s throat. Sometimes in my life I have had to meet that smell, and whenever I get a whiff of it, I always have a vision of the wing at Brakelond, all wrecked and blackened and fallen in, haunted by the dreadful acid fumes of stale fire and smoke.’
Gundred might have protested further against the quite uncalled-for vigour of Ivor Restormel’s memory, but at that moment Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was making efforts to capture her attention from behind a bower of odontoglossums. She smiled her acquiescence, made some indifferent remark to her neighbour, and rose to head the departing procession. Thank Heaven, the ordeal was over, and she had come out of it safely, without any more loss of self-respect than was involved in the conception of so incalculable an instinct of hostility. Gundred felt her self-complacency returning. She knew that it does not matter what sentiments one may entertain, so long as one gives no sign of entertaining them. One’s private blemishes are one’s own private concern alone, provided that one does not let one’s clothes slip down and reveal them to the world.
Her husband, meanwhile, at the other end of the table had proved but a tame and uninteresting companion to Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. His attentionthroughout the meal had been fixed at every possible moment on Gundred’s right-hand partner. For whole long minutes he scanned that keen, handsome face. Where had he seen it before? Why did he find it so very much more attractive than even its own intrinsic beauty warranted? He stared at it, analyzed it, dissected its features. No, collectively and separately they were quite new to him. He grew more and more confident that he had never met the young fellow before; otherwise he must have remembered him. It was not a face to be forgotten. No, he had never seen it before. And yet the imperious conviction grew and deepened in him that that face was worn by no stranger—that he and the boy at the end of the table were in some mysterious way the oldest of intimate friends. Many years before he had felt the same passion of recognition when he at last understood what it was he felt for Isabel; now the same haunting sense of old acquaintance returned to him, and held him in a firm and inexorable grip. As soon as the women had all left the room, he carried round his glass, and settled himself decisively at Ivor Restormel’s side, thereby upsetting all the post-prandial arrangements, which had been meant to make him the prey of more interesting and conspicuous men among the guests.
‘We met on the road this afternoon, I think,’ said Kingston; ‘or, rather, I passed you. You refused to accept a lift.’
Ivor Restormel smiled back at him.
‘It was awfully good of you,’ he replied. ‘I have never been offered a lift by a motor before. But, you see, I was so close to Restormel, it would hardly have been worth while.’
‘Are you staying here?’ inquired Kingston, more and more strongly drawn to this new acquaintance.
‘Yes; Jack Hoope-Arkwright is a great friend ofmine. We are at Oxford together. And, besides, I belong here in a sort of way. The place used to be my people’s. I am Ivor Restormel.’
The name instantly brought back to Kingston’s mind that deadly accident which had eventually been the secondary cause of Isabel’s death. He shuddered. But the link of recollection thus forged seemed to bind him more closely to young Restormel. The boy had an inexplicably strong fascination. He was pleasant, he was good-looking, he was well built; but there was something else. He was more attractive than all these good qualities could have made him. Kingston took an increasing pleasure in hearing him speak.
‘I remember all about you,’ answered the older man. ‘My wife used to know your mother well. It was my wife you have been sitting next to. Perhaps she told you how she used to know your people.’
Kingston knew Gundred’s devoted loyalty to all old friends and neighbours, and was anxious to impress Ivor Restormel’s identity upon her, foreseeing that it would incline her favourably to his sudden plan of seeing as much as possible of the young fellow.
‘Yes, Lady Gundred soon recognised who I was. But I am afraid she was a little disappointed in me. I think I could see it.’
Kingston was slightly alarmed. He knew Gundred’s prejudices of old—soft and mild as milk; hard, ineluctable as iron.
‘Oh, nonsense!’ he replied, with more anxiety than the occasion appeared to warrant. ‘My wife is always a little cool and non-committal when she meets people for the first time. You will soon get accustomed to her.’
It never occurred to him that he was apparently explaining his wife, more or less apologetically, to atotal stranger. Ivor Restormel was puzzled. His beauty had already made him many sudden friends, had immensely helped him on his way through life, predisposing everyone in his favour; but it had never yet kindled such a fire of zeal as seemed to be developing in Mr. Darnley. He was inclined to be cautious in acceptance, and during the rest of the meal gave careful, quiet answers to Kingston’s advances. But Kingston had not the faintest interest in the boy’s beauty, nor, precisely, in the boy himself. It was the acquaintance, the old friend in him, that Kingston divined so keenly, and was eager to investigate more fully. The vehement attraction that he felt towards Ivor Restormel was something, so to speak, impersonal, something quite unconnected with the boy’s pleasant manners or agreeable face. It was an attraction towards something deep and hidden in the young fellow’s personality, and the attraction grew stronger and clearer with every minute of their dialogue.
At last the time came to go into the drawing-room. The men rose, and drifted in knots towards the door. Kingston, as he went, retained possession of young Restormel, despite the evident anxiety of Mr. Hoope-Arkwright and Sir Nigel to have a word with Lady Gundred’s husband.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘How long are you staying with the Hoope-Arkwrights? Come over to Brakelond, will you? Come over to-morrow. I should like you to see the place.’
