Chapter III: Part 3

The attack died down with severe loss to Don Balthasar. The garrison had reason to feel pleased as they snatched portions of rest during the night. The Seneschal reposed in the bosom of his family. He was weary unto death, but he felt unable to sleep. At the back of his mind throbbed the safety of the Castle. It was his main preoccupation, and it still gripped him in spite of the new bitterness, which underlay his thought like a festering toothache. “No, it was monstrous, unheard of in the annals of war and chivalry, that he should sacrifice his daughter and his wife!” He moaned in agony. Beside him lay his wife, the long brown hair across her face. He sat up in his leathern armour as stiffly as though another attack had been signalled. Slowly he recollected that he had given her away with his word.... At that moment his daughter sighed in her sleep, and he cried aloud once more. Did loyalty to his lord demand that he leave nothing undone even to his own undoing? Must he give wife and daughter like provender into the jaws of those who were defending his lord’s castle? It was unutterable, unspeakable, unbelievable. Who would help him in his biting loneliness, when he could not even think of a road out or even of words in which to pray? Unthinkingly he muttered aloud “Most Serene Virgin! A thousand candles and a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella.” Then silence fell, and the weary Seneschal felt an unanswered prayer eddying in his empty heart. To whom could he turn in his distress? His dear lord was far away. He would never see him again. Again he cried to the Virgin, and again silence followed his cry. He shivered with fear and fury. He swayed miserably to and fro on his knees. If he slept not, he would scarce be able to fight on the morrow. A thousand curses that his last days on earth should be embittered beyond the endurance of the loyal and the deserts of the faithful. At one time he began to despair. Perhaps it would be better to hurl himself off the ramparts and let his dead body announce the end of the siege to Don Balthasar the next morning. No, that would leave wife and daughter to the mutineers. He pulled himself to the top of the mighty keep. There were the flickering lights of Don Balthasar’s camp. Would the Serene and Holy Virgin make no answer, give no sign to one so fiercely tried? He had dedicated his daughter a hundred times to the Immaculate Serenity. Well, what was the use, if she could do nothing to save her child? He began to expostulate with the Blessed Virgin and reasonably. Could she do nothing with all the armies of Heaven recognising her as their Commandress? He scolded her with the childlike faith of the mediæval warrior, who saw the Virgin like the Tournament Queen learning over heavenly barriers and deeply interested and concerned in all the affairs of heart and chivalry on earth. “Take or abandon her,” the Seneschal shouted into the night, “you know best, most sweet and serene Lady, whether she shall be yours or for Don Balthasar. If you will not save her I will give her to him called ‘The Cruel!’” He lifted his waving hands to Heaven as a man carried down a whirlpool. Not a star fell. No vision appeared.

His mind was now set and he returned to the armoury, pulled a vellum leaf out of a Breviary and began writing a letter to Don Balthasar. Anything rather than throw his daughter to the lout on the ramparts. The Don was a Cavalier and a great gentleman of Spain. He began scratching the titles of Don Balthasar in the fullness of all the laudatory etiquette of the time. Then he explained that two of his soldiers had mutinied, which placed the Castle in Don Balthasar’s hands whenever it should seem agreeable to him. He begged Don Balthasar to understand that he was not surrendering the Castle of his lord foolishly or fearfully. The mutineers with Moorish impudence had demanded his wife and daughter as the price of keeping their place on the ramparts. He ventured to place the matter before the august eyes of Don Balthasar himself, who, as the paragon of chivalry and loyalty and such matters in Spain, could advise his troubled servant whether loyalty to his family or to his lord came first, and whether he was bound to persevere at the price of offering his wife and daughter to these foul mutineers. He appealed to Don Balthasar for a ruling. He would bow to his decision.

He carefully sealed the letter with his lord’s seal, and went on the ramparts. He lit and waved a torch with slow movements in sign of parley or surrender. He was quickly noticed, and Don Balthasar’s secretary approached with an escort. The Seneschal threw the letter over the ramparts and staggered back to rest. A whisper passed through the Castle.

In the morning the garrison were not surprised to see an unarmed company approaching the barbican waving the personal standard of Don Balthasar. The Seneschal himself descended from his watchpoint on the keep and leaning through the crenellations picked a letter from the top of a spearpoint. He read it slowly and its purport burst like the first glimpse of harbour on the eyes of the shipwrecked, for Don Balthasar commended his loyalty and fidelity, and was grieved to hear that two of his soldiers had mutineered and shown a lesser sense of loyalty to their lord. He considered that the terms they had offered their Seneschal were arrogant and outrageous, and foul beyond the foulness of the pit. He wished the Seneschal to mind not their threats, but to let them both desert to his camp. He gave his word that their desertion would not afflict the Seneschal in a military sense. Let him send them under safe conduct forthwith.

