The Great House Part 11

"That shocks you, Mr. Ba.s.set," the curate continued with dignity, "that I should marry one in her position? Well, I am not called upon to justify it. Why I think her worthy, and more than worthy to share my life, is my business. I only trouble you with the matter because you have made me an offer which you might not have made had you known this."

Ba.s.set did not deny the fact. He could not, indeed. His taste, his prejudice, his traditions all had received a blow, all were up in arms; and, for the moment, at any rate he repented of his visit. He felt that in stepping out of the normal round he had made a mistake. He should have foreseen, he should have known that he would meet with such shocks. "You have certainly astonished me," he said after a pause of dismay. "I cannot think the match suitable, Mr. Colet. May I ask if my uncle knows of this?"

"Miss Audley knows of it."

"But--you cannot yourself think it suitable!"

"I have," Colet replied dryly, "or rather I had seventy pounds a year. What girl, born in comfort, gently bred, sheltered from childhood could I ask to share that? How could I, with so little in the present and no prospects, ask a gentlewoman to share my lot?"

Ba.s.set did not reply, but he was not convinced. A clergyman to marry a servant, good and refined as Etruria was! It seemed to him to be unseemly, to be altogether wrong.

Colet too was silent a moment. Then, "I am glad I have told you this," he said. "I shall not now trespa.s.s on you. On the other hand, I hope that you may still do something--and with your name, you can do much--for the good cause. If rumor goes for anything, many will in the next few months examine the ground on which they stand. It will be much, if what I have said has weight with you."

He spoke with constraint, but he spoke like a man, and Ba.s.set owned his equality while he resented it. He felt that he ought to renew his offer of hospitality, but he could not--reserve and shyness had him again in their grip. He muttered something about thinking it over, added a word or two of thanks--which were cut short by the flickering out of the candle--and a minute later he was in the dark deserted street, and walking back to his inn--not over well content with himself, if the truth be told.

Either he should not have gone, he felt, or he should have gone the whole way, sunk his ideas of caste, and carried the thing through. What was it to him if the man was going to marry a servant?

But that was a detail. The main point was that he should not have gone. It had been a foolish impulse--he saw it now--which had taken him to the barber's shop; and one which he might have known that he would repent. He ought to have foreseen that he could not place himself on Colet's level without coming into collision with him; that he could not draw wisdom from him without paying toll.

An impossible person, he thought, a man of ideas quite unlike his own! And yet the man had spoken well and ably, and spoken from experience. He had told the things that he had seen as he pa.s.sed from house to house, hard, sad facts, the outcome of rising numbers and falling wages, of over-production, of mouths foodless and unwanted. And all made worse, as he maintained, by this tax on bread, that barely touched the rich man's income, yet took a heavy toll from the small wage.

As he recalled some of the things that he had heard, Ba.s.set felt his interest revive. Colet had dealt with facts; he had attempted no oratory, he had cast no glamour over them. But he had brought to bear upon them the light of an ideal--the Christian ideal of unselfishness; and his hearer, while he doubted, while he did not admit that the solution was practical, owned its beauty.

For he too, as we know, had had his aspirations, though he had rarely thought of turning them into action. Instead, he had hidden them behind the commonplace; and in this he had matched the times, which were commonplace. For the country lay in the trough of the wave. Neither the fine fury of the generation which had adored the rights of man, nor the splendid endurance which the great war had fostered, nor the lesser ardors of the Reform era, which found its single panacea in votes, touched or enn.o.bled it. Great wealth and great poverty, jostling one another, marked a material age, seeking remedies in material things, despising arms, decrying enthusiasm; an age which felt, but hardly bowed as yet, to the breath of the new spirit.

But Ba.s.set--perhaps because the present offered no great prospect to the straitened squire--had had his glimpses of a life higher and finer, devoted to something above the pa.s.sing whim and the day's indulgence, a life that should not be useless to those who came after him. Was it possible that he now heard the call? Could this be the crusade of which he had idly dreamed? Had the trumpet sounded at the moment of his utmost need?

