Prisoners

Such an imitation peace, coy as a fickle mistress, Wentworth cherished.

Was it worth all the trouble he took to preserve it, when the real thing lay at his very door?

On this February morning, as he sat looking out across the down, white in the pale sunshine, the current of his life ran low. He had returned the night before from one of his periodical journeys to Italy to visit Michael in his cell. He was tired with the clang and hurry of the long journey, depressed almost to despair by the renewed realisation of his brother"s fate. Two years--close on two years, had Michael been in prison.

In Wentworth"s faithful heart that wound never healed. To-day it bled afresh. He bit his lip, and his face quivered.

Wentworth was not as handsome as Michael, but, nevertheless, he was distinctly good to look at, and the half-brothers, in spite of the fifteen years" difference between their ages, bore a certain superficial resemblance to each other. Wentworth was of middle height, lightly and leanly built, with a high bridge on a rather thin nose, and with narrow, clean grey eyes under light eyelashes. He looked as if he had been made up of different shades of one colour. His light brown hair had a little grey in it, his delicately cut face and nervous hands were both tanned, by persistent exposure to all kinds of weather, to nearly the same shade of indeterminate brown as his hair.

You could not look at Wentworth without seeing that he was a man who had never even glanced at the ign.o.ble side of life, for whose fastidious, sensitive nature sensual lures had no attraction, a man who could not lie, who could not stoop, whose mind was as clean as his hand, and, for an Englishman, that is saying a good deal. He was manly in a physical sense. He rode straight, he shot well. He could endure bodily strain with indifference, though he was not robustly built. He was sane, even-tempered, liable to petty resentments, mildly and resolutely selfish, except where Michael was concerned, a conscientious and just master--at least, just in intention--a patient and respectful son where patience and respect had not been easy.

The strain of scholar and student in him was about evenly mixed with that of the country gentleman. The result was a certain innate sense of superiority which he was not in the least aware that he showed. He had no idea that he was considered "fine," and "thinking a good deal of himself," by the more bucolic of his country neighbours. No one could say that Wentworth was childlike, but perhaps he was a little childish.

He certainly had a _naf_ and unshakable belief that the impressions he had formed as to his own character were shared by others. He supposed it was recognised by his neighbours that they had a thinker in their midst, and always tacitly occupied the ground which he imagined had been conceded to him on that account.

His mother, a beautiful, foolish, whimsical, hard-riding heiress, the last of a long line, had married the youngest son--the one brilliant, cultivated member--of a family as ancient, as uneducated, and as prosaic as her own. Wentworth was the result of that union. His father had died before his talents were fully recognised: that is to say, just when it was beginning to be perceived that he was a genius only in his own cla.s.s, and that there were hordes of educated men in the middle cla.s.ses who could beat him at every point on his own ground, except in carriage and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted. Still, in his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died, and was mourned as a genius.

After many years of uneasy, imprudent widowhood, the widow of the great man had made a disastrous second marriage, and had died at Michael"s birth.

No one had disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael.

Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael"s father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael"s father had appointed Wentworth as his son"s guardian. If it had been a jealous affection on Wentworth"s part, it had also been a deep one. And it had been returned with a single-hearted devotion on Michael"s part which had gradually knit together the hearts of the older and the younger man, as it seemed indissolubly. No one had come between them. Once or twice Wentworth had become uneasy, suspicious of Michael"s affection for his tutor at Eton, distrustful of the intimacies Michael formed with boys, and, later on, with men of his own age. Wentworth had nipped a few of these incipient friendships in the bud. He vaguely felt that each case, judged by its own merits, was undesirable. Some of these friendships he had not been able to nip. These he ignored; among that number was Michael"s affection for his G.o.dfather, the Bishop of Lostford. Michael"s boyish pa.s.sion for Fay, Wentworth had never divined. It had come about during the last year of his great uncle"s life at Barford, which was within a few miles of Priesthope, Fay"s home. Michael had spent many weeks at Barford with the old man, who was devoted to him. Everyone had expected that he would make Michael his heir, but when he died soon afterwards, it was found he had left the place, in a will dated many years back, to Wentworth. If Michael had never mentioned his first painful contact with life to Wentworth, it was perhaps partly because he instinctively felt that the confidence would be coldly received, partly also because Michael was a man of few words, to whom speech had never taken the shape of relief.