The mutineers were waiting in their turret when the Seneschal reached them. They had watched the coming of the embassage eagerly, and doubted not that the Seneschal had made a desperate bid for terms to save the Castle now he knew he could hold it no longer. Ineffectually for certain. With his prize in his jaws Don Balthasar was not the one to let it drop for a kiss given to his greedy cheeks. They awaited the Seneschal as the player who has called Checkmate and knows that any further struggle is useless. The Seneschal showed neither levity nor seriousness in his face. He spoke gently and firmly as though he was discussing some minute part of their routine. “My children, you have against all your loyalty to your lord offered to mutiny and go over to Don Balthasar unless I give you my wife and daughter. I have decided to surrender the Castle rather than allow such a misery to be inflicted upon me, and I bid you accompany Don Balthasar’s men and tell that great and terrible lord that I can no longer defend the Castle and will accept his commands. Go!”

The mutineers looked up with angry surprise. They felt they were being cheated out of their rights, out of their agreement, out of their pleasure. They had expected the immediate fulfilment of their demand. At any rate the siege was over. They could only rejoice that their weariness was at an end, though they would have preferred a few more weeks’ fighting, lightened as they had hoped by the wicked debauchery they had devised at their unfortunate Seneschal’s expense. For one baffled moment they hesitated. But the Seneschal had left them no choice, and they turned to accept the freedom they had not desired. They walked on to the ramparts amid their scowling comrades and lowered themselves with a rope that the Seneschal grimly held for them. With a malevolent grin they slid down into their new allegiance. At least they would be fed well that night, when they brought Don Balthasar good news. They marched away stretching their cramped legs between the riders who had come to meet them. Within an hour they stood before Don Balthasar called the Cruel. He did not waste his time with them. He mentioned his detestation of all kinds of disloyalty, especially to an absent lord. He showed no surprise or gratitude on hearing that the Castle was now within his reach. To their terror-struck excitement they learnt that the terrible one had been informed of the predicament in which they had placed the loyal Seneschal. He briefly informed them that he was unwilling to profit by so base an action even if it did place the Castle in his power. The mutineers stared at him with dull amaze.

The Seneschal was more agreeably surprised an hour later when he saw a scaffold being erected in front of the barbican, and his two defaulters being bound and deliberately executed. A roar of laughter and derision rose from the Castle walls. It was almost worth the surrender to enjoy so majestic a jest on the part of Don Balthasar. With parched throats and weary lungs the garrison shouted _Vivas_ to Don Balthasar’s name. As for the Seneschal, he could only utter delirious thanks to the Virgin, who had delivered him so mightily from domestic shame and agony. She had strange and devious ways, the _Serenissima_, for coming to the rescue of her clients. This was really her most brilliant master-stroke!

The Seneschal laughed his first laugh during the siege, and he was still smiling when the riders of Don Balthasar again approached the barbican waving the signal of parley. It must be for the final surrender of the Castle, thought the Seneschal. Sadly he picked the letter of summons from the tip of the spearpoint handed to him.

He broke the heavy seal and coloured cord fastening the vellum. It brought him the greeting of his enemy, who further made plain his great regret that contrary to the laws of war he had killed two of the garrison after they had left the Seneschal under his safe conduct. But he had done what he thought was due to himself and to the honour of all Christian princes. Treachery among men-at-arms could not be too speedily or sternly punished. But lest he had taken any unfair advantage of the heroic garrison he was sending two suitable men-at-arms to take the place of the mutineers! By their fidelity to himself they were sworn to fight exactly as the Seneschal disposed and directed them. There was no doubt! Two stalwarts were waiting for admittance at the barbican and their escort was already riding away. And the letter was signed in the big, gawky lettering of Don Balthasar himself who was called the Cruel!

A SAVING PHANTASM

When they parted they parted good friends. Gregory Cappleston was more than a gentleman. He was very affluent; and he refused to let Matilda Bryant suffer financially by his marriage. He was bound to marry to keep up the grand old name of Cappleston. Aunts, aged and dowager, expected him to marry if he was to expect anything from them. He was a rough-and-ready fellow, Gregory Cappleston. At the University he was called “Cobblestones.” He wanted to be kind, but he did not cause particularly smooth-going to those who came his way. He found it hard to leave the woman who had lived with him since Oxford days, but it was harder to find a wife and tie himself to her for the rest of his days. Matilda felt this turn in her life hardest, but she suppressed the sighs of her soul even when she read Gregory’s engagement in that column of marriages and engagements of the _Morning Post_ which may far more truly be called one of agony.

Still, she ought to have been preparing for the wrench for years. Presumably she had known other men before, and should have experienced the circumstantial shock of a thoughtless man’s thought-out departure. Cappleston never imagined her pained for a moment. He was not insensitive, however, to her genuine grief when he cheerfully announced the settlement he had made on her. Nobody can live on a woman’s love for many years without responding to some of the myriad ripples of her inmost thought. True, that with tragedy they become confused and break off, and on the sand of hardship they are stayed and disappear. But in the spectroscope of Matilda’s mind a real love for the man, with whom she had contracted herself quarterly for the last three years, shone white. If the colours of her aura could have been analysed, there would have been found no red tinge of malice therein, no green line of jealousy, no purple splosh of hate. The white soul is rare even among good and virtuous women.

