"I shall certainly support any just claim," he said, as Tatham rose, "but I warn you that Mr. Melrose is ill--he is very irritable--and Mrs.
Melrose had better not attempt to spring any surprises on him. If she will write me a letter, I will see that it gets to Mr. Melrose, and I will do my best for her."
"No one could ask you to do any more," said Tatham heartily, repenting himself a little. "They will be with us for the present. Mrs. Melrose shall write you a full statement and you will reply to Duddon?"
"By all means."
"There are a good many other things," said Tatham--uncertainly--as he lingered, hat in hand--"that you and I might discuss--Mainstairs, for instance! I ought to tell you that my mother has just sent two nurses there. The condition of things is simply appalling."
Faversham straightened his tall figure.
"Mainstairs is a deadlock. Mr. Melrose won"t repair the cottages. He intends to pull them down. He has given the people notice, and he is receiving no rent. They won"t go. I suppose the next step will be to apply for an ejectment order. Meanwhile the people stay at their own peril. There you have the whole thing."
"I hear the children are dying like flies."
"I can do nothing," said Faversham.
Again a shock of antagonism pa.s.sed through the two men. "Yes, you can!"
thought Tatham; "you can resign your fat post, and your expectations, and put the screw on the old man, that"s what you could do." Aloud he said:
"A couple of thousand pounds, according to Undershaw, would do the job.
If you succeed in forcing them out, where are they to go?"
"That"s not our affair."
Tatham caught up his hat and stick, and abruptly departed; reflecting indeed when he reached the street, that he had not been the most diplomatic of amba.s.sadors on Mrs. Melrose"s behalf.
Faversham, after some ten minutes of motionless reflection, heavily returned to his papers, ordering his horse to be ready in half an hour.
He forced himself to write some ordinary business letters, and to eat some lunch, and immediately after he started on horseback to find his way through the October lanes to the village of Mainstairs.
A man more hara.s.sed, and yet more resolved, it would have been difficult to find. For six weeks now he had been wading deeper and deeper into a moral quagmire from which he saw no issue at all--except indeed by the death of Edmund Melrose! That event would solve all difficulties.
For some time now he had been convinced, not only that the mother and daughter were living, but that there had been some recent communication between them and Melrose. Various trifling incidents and cryptic sayings of the old man, not now so much on his guard as formerly, had led Faversham to this conclusion. He realized that he himself had been haunted of late by the constant expectation that they might turn up.
Well, now they had turned up. Was he at once to make way for them, as Tatham clearly took for granted?--to advise Melrose to tear up his newly made will, and gracefully surrender his expectations as Melrose"s heir to this girl of twenty-one? By no means!
What is the claim of birth in such a case, if you come to that? Look at it straight in the face. A child is born to a certain father; is then torn from that father against his will, and brought up for twenty years out of his reach. What claim has that child, when mature, upon the father--beyond, of course, a claim for reasonable provision--unless he chooses to acknowledge a further obligation? None whatever. The father has lived his life, and acc.u.mulated his fortune, without the child"s help, without the child"s affection or tendance. His possessions are morally and legally his own, to deal with as he pleases.
In the course of life, other human beings become connected with him, attached to him, and he to them. Natural claims must be considered and decently satisfied--agreed! But for the disposal of a man"s superfluities, of such a fortune as Melrose"s, there is no law--there ought to be no law; and the English character, as distinct from the French, has decided that there shall be no law. "If his liking, or his caprice even," thought Faversham pa.s.sionately, "chooses to make me his heir, he has every right to give, and I to accept. I am a stranger to him; so, in all but the physical sense, is his daughter. But I am not a stranger to English life. My upbringing and experience--even such as they are--are better qualifications than hers. What can a girl of twenty, partly Italian, brought up away from England, hardly speaking her father"s tongue, do for this English estate, compared to what I could do--with a free hand, and a million to draw on? Whom do I wrong by accepting what a miraculous chance has brought me--by standing by it--by fighting for it? No one--justly considered. And I will fight for it--though a hundred Tathams call me adventurer!"
So much for the root determination of the man; the result of weeks of excited brooding over wealth, and what can be done with wealth, amid increasing difficulties and problems from all sides.
His determination indeed did not protect him from the attacks of conscience; of certain moral instincts and prepossessions, that is, natural to a man of his birth and environment.
The mind, however, replied to them glibly enough. "I shall do the just and reasonable thing! As I promised Tatham, I shall look into the story of these two women, and if it is what it professes to be, I shall press Melrose to provide for them."
Conscience objected: "If he refuses?"
"They can enforce their claim legally, and I shall make him realize it."
"Can you?" said Conscience. "Have you any hold upon him at all?"
A flood of humiliation, indeed, rushed in upon him, as he recalled his effort, while Melrose was away in August, to make at least some temporary improvement in the condition of the Mainstairs cottages--secretly--out of his own money--by the help of the cottagers themselves. The attempt had been reported to Melrose by that spying little beast, Nash, and peremptorily stopped by telegram--"Kindly leave my property alone. It is not yours to meddle with."
And that most abominable scene, after Melrose"s return to the Tower!