There had no doubt been wretched moments in Wentworth"s devotion to Michael, but nevertheless it had been the best thing so far in his somewhat colourless existence, with its hesitating essays in other directions, its half-hearted withdrawals, its pigeon-holed emotions. He had not been half-hearted about Michael. It is perhaps natural that we should love very deeply those who have had the power to release us momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is a child"s hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while Self, the dingy turnkey, for once slept at his post?

One of the reasons of his devotion to Michael was that Michael"s character did not apparently or perceptibly alter. He was very much the same person in his striped convict"s blouse as he had been in his Eton jacket. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had ever realised of what materials that character consisted. Wentworth was of those who never get the best out of men and women, who never divine and meet, but only come into surprised uncomfortable contact with their deeper emotions.

Michael"s pa.s.sion of service for Fay would have been a great shock to Wentworth had he suspected it. It remained for the duke to perceive the latent power in Michael, and to be taken instantly into his confidence on the matter, while Wentworth, unwitting, had remained for life outside his brother"s mind.

Some men and women are half conscious that they are thus left out, are companions only of "the outer court" of the lives of others. But Wentworth never suspected this, partly because he regarded as friendship a degree of intimacy which most men and all women regard as acquaintanceship. He did not know there was anything more. Those from whom others need much, learn perforce, whether they will or no, to what heights, to what depths human nature can climb and--fall. But Wentworth was not a person on whom others made large demands. But if his love for Michael had been his one tangible happiness, it had become now his one real pain.

Contrary to all his habits, he sat on, hour after hour, motionless, inert, watching the cloud shadows pa.s.s across the down. He tried to rouse himself. He told himself that he must settle back into his old occupations. He must get forward with his history of Suss.e.x, and write up his diary. He must come to some decision about the allotment scheme on his property in Saundersfoot. He must go over and help Colonel Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way across his property where it joined Wentworth"s own land. Colonel Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as a b.u.mble bee bungles into a spider"s web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere presence entangled the plainest matter into a confused coc.o.o.n, with himself struggling in the middle.

Wentworth must save the old autocrat from putting himself in the wrong, when he was so plainly in the right. Wentworth must at any rate, if he could do nothing else this morning, read his letters, which had acc.u.mulated during his short absence.

Without moving from his chair he turned over, with a groan, the pile of envelopes waiting for him at his elbow. Invitations, bills, tenants"

complaints, an unexpected dividend. It was all one to him. The Bishop of Lostford--so his secretary wrote--accepted Wentworth"s invitation to dine and sleep at Barford that night, after holding a confirmation at Saundersfoot. Wentworth had forgotten he had asked him. Very well, he must remember to order a room to be got ready. That was all. A subscription earnestly solicited by the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman for a parish library. Why could he not be left in peace? Oh!

what was the use of anything--of life, health, money, intellect, if existence was always to be like this, if every day was to be like this, only like this? This weary, dry-as-dust grind, this making a handful of bricks out of a cartload of straw, this distaste and fatigue, and sense of being duped by satisfaction, which was only another form of dissatisfaction, after all. What was the use of living exactly as you liked, _if you did not like it?_ Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his distress about his brother"s fate.

That wound, never healed, bled afresh. Who felt for him in his trouble?

Who, among all his friends, cared, or understood? No one. That was the way of the world.

Fay"s sweet, forlorn face, snowdrop pale under its long black veil, rose suddenly before him, as he had seen it some weeks ago, when he had met her walking in the woods near her father"s house. She had gone back to her old home after the duke"s death. She, at least, had grieved for him and Michael with an intensity which he had never forgotten. Even in her widowed desolation she had remembered Michael, and always asked after him when Wentworth went over to Priesthope. And Wentworth was often there, for one reason or another. Michael, too, had asked after her, and had sent her a message by his brother. Should he go over to-day and deliver it in person? Among his letters was a scrawling, illegible note, already several days old, from Colonel Bellairs, Fay"s father, about the right of way. The matter, it seemed, was more urgent than Wentworth had realised. Any matter pertaining to Colonel Bellairs was always, in the opinion of the latter, of momentous urgency.

