The Mating of Lydia Part 13

Nevertheless, as he still glared at his enemy, Melrose suddenly realized that the man was right. He would have to submit. For many reasons, he could not--at this moment in particular--excite any fresh hue and cry which might bring the whole countryside on his back. Unless the doctor were lying, and he could get another of the craft to certify it, he would have to put up--for the very minimum of time--with the intolerable plague of this invasion.

He turned away abruptly, took a turn up and down the only free s.p.a.ce the room contained, and returned.

"Perhaps you will kindly inform me, sir--since you have been good enough to take this philanthropic business on yourself--or rather to shovel it on to me"--each sarcastic word was flung like a javelin at the doctor--"whether you know anything whatever of this youth you are thrusting upon me? I don't imagine that he has dropped from the skies! If you don't know, and haven't troubled yourself to find out, I shall set the police on at once, track his friends, and hand him over!"

Undershaw was at once all civility and alacrity.

"I have already made some inquiries at Keswick, Mr. Melrose, where I was this morning. He was staying, it appears, with some friends at the Victoria Hotel--a Mr. and Mrs. Ransom, Americans. The hotel people thought that he had been to meet them at Liverpool, had taken them through the Lakes, and had then seen them off for the south. He himself was on his way to Scotland to fish. He had sent his luggage to Pengarth by rail, and chose to bicycle, himself, through the Vale of St. John, because the weather was so fine. He intended to catch a night train on the main line."

"Just as I supposed! Idle scapegrace!--with nothing in the world to do but to get himself and other people into trouble!"

"You saw the card that I left for you on the hall table? But there is something else that we found upon him in undressing him which I should greatly prefer, if I might, to hand over to your care. You, I have no doubt, understand such things. They seem to be valuable, and neither the nurses nor I at all wish to have charge of them. There is a ring"--Undershaw searched his pockets--"and this case."

He held out two small objects. Melrose--still breathing quick with anger--took them unwillingly. With the instinctive gesture of the collector, however, he put up his eyegla.s.s to look at the ring. Undershaw saw him start.

"Good heavens!"

The voice was that of another man. He looked frowning at Undershaw.

"Where did you get this?"

"He wore it on his left hand. It is sharp as you see, and rather large, and the nurse was afraid, while he is still restless and sometimes delirious, he might do himself some hurt with it."

Melrose opened the case--a small flat case of worn green leather some six inches long; and looked at its contents in a speechless amazement. The ring was a Greek gem of the best period--an Artemis with the towered crown, cut in amethyst. The case contained six pieces,--two cameos, and four engraved gems--amethyst, cornelian, sardonyx, and rock crystal; which Melrose recognized at once as among the most precious things of this kind in the world! He turned abruptly, walked to his writing-table, took out the gems, weighed them in his hand, examined them with a magnifying gla.s.s, or held them to the light, muttering to himself, and apparently no longer conscious of the presence of Undershaw.

Recollections ran about his brain: "Mackworth showed me that Medusa himself last year in London. He bought that Mars at the Castellani sale.

And that's the Muse which that stupid brute Vincent had my commission for, and let slip through his fingers at the Arconati sale!"

Undershaw observed him, with an amus.e.m.e.nt carefully concealed. He had suspected from the beginning that in these possessions of the poor stricken youth means might be found for taming the formidable master of the Tower. For himself he scorned "la curiosite," and its devotees, as mere triflers and sh.e.l.l-gatherers on sh.o.r.es bathed by the great ocean of science. But like all natural rulers of men he was quick to seize on any weakness that suited his own ends; and he said to himself that Faversham was safe.

"They are valuable?" he asked, as Melrose still sat absorbed.

"They are," was the curt reply.

"I am glad they have fallen into such good hands. They show I think"--the speaker smiled amicably--"that we have not to do with any mere penniless adventurer. His friends are probably at this moment extremely anxious about him. I hope we may soon get some clue to them. Now"--the voice sharpened to the practical note--"may I appeal to you, Mr. Melrose, to make arrangements for the nurses as soon as is convenient to you. Their wants are very simple--two beds--plain food--small amount of attendance--and some means of communicating without too much delay with myself, or the chemist. I promise they shall give as little trouble as possible!"

Melrose rose slowly without replying. He took a bunch of keys from is pocket, and opened one of the drawers in the Riesener table. As he did so, the drawer, under a stream of sunset light from the window beyond it, seemed to give out a many-coloured flash--a rapid Irislike effect, lost in a moment. The impression made on Undershaw was that the drawer already contained gems like those in the case--or jewels--or both.

Melrose seemed to have opened the drawer in a fit of abstraction during which he had forgotten Undershaw's presence. But, if so, the act roused him, and he looked round half angrily, half furtively at his visitor, as he hastily relocked the drawer.

Then speaking with renewed arrogance, he said:

"Well, sir, I will see to these things. For to-night, I consent--for to-night only, mind you--reserving entirely my liberty of action for to-morrow."

Undershaw nodded, and they left the room together.

Dixon and Mrs. Dixon were both waiting in the pa.s.sage outside, watching for Melrose, and hanging on his aspect. To their amazement they were told that a room was to be got ready for the nurses, a girl was to be fetched to wait on them from the farm, and food was to be cooked.

The faces of both the old servants showed instant relief. Dixon went off to the farm, and Mrs. Dixon flew to her kitchen. She was getting old, and the thought of the extra work to be done oppressed her.

Nevertheless after these years of solitude, pa.s.sed as it were in a besieged camp--Threlfall and its inmates against the world--this new and tardy contact with humanity, this momentary return to neighbourly, kindly ways brought with it a strange sweetness. And when night fell, and a subdued, scarcely perceptible murmur of life began to creep about the pa.s.sages of the old house, in general so dead and silent, Mrs. Dixon might have been heard hoa.r.s.ely crooning an old song to herself as she went to and fro in the kitchen. All the evening she and Dixon were restless, inventing work, when work was finished, running from yard to house and house to yard, calling to each other without reason, and looking at each other with bewildered eyes. They were like beetles under a stone, when the stone is suddenly lifted.

Gradually the house sank to rest. Dixon creeping past the door of the sick-room, on his stockinged feet, could hear the moaning, the hoa.r.s.e indeterminate sounds, now loud, now plaintive, made by the sufferer. The day nurse came out with an anxious face, on her way to bed. Mr. Faversham she said was very ill--what could be done if it did become necessary to summon the doctor? Dixon a.s.sured her the gardener who was also the groom was sleeping in the house, and the horse was in the stable. She had only to wake Mrs. Dixon--he showed her where and how. In the dark corridor, amid all its obstructive lumber, these two people who had never seen each other before, man and woman, took anxious counsel for the help of an unconscious third, a complete stranger to both of them.

The night nurse gave a dose of morphia according to directions, and sat down on a low chair at the foot of the bed watching her patient.

About two o'clock in the morning, just as the darkness was beginning to thin, she was startled by a sound outside. She half rose, and saw the door open to admit a tall and gaunt figure, whom she recognized as the master of the house.

She held up an anxious finger, but Melrose advanced in spite of it. His old flowered dressing-gown and gray head came within the range of the night-light, and the nurse saw his shadow projected, grotesque and threatening, on the white traceries of the ceiling. But he made no sound, and never looked at the nurse. He stood surveying young Faversham for some time, as he lay hot and haggard with fever, yet sleeping under the power of morphia. And at last, without a word, the nurse saw her formidable visitor depart.

Melrose returned to his own quarters. The window of his room was open, and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show purple through dim veils of silvery cloud. He stood still, looking out.

His mind was churning like a yeasty sea. Old facts came to the surface; faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the Campagna. Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily.

It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone. He thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted him. And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind. Self-pity; recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned his back some thirty years before--the normal pleasures, friendships, occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment--against two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion, deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second--his wife--whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against and deserted him.

Also--creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age--and of the end, waiting. He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded. So defiant was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will. He would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that seemed to admit the grim fact--weakly accepted--into the citadel of a still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent. Some day he would feel, perhaps suddenly--the thought of it sent through him a shiver of impotent revolt against the human destiny--the clutch of the master whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!--only subterraneously connected with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected. The advent of the unconscious youth below had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of crystallizing force. Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the Dixons. Something seemed to have ended; and the mere change suggested that something might begin.

The sudden shock, indeed, of the new event, the mere interruption of habit, were serious matters in the psychology of a man, with whom neither brain nor nerves were normally attuned. Melrose moved restlessly about his room for a great part of the night. He could not get the haggard image of Faversham out of his mind; and he was actually, in the end, tormented by the thought that, in spite of nurses and doctors, he might die.

Nonsense! One could get a specialist from Edinburgh--from London if necessary.

And always, by whatever road, his thoughts came back--as it were leaping--to the gems. Amethyst, sardonyx, crystal--they twinkled and flashed through all the byways of the brain. So long as the house held their owner, it held them also. Two of them he had coveted for years.

They must not--they should not--be lost to him again. By what ridiculous chance had this lad got hold of them?

With the morning came a letter from a crony of Melrose's in London, an old Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, with whom he had had not a few dealings in the past.

"Have you heard that that queer fish Mackworth has left his whole cabinet of gems to a young nephew--his sister's son, to whom they say he has been much attached? Everything else goes to the British Museum and South Kensington, and it is a queer business to have left the most precious thing of all to a youth who in all probability has neither knowledge nor taste, and may be trusted to turn them into cash as soon as possible. Do you remember the amethyst Medusa? I could shout with joy when I think of it! You will be wanting to run the nephew to earth. Make haste!--or Germany or America will grab them."

But the amethyst Medusa lay safe in her green case in the drawer of the Riesener table.

V

Duddon Castle in May was an agreeable place. Its park, lying on the eastern slopes of the mountain ma.s.s which includes Skiddaw and Blencathra, had none of the usual monotony of parks, but was a genuine "chase," running up on the western side into the heather and rock of the mountain where the deer were at home, while on the east and south its splendid oaks stood thick in bracken beside sparkling becks, overlooking dells and valleys of succulent gra.s.s where the sheep ranged at will. The house consisted of an early Tudor keep, married to a Jacobean house of rose-coloured brick, which Lady Tatham had since her widowhood succeeded in freeing from the ugly stucco which had once disguised and defaced it.

It could not claim the cla.s.sical charm, the learned elegance of Threlfall Tower. Duddon was romantic--a medley of beautiful things, full of history, colour, and time, fused by the trees and fern, the luxuriant creepers and mosses, and of a mild and rainy climate into a lovely irregular whole; with no outline to speak of, yet with nothing that one could seriously wish away. The size was great, yet no one but an auctioneer could have called it "superb"; it seemed indeed to take a pleasure in concealing the whole extent of its cl.u.s.tered building; and by the time you were aware of it, you had fallen in love with Duddon, and nothing mattered.

But if without, in its broad external features, Duddon betrayed a romantic freedom in the minds of those who had planned it, nothing could have been more orderly or exquisite than its detail, when detail had to be considered. The Italian garden round the house with its formal ma.s.ses of contrasting colour, its pleached alleys, and pergolas, its steps, vases, and fountains, was as good in its way as the glorious wildness of the Chase. One might have applied to it the Sophoclean thought--"How clever is man who can make all these things!"--so diverse, and so pleasant. And indoors, Duddon was oppressive by the very ingenuity of its refinement, the rightness of every touch. No overcrowding; no ostentation. Beautiful s.p.a.ces, giving room and dignity to a few beautiful objects; famous pictures, yet not too many; and, in general, things rather suggestive than perfect; sketches--fragments--from the great arts of the world; as it were, a lovely wreckage from a vast ocean set tenderly in a perfect order, breathing at once the greatness and the eternal defeat of men.

The interior beauty of Duddon was entirely due to Victoria, Lady Tatham, mother of the young man who now owned the Tatham estates. She had created it through many years; she had been terribly "advised," in the process, by a number of clever folk, English and foreign; and the result alternately pleased and tormented her. To be fastidious to such a point is to grow more so. And Victoria Tatham was nothing if not fastidious.

She had money, taste, patience, yet ennui confronted her in many paths; and except for the son she adored she was scarcely a happy woman. She was personally generous and soft-hearted, but all "causes" found in her rather a critic than a supporter. The follies of her own cla.s.s were particularly plain to her; her relations, with their great names, and great "places," seemed to her often the most ridiculous persons in the world--a world no longer made for them. But one must hasten to add that she was no less aware of her own absurdities; so that the ironic mind in her robbed her both of conceit for herself and enthusiasm for others.