She loved Gregory sufficiently not to wish him to sacrifice his life to her. She was incapable of a scene. She loved him enough to love herself for her own self-suppression. She felt as though she were giving her soul an opiate with a steel needle. It was so like him to make over a lump sum to her without noticing the lump in her throat. He kissed her for the last time, and she wished him happiness in marriage as few mothers have wished their own beloved sons. As she walked out, he felt sorry, but not sorry in another way, that he would see her no more. That was in the letter and the spirit of their agreement. She had played the game, he reflected. And he was certain that he had, too. He was a Cappleston!

The marriage was a great success. How could it be otherwise? The pandemonium of an advertised social event, the honeymoon reflected in the _Daily Mirror_, the town house purchased from the dissolving partnership of the Plantagenet-Goldenburgs, their first country house party discreetly portrayed in the _Sketch_, the shower of pleasant, meaningless snippets which Press Agencies supplied from the _Powder Puff_, the _Flapper_ and other recognised organs of fashion are still within the memory of Society. Gregory began nibbling at a political career with a good conscience. He had had his past like most men, but unlike most men he had shown a post-amorous generosity which satisfied him almost to feelings of virtue.

Domestic beatitude was his proper reward, and he passed into paternal tranquillity watching the race of Cappleston projected into yet another generation, and his children growing up like little dissected parts of his own youth. He watched them playing about the house and reflected on that wonderful measure of repayment he had been able to make to his wife. So many women had no children. He had been generous in his paternity. Generosity was his strong feature. That was why he felt women had always liked him, to use a mild expression. There had been Matilda, for instance--but he dismissed her from his mind.

* * * * *

He was quite disturbed when her name was announced by the butler. It was seven years since they had parted. It was unexpected and it was undesirable, this visit. He tore a preparatory blank cheque out of his book before she came in. He was always prepared to meet women with that astonishing generosity of his. “Mrs. Bryant,” said the footman. She showed no make-up to cover the difference of seven years. It was not a professional--hardly a predatory--visit, he reflected. Shabby clothes and daylight were not heart-overwhelming. He gave her a chair.

“I am glad to see you looking so well, Matilda,” he began chivalrously, “but you should have written to me through my lawyers if you wanted to see me.”

“I am not in need of anything that comes through lawyers, Gregory,” she answered. “I only wanted to see you again for the last time, you know.” Gregory was puzzled.

“But I am not leaving the country,” he said. “Why should you want to say good-bye to me?” “But I am,” she shot, and with a pause, “for another country, and I am taking the shortest and cheapest path possible. I am done with the half-world in which I live. You know that for me middle age must be what old age is to other folk. It is death, and I believe in taking death by the forelock. But I wanted to see you once again and to say that you were the best thing I found in this world, and I would always have lived with you even had you lost all your money. I rather hoped the chance would come to show you that. But it never did, and then you married and were happy, and your happiness made me happy in a sort of way. Good-bye.”

“You’re not going to kill yourself?” asked the astonished Cappleston. She nodded vacantly. Cappleston was immensely touched. She had confirmed the high opinion he had of himself. And she had come without an ulterior object just to say good-bye. It was amazing. He felt that something was required of him. He was inartistic and could not rise to the dramatic. But as a patron of several Church livings he admonished her gently as to the heinousness of self-destruction and how unpleasant coroners’ verdicts were liable to be for surviving friends. He was one of those men who live in dread of painful impressions in public.

She was not to be dissuaded of her purpose, but she agreed to see him before she committed the supreme act of bodily renunciation. He offered to increase her little income, but she smiled pathetically and passed out of his presence. She was content to have looked once again into his eyes. Her love had not failed. It was no mere memory. She would certainly keep the promise he had obtained from her.

Cappleston was left to reflect on his proffered generosity. He had never known a woman refuse money before. But it was a woman’s way to want what she wanted to the exclusion of all else for the moment. For the moment she wanted to see him. He felt suitably pleased. He was glad he was not a woman to be swayed by whims and fancies, to be utterly dependent on men’s good will and charity. He felt glad to be a man and to feel virtuous. He realised how much more generous he was than other men, and threw himself back in his chair with the easy content of a man who has always enjoyed life without making his conscience suffer. Then a whole year passed.

* * * * *

Gregory Cappleston, M.P., was sleeping alone in his dressing-room when he woke with a jerk and saw a figure standing at the foot of his bed. He looked and could not doubt, for he believed in his senses and in very little else in life. It was Matilda, and he was intensely annoyed that she should have been so ill-advised, not to say criminal, to penetrate into the sleeping-room. It was indiscreet, outrageous and very dangerous, and he hissed all this and more at her. He made more than the protest of the British householder and the patron of Church livings. He ordered her to leave the house instantly, and as quietly as she came--without waking his wife in the adjoining room. He was too sleepy to imagine how she could have entered without ringing or waking the servants. He faced her look of piercing sadness with an angry stare, but it never wilted. Then it faded away, and Cappleston rather angrily discovered he was alone. He felt as though he had been the victim of some clever conjuring trick. He switched on the electric light, and at that moment the voice of Big Ben rang through the London hemisphere--one! two! three! He confirmed the clock of Empire by his own watch, and perceived that he was not dreaming.