Colonel Bellairs asked Wentworth to come over to luncheon the first day he could, and to walk over the debatable ground with him.

Wentworth looked at his watch, started up and rang the bell, and ordered his cob Conrad to be brought round at once.

CHAPTER VIII

Le plus grand element des mauvaises actions secretes, des lachetes inconnues, est peut-etre un honheur incomplet.

--BALZAC.

When Fay, in her panic-stricken widowhood, had fled back to her old home in Hampshire, she found all very much as she had left it, except that her father"s hair was damply dyed, her sister Magdalen"s frankly grey, and the pigtail of Bessie, the youngest daughter, was now an imposing bronze coil in the nape of her neck.

But if little else was radically changed in the old home except the hair of the family, nevertheless, the whole place had somehow declined and shrunk in Fay"s eyes during the three years of her marriage. The dear old gabled Tudor house, with its twisted chimneys, looked much the same from the outside, but within, in spite of its wealth of old pictures and cabinets and china, it had contracted the dim, melancholy aspect which is the result of prolonged scarcity of money. Nothing had been spent on the place for years. Magdalen seemed to have faded together with the curtains, and the darned carpets, and the bleached chintzes.

Colonel Bellairs alone, a handsome man of sixty, had remained remarkably young for his age. The balance, however, was made even by the fact that those who lived with him grew old before their time. It had been so with his wife. It was obviously so with his eldest daughter. Many men as superficially affectionate as Colonel Bellairs, and at heart as callous, as exacting and as inconsiderate, have made endurable husbands. But Colonel Bellairs was not only irresolute and vacillating and incapable of even the most necessary decisions, but he was an inveterate enemy of all decision on the part of others, inimical to all suggested arrangements or plans for household convenience. The words "spring cleaning" could never be mentioned in his presence. The thing itself could only be achieved by stealth. A month at the seaside for the sake of the children was a subject that could not be approached. All small feminine social arrangements, dependent for their accomplishment on the use of the horses, were mown down like gra.s.s. Colonel Bellairs hated what he called "living by clockwork."

You may read, if you care to do so, in the faces of many gentle-tempered and apparently prosperous married women, an enormous fatigue. Wicked, blood-curdling husbands do not bring this look into women"s faces. It is men like Colonel Bellairs who hold the recipe for calling it into existence.

Mrs. Bellairs, a beautiful woman, with high spirits, but not high-spirited, became more and more silent and apathetic year by year, yielded more and more and more, yielded at last without expostulation equally at every point, when she should have yielded and when she should have stood firm, yielded at last even where her children"s health and well-being were concerned.

Apathy and health are seldom housemates for long together. Mrs. Bellairs gradually declined from her chair to her sofa. She made no effort to live after her youngest daughter was born. She could have done so if she had wished it, but she seemed to have no wish on the subject, or on any other subject. There is an Arabian proverb which seems to embody in it all the melancholy of the desert, and Mrs. Bellairs exemplified it. "It is better to sit than to stand. It is better to lie than to sit. It is better to sleep than to lie. It is better to die than to sleep."

Fay had been glad enough, as we have seen, to escape from home by marriage. No such way of escape had apparently presented itself for the elder sister. As Magdalen and Fay sat together on the terrace in front of the house, the contrast between the sisters was more marked than the ten years" difference of age seemed to warrant.

Magdalen was a tall, thin woman of thirty-five, who looked older than her age. She had evidently been extremely pretty once. Perhaps she might even have been young once. But it must have been a long time ago. She was a faded, distinguished-looking person, with a slight stoop, and a worn, delicately-featured face, and humorous, tranquil eyes. Her thick hair was grey. She looked as if she had borne for many years the brunt of continued ill health, or the ill health of others, as if she had been obliged to lift heavy weights too young. Perhaps she had. Everything about her personality seemed fragile except her peace of mind. You could not look at Magdalen without seeing that she was a happy creature.

