Ancestors

XVI

The young Marquess of Strathland and Zeal sat alone in the smoking-room at Capheaton--the guests, with the exception of Flora Thangue and Isabel Otis had departed six days ago--sunk in a melancholy so profound that his brain was mercifully inactive: if the history of the past week was dully insistent the future was not.

He had witnessed the descent of his grandfather and cousin into the vault of the chapel at Strathland Abbey two days before, and after the necessary interviews with stewards and family solicitors had returned this afternoon to Capheaton with his mother. Lady Victoria, even her dauntless soul sick with grief and horrors, had gone to bed at once, and after a funereal dinner, where he had made no response whatever to the feeble efforts of the girls to illuminate the darkness in which he moved, had gone to the smoking-room alone, wishing to think and plan, yet grateful that he could not.

He had known nothing of the weakness of his grandfather"s heart, and the old gentleman, as ruddy and debonair as ever, had just come in from the coverts when he arrived at the Abbey a few hours after Zeal"s departure from Capheaton. Always vain of his health and appearance since his complete recovery, now many years ago, Lord Strathland had turned a haughty back upon the one physician that had dared to warn him; not even his valet was permitted to suspect that he had been forced to pay to Time any debt beyond bleaching hair and an occasional twinge of gout.

The care he had taken of himself in his delicate youth had given him a finer const.i.tution than he would have been likely to enjoy had he been able to go the wild way of many of his family; and it was his familiar boast that he intended to live until ninety.

Elton"s visit roused no curiosity in his complacent breast, for the favorite seldom announced his coming, and it was quite in order that he should run down for congratulations, and delight his affectionate if disapproving relative with personal details of the great fight. He had come with the intention of being the one to break the news of his cousin"s death to his grandfather, should it be necessary; but he permitted himself to hope that Zeal would rise above his type. He had driven him to the station himself, dispensing with the groom as well, and pleaded with him to wait at least a month; to consider the matter more coolly and carefully than had hitherto been possible; begged him to return to Capheaton; offered to travel with him if he preferred to leave England. Whatever might threaten in the future there could be no immediate danger of arrest, for if the shot had carried beyond the private rooms of the Club there would have been evidence of the fact at once, and if the undertakers had suspected the truth and delayed giving information, their purpose was blackmail and could be dealt with.

And while he argued and pleaded he wondered, as he had during the hours he watched beside his cousin sleeping, if, in spite of certain principles which he had believed to be immutable, he could have found any other solution himself. Honor has many arbitrary inflections, and Zeal"s act, being wholly abominable, there must seem, in his code, to be no place for him among men. To walk among them unscathed, punished only by a conscience that time would inevitably dull, and the loss of a small fortune that his promised wife would more than replace, while some pa.s.sionate creature without powerful friends or money for blackmail went to the noose, was an outrage abroad in the secret regions of the spirit even if it made no a.s.sault upon public standards. He deserved extinction, one way or another, and it would be almost as great an outrage were he to cover his family with his own disgrace. Certain men might, after such a lesson, live on to devote their lives to repentance and beneficent works, but not Zeal; and Gwynne had no great respect for a character made over after some terrifying explosion among its baser parts. And the question would always remain if the highest honor would not have commanded confession.

He made a deliberate effort to put himself in Zeal"s place, and after several failures accomplished the feat. He was willing to believe that his first impulse would have been to destroy himself, not so much through fear as through a blind sense of atonement, for when he endeavored to argue that the crime belonged to the law and the public, he swore at himself for a prig. Either way was suicide, and if the more deliberate might d.a.m.n a man"s soul, no doubt he deserved nothing less, and at least he had done his duty by his family and his cla.s.s. Gwynne had in the base of his character a puritanical stratum by no means mined as yet, but with too many outcroppings to have been overlooked. But the very strength it gave him served to confuse the simplicity of the religious instinct; and duty, like the code of honor, endures many interpretations in complex minds. He was quite sure that ultimately he would have decided with his cold intelligence; and he was equally sure that if he had doggedly determined to conquer life and be conquered by nothing, that the best part of his mental existence would have gone into the grave with his ideals.

Although there was still some confusion in his mind, he kept it out of his words, and as he drove home from the station he was sanguine enough to hope that he had at least dissuaded Zeal from precipitancy; for his cousin, flippant, cynical, appeared to be quite his usual self, and as he nodded from the window of the train bore little resemblance to the demoralized wretch of the night.

Nevertheless, he hastened to his grandfather, for he knew how little the mood of the moment may presage that of an hour hence; although he was reasonably sure that if Zeal lived until the following morning it would be some time before he brought himself to the sticking-point again. He announced to his mother and his guests that it was his duty to spend twenty-four hours with his grandfather, promising to return in time for two hours" shooting on the morrow.