If only it were so! During the evening he had kept his sorrow at bay as well as he could, distracting his thoughts with pa.s.sing objects. Now, as the boots ushered him up the close-smelling stairs to the inn's best room, and he stood in his hat and coat, looking on the cold bare aspect and the unfamiliar things--he owned himself desolate. The thought of Mary, of his hopes and plans and of the end of these, returned upon him in an irresistible flood. The waters which he had stemmed all day, though all day they had lapped his lips, overwhelmed him with their bitterness. Mary! He had loved her and she--he knew what she thought of him.

He could not take up the old life. She had made an end of that, the rather as from this time onward the Gatehouse would be closed to him by her presence. And the old house near Wootton where he had been wont to pa.s.s part of his time? That hardly met his needs or his aspirations. Unhappy as he was, he could not see himself sitting down in idleness, to brood and to rust in a home so remote, so quiet, so lost among the stony hills that the country said of it, "Wootton under Weaver Where G.o.d came never!"

No, he could hardly face that. Hitherto he had not been called upon to say what he would do with his life. Now the question was put to him and he had to answer it. He had to answer it. For many minutes he sat on the bed staring before him. And from time to time he sighed.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE GREAT HOUSE AT BEAUDELAYS.

It was about a week after this that two men stood on the neglected lawn, contemplating the long blind front of Beaudelays House. With all its grandeur the house lacked the dignity of ruin, for ruin presumes a past, and the larger part of the Great House had no past. The ancient wing that had welcomed brides, and echoed the laughter of children and given back the sullen notes of the pa.s.sing-bell did not suffice to redeem the whole. By night the house might pa.s.s; the silent bulk imposed on the eye. By day it required no effort of fancy to see the scaffold still clinging to the brickwork, or to discern that the grand entrance had never opened to guest or neighbor, that everyday life had never gazed through the blank windows of the long facade.

The house, indeed, was not only dead. It had never lived.

Certainly Nature had done something to shroud the dead. The lawn was knee-deep in weeds, and the evergreens about it had pushed out embracing arms to narrow the vista before the windows. At the lower end of the lawn a paved terrace, the width of the house, promised a freer air, but even here gra.s.s sprouted between the flags, and elders labored to uproot the stately bal.u.s.trade that looked on the lower garden. This garden, once formal, was now a tangle of vegetation, a wilderness amid whose broad walks Venuses slowly turned to Dryads, and cla.s.sic urns lay in fragments, split by the frosts of some excessive winter. Only the prospect of the Trent Valley and the Derbyshire foot-hills, visible beyond the pleasance, still pleased; and this view was vague and sad and distant. For the Great House, as became its greatness, shunned the public eye, and, lying far back, set a wide stretch of park between its bounds and the verge of the upland.

One of the two men was the owner. The other who bore a bunch of keys was Stubbs. Both had a depressed air. It would have been hard to say which of the two entered more deeply into the sadness of the place.

Presently my lord turned his back on the house. "The view is fine," he said. "The only fine thing about the place," he added bitterly. "Isn't there a sort of Belvedere below the garden?"

"There is, my lord. But I fear that it is out of repair."

"Like everything else! There, don't think I'm blaming you for it, man. You cannot make bricks without straw. But let us look at this Belvedere."

They descended the steps, and pa.s.sed slowly along the gra.s.s-grown walk, now and again stepping aside to avoid the clutch of a straggling rose bough, or the fragments of a broken pillar. They paused to inspect the sundial, a giant b.u.t.terfly with closed wings, a replica of the stone monster in the Yew Walk. Lord Audley read the inscription, barely visible through the verdigris that stained the dial-plate: "Non sine sole volo!"

"Just so!" he said. "A short life and a merry one!"

A few paces farther along the walk they stopped to examine the basin of the great fountain. Cracked from edge to centre, and become a shallow bed of clay and weeds, it was now as unsightly as it had been beautiful in the days when fair women leaning over it had fed the gold fish, or viewed their mirrored faces in its waters.

