Lady Connie Part 40

Falloden nodded, wrote him a statement to that effect, ordered whisky and soda, and saw them safely to their carriage.

Then pacing slowly through the rooms, he went back towards the library.

His mind was divided between a kind of huckster's triumph and a sense of intolerable humiliation. All around him were the "tribal signs" of race, continuity, history--which he had taken for granted all his life. But now that a gulf had opened between him and them, his heart clung to them consciously for the first time. No good! He felt himself cast out--stripped--exposed. The easy shelter fashioned for him and his by the lives of generations of his kindred had fallen in fragments about him.

"Well--I never earned it!"--he said to himself bitterly, turning in disgust on his own self-pity.

When he reached the library he found his father walking up and down deep in thought. He looked up as his son entered.

"Well, that saves the bankruptcy, Duggy, and--as far as I can see--leaves a few thousands over--portions for the younger children, and what will enable you to turn round."

Douglas a.s.sented silently. After a long look at his son, Sir Arthur opened a side door which led from the library into the suite of drawing-rooms. Slowly he pa.s.sed through them, examining the pictures steadily, one by one. At the end of the series, he turned and came back again to his own room, with a bent head and meditative step. Falloden followed him.

In the library, Sir Arthur suddenly straightened himself.

"Duggy, do you hate me--for the mess I've made--of your inheritance?"

The question stirred a quick irritation in Falloden. It seemed to him futile and histrionic; akin to all those weaknesses in his father which had brought them disaster.

"I don't think you need ask me that," he said, rather sharply, as he opened a drawer in his father's writing-table, and locked up the paper containing Herr Schwarz's offer.

Sir Arthur looked at him wistfully.

"You've been a brick, Duggy--since I told you. I don't know that I had any right to count upon it."

"What else could I do?" said Douglas, trying to laugh, but conscious--resenting it--of a swelling in the throat.

"You could have given a good many more twists to the screw--if you'd been a different sort," said his father slowly. "And you're a tough customer, Duggy, to some people. But to me"--He paused, beginning again in another tone--

"Duggy, don't be offended with me--but did you ever want to marry Lady Constance Bledlow? You wrote to me about her at Christmas."

Douglas gave a rather excited laugh.

"It's rather late in the day to ask me that question."

His father eyed him.

"You mean she refused you?"

His son nodded.

"Before this collapse?"

"Before she knew anything about it"

"Poor old Duggy!" said his father, in a low voice. "But perhaps--after all--she'll think better of it. By all accounts she has the charm of her mother, whom Risborough married to please himself and not his family."

Falloden said nothing. He wished to goodness his father would drop the subject. Sir Arthur understood he was touching things too sore to handle, and sighed.

"Well, shake hands, Duggy, old boy. You carried this thing through splendidly to-day. But it seems to have taken it out of me--which isn't fair. I shall go for a little walk. Tell your mother I shall be back in an hour or so."

The son took his father's hand. The strong young grasp brought a momentary sense of comfort to the older man. They eyed each other, both pale, both conscious of feelings to which it was easier to give no voice. Then their hands dropped. Sir Arthur looked for his hat and stick, which were lying near, and went out of the open gla.s.s door into the garden. He pa.s.sed through the garden into the park beyond walking slowly and heavily, his son's eyes following him.

CHAPTER XIV

Out of sight of the house, at the entrance of the walk leading to the moor, Sir Arthur was conscious again of transitory, but rather sharp pains across the chest.

He sat down to rest, and they soon pa.s.sed away. After a few minutes he pursued his walk, climbing towards the open stretches of heathery moor, which lay beyond the park, and a certain ghyll or hollow with a wild stream in it that cleft the moor high up--one of his favourite haunts.

He climbed through ferny paths, and amid stretches of heather just coming to its purple prime, up towards the higher regions of the moor where the millstone grit cropped out in sharp edges, showing gaunt and dark against the afternoon sky. Here the beautiful stream that made a waterfall within the park came sliding down shelf after shelf of yellowish rock, with pools of deep brown water at intervals, overhung with mountain ash and birch.

After the warm day, all the evening scents were abroad, carried by a gentle wind. Sir Arthur drank them in, with the sensuous pleasure which had been one of his gifts in life. The honey smell of the heather, the woody smell of the bracken, the faint fragrance of wood-smoke wafted from a bonfire in the valley below--they all carried with them an inexpressible magic for the man wandering on the moor. So did the movements of birds--the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the hovering of two kestrels, a flight of wild duck in the distance. Each and all reminded him of the halcyon times of life--adventures of his boyhood, the sporting pleasures of his manhood. By George!--how he had enjoyed them all!

Presently, to his left, on the edge of the heathery slope he caught sight of one of the b.u.t.ts used in the great grouse-shoots of the moor.

What a jolly party they had had last year in that week of wonderful October weather! Two hundred brace on the home moor the first day, and almost as many on the Fairdale moor the following day. Some of the men had never shot better. One of the party was now Viceroy of India; another had been killed in one of the endless little frontier fights that are the price, month by month, which the British Empire pays for its existence. Douglas had come off particularly well. His shooting from that b.u.t.t to the left had been magnificent. Sir Arthur remembered well how the old hands had praised it, warming the c.o.c.kles of his own heart.

"I will have one more shoot," he said to himself with pa.s.sion--"I will!"

Then, feeling suddenly tired, he sat down beside the slipping stream. It was fairly full, after some recent rain, and the music of it rang in his ears. Stretching out a hand he filled it full of silky gra.s.s and thyme, sniffing at it in delight. "How strange," he thought, "that I can still enjoy these things. But I shall--till I die."