Ivor Restormel accepted the unexpected invitation with thanks. Jack Hoope-Arkwright, following in their wake, wondered at the precipitate friendliness of Mr. Darnley. Such sudden hospitality was by no means in the traditions of Brakelond. A long preliminary purification was generally necessary before Lady Gundred considered her friends well testedenough to be invited to the Castle. And here was Ivor Restormel, after half an hour’s acquaintance, not only asked, but pressed to come, and to come as soon as possible. Times were changing indeed. It had taken the Hoope-Arkwrights three years to know the Darnleys, and eight to be dined with by them.
The rest of the evening passed without event. Gundred, however, gradually grew displeased with her surroundings. At first she had duly been throned on the best sofa, and listened to in silent admiration while she pronounced on the weather, the decadence of decorum in the servants’ hall, and the proper management of cooks. But ere long Lady Pope, whom, in her mind, Gundred characterized as a pushing young person, had begun to cut in frivolously, irreverently, with jokes and stories. Gundred, who had a faint instinct that all wit was more or less vulgar, did her best to repress these interruptions; but her efforts were vain, and soon even her devout hostess was listening and laughing at Lady Pope’s sallies. Lady Gundred was left rather out of the picture, and her authoritative comments on cooks began to lose their hold on the general attention. Then when the men appeared it was even worse. Lady Pope became the centre of a court; even those who came to make their dutiful obeisance to Lady Gundred passed hastily on, after a few pallid words about the weather, to join the cheerful crowd round the younger woman. Then games were played, largely at Lady Pope’s instigation; and Gundred, who would have disliked any proposal that sprung from one whom she now felt herself compelled to regard, however disdainfully, as a rival, had, further, personal reasons for disapproving this development. For she sang; and she expected, accordingly, to be asked to sing. Her music was waiting outside to be fetched; it would have been obviouslyproper of Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright to press her most important guest to perform. But apparently everyone preferred the thoughtless gaiety of this unprofitable evening to hearing Lady Gundred discoursing Chaminade in her neat and well-drilled little flute of a voice, which, as her friends said in extenuation, was so truly wonderful for a woman of forty.
Finally, to add to all these annoyances, she saw her husband neglecting everyone else in the room to talk to that young man for whom she had conceived such a repulsion. She would rather, even, have seen him spending the time in attendance on that forward Lady Pope. But Kingston was so distressingly friendly. Actuated by many collaborating motives, Gundred made haste to ask for her carriage, and showed every sign of imminent departure, much to the distress of hospitable Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright felt that the evening had not been altogether satisfactory since dinner. Lady Pope had evidently shone excessively; and the light of Lady Gundred Darnley had been thereby most unjustly dimmed. It grew plain that Lady Gundred was a little put out. Gaiety and dignity were hard to combine. Lady Pope offered the gaiety; Lady Gundred the dignity. And the two ambitions were irreconcilable; for it was already clear that Lady Gundred could not amuse—certainly not while Lady Pope was of the party. Grievously did Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright regret that she had infused the gay and sparkling element of the young woman into what she had meant to be the serene if soporific delights of a dinner made illustrious by the presence of March and Brakelond. But it was now too late for regret, and no entreaties could soften Lady Gundred’s determination to go.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Gundred sweetly. ‘Such a delightful evening. We have enjoyed ourselves somuch. But we must really think of the horses. Good-night, Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. Good-night—good-night—good-night.’
Scattering bows and farewell condescension like a queen, the Lady Gundred Darnley moved towards the hall. Kingston obediently followed her, and soon the door of the brougham was shut upon them, and they were off. Gundred smoothed out her flounce with a certain pettishness unusual to her calm temperament.
‘A dreadful house,’ she said decisively, ‘so horribly rich and new—and the most vulgar and trying people. One wonders how even the Hoope-Arkwrights contrive to collect such a crew. Surely, Kingston, I could not have heard you asking one of them to come to Brakelond? Just as we were leaving. It must have been my fancy, of course.’ She was sitting very upright, rigid with rectitude, her pale lips compressed, her pale eyes gleaming scornfully. Kingston felt like a guilty child.
‘Only young Restormel,’ he said. ‘You will like him, Gundred. I am sure you will like him immensely. He is one of the most attractive people I have ever met. After all, he is an old neighbour of yours, not like the Hoope-Arkwrights and the rest of their friends. I made him promise to come over to-morrow. And then, later on, he might come to stay with us for a bit. I should like you to see more of him, Gundred. He will be someone for you to help and befriend.’
A very long silence, leaden and ominous, filled the brougham. Then Gundred spoke, in a bland, deliberate low voice.
‘Really, Kingston,’ she said, ‘you are almost trying at times.’
Her husband felt himself annihilated. This, from Gundred, was very heavy rebuke. He made no answer, and they drove on to Brakelond without another word.