Faversham could never think of it without shame and disgust. Ten times had he been on the point of dashing down his papers at Melrose"s feet, and turning his back on the old madman, and his house, forever. It was, of course, the thought of the gifts he had already accepted, and of that vast heritage waiting for him when Melrose should be in his grave, which had restrained him--that alone; no cynic could put it more nakedly than did Faversham"s own thoughts. He was tied and bound by his own actions, and his own desires; he had submitted--grovelled to a tyrant; and he knew well enough that from that day he had been a lesser and a meaner man.
But--no silly exaggeration! He straightened himself in his saddle. He was doing plenty of good work elsewhere, work with which Melrose did not trouble himself to interfere; work which would gradually tell upon the condition and happiness of the estate. Put that against the other. Men are not plaster saints--or, still less, live ones, with the power of miracle; but struggling creatures of flesh and blood, who do, not what they will, but what they can.
And suddenly he seemed once more to be writing to Lydia Penfold. How often he had written to her during these two months! He recalled the joy of the earlier correspondence, in which he had been his natural self, pleading, arguing, planning; showing all the eagerness--the sincere eagerness--there was in him, to make a decent job of his agency, to stand well with his new neighbours--above all with "one slight girl."
And her letters to him--sweet, frank, intelligent, sympathetic--they had been his founts of refreshing, his manna by the way. Until that fatal night, when Melrose had crushed in him all that foolish optimism and self-conceit with which he had entered into the original bargain! Since then, he knew well that his letters had chilled and disappointed her; they had been the letters of a slave.
And now this awful business at Mainstairs! Bessie Dobbs, the girl of eighteen--Lydia"s friend--who had been slowly dying since the diphtheria epidemic of the year before, was dead at last, after much suffering; and he did not expect to find the child of eight, her little sister, still alive. There were nearly a score of other cases, and there were three children down with scarlet fever, besides some terrible attacks of blood-poisoning--one after childbirth--due probably to some form of the scarlet fever infection, acting on persons weakened by the long effect of filthy conditions. What would Lydia say, when she knew--when she came?
From her latest letter it was not clear to him on what day she would reach home. After making his inspection he would ride on to Green Cottage and inquire. He dreaded to meet her; and yet he was eager to defend himself; his mind was already rehearsing all that he would say.
A long lane, shaded by heavy trees, made an abrupt turning, and he saw before him the Mainstairs village--one straggling street of wretched houses, mostly thatched, and built of "clay-lump," whitewashed. In a county of prosperous farming, and good landlords, where cottages had been largely rebuilt during the preceding century, this miserable village, with various other hamlets and almost all the cottages attached to farms on the Melrose estate, were the scandal of the countryside.
Roofs that let in rain and wind, clay floors, a subsoil soaked in every possible abomination, bedrooms "more like dens for wild animals than sleeping-places for men and women," to quote a recent Government report, and a polluted water supply!--what more could reckless human living, aided by human carelessness and cruelty, have done to make a h.e.l.l of natural beauty?
Over the village rose the low shoulder of a gra.s.sy fell, its patches of golden fern glistening under the October sunshine; great sycamores, with their rounded ma.s.ses of leaf, hung above the dilapidated roofs, as though Nature herself tried to shelter the beings for whom men had no care; the thatched slopes were green with moss and weed; and the blue smoke wreaths that rose from the chimneys, together with the few flowers that gleamed in the gardens, the picturesque irregularity of the houses, and the general setting of wood and distant mountain, made of the poisoned village a "subject," on which a wandering artist, who had set up his canvas at the corner of the road, was at the moment, indeed, hard at work. There might be death in those houses; but out of the beauty which sunshine strikes from ruin, a man, honestly in search of a few pounds, was making what he could.
To Faversham"s overstrung mind the whole scene was as the blood-stained palace of the Atreidae to the agonized vision of Ca.s.sandra. He saw it steeped in death--death upon death--and dreaded of what new "murder" he might hear as soon as he approached the houses. For what was it but murder? His conscience, arguing with itself, did not dispute the word.
Had Melrose, out of his immense income, spent a couple of thousand pounds on the village at any time during the preceding years, a score of deaths would have been saved, and the physical degeneracy of a whole population would have been prevented.
Heavens! that light figure in Dobbs"s garden, talking with the old shepherd--his heart leapt and then sickened. It was Lydia.
A poignant fear stirred in him. He gave his horse a touch of the whip, and was at her side.
"Miss Penfold!--you oughtn"t to be here! For heaven"s sake go home!"
Lydia, who in the absorption of her talk with the shepherd had not heard his approach, turned with a start. Her face was one of pa.s.sionate grief--there were tears on her cheek.
"Oh, Mr. Faversham--"
"The child?" he asked, as he dismounted.
"She died--last night."
"Aye, an" there"s another doon--t" li"le boy--t" three-year-old," said old Dobbs sharply, straightening himself on his stick, at sight of the agent.
"The nurses are here?" said Faversham after a pause.
"Aye," said the shepherd, turning toward his cottage, "but they can do nowt. The childer are marked for deein afore they"re sick." And he walked away, his inner mind shaken with a pa.s.sion that forbade him to stay and talk with Melrose"s agent.
Two or three labourers who were lounging in front of their houses came slowly toward the agent. It was evident that there was unemployment as well as disease in the village, and that the neighbouring farms, where there were young children, were cutting themselves off, as much as they could, from the Mainstairs infection, by dismissing the Mainstairs men.
Faversham meanwhile again implored Lydia to go home. "This whole place reeks with infection. You ought not to be here."