He took for granted that Zeal had gone to London. What then was his foreboding horror when Lord Strathland, as they sat alone at luncheon--the unmarried aunts were visiting--remarked with acerbity:

"Zeal arrived on the train before yours--went straight to his room, giving orders he was not to be called until dinner--has not honored me with so much as an intimation that he was in the house--Where are you going?"

Gwynne had half risen. He sat down hastily.

"I was afraid he might be ill," he replied, coolly. "But doubtless he merely had a bad night and wants sleep."

In a flash he had understood. It was like Zeal"s cynicism to die as close to the family vault as possible.

No meal had ever seemed as long as that last luncheon with his grandfather, who promptly dismissed the subject of his detested heir and asked a hundred questions about the campaign. A fierce sense of protecting the two men he loved best enabled Gwynne to answer as collectedly as if he had not been possessed with the sickening idea that the very bones had gone out of him. When luncheon was over he accompanied his grandfather to the library, then after smoking a third of a cigar, left him to his nap, frankly stating that he thought he had better look up Zeal, who had been rather seedy of late; he would risk being unwelcome.

He walked slowly up the stair and along the corridor to his cousin"s suite; he was in no hurry to reach it, but neither could he wait for the possible discovery of the servants at the dinner-hour.

He knocked at the door of the sitting-room. There was no answer. He turned the handle. The door was locked. Then he pounded and called. He was about to fling himself against the door when he heard a quick step in the corridor, and before he could retreat Lord Strathland was beside him. There was no defect in the old gentleman"s eyesight nor in his perceptions. Zeal"s abrupt arrival without servant or luggage, and his more than usual rudeness, had charged him with vague suspicions as well as annoyance. When Gwynne, in spite of his self-control, had turned livid upon hearing that Zeal was in the Abbey, and had risen as if to fly to his rescue, a dark if undefined foreboding had entered his grandfather"s mind. But Lord Strathland respected the reserve of his guests, no matter how nearly related, and, dismissing the subject, had forgotten his apprehension until Gwynne revived it by his untimely pilgrimage. Then Lord Strathland thought the time had come to hear the truth.

"Well?" he demanded, sharply. "What is it? What"s up? Why doesn"t Zeal open? I saw him in Piccadilly on Sat.u.r.day and he stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I thought at the moment it was some of his d.a.m.ned impertinence, but concluded that he had something on his mind. He looked more dead than alive."

Gwynne"s back was to the light, and he controlled his voice, although his heart was thumping. "Well, he has been, poor chap--awfully seedy--I am really worried. He may have antic.i.p.ated a final hemorrhage, and crawled home to die." He cherished the hope that Zeal had been at pains to procure an untraceable drug.

"Ah! Well--I hope that is it if the poor fellow is dead. He looked as if he had more than ill-health on his mind. I thought he had pulled up, but no doubt he went to pieces over some wretched woman again. Come, let us get in. I don"t want the servants to know anything of this at present."

They threw themselves against the door. The old gentleman was heavy and Gwynne sound and wiry in spite of his delicate appearance. The door was stout but its hinges were old, and after several attempts they drove it in. Lord Strathland"s face was pale and he was panting, but he led the way rapidly through the sitting-room into the bedroom.

Zeal had undressed, extended himself on the bed, and covered his body with an eider-down quilt. Lord Strathland jerked it off, and both saw what they had expected to see, for a faint odor of burnt powder lingered in the rooms.

Lord Strathland"s face was ghastly, almost blue. He had antic.i.p.ated death, not with the imagination of the young, but dully, through the atrophied faculties of his age, and the shock could hardly have been greater had he found his grandson without warning.

"What does this mean?" he demanded, thickly. "You know and I will know."

Gwynne took him firmly by the arm and turned him about. "Not here," he said. "Come to the library. I will tell you, but I am no more fit to talk just now than you are to listen."

His grandfather submitted, and Gwynne dropped his arm and rearranged the quilt over his cousin"s body. At the same moment Lord Strathland"s eyes lit on a sealed letter addressed to himself. Before Gwynne could interfere he had broken the seal. It ran:

MY LORD,--I murdered Brathland. In cold blood--saving the fact that I was drunk. My entire private fortune has gone for purposes of blackmail. Even that might not have saved me eventually from the hangman, we have grown so d.a.m.ned democratic. All things considered, I am sure you will agree that it is quite proper I should make the exit of a gentleman while there is yet time. Jack will give you further particulars, should you care to listen to them. ZEAL."

He too had known nothing of the condition of his grandfather"s heart, and it had amused him to plan a last shock to the perennial optimism and complacency of the person he disliked most on earth. The smile was still on his frozen lips that expressed the amused antic.i.p.ation of his brain. Death, to do him justice, he had met with none of the cowardice he had vaunted, and consistently with his arid cynical soul.