"The fortunes of the Audleys in a nutsh.e.l.l!" muttered the unlucky owner. And turning on his heel, "Confound it, Stubbs," he cried, "I have had as much of this as I can stand! A little more and I shall go back and cut my throat! It is beginning to rain, too. D--n the Belvedere! Let us go into the house. That cannot be as bad as this."

Without waiting for an answer, or looking behind him, he strode back the way they had come. Stubbs followed in silence, and they regained the lawn.

"I tell you what it is," Audley continued, letting the agent come abreast of him. "You must find some vulgarian to take the place--iron man or cotton man, I don't care who he is, if he has got the cash I You must let it, Stubbs. You must let it! It's a white elephant, it's the d--ndest White Elephant man ever had!"

The lawyer shook his head. "You may be sure, my lord," he said mildly, "I should have advised that long ago, if it were possible. But we couldn't let it in its present state--for a short term; and we have no more power to lease it for a long one than, as your lordship knows, we have power to sell it."

The other swore. At the outset he had scarcely felt his poverty. But he was beginning to feel it. There were moments such as this when his withers were wrung; when the consequence which the t.i.tle had brought failed to soften the hardships of his lot--a poor peer with a vast house. Had he tried to keep the Great House in repair it would have swallowed the whole income of the peerage--a sum which, as it was, barely sufficed for his needs as a bachelor.

Already Stubbs had hinted that there was one way out--a rich marriage. And Audley had received the hint with the easiness of a man who was in no haste to marry and might, likely enough, marry where money was. But once or twice during the last few days, which they had been spending in a review of the property, my lord had shown irritation. When an old farmer had said to his face, that he must bring home a bride with a good fat chest, "and his lordship would be what his forbears had been," the great man, in place of a laughing answer, had turned glumly away.

Presently the two halted at the door of the north wing. Stubbs unlocked it and pushed it open. They entered an ante-room of moderate size.

"Faugh!" Audley cried. "Open a window! Break one if necessary."

Stubbs succeeded in opening one, and they pa.s.sed on into the great hall, a room sixty feet long and open to the roof, a gallery running round it. A withdrawing-room of half the length opened at one end, and midway along the inner side a short pa.s.sage led to a second hall--the servants' hall--the twin of this. Together they formed an H, and were probably a Jacobean copy of a Henry the Eighth building. A long table, some benches, and a score of ma.s.sive chairs furnished the room. Between the windows hung a few ragged pictures, and on either side of the farther door a piece of tapestry hung askew.

Audley looked about him. In this room eighty years before the old lord had held his revels. The two hearths had glowed with logs, a hundred wax-lights had shone on silver and gla.s.s and the rosy tints of old wine. Guests in satin and velvet, henchmen and led captains, had filled it with laughter and jest, and song. With a foot on the table they had toasted the young king--not stout Farmer George, not the old, mad monarch, but the gay young sovereign. To-day desolation reigned. The windows gray with dirt let in a grisly light. All was bare and cold and rusty--the webs of spiders crossed the very hearths. The old lord, mouldering in his coffin, was not more unlike that Georgian reveller than was the room of to-day unlike the room of eighty years before.

Perhaps the thought struck his descendant. "G.o.d! What a charnel-house!" he cried. "To think that men made merry in this room. It's a vault, it's a grave! Let us get away from it. What's through, man?"

They pa.s.sed into the withdrawing-room, where panels of needlework of Queen Anne's time, gloomy with age, filled the wall s.p.a.ces, and a few pieces of furniture crouched under shrouds of dust. As they stood gazing two rats leapt from a screen of Cordovan leather that lay in tatters on the floor. The rats paused an instant to stare at the intruders, then fled in panic.

The younger man advanced to one of the panels in the wall. "A hunting scene?" he said. "These may be worth money some day."

The lawyer looked doubtful. "It will be a long day first, I am afraid," he said. "It's funereal stuff at the best, my lord."

"At any rate it is out of reach of the rats," Lord Audley answered. He cast a look of distaste at the shreds of the screen. He touched them with his foot. A third rat sprang out and fled squeaking to covert. "Oh, d--n!" he said. "Let us see something else."

The lawyer led the way upstairs to the ghostly, echoing gallery that ran round the hall. They glanced into the princ.i.p.al guest-room, which was over the drawing-room. Then they went by the short pa.s.sage of the H to the range of bedrooms over the servants' hall. For the most part they opened one from the other.

"The parents slept in the outer and the young ladies in the inner," Audley said, smiling. "Gad! it tells a tale of the times!"

Stubbs opened the nearest door and recoiled. "Take care, my lord!" he said. "Here are the bats!"

"Faugh! What a smell! Can't you keep them out?"

"We tried years ago--I hate them like poison--but it was of no use. They are in all these upper rooms."

They were. For when Stubbs, humping his shoulders as under a shower, opened a second door, the bats streamed forth in a long silent procession, only to stream back again as silently. In a dusky corner of the second room a cl.u.s.ter, like a huge bunch of grapes, hung to one of the rafters. Now and again a bat detached itself and joined the living current that swept without a sound through the shadowy rooms.

"There's nothing beyond these rooms?"

"No."

"Then let us go down. Rats and bats and rottenness! Non sine sole volo! We may not, but the bats do. Let us go down! Or no! I was forgetting. Where is the Muniment Room?"

"This way, my lord," Stubbs replied, turning with suspicious readiness--the bats were his pet aversion. "I brought a candle and some of the new lucifers. This way, my lord."

He led the way down to a door set in a corner of the ante-room. He unlocked this and they found themselves at the foot of a circular staircase. On the farther side of the stairfoot was another door which led, Stubbs explained, into the servants' quarters. "This turret," he added, "is older even than the wing, and forms no part of the H. It was retained because it supplied a second staircase, and also a short cut from the servants' hall to the entrance. The Muniment Room is over this lobby on the first floor. Allow me to go first, my lord."

The air was close, but not unpleasant, and the stairs were clean. On the first floor a low-browed door, clamped and studded with iron, showed itself. Stubbs halted before it. There was a sputter. A light shone out. "Wonderful invention!" he said. "Electric telegraph not more wonderful, though marvellous invention that, my lord."

"Yes," the other answered dryly. "But--when were you here last, Stubbs?"

"Not for a twelvemonth, my lord."

"Leave your candle?"

"No."

"Then what's that?" The young man pointed to something that lay in the angle between a stair and the wall.

"G.o.d bless my soul!" the lawyer cried. "It's a candle."

"And clean. It has not been there a week. Who has been here, my friend?"

Stubbs reflected. "No one with my authority," he said. "But if the devil himself has been here," he continued, stoutly recovering himself, "he can have done no harm. I can prove that in five minutes, my lord--if you will kindly hold the light." He inserted a large key in the lock, and with an effort, he shot back the bolts. He pushed open the door and signed to Lord Audley to enter.

He did so, and Stubbs followed. They stood and looked about them. They were in a whitewashed chamber twelve feet square, clean, bare, empty. The walls gave back the light so that the one candle lit the place perfectly.

"It's as good as air-tight," Stubbs said with pride. "And you see, my lord, we swept it as bare as the palm of my hand. I can answer for it that not a shred of paper or a piece of wax was left."

Audley, gazing about him, seemed satisfied. His face relaxed. "Yes," he said, "you could not overlook anything in a place like this. I'm glad I've seen it."

He was turning to go when a thought struck him. He lowered the light and scanned the floor. "All the same, somebody has been here!" he exclaimed. "There's one of the things you are so pleased with--a lucifer!"

Stubbs stooped and looked. "A lucifer?" he repeated. He picked up the bit of charred wood and examined it. "Now how did that come here? I never used one till six months ago."

My lord frowned. "Who is it?" he asked.

"Some one, I fear, who has had a key made," the agent answered, shaking his head, "I can see that for myself. But has he learned anything?"

Stubbs stared. "There's nothing to learn, my lord," he said. "You can see that. Whoever he is, he has cracked the nut and found no kernel!"

The young man looked round him again. He nodded. "I suppose so," he said. But he seemed ill at ease and inclined to find fault. He threw the light of the candle this way and that, as if he expected the clean white walls to tell a tale. "What's that?" he asked suddenly. "A crack? Or what?"

Stubbs looked, pa.s.sed his hand over the mark on the wall, effaced it. "No, my lord, a cobweb," he said. "Nothing."

There was no more to be seen, yet Audley seemed loth to go. At length he turned and went out. Stubbs closed and locked the door behind them, then he took the candle from his lordship and invited him to go down before him. Still the young man hesitated. "I suppose we can learn nothing more?" he said.

"Nothing, my lord," Stubbs answered. "To tell you the truth, I have long thought Mr. John mad, and it is possible that his madness has taken this turn. But I am equally sure that there is nothing for him to discover, if he spends every day of his life here."

"All the same I don't like it," the owner objected. "Whoever has been here has no right here. It is odd that I had some notion of this before we came. You may depend upon it that this was why he fixed himself at the Gatehouse."

"He may have had something of the sort in his mind," Stubbs admitted. "But I don't think so, my lord. More probably, being here and idle, he took to wandering in for lack of something to do."

"And by and by, had a key made and strayed into the Muniment Room! No, that won't do, Stubbs. And frankly there should be closer supervision here. It should not have remained for me to discover this."

He began to descend, leaving Stubbs to digest the remark; who for his part thought honestly that too much was being made of the matter. Probably the intruder was John Audley; the man had a bee in his bonnet, and what more likely than that he should be taken with a craze to haunt the house which he believed was his own? But the agent was too prudent to defend himself while the young man's vexation was fresh. He followed him down in silence, and before many minutes had pa.s.sed, they were in the open air, and had locked the door behind them.

Clouds hung low on the tops of the trees, mist veiled the view, and a small rain was falling on the wet lawn. Nevertheless the young man moved into the open. "Come this way," he said.

The lawyer turned up the collar of his coat and followed him unwillingly. "Where does he get in?" my lord asked. It seemed as if the longer he dwelt on the matter the less he liked it. "Not by that door--the lock is rusty. The key had shrieked in it. Probably he enters by one of the windows in the new part."

He walked towards the middle of the lawn and Stubbs, thankful that he wore Wellington boots, followed him.

The lawyer thought that he had never seen the house wear so dreary an aspect as it wore under the gray weeping sky. But his lordship was more practical. "These windows look the most likely," he said after a short survey: and he dragged his unwilling attendant to the point he had marked.

A nearer view strengthened his suspicions. On the sill of one of the windows were scratches and stains. "You see?" he said. "It should not have been left to me to discover this! Probably John Audley comes from the Gatehouse by the Yew Walk." He turned to measure the distance with his eye, the distance which divided the spot from the Iron Gate. "That's it," he said, "he comes----"

Then, "Good G--d!" he muttered. "Look! Look!" Stubbs looked. They both looked. Beyond the lawn, on the farther side of the iron grille and clinging to it with both hands, a man stood bareheaded under the rain. Whether he had come uncovered, or his hat had been jerked from him by some movement caused by their appearance, they could not tell; nor how long he had stood thus, gazing at them through the bars. But they could see that his eyes never wavered, that his hands gripped the iron, and the two knew by instinct that in the intensity of his hate, the man was insensible alike to the rain that drenched him, and to the wind that blew out the skirts of his thin black coat.

Even Stubbs held his breath. Even he felt that there was something uncanny and ominous in the appearance. For the gazer was John Audley.

CHAPTER XVII.

TO THE RESCUE.

Stubbs was the first to collect himself, but a minute elapsed before he spoke. Then, "He must be mad," he cried, "mad, to expose himself to the weather at his age. If I had not seen it, I couldn't believe it!"

"I suppose it is John Audley?"

"Yes." Then raising his voice, "My lord! I don't think I would go to him now!"