He rose and searched the room. It was locked, and nothing had been displaced. He suddenly developed a creepy and almost guilty feeling for no reason. It was not in consonance with the mind of a virtuous householder and a benefactor to his species. Then it struck him full. Perhaps he had seen a ghost! Perhaps, however, it was only a bad dream. Perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps he ought to do something. What about Matilda? He fumbled for her address on the card he had kept in his pocket-case. It was a flat in Maida Vale, quite impossible for him to reach at this hour of the night. Nor respectable either, but he could send his valet to inquire early in the morning. He rang his night bell. His valet appeared, and hoped he was not ill. Cappleston gave him the card and told him to go to the address and find out what was happening to the lady whose name it bore.

Further, Cappleston ordered him to refuse to take _no_ as an answer. He must find out how the lady in the second flat was, and return as soon as possible. If he had any trouble he could send a policeman in a cab to fetch himself.... An hour passed, and a second hour before a policeman rang at the door. Cappleston let him in. The policeman explained that a strange man had been found trying to force entrance in a flat at Maida Vale and excused himself by giving Mr. Cappleston’s name. He had been taken in charge, and the police would like to have evidence of his identity or sanity.

Cappleston, with a weary “It is all right,” swung himself out of his dressing-gown and dressed. He accompanied the policeman without a word to Maida Vale. He found his valet between the caretaker and a policeman on the second floor. He had never been there before, but he told the caretaker enough to show that he had a right to entry, in fact that he paid the rent of the flat in all probability. Besides, he had very bad news for the occupant and he demanded entrance. He was prepared to stand the financial damage of any breakages, also the remuneration necessary to their trouble. The police exchanged highly intelligent glances, and the caretaker said he was not the one to stand in the way of the law. Some panes of frosted glass were cut out of the door with a chisel, and the door opened from outside. The occupant, it appeared, had given strict orders that nobody was to disturb her till ten the next morning.

Cappleston entered and opened door after door. The farthest room of the suite was a bedroom. He switched on the light. Matilda was lying on the floor breathing heavily, while an empty bottle remained in her outstretched hand. Cappleston ordered a doctor to be brought, and a policeman saluted ... a precious half-hour passed before any revival was possible. But the doctor gradually brought her out of unconsciousness. When she caught sight of Cappleston’s worried face, she cried aloud: “Forgive me, forgive me. I did not keep my promise.”

“But I rather think you did,” he answered, “for that is how I happen to be here. You came into my room at three this morning, and it is now half-past five. How can you explain it?” She could not explain it. Women can explain anything, but they do not always need to. Strange powers are always at their aid. She confessed that she had taken a strong overdose; and the sympathetic police withdrew at this moment with several bank-notes of Cappleston to be shared, or to be used for the repainting of Scotland Yard, or whatever use gratuities to policemen are put to. “But,” she continued, “I remembered when it was too late my promise to you. I had passed over the border, and my last feeling was a bitter regret that for the first time I had broken my word to you, the very first time in my life. Will you ever forgive me?”

“You need no forgiveness,” said Cappleston, holding her hand while the doctor felt the pulse in the other, “for you came into my room and stood looking at me from the foot of my bed. I could guess then what had happened. I never knew you to fail me in any way. You always played the game, and your word was always better than any gentleman’s. Thank God, we were in the nick of time, for the doctor says you would have been dead by ten o’clock. Matilda, I have seen your ghost while you were yet alive. Or was it your soul? It was the whitest thing I have ever laid eyes upon!”

JEALOUSY

Jealousy is the worst and most terrible in the sinful category. Jealousy may not be the unforgivable sin, but it is certainly the unforgiving one. Jealousy is not to be defined or analysed. There is a method in madness and a refinement in Love, but Jealousy knows neither how to plan nor how to relent. It is a torrential surge of misgiving and misdirection that bides no hour and keeps no banks. It is the strongest emotion known to man, for it has no gradations, no preludes, and no convalescence. It leaps fully armed and full-grown upon the jealous brain, and gives no peace to the jealous nor if possible to the jealoused. In man or woman it conspires and consummates the acts of madness and crime, which are sometimes but only pardoned to those who act under stress of emotional love.

Jealousy is the perversion of Love. It is unto Love what the Apples of Sodom are to the fragrant orange-blossom. It is even what Atheism is to Faith, and Turpitude is to Sanctity; and perhaps great lovers must tread along the gulf of Jealousy just as the great contemplatives never realise the divine ecstasy until after they have sighted the appalling abyss which may be described as Time without God, otherwise Hell, for Heaven is God without Time.

Jealousy is more cruel than Love, though Love, in all conscience, is cruel enough. Love more often destroys the lover than the beloved, but Jealousy seeks only the destruction of the jealoused. Jealousy is the diseased elephantiasis of sentiment, Love smitten to leprosy! Vision the divine and rosy Eros suddenly turned into a leper white as snow! Vision the once resilient and rainbowed wings caked and cracked like the flukes of a rotten fungus! Vision the delicate little limbs puffed and pustuled, and the divine brow puckered and blistered, the mother-of-pearl ears chipped and chapped, the mouth opened like an old wound instead of a fresh budding rose! Vision the eye rotting wickedly into its cavity--and even so you have not sufficiently symbolised Jealousy, the bane of mankind, and apparently of godkind as well, since it is written that they include some who are jealous!

