Wenderholme Part 31

It is the misfortune of certain positions that the virtues which are necessary to those who occupy them have to be translated into a money outlay before they can be adequately appreciated. Colonel Stanburne was not an extravagant man by nature; he was simple in all his habits and tastes, liked to live quietly at his own house, hated London, and indulged himself only in an innocent taste for tandem-driving, which certainly did not cost him two hundred a-year. But this was John Stanburne's character in his private capacity; as a leader of men--as the head of a regiment--his nature was very different. Whether his surroundings excited him, and so caused him to lose the mental balance which is necessary to perfect prudence, or whether he acted at first in ignorance of the wonderful acc.u.mulativeness of tradesmen's bills, and afterwards went on from the force of established habit, it is certain that from the 23d of May, 1853, when his regiment a.s.sembled for the first time, Colonel Stanburne entered upon a new phase of his existence.

Hitherto he had lived strictly within his income, whilst from the year 1853 he lived within it no longer.

His whole style of living had been heightened and increased by his position in the militia. The way he drove out was typical of every thing else. Before his colonelcy he had been contented with a tandem, and his tandem was horsed from the four ordinary carriage-horses which were regularly kept at Wenderholme. But since it had seemed convenient--nay, almost indispensably necessary--to have a commodious vehicle of some kind, that he might convey his officers from Sootythorn to Wenderholme every time he asked them to dinner--and since he had naturally selected a drag as the proper thing to have, and the pleasantest thing for himself to drive--there had been an increase in his stable expenses, and a change in his habits, which lasted all the year round. Besides, his natural kindliness and generosity of disposition, which had formerly found a sufficing expression in a general heartiness and good-nature, now began to express themselves in a much more expensive way--namely, by more frequent and more profuse hospitality.

In the year 1865 Colonel Stanburne was still at the head of his regiment of militia, and during the annual trainings the Wenderholme coach has never ceased to run. Wenderholme had become quite a famous place, and tourists knowing in architecture came to see it from distant counties.

It is a perfect type now of a great Elizabethan mansion: the exterior, especially the central ma.s.s over the porch, is enriched with elaborate sculpture; there are great mullioned windows everywhere, and plenty of those rich mouldings and copings which diversify the fronts of great houses of that age, and crown their lofty walls. There are globes and pinnacles on the completed gables, and at the intersections of the roofing rise fantastic vanes of iron-work, gilded, and glittering in the sunshine against the blue of the summer sky.

The interior has but one defect--it seems to require, in its inhabitants, the costume of Sir Walter Raleigh and the great ladies of his time. It has become like a poem or a dream, and one would hardly be surprised to find Edmund Spenser there reading the "Faery Queene" to the n.o.ble Surrey, or imagining, in the solitude of one of its magnificent rooms, some canto still to be written.

Let us pause here, and look at the place simply as in a picture, or series of pictures, before the current of events hurries us on till we have no time left to enjoy beautiful things, nor mental tranquillity enough to feel in tune with this perfect peace.

It is noon in summer. Under every oak in the great avenues lies a dark patch of shadow, and on the rich expanse of the open park the sunshine glows and darkens as the thin white clouds sail slowly in the blue aerial ocean. How rich and stately is the rounded foliage--how perfect the fulness of the protected trees! In the midst of them stands the house of Wenderholme, surrounded by soft margins of green lawn and wide borders of gleaming flowers.

It is pleasant this hot day to enter the great cool hall, to walk on its pavement of marble (white marble and black, in lozenges), and rest the eye in the subdued light which reigns there, even at noon.

Under pretext of restoration, Wenderholme had been made a great deal more splendid, and incomparably more comfortable, than it ever was in the time of its pristine magnificence. In the wainscot and the furniture the architect had lavishly used a great variety of strange and beautiful woods, quite unknown to our ancestors; and not contented with the stones and marbles of the British islands, he had brought varieties from Normandy, and Sicily, and Spain, and the Mediterranean sh.o.r.es of Africa.

