The Mating of Lydia Part 33

The eyes responded.

"What do we see?" she said, with her shy smile. "Surely we only see what we think--or dream!"

"True!" cried Delorme; "but a painter thinks _in paint_."

"There you go," said Boden, "with your esoteric stuff. All your great painters have thought and felt with the mult.i.tude--painted for the mult.i.tude."

"Never." The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up. "The mult.i.tude is a brute beast!"

"A just beast," murmured Boden.

"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter--in all the world!"

"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.

"Good heavens, no! Artists--and judges--together. The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven."

Boden caught Victoria's laugh.

"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I can stand--with apologies to my hostess."

"Oh, we're done for," said Victoria, quietly.

Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in the sunshine, then to his hostess.

"Not yet. But you're doomed. As the old Yorkshireman said to his son, when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travelling menagerie--that 'genelman's to be wooried _soom_ day.' When the real Armageddon comes, it'll not find you in possession. _You'll_ have gone down long before."

"Really? Then who will be in possession?" asked Gerald Tatham, a very perceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice. He disliked Boden as one of "the infernal Radicals" whom Victoria would inflict on the sacred precincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.

"Merely the rich"--the tone was still nonchalant--"the Haves against the Haven'ts. No nonsense left, by that time, about 'blood' and 'family.'

Society will have dropped all those little tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and embroideries.

We shall have come to the naked fundamental things."

"The struggle of rich and poor?" said Delorme. "Precisely. That's what all you fellows who go and preach revolution to dockers are after. And what on earth would the world do without wealth? Wealth is only materialized intelligence! What's wrong with it?"

"Only that we're dying of it."

The young man paused. He sat silently smoking, his eyes--unseeing--fixed upon the house. Lucy Manisty looked at him with sympathy.

"You mean," she said, "that no one who has the power to be rich has now ever the courage to be poor?"

He nodded, and turning to her he continued in a lower voice: "And think what's lost! Are we _all_ to be smothered in this paraphernalia of servants, and motor cars and gluttonous living? There's scarcely a man--for instance--among my friends who'll dare to marry! Hundreds used to be enough--now they must have thousands--or say their wives must. And they'll sell their souls to get the thousands. Who's the better--who's the happier for it in the end? We have left ourselves nothing to love with--nothing to be happy with. What does natural beauty--or human feeling--matter to the men who spend their days speculating in the City?

I know 'em. I have watched some of them for years. It's a thirst that destroys a man. To want to be rich is bad enough--to want to be rich _quick_ is death and d.a.m.nation ..."

There was silence again, till suddenly Boden addressed Colonel Barton, who was sitting opposite half asleep in the sun.

"I say, what's the name of a village, about two miles from here, I walked through while you were all at church this morning?--the most G.o.d-forsaken place I ever saw!--a horrible, insanitary hole!"

"Mainstairs!" said Barton, promptly, waking up. "That's the only village hereabout that fits the description. But Melrose owns two or three of them."

"The man that owns that village ought to be hung," said Boden with quiet ferocity. "In any decent state of society he would be hung."

Barton shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm on the sanitary authority. We've summoned him till we're tired, to put those cottages in repair. No use. Now, we've told him that we shall repair them ourselves and send in the bill to him. That's stirred him, and he's immediately given everybody notice to quit--says he'll close the whole village. But the people won't go. There are no other cottages for miles--they've taken to stoning our inspectors."

"And you think our land system's going to last on these terms?" said Boden, his eyes flaming.

The little Tory opposite drew himself up.

"It's not the system--it's the man."

"The system's judged--that permits the man."

"Melrose is unique," said Barton, hotly; "we are a model county, but for the Melrose estate."

"But the exception is d.a.m.ning! It compromises you all. That such a place as Mainstairs should be _possible_--that's the point!"

"For you Socialists, I daresay!" cried Barton. "The rest of us know better than to expect a perfect world!"

Boden laughed, the pa.s.sion dying from his face.

"Ah, well, we shall have to make you march--you fellows in possession. No hope--unless we are 'behind you with a bradawl!'"

"On the contrary! We marched before you Socialists were thought of. Who have put the bulk of the cottages of England in repair during the last half century, I should like to know--and built most of the new ones? The landlords of England! Who stands in the way of reform at the present moment? The small owner. And who are the small owners? Mainly Radical tradesmen."

Boden looked at him--then queerly smiled. "I daresay. I trust no man--further than I can see him. But if what you say is true, why don't you Conservatives--in your own interest--coerce men like Melrose? He's giving you away, every month he exists."

"Well, Tatham's at it," said Barton quietly; "we're all at it. And there's a new agent just appointed. Something to be hoped from him."

"Who is it?"

"You didn't hear us discussing him last night? A man called Claude Faversham."

"Claude Faversham? A tall, dark fellow--writes a little--does a little law--but mostly unemployed? Oh, I know him perfectly. Faversham? You don't mean it!" Boden threw himself back in his chair with a sarcastic lip, and relit his pipe. As he watched the spirals of smoke he recalled the few incidents of his acquaintance with the young man. They had both been among the original members of a small club in London, frequented by men of letters and junior barristers. Faversham had long since dropped out of the club, and was now the companion, so Boden understood, of much richer men, and a great frequenter of the Stock Exchange, where money is mysteriously made without working for it. That fact alone was enough for Cyril Boden. He felt an instinctive, almost a fanatical, antipathy toward the new agent. On the one side the worshippers of the Unbought and the Unpriced; on the other Mammon and all his troop. It was so that Boden habitually envisaged his generation. It was so, and by no other test, that he divided the sheep from the goats.

Meanwhile, Lydia Penfold, driving a diminutive pony, was slowly approaching the castle through the avenue of splendid oaks which led up to it. Faversham was walking beside her. He had overtaken her at the beginning of the avenue, and had sent on his motor that he might have the pleasure of her society.

The daintiness of her white dress, with all its pretty details, the touch of blue in her hat, and at her waist, delighted his eyes. It pleased him that there was not a trace in her of Bohemian carelessness in these respects. Everything was simple, but everything was considered. She knew her own beauty; that was clear. It gave her self-possession; but, so far as he could see, without a trace of conceit. He had never met a young girl with whom he could talk so easily.

She had greeted him with her most friendly smile. But it seemed to him nevertheless that she was a little pensive and overcast.

"You dined here last night?" he asked her. "Did the lion roar properly?"

"Magnificently. You weren't there?"

"No. Undershaw put down his foot. I shan't submit much longer!"