John Goldenough was jealous, yet he was highly respectable. He was the active and reliable head of the firm of Goldenough Brothers, the famous plumbers, whose plumbing had accompanied the flag and made the remotest and most tropical countries sanitatious to their conquerors.

The Goldenough plumbing had won medals at every exhibition since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a diploma signed by the Prince Consort had been awarded to the head of the firm. Miniature products of the firm adorned the famous Doll’s House, minutely constructed by the experts and artists of the British Empire, and delighted Royalty, young and old, by their realistic efficiency. It was the boast of John Goldenough’s father that the sun never set on Goldenough plumbing. Be that as it may, John Goldenough was a very jealous man.

Commercially he was jealous. It was not only domestically that he cherished this cancer. Otherwise he was unimaginative. With an assured competence of means he devoted himself to the comfort of himself and his family. He was not yet forty, and he was the head of Goldenough Brothers. Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-five. John Goldenough was the flower of British bourgeoisie, and he might be said to incarnate the Nonconformist Conscience. There was nothing against him at Bank or Chapel, unless in the arcana of his heart he possibly kept something against himself. He was a jealous man, that was all. But human society understood and appreciated his jealousy, for, if it constrained him to narrow ideas, it led to impeccable business honesty. He was jealous to a farthing in the accounts of his firm or of himself.

But he was also jealous of family affections, though this the world considered rather creditable, touching almost. He could not allow himself to be supplanted in the home circle for a moment even by another member of the same family. In fact there was a dark page to his record which only his subconscious memory reflected from the darkened mirror of the past. As the first-born he had been adored by his mother until his nerves became restive if they were not basking in the sunlight of her maternal hyperpossession. He felt ill if she was not worrying or fussing herself over him. He expected and required not only her attention but her continued and foolish infatuation. When her second son was born he became furiously jealous.

During these long ante-natal months she had shown herself less and less absorbed in him, and he had become conscious of some impending rival. Uneasily he sensed that her adoration was being drained elsewhere, and the moment his baby brother arrived, he knew that he must take second place. Jealousy ran like secret poison into his every tissue and vein, though he was too young to know or understand what and why he felt. Possibly he was no more responsible for his jealousy than for having the measles. Anyhow, he bided his opportunity perhaps unconsciously, but sullen and pertinacious. He watched his baby brother being soothed and swaddled, pampered and christened. It was a little more he felt than he could stand. Months passed, and the new baby occupied more and more of the nursery space and more and more of his mother’s affection. After six months the baby was introduced into the night nursery as well. A nurse slept between the two brothers while a nightlight floated in a basin of water in the middle of the room. One night John found himself wandering round the room in a state of horror. Nightmare was upon him. He felt he was being cramped and suffocated by the new baby. Fear mingled with jealousy and self-preservation shot the speckled spectrum of his hatred. In a violent effort to be rid of the besetting menace he picked the nightlight out of its watery cage, and threw it upon the barely moving heap of down. A light flame flickered into the air, but John had skipped back into bed before the baby cried, and the nurse awoke too late to put out the flames. In vain was the alarm given. By the time the household had quenched the fire, baby was singed and suffocated to death, partly by the smoke and partly by the efforts made to extinguish the last spark. Through the house rang one piercing cry--the cry of Rachel mourning, the cry that from the beginning to the end of the world can never be appeased, the inconsolable cry of a mother wailing for her child.

John was only six at the time of the tragedy, but from that moment his restlessness disappeared. He was no longer troubled by nightmare, and continued on his former course like a normal and well-behaved little boy. Of necessity his mother renewed and redoubled the old affection for her only son. Years began to pass, untroubled and undimmed for either. The pathetic and beautiful mother idealised and idolised her son. He repaid her with an adoration that was partly a reflected adoration of himself. There was no rival. He had no brother, and she had no lover, and each thought the other perfect. She never dared marry one of the very many suitable suitors who appeared on the scene after her husband’s death. John’s jealousy was always enough to scare her. He always slept beside her, and she would not face or contemplate the days and nights when she must relegate him to the attic. She liked to be near him in case he stirred or cried in the dark. She was not content with being his night nurse. She became his governess and would let no one teach him except herself. They became more intimately involved in each other’s lives than they had been before his birth. They had been the same body. Now they were the same soul and mind, and he was the dominant. It seemed forgotten that there had ever been a baby brother.