As for the arrangements that regarded comfort and convenience, John Stanburne's architect had learned the extent of a rich Englishman's exigence when he erected the mansions of five or six great cotton-manufacturers, and, strong in this experience, had made Wenderholme a model place for elaborately perfect housekeeping.

What had been done with the modern furniture that had been saved on the night of the fire? We may learn this, and some other matters also, when the Colonel comes in to lunch.

He crosses his great hall, and goes straight to the dining-room. The twelve years that have pa.s.sed by have aged him even more than so many dozens of months ought to have done. His hair is getting prematurely gray, and his step, though still firm and manly, has lost a good deal of its elasticity, and something of its grace. The expression on his countenance does not quite correspond with all the glory of the paradise that is his, with the sunshine on the broad green park and vast shade-bestowing trees, with the rich peace of these cool and silent halls. When he is with other people, his face is very much as it used to be; but when he is alone, as he is now, it looks weary and haggard, as if to live were an effort and a care--as if some hateful anxiety haunted him, and wore him hour after hour.

"Tell her ladyship that I have come in to lunch; and stay--you need not wait upon us to-day."

Lady Helena comes with her scarcely audible little step, and quietly takes her place at the table. _She_ is not very much changed by the lapse of these last twelve years. She is still rather pretty, and she looks as intelligent as ever, though not perhaps quite so lively. But as for liveliness, she has nothing to encourage her vivacity just now, for the Colonel eats his slice of cold beef in silence, and scarcely even looks in her direction. When he looks up at all, it is at the window,--not that there is any thing particular to be seen there--only the sunny garden with the fountain, fed from the hills behind.

"My dear," said Lady Helena, "as the regiment is disbanded now, I suppose we have no longer any reason to remain at Wenderholme? Suppose we went up to town again for the end of the season? There are several people that you promised to see, and didn't call upon before you came away. There's old Lady Sonachan's ball on the 15th, and I think we ought to do something ourselves in Grosvenor Square--you know we meant to do, if the training of the regiment had not been a fortnight earlier than we expected."

"I think it would be as well to stop quietly at Wenderholme."

"I'm afraid, dear," said Lady Helena, caressingly, "that you're losing your good habits, and going back to the ideas you had many years ago, before the militia began. You've been so very nice for a long time now that it would be a pity to go back again to what you used to be before you were properly civilized. For you know, dear, you were _not_ quite civilized then--you were _sauvage_, almost a recluse; and now you like society, and it does you good--doesn't it, dear? Everybody ought to go into society--we all of us need it. _Do_ come with me to town, dear, and after that I will go with you wherever you like."

"Helena," the Colonel answered, gravely, "that's the sort of game we have been playing for many years. 'Do indulge me in my fancy, and then I will indulge you in some fancy of your own.' It is time to put a stop to that sort of thing."

"It would be a pity, I think. Have we not been very happy, my love, all these years together?"

"Yes, no doubt, of course. But I'll tell you what it is, Helena--we made a great mistake."

Lady Helena's face flushed, and her eyes filled. "A mistake! I am grieved if you think your marriage was a mistake, John. I never think so of mine."

"It isn't that; I don't mean the marriage. I mean something since the marriage. But it's no use talking about that just now. I say, put your shawl on and take a little walk with me, will you?"

They went in silence by the path that rose towards the moors behind the house. When they came to the pond, the Colonel seemed to pause and hesitate a little; then he said, "No, not here--on the open moor."

They came to the region of the heather, and the park of Wenderholme, with all the estate around it, lay spread like a great map beneath them.

"Sit down here, Helena, and let us talk together quietly. It may be better for both of us." Then came a long pause of silence, and when Lady Helena looked in the Colonel's face, she perceived that his eyes were wandering over the land from one field to another, with a strange expression of lingering and longing and regret. Evidently he had forgotten that she was with him.

"Dear," she said at last, "what was that great mistake you talked about?"

