Chapter I: Autobiographical

I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down _en grande tenue_ by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose, for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.

As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was, legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.

At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire, called her Lady Skene.

As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had contracted a reckless _mésalliance_ with the lady who now bore his name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.

Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination, erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.

I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf, without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact secret of what constitutes the _comme il faut_. That may be said, broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all things--the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the spiritual evolutions of fashion.

There was an unseemly old heathen visited us once upon a time, who made himself very merry over Lord Skene’s “atonement,” as he called it. This was Sir Maurice Carnac, ex-governor of Madras, who had been an intimate friend of his lordship in the sixties, and who now, on his retirement, after twenty years’ service, came to renew the acquaintance. From him I learned, at discretion, not a few facts hitherto unknown to me: how, for instance, my stepfather, in the matter of his second marriage, had been “cast into a net by his own feet” in their very hope of going astray, which was to imply that he had been caught to matrimony in the act of trying to evade it; how Lady Skene had no sooner conquered him by her beauty, than she had used it to the subjugation of the old Adam she had entertained, by holding it the prize to his strict reformation; how, in short, she had made a tame and orderly spouse out of the most unpromising material possible.

Sir Maurice had no great delicacy, it is to be feared, though he could be mum on some points on which I sought enlightenment. Of Lady Skene’s social status before her marriage he would not speak; though I certainly gathered from him that it was inconsiderable.

“Take Fortune’s gifts, my lad,” he said, “and hold your silly tongue. It’s time to question her when she turns on you.”

“Scruples,” I began.

“Scruples be damned,” said he. “What has a ranker need of scruples? Ain’t you promoted for your mother’s son?”

That was the truth of it, and, to confess myself, the sorrow. I was not a loved child, conscious of rights or merits. I was an “encumbrance.” A dreamy, rather morbid temperament oppressed me with the weight of my own burden on the situation.

Not that I was ever treated unkindly; but there is an endurance that is harder than neglect. It might be thought that Lady Skene would have wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family. She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her. We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain carving a brand that is destined for the burning.

I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft, monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless--an angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits.

At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect--one thing in especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the detectives.