It was true even in her case that the mother can never forget the child she has borne, but she saw both the boys in the survivor. Without the least suspicion of the distant crime she innocently loved the slayer and the slain with one passionate and abiding love. The plasticity of boyhood wiped all trace from his memory. He was not conscious of his one awful act of infantile incendiarism. But in the lower levels of his nature it still lay memorified like one of those buried fossils by which the gentle earth remembers her past monsters. And close to the hushed record under the running surface stream of daily life lay the dismal dragon of Jealousy, but no fossil. It was always there, though it was given no inducement or provocation to break forth. It had lain there waiting while Master John became a schoolboy, and a successful one. He had gained too many prizes and enjoyed too many successes to feel the least dislike or envy or disgust of others at school. He took a successful course at the University, and after coming of age he took over his deceased father’s business. He was a born plumber, a Master-plumber, and in fact he proved the Empire’s Super-plumber. Tubs, piping, lavabos, taps, sinks and shower-baths were his sphere. He applied not merely intelligence but genius to the problems of Imperial Sanitation. He received an Indian decoration and a testimonial from an Australian Premier. He prolonged the lives of the Royal Family more than all the prayers in the Prayer Book on their behalf.

Respectability demanded only one thing further. He must marry. His mother had long dreaded the day when she would be supplanted herself. She had kept herself free for him. It was more than she could expect that he should keep himself eternally free for her. As she had been nurse, governess and playmate, sister and mother to him, she would doubtless, had they lived in a Ptolemaic civilisation, been ready to sacrifice herself yet further. But happily the Nonconformist Conscience takes a rather sturdy stand. So when John Goldenough married the daughter of the chief clerk in his own firm, his mother was glad enough to be allowed to remain as their housekeeper.

John Goldenough’s wife was more than pretty. The daughter of an employee who had risen with the years in the Goldenough employ, without pretence of blood or breeding, she appreciated the social honour which had been paid her, and was loyally prepared to merge her personality and prospects in the Lord of Sanitation, who had fallen in love as much with her love for him as with her pretty little face. Unwittingly he had transferred to her the whole accumulated sleeping powers of jealousy, with which as a child he had surrounded his mother. As little witting, she mistook the jealous symptoms for an excess of love for herself. His mother slowly sank into a second place that was lower than servile. She never murmured when he took her rings and gave them to his sweetheart. It was no theft, for he slipped them from her fingers while she sat sadly watching and mutely wondering. She realised that he was sloughing the old love for the new, and she felt the prick of sacrifice when she saw the stones glitter on the wife’s fingers the following night. She knew that she had been replaced utterly and for ever. Then it was that she began to mourn that she had never dared have other children because she had been terrified by her son’s queer jealousies. But she had had the pleasure of spoiling him. It was spoiled goods in a way that she was passing on to another, if that could be any satisfaction to her.

John Goldenough’s love for his wife passed by the path of passion into jealousy, his underlying and besetting mood. Jealousy is as delicious a sauce as can flick the palate of a woman, who is in love with the man who exercises jealousy on her behalf. But when her love has been worn to boredom and only a stump of convention marks the spot where once grew the fairy tree of their romance, jealousy thrives like poison-ivy round the dead wood. During the first ten years of their marriage John Goldenough had forbidden his wife to bear him children, partly out of a sense of economy and partly, though this he never admitted, because he wished to keep his wife’s love concentrated upon himself.

Himself an only son, he intended to have an only son towards the end of his married life, and thought it perfectly appropriate and proper to keep his issue within this drastic limitation. He liked to feel her sentimental as well as her material dependence upon him. This dependence he thought could be prolonged while she was childless. That she should entertain an admirer had hardly crossed his imagination. As it was, he could not bear other men to sit beside her at table, and the politest and most constrained givers of compliments to his wife were thrown into terrified exit. In the end neither his friends nor hers cared to call, esteeming themselves fortunate if he showed himself merely nervous and not in some way objectionable. He had been jealous at different times of her mother-in-law and even of her maidservant. She was compelled to shed them both. If his love had become jealousy, hers had become fear.

Despairing of finding some anchor for the desire she still had to love something, she let a child live and quicken under her heart. It was some time before she let her husband know what was coming. When he realised it, all his queerness came to the surface. Though he hung around her still like a hawk around a chicken coop, he showed no gentler shade of feeling toward her. His eyes seemed to pass through her and to strike into the oblique future. However interesting she might have become, he was no longer interested in her personally. His mind and soul were concentrated on the coming child, of whom he quickly became jealous to the exclusion even of the poor all-including mother. The sense of paternal possession proved stronger than any marital pride. As father of the coming child he demanded some sympathy and praise, and finally took to his bed in expectation of visits, gifts, and finally congratulations.

John Goldenough’s thoughts carried him afar. The occasion was solemn enough in all conscience. It was possible that a future head of Goldenough Brothers was shortly approaching the earth. If the child were male, what a vista opened before the heir and successor of himself! In political circles a Plumbing Peerage had already been mooted, and if Plumbing, like Beer, Shipyards and tintacks, was to produce a Peerage, who could be more suitable than John Goldenough? To the man in the street the plumbing age was synchronous with the rise and fame of the great firm. And each time that John Goldenough’s name was mentioned, the pulse of every plumber in the Empire beat higher. It was an heir to his future Peerage that he imagined. He could not sufficiently impress upon his wife the care, the thought, and the isolation which must surround her in a prospect of such importance. Dull and listless, she awaited the days of dreariness; the weeks of weariness, which prelude motherhood. He had caused her to occupy a room at the end of the passage, in which he himself lay camped, intercepting her presents and friends, and taking up more of the doctor’s time than the patient herself. He felt a new importance, and demanded the same reverence in the home that he received in the plumbing world. He resented every attention she received, all of which in some oblique process of thought he wished to be applied to himself. The child was his, and he felt an uncontrollable sense of possession welling under his sense of pompous pride. He grudged every moment that the child remained part of its mother. He longed for the speedy dissolution of their company, when he could take the child into his arms and show the world that it was his and his only.

The moment came unexpectedly, for neither the doctor nor nurse was under the roof when John Goldenough was awakened from sleep by the premature groans of his wife. He roused himself and hurried into the room in which she was confined. He stumbled twice and switched on the light with delay. To his horror he saw that he was late. The child had been born! He rushed to the bell to ring the alarm and to bring medical aid. Then he hesitated, rushed to the bedside and lifted the baby into the awaiting cot and blanket. It was a boy, and a fierce burst of pride and satisfaction outweighed any anxiety rising in his mind for the mother, who lay quietly breathing in the exhaustion of accomplished pain. It was a boy! That was the great thing. Goldenough Brothers would be perpetuated through the ages!

Vistas of cosmic thought swept through his brain during those seconds. He looked back unto the foundation of Goldenough Brothers if not as far as the beginning of the world, and he looked ahead and saw the firm majestically installed around the world. Where the name of Goldenough was not known was simply not civilisation; that was all. If he had had imagination, his mind might have visualised the firm in Biblical guise contracting for the water-pipes of Babel. But his social and personal pride was sufficient to inspire him to mutter, “John, second Lord Goldenough,” as he lifted and laid down the infant. He covered him with the blanket and returned to the bell. With his finger upon the knob again he hesitated. He heard an arresting groan from his wife. It was the first notice he had taken of her. Once more his thought flashed ahead murkily, and he foresaw her recovery, her maternal triumph, her possession of his boy, perhaps as intimate and absorbing as his mother’s devotion to himself. And he shuddered with jealousy. It was his boy and he wanted no mother’s tender care to soften the strong abiding bond between father and son. He glanced at the child’s cot. In the far past of buried deeds and dead thoughts he recalled a child’s cot similar to this one. It gave him a dreamy sensation of some previous existence, some underground occurrences, but very far back. He could not recollect the circumstance, but the sight of the baby in the cot filled him with a vivid and fierce desire to be rid of something. Flaming jealousy demanded blood. His eye fell full on his wife, and a passion of murderous envy coloured the very retina of his eye. He could not bear to think that the success, the joy and the satisfaction of the boy’s birth would redound to her. He would have liked to kill her, and to throw the nightlight upon the sheets if he could be certain that they would have risen in solid, enveloping, destroying flame. His finger still hovered on the unpressed bell. The alarm had not been given, and it crossed the cunning of his frantic mind that, if he waited a while, perhaps she would die of her own exhaustion. She had not recovered consciousness. Perhaps she never would.

He stood feeling the bell knob. She gave another deep groan, and moved as though in helpless signal for aid. He guessed that she was slowly expiring of hæmorrhage. The baby was quiet, and he needed only to stand there waiting and watching till the right moment came to sound the bell. He would be found there striving to save her by her bedside, the perfect type of the mourning, maladroit husband. It was a question of timing the doctor’s arrival in order that it might appear that everything had been done, but that the Hand of God had been lifted against good Brother Goldenough, so prosperous and happy in all other affairs of life. In his mind he was already dictating the notices which would appear in the local Press in edifying eulogy of his dead wife and in considerate sympathy for himself. His finger trembled on the bell. Still he waited. A rattle of breath had begun to sound in her uncovered throat. Her broken body began to heave like a rudderless ship. Then she fell quiet and seemed to sink like a corpse under the debris of the bed. With a calm finger John Goldenough deliberately rang the electric bell.

The house was roused, but it was half an hour before the doctor arrived in a terrible state of anxiety. He had confidently prophesied the birth for the following week. Meantime hysterical maids had chafed his wife’s hands and poured brandy into her icy mouth. The doctor felt her pulse and turned aside to the baby, which he lifted and examined with continued anxiety. John Goldenough had retired, leaving the medical profession to clear his work.

Returning to his room he waited for the first bulletin. Nurses arrived and the doctor’s colleagues were summoned. Apparently she was making a fight of it yet. An hour passed.

The doctor, with a ghastly face, presented himself at John Goldenough’s door. “I am sorry to have to bring such bad news.”

John Goldenough looked up with assumed despair. “My poor wife, my poor wife!” he said, and buried his face with much fantastic sobbing in his hands.

The doctor laid his hand on his shoulder and said: “Your wife, I am happy to say, will live, though she has had a narrow escape.”

John Goldenough stood upright. “What is your bad news, then?” he asked feebly.

“The boy is dead. He must have been born an hour before my arrival. His umbilical cord was never fastened, and he bled to death. If I could have arrived only half an hour sooner!” And he passed out.