He started and looked round at her suddenly. Then, laying his hand very gently on her shoulder, said with strange tenderness, "You won't be hurt, will you? It was mutual, you know."

"Do you recollect, Helena," he went on, after a little while, "the time when I first began to drive four horses? You didn't approve of it--of course I know you didn't--and there were a good many other things that you didn't approve of either, and your opinion was plain enough in your way with me. Well, then, there were some things that you either did or wanted to do, you know, which didn't quite suit me, and seemed to me as unnecessary as my fancy for driving four horses seemed to you. But I found out that I could keep you in a good temper, and make you indulge me in my fancies, by indulging you in corresponding fancies of your own.

So whenever I resolved upon an extravagance, I stopped your criticisms by some bribe; and the biggest bribe of all--the one that kept you indulgent to me year after year--was that house in Grosvenor Square."

"It was your own proposing."

"That's just what I am saying. I proposed the house in town to keep you quiet--to keep you from criticising me. You had got into a way of criticising me about the time of the fire, and I hated being criticised. So I thought, 'She shall have her own way if she'll only let me have mine;' and it seems you thought something of the same kind, for you became very indulgent with me. That has been our mistake, Helena."

"But _was_ it such a mistake after all, darling? Have we not been very happy all these years? I remember we were not so happy just when the militia began. You were not so nice with me as you have been since."

"Perhaps not--and you weren't as nice with me either, Helena; but we were nearer being right then than we ever have been during the last few years. I mean to say that, if we had said plainly to each other then--in a kind sort of way, of course--what each was thinking, we should have spared each other a great deal of suffering."

"We have suffered very little, love; we have been very happy."

"The punishment is yet to come. I've been punished, in my mind, for years past, and said nothing about it to you, because I wanted partly to spare you, and partly to screen myself, for I thought I could bring things round again."

"Do you mean about money?"

"Yes."

"Well, but, dear, you always told me that there had been no diminution in our income. Did you not tell me the truth?"

"All that was perfectly true. The income was not diminished, but the new investments weren't as safe as the old ones. Don't you see, we had less capital to get our income from, and our expenses were even heavier than they used to be. So I invested at higher interest, to make up the difference in our income, and I've been carrying that on to an extent you know nothing about."

Lady Helena began to be alarmed. n.o.body knew better than her ladyship that the _prestige_ of aristocracy rested ultimately upon wealth, and that she could no more keep up her station without a good income than her strength without food. It had been a capital error of John Stanburne's from the beginning, not to consult his wife on every detail of his money transactions. She had always been perfectly prudent in not letting current expenses go beyond income, although, as they had only one child, there appeared to be no necessity for saving. She would have advised him well if he had invited her to advise him; but though he had always told her, with truth, that their income was four thousand a-year, he had not told her the history of the capital sum from which this income had, in consequence of some devices of his own, been drawn so unfailingly. The restoration of Wenderholme had been a very costly undertaking indeed. The whole outlay upon it John Stanburne had never dared to calculate; but we, who have no reason for that nervous abstinence from terrible totals, know that during the years immediately succeeding the great fire, he did not, in the restoration and adornment of his beautiful home, spend less than twenty-seven thousand pounds. The result, no doubt, was worth even so large an outlay as this; nor was the sum in itself very wildly extravagant, when one reflects that one of the Sootythorn cotton-spinners laid out fully as much on an ugly new house about half a mile beyond Chesnut Hill. But it diminished John Stanburne's funded property by more than one-half, and it therefore became necessary to invest the remainder more productively, to keep his income up to its old level.