Below him, as he sat, lay the greater part of his estate stretching east and west; bounded on the west by some of the high moors leading up to the Pennine range, lost on the east in a blue and wooded distance. He could see the towers of three village churches, and the blurred greys and browns of the houses cl.u.s.tering round them--some near, some far.

Stone farm-buildings, their white-washed gables glowing under the level sun, caught his eye, one after the other--now hidden in wood, now standing out upon the fields or the moorland, with one sycamore or a group of yews to shelter them. And here and there were larger houses; houses of the middle gentry, with their gardens and enclosures. Farms, villages, woods and moors, they were all his--nominally his, for a few weeks or months longer. And there was scarcely one of them in the whole wide scene, with which he had not some sporting a.s.sociation; whether of the hunting field, or the big autumn shoots, or the jolly partridge drives over the stubbles.

But it suddenly and sharply struck him how very few other a.s.sociations he possessed with these places spread below him in the declining August sunshine. He had not owned Flood more than fifteen years--enough however to lose it in! And he had succeeded a father who had been the beloved head of the county, a just and liberal landlord, a man of scrupulous kindness and honour, for whom everybody had a friendly word. His ruined son on the moorside thought with wonder and envy of his father's popular arts, which yet were no arts. For himself he confessed,--aware as he was, this afternoon, of the presence in his mind of a new and strange insight with regard to his own life and past, as though he were writing his own obituary--that the people living in these farms and villages had meant little more to him than the troublesome conditions on which he enjoyed the pleasures of the Flood estates, the great income he drew from them, and the sport for which they were famous. He had his friends among the farmers of course, though they were few. There were men who had cringed to him, and whom he had rewarded. And Laura had given away plentifully in the villages. But his chief agent he knew had been a hard man and a careless one; and he had always loathed the trouble of looking after him. Again and again he had been appealed to, as against his agent; and he had not even answered the letters. He had occasionally done some public duties; he had allowed himself to be placed on the County Council, but had hardly ever attended meetings; he had taken the chair and made a speech occasionally, when it would have cost him more effort to refuse than to accept; and those portions of the estate which adjoined the castle were in fairly good repair. But on the remoter farms, and especially since his financial resources had begun to fail, he knew very well that there were cottages and farm-houses in a scandalous state, on which not a farthing had been spent for years.

No, it could not be said he had played a successful part as a landowner.

He had meant no harm to anybody. He had been simply idle and preoccupied; and that in a business where, under modern conditions, idleness is immoral. He was quite conscious that there were good men, frugal men, kind and G.o.d-fearing men, landlords like himself, though on a much smaller scale, in that tract of country under his feet, who felt bitterly towards him, who judged him severely, who would be thankful to see the last of him, and to know that the land had pa.s.sed into other and better hands. Fifty-two years of life lived in that northern Vale of Eden; and what was there to show for them?--in honest work done, in peace of conscience, in friends? Now that the pictures were sold, there would be just enough to pay everybody, with a very little over. There was some comfort in that. He would have ruined n.o.body but himself and Duggy. Poor Laura would be quite comfortable on her own money, and would give him house-room no doubt--till the end.

The end? But he might live another twenty years. The thought was intolerable. The apathy in which he had been lately living gave way. He realised, with quickened breath, what this parting from his inheritance and all the a.s.sociations of his life would mean. He saw himself as a tree, dragged violently out of its native earth--rootless and rotten.

Poor Duggy! Duggy was as proud and wilful as himself; with more personal ambition however, and less of that easy, sensuous recklessness, that gambler's spirit, which had led his father into such quagmires. Duggy had shown up well these last weeks. He was not a boy to talk, but in acts he had been good.

And through the man's remorseful soul there throbbed the one deep, disinterested affection of his life--his love for his son. He had been very fond of Laura, but when it came to moments like this she meant little to him.

He gave himself up to this feeling of love. How strange that it should both rend and soothe!--that it and it alone brought some comfort, some spermaceti for the inward bruise, amid all the bitterness connected with it. Duggy, in his arms, as a little toddling fellow, Duggy at school--playing for Harrow at Lord's--Duggy at college--

But of that part of his son's life, as he realised with shame, he knew very little. He had been too entirely absorbed, when it arrived, in the frantic struggle, first for money, and then for solvency. Duggy had become in some ways during the last two years a stranger to him--his own fault! What had he done to help him through his college life--to "influence him for good," as people said? Nothing. He had been enormously proud of his son's university distinctions; he had supplied him lavishly with money; he had concealed from him his own financial situation till it was hopeless; he had given him the jolliest possible vacation, and that was all that could be said.

The father groaned within himself. And yet again--how strangely!--did some fraction of healing virtue flow from his very distress?--from his remembrance, above all, of how Duggy had tried to help him?--during these few weeks since he knew?

Ah!--Tidswell Church coming out of the shadows! He remembered how one winter he had been coming home late on horseback through dark lanes, when he met the parson of that church, old and threadbare and narrow-chested, trudging on, head bent, against a spitting rain. The owner of Flood had been smitten with a sudden compunction, and dismounting he had walked his horse beside the old man. The living of Tidswell was in his own gift. It amounted, he remembered, to some 140 a year. The old man, whose name was Trevenen, had an old wife, to whom Sir Arthur thought Lady Laura had sometimes sent some cast-off clothes.

Mr. Trevenen had been baptising a prematurely born child in a high moorland farm. The walk there and back had been steep and long, and his thin lantern-jawed face shone very white through the wintry dusk.

"You must be very tired," Sir Arthur had said, remembering uncomfortably the dinner to which he was himself bent--the chef, the wines, the large house-party.