But very few did look at her when Fay was beside her. Fay"s beauty had increased in some ways and diminished in others during the year of her widowhood. She had become slightly thinner and paler, but not to the extent when beauty suffers wrong. A very young face can bear a worn look, and even have its charm enhanced thereby. The mark of suffering on Fay"s childlike face and in her deep violet eyes had brought with it an expression which might easily be mistaken for spirituality, especially by those--and they are very many--to whom a pallid and attenuated aspect are the outward signs of spirituality.

That she was miserable was obvious. _But why was she so restless?_ Magdalen had often silently asked herself that question during the past year. Even Bessie, the youngest sister, had noticed Fay"s continual restlessness and had commented on it, had advised her sister to embark on a course of reading, and to endeavour to interest herself in work for others.

She had also, with the untempered candour of eighteen, suggested to Fay that she should cease to make a slave of Magdalen. It is hardly necessary to add that Fay and Bessie did not materially increase the sum of each other"s happiness.

As Magdalen and Fay were sitting together in the sun the door into the garden opened, and Bessie stalked slowly towards them across the gra.s.s, in a short cycling skirt.

"It surely is not necessary to be quite so badly dressed as Bessie,"

said Fay with instant irritation. "If she must wear one of those hideous short skirts, it might at any rate be well cut. I have told her so often enough."

Since Bessie had been guilty of the enormity of suggesting a course of reading, Fay had made many sarcastic comments on Bessie"s direful clothes.

"I must advise her to take dress more seriously," said Magdalen absently. She was depressed by a faint misgiving about Bessie. Bessie was to have lunched to-day with congenial archaeological friends, intelligent owners of interesting fossils. Nevertheless, when Wentworth"s cob Conrad was seen courteously allowing himself to be conducted to the stable she instantly decided to lunch at home, and to visit her friends when they were not expecting her, in the afternoon.

_It could make no difference to them_, she had told Magdalen, who shook her head over that well-known phrase, which Colonel Bellairs had long since established as "a household word." Bessie was not to be moved by Magdalen"s disapproval, however. She retired to her chamber, donned a certain enamel brooch which she only wore on Sundays, and appeared at luncheon.

It was not a particularly cheerful meal. Wentworth was silent and depressed. Colonel Bellairs did not for an instant cease to speak about the right of way during the whole of luncheon, even when his back was turned while he was bending over a ham on the sideboard. And the moment luncheon was over he had marched Wentworth off to the scene of the dispute.

Magdalen was vaguely uneasy at the tiny incident of Bessie"s change of plan, and was glad it had escaped Fay"s notice. Most things about Bessie did escape Fay"s notice except her clothes. Bessie was not at eighteen an ingratiating person. No one had ever called her the sunbeam of the home. She had preserved throughout her solemn childhood and flinty youth a sort of resentful protest against the att.i.tude of her family at her advent, namely, that she was not wanted. Her mother had died at her birth, and for several years afterwards her father had studiously ignored her presence in the house, not without a sense of melancholy satisfaction at this proof of his devotion to her mother.

"No, no. It may be unreasonable. It may be foolish," he was wont to say to friends who had not accused him of unreasonableness, "but don"t ask me to be fond of that child. I can"t look at her without remembering what her birth cost me."

Bessie was a fine, strong young woman, with a perfectly impa.s.sive handsome face--no Bellairs could achieve plainness--and the manner of one who moves among fellow creatures who do not come up to the standard of conduct which she has selected as the lowest permissible to herself and others. Bessie had not so far evinced a preference for anyone in her own family circle, or outside it. Her affections consisted so far of a distinct dislike of and contempt for her father. She had accorded to Fay a solemn compa.s.sion when first the latter returned to Priesthope.

Indeed, the estrangement between the sisters, brought about by the suggested course of reading, had been the unfortunate result of a cogitating pity on Bessie"s part for the lamentable want of regulation of Fay"s mind.

Bessie liked Magdalen, though she disapproved of her manner of life as weak and illogical. You could not love Bessie any more than you could love an ironclad. She bore the same resemblance to a woman that an iron building does to a house. She was not in reality harder than tin or granite or asphalt, or her father; but it would not be an over-statement to suggest that she lacked softness.