Whilst he is telling these things to Lady Helena in his own way, let us narrate them somewhat more succinctly in ours. It had happened, about three years after the fire--that is, in the year 1856--that a new bank had been established in Sootythorn, called the Sootythorn District Bank, and some of the capitalists both in the immediate locality and in the neighboring country had invested in it rather largely. Amongst these was our acquaintance, Mr. Joseph Anison of Arkwright Lodge, near Whittlecup, who, not having a son to succeed him in his business, did not care to extend it, and sought another investment for his savings which might as nearly as possible approach in productiveness the ample returns of commerce. Mr. Anison was one of the original founders of the new bank, and if the idea had not positively its first source in his own mind, it was he who brought it to a practicable shape, and finally made it a reality. Colonel Stanburne had taken Joseph Anison into his confidence about his money matters--at least so far as to show him the present reduced state of his funded capital; and he added that, with his diminished income, it had become necessary to economize by a determined reduction of expenses, the most obvious means to which would be the resignation of his commission in the militia--which, directly or indirectly, cost him a clear thousand a-year--and the abandonment of the house in town, which had then recently been established for the gratification of Lady Helena, and furnished with the modern furniture saved at the burning of Wenderholme. Mr. Anison strongly dissuaded the Colonel from both these steps, urging upon him the popularity which he enjoyed both in the regiment and at Sootythorn, and even certain considerations of public duty to which an English gentleman is rarely altogether insensible. The Colonel liked the regiment, he liked his position, and it may even be said, without any exaggeration of his merits, that, independently of the consideration which it procured him, he felt an inward satisfaction in doing something which could be considered useful. To resign his commission, then, would have been difficult for another reason, if not altogether impossible. The regiment, instead of coming to Sootythorn for a month's training in the year, was on permanent garrison duty in Ireland, and he could not gracefully leave it.

The other project--the abandonment of his house in London--might have been agreeable enough to himself personally, but he was one of those husbands who, from weakness or some other cause, find it impossible to deprive a wife of any thing which she greatly cares for. This defect was due in his case, as it is in many others, to an inveterate habit of politeness towards all women, _even_ towards his wife; and just as no gentleman would take possession of a chair or a footstool which a lady happened to be using, so John Stanburne could not turn Lady Helena out of that house in town which she liked so much, and which both of them looked upon as peculiarly her own. It is easy for rough and brutal men to do these things, but a gentleman will often get into money embarra.s.sments out of mere delicacy. I don't mean to imply that the Colonel's way of dealing with his wife was the best way. It would have been far better to be frank with her from the beginning; but then a simple nature like John Stanburne's has such a difficulty in uniting the gentleness and the firmness which are equally necessary when one has to carry out measures which are sure to be disagreeable to a lady. The _suaviter in modo_, &c., is, after all, a species of hypocrisy--at least until it has become habitual; and when the Colonel was soft in manner, which he always was with women, he was soft in the matter also. In a word, though no one was better qualified to please a lady, he was utterly incapable of governing one--an incapacity which perhaps he shared with the majority of the sons of Adam.

As retrenchment had appeared impossible, or, at least, too difficult to be undertaken so long as there was the alternative of a change of investments, the Colonel begged Mr. Anison, as an experienced man of business, to look out for something good in that way; and Mr. Anison, who, with his brother capitalists, had just started the Sootythorn District Bank, honestly represented to his friend that a better and a safer investment was not likely to be found anywhere. As he preached not merely by precept but by example, and showed that he had actually staked every thing which he possessed on the soundness of the speculation--he, the father of a family--Colonel Stanburne was easily persuaded, and became one of the largest shareholders. The bank was soon in a very flourishing condition--in fact it was really prosperous, and exceeded the most sanguine hopes of its originators. The manager was both an honorable man and a man of real ability as a financier. The dividends were very large, and _not_ paid out of capital.

After five or six years of this prosperity, during which the Colonel's aggregate income had been higher than it ever was during his best days as a fund-holder, he began to conceive the idea of replacing, by economy, the sum of 27,000, which had been withdrawn from his funded capital for the restoration and embellishment of Wenderholme. To do this he prudently began by saving the surplus of his income; but as this did not seem to acc.u.mulate fast enough for his desires, he thought that, without permanently alienating his estate, he might mortgage some portion of it, and invest the money so procured at the higher interest received by the shareholders of the Sootythorn District Bank. The mere surplus of interest would of itself redeem the mortgage after a few years, leaving the money borrowed in his own hands as a clear increase of capital. In this way he mortgaged a great part of the estate of Wenderholme to our friend Mr. Jacob Ogden of Milend.

All these things were done _clam Helena_--unknown to her ladyship. She was not supposed to understand business, and probably the Colonel, from the first, had apprehended her womanish fears of the glorious uncertainties of speculation. His conscience, however, was perfectly at ease. At the cost of a degree of risk which he set aside as too trifling to be dwelt upon, he was gradually--nay, even rapidly--replacing the money sunk in Wenderholme; and every day brought him nearer to the time when he might live in his n.o.ble mansion without the tormenting thought that it had been paid for out of his inherited capital. At the same time, so far from withdrawing from the world's eyes into the obscurity which is usually one of the most essential conditions of retrenchment, he actually filled a higher place in the county than he had ever occupied before. The taste for society grows upon us and becomes a habit, so that the man who a year or two since bore solitude with perfect ease, may to-morrow find much companionship a real want, though an acquired one. The more sociable John Stanburne became, the more he felt persuaded that the house in London was a proper thing to keep up, and there came to be quite an admirable harmony between him and Lady Helena. She had always loved him very much, but in the days when he had a fancy for retirement, she had felt just a shade of contempt for the rusticity of his tastes. As this rusticity wore off, her ladyship respected her husband more completely; and the coolness which had existed between them in the year 1853 was succeeded by an affectionate indulgence on both sides, which was entirely satisfactory to Lady Helena, and was only a little less so to the Colonel, because he knew it to be a sacrifice of firmness.

He began to feel this very keenly at the time our story reopens, because some very heavy misfortunes had befallen the Sootythorn District Bank, and the Colonel began to doubt whether, after all, his financial operations (successful as they had hitherto appeared) were quite so prudent as he and Mr. Anison had believed. Mr. Stedman had been against the enterprise from the very first, and had openly attempted to dissuade both Mr. Anison and the Colonel from any partic.i.p.ation in it; but then Mr. Stedman, who had neither the expenses of a family nor the drain of a high social position, could afford the utmost extremity of prudence, and could literally have lived in his accustomed manner if his money had been invested at one per cent. However, the Bank had kept up the Colonel's position by giving him an easy income for several years; and by enabling him to put by a surplus, had compensated, by the mental satisfaction which is the reward of those who save, any little anxiety which from time to time may have disturbed the tranquillity of his mind.

But now the anxiety was no longer a light one, to be compensated by thinking about savings. A private meeting of the princ.i.p.al shareholders had been held the day before, and it had become clear to them that the position of the Sootythorn Bank (and consequently their own individual position, for their liability was unlimited) was perilous in the extreme. Immense sums had been advanced to cotton firms which were believed to be sound, but which had gone down within the preceding fortnight; and many other loans were believed to be very doubtful. Under these circ.u.mstances, the chief shareholders--Colonel Stanburne amongst the number--bound themselves by a mutual promise not to attempt to sell, as any unusual influx of shares upon the market would at once provoke their depreciation, and probably create a panic.

Whilst the Colonel had been telling all these things to Lady Helena, he had not dared to look once upon her face; but when he had come to an end, a silence followed--a silence so painful that he could not bear it, and turned to her that she might speak to him. She was not looking in his direction. She was not looking at Wenderholme, nor on any portion of the fair estate around it; but her eyes were fixed on the uttermost line of the far horizon. She was very pale; her lips were closely compressed, and there was a tragic sternness and severity in her brow that John Stanburne had never before seen.

For a whole minute--for sixty intolerable seconds--not one word escaped her.

"Helena, speak to me!"

She turned slowly towards him, and rose to her feet. Then came words--words that cut and chilled as if they were made of sharp steel that had been sheathed in a scabbard of ice.

"You have been very imprudent and very weak. You are not fit to have the management of your own affairs."