THE DRUMMER OF GORDONMUIR

Two years before the war broke out, I became trustee to Allan Gordon, of Gordonmuir, in the county of Argyle and kingdom of Scotland. He was not more than a fledged schoolboy when he inherited his uncle’s property and the nominal chieftainship of the clan. My connection was distant, but I was persuaded by his aunt to supervise his affairs. A week later, I found myself sitting in the “Flying Scotchman” with an old lawyer for colleague, who confided to me that he did not expect the estate to bear our travelling expenses.

Late that night, after a ten miles’ drive from the station in the drenching embrace of a Scotch mist, we reached Gordonmuir. I was chilled to the heart when I first viewed the mixture of Indian bungalow and mediæval dungeon that made up Allan’s mansion. In the centre was a stone keep, ivy-clad, crumbling, and crenellated. On either wing in the inclosure, where they used to herd the stolen cattle, was a modern shooting box attached with the minimum of architectural art. My companion shivered in the gaunt doorway like one of his old parchments crackling in a draught. But Allan ran out, as cheery and cock-a-hoop as the chieftain’s feather in his bonnet. He seemed the one representative of joy and life within that grisly precinct.

We passed the whole of the next day discussing wills and mortgages in the dead jargon of Scots law. My colleague wished to pay off the mortgages and the annuity due to Allan’s aunt, but there was equally the question of Allan’s allowance at the university to be considered, and I plumped for as much as the rickety estate would allow. I felt that college life comes but once, and not to everybody, and that three hundred pounds was necessary to uphold the dignity of a young laird thrown among Jews and Saxons.

The lawyer insisted on cutting it down to fifty, to preserve what he called a “feenancial aspeect.” But Allan was satisfied; and so was I, when I found that his gratitude took the form of free trout-fishing for life. Trustees are not generally rewarded; in fact, as my gloomy colleague reiterated, they are oftener liable to terms of imprisonment for inadvertently touching trust money with other than the legal end of the poker. So I left the rest of the business to his care and started out to test Allan’s trout--in my opinion the most valuable stock he possessed.

The old lawyer remained perfectly content wheezing snuff to blow away the damp that rose out of the old parchments, while Allan and I were whipping the neighbouring lakes with iron-bodied flies twisting at the end of silver gut. After a week’s work, the lawyer left us to ourselves for good.

“There are grand sheepskins in your chest,” he told Allan, on departing, “and specimens of Scotch law in all its manifold application. And there’s much of interest concerning your family, much of good report and some of ill--and one tale among the papers that I reserve for your ears alone, though your gillie, Murdoch, whom I have been questioning, can serve you the popular version.”

When the lawyer had gone, I never cared to ask Allan what this might be; and reticence is to be encouraged in youth. It was not for two years that I was to learn.

Meantime, I had taken vacations regularly at Gordonmuir. Every autumn I travelled north with a skein of trout lines and feather flies in my lap. It is the one perfect occupation in a train. It plies the heart with reminiscence and expectation by turns. It soothes away more hours of motion than reading or talking, and it leaves the mind active and the fingers nimble at the end of the journey. Often have I thought of patenting it as a railway amusement, but then the true and complete anglers whom it would occupy are diminished to few in the land.

I used to arrive at Gordonmuir with my cap and pockets bristling with silk flies and lengths of gut every autumn. And Gordonmuir in autumn!--when the skies have settled into their summer sheen and the red heath is running to dull purple; when the long, billowy hills lie reflected on the waters that float above their foundations in the Hebridean sea, hills that change their marine flora a few yards above the rocky tide belt for all the sweeter weeds of earth--sea pinks for mountain heather and the long yellow tide ribbons for the crisp bracken and harts-tongue ferns. Hills of transformation and wonder! At their feet the heavy, opaque water of the sea lounges over rocks studded with green limpets and suckstones, while in their hollows, under the clouds above, the bubbling springs run into fresh streams and lakes. But the best contrast of all is furnished by the coarse, lubberly fish that basks under the shadow of the rocks, fit only for the seine net and the spear of the poacher; a fish without a soul. But a good Providence replaces him in the higher, dew-fed waters with the merry brook trout--as gamy a jester, in his motley of red spot and yellow, as ever tumbled at one end of a fifty-foot line.

It was this perennial sport that drove away the gloom and discomfort attached to Allan’s residence. He kept no servant but Murdoch, who was better at twisting flies than making beds, and could stalk game more easily that he could cook it. The house itself remained dreary even when flooded by the five thousand acres of sunshine included in the property. It looked what it was--the half-dismantled mansion of a line of fighters and spendthrifts. Even at night, Allan’s red family claret and silver-sconce lights--sole heirlooms besides a lock of the Pretender’s hair--were as insufficient to clear the gauntness of the atmosphere as the burning sunset and white starlight to drive the evening mists from the hills.

But our days were largely spent in the open air, and evening found us too tired to care whether our shelter was uncanny or not. Matters ghostly were drowned in the steam of smoking cakes and trout baked so fresh that their red spots showed like red wax under the melting butter. And now that the old days have passed away and that the iron has swept over our home life, it is good to look back and enjoy their memory.