"Don"t read it! Don"t!" Gwynne had exclaimed, in agony, and forgetting the awful figure on the bed in his alarm at the sight of his grandfather"s face. "If you must know the truth let me tell it in my own way."

But Lord Strathland read, and fell at his feet like a bundle of old clothes.

XVII

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor, in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal"s five girls, and himself; the hideous reiteration of "your lordship" by the obsequious servants, that reproduced in his mind the slow deep notes of the pa.s.sing bell, tolled in the village for his grandfather and cousin.

A letter from Julia Kaye had fluttered in like a dove of promise, but he had never been able to recall anything in the six pages of graceful sympathy but her allusions to the dead as "the marquess" and "the earl."

He told himself angrily that his brain must have weakened to notice a solecism at such a time, but it is in moments of abnormal mental strain that trifles have their innings; and during the beautiful service in the chapel he caught himself wondering if any woman of his own cla.s.s could have made such a slip. Always deaf to gossip, he had no suspicion that his Julia had been laughed at more than once for her inability to grasp all the unwritten laws of a world which she had entered too late. With an ear in which a t.i.tle lingered like a full voluptuous note of music, she was blunt to certain of the democratic canons of modern society.

Although it gave her the keenest pleasure to address the highest bulwarks of the peerage off-handedly as "duke" and "d.u.c.h.ess," there had been moments of confusion when she had lapsed naturally into "your grace." And it would have seemed like a lost opportunity to have alluded to a t.i.tled foreigner without his "von" or "de," even where there was a more positive t.i.tle to use as often as she pleased. It was the one weak spot in a singularly acute and accomplished mind.

But of all this Gwynne knew nothing, and he was dully wondering if a great love could be affected by trifles, and if his brain and character were of less immutable material than he had believed, his mental vision still straying through the insupportable gloom of the past week, when he heard a light foot-fall beyond the door. He sprang to his feet, cursing his nerves, and was by no means rea.s.sured upon seeing the long figure of a woman, dressed entirely in white, a candle in her hand, approaching him down the dark corridor. He had never given a moment"s thought in his active life to psychic phenomena, but he was in a state of mind where nothing would have surprised him, and he had turned cold to his finger-tips when a familiar voice rea.s.sured him.

"I am not Lady Macbeth," said Isabel, with a tremor in her own voice, as she entered and blew out the candle. "But I felt like her as I braved the terrors of all those dark corridors and that staircase in my wild desire to talk to a living person. I had arrived at that stage where all your ancestors gibbered at the foot of my bed. Flora has been sleeping with me, but your mother wanted her to-night, and I am deserted."

"What a lot of babies you are!" Gwynne was delighted to wreak his self-contempt on some one else, but glad of the interruption, and unexpectedly mellowed by the sight of a pretty woman after the red noses and sable plumage of the past week. It was true that he had seen Isabel at dinner, but like Flora she had worn a black gown out of respect to the family woe, and he hated the sight of black.

Now she wore a gown of soft white wool fastened at the throat and waist with a blue ribbon; and even her profile, whose severity he had disapproved, having a masculine weakness for pugs, was softened by the absence of the coils or braids that commonly framed it: her hair hung in one tremendous plait to the heels of her slippers.

"I see that you have no more sleep in you than I have," he said. "Let us make a night of it."

It had rained all day and he was suddenly alive to a sense of physical discomfort. He rang and ordered a servant to make a fire and bring the tea-service.

"How did you know I was here?" he asked Isabel, when they were alone again.

"I felt that you were, but I went first to your room and tapped. I was quite capable of waking you up. Thank heaven I summoned the courage to come down. This is delightful."

The fire was crackling in the grate, the water boiling in the big silver kettle. Isabel made his tea almost black, but diluted her own, lest she should be left alone before she too was ready for sleep.

"You have had a beastly time these last days," he said, for he was genuinely hospitable. "I am sorry you did not happen to come a month earlier. Have you seen anything of Hexam? He was going on to Arcot."

"He rode over, or walked over, every day. We should have fallen a prey to melancholy without him, although you may believe me when I a.s.sure you that we thought more of you than we did of ourselves. I am your own blood-relation, so I have a right to feel dreadfully sympathetic--may I have a cigarette?"

"What a brick you are to smoke! I don"t mind being sympathized with for a change. I have had to do so much sympathizing with others in the last week that I have not had time to pity myself. Even my mother went to pieces, for she was fond of Zeal, poor old chap, and her conscience scorched her because she was always rather nasty to my grandfather--she likes and dislikes tremendously, you know; although to most people she is merely indifferent. But when she dislikes--" He blew the ashes from the tip of his cigarette with a slight whistling sound.