The Honour of the Clintons

by Archibald Marshall

CHAPTER V

WAITING

Brummels,
Carchester, Sept. 26th, 19—.

MY DEAR EDWARD,

I have to thank you for your second letter, and for your cheque for £7,000, which I cannot now refuse, but which, upon my soul, I don't know what to do with. If I buy another necklace with it, I publish to the world—or to such part of it as will see the pearls upon my wife's neck—what I intend to keep even from the partner of my joys and sorrows herself. If only a certain young woman had been able to bring herself to consent to the proposal made to her, the difficulty might have been got over by adding to her stock of trinkets. But it is of no use to cry over that, and my little friend Joan will assuredly have considered herself justified in her refusal by the somewhat startling suddenness with which the illustrious Robert consoled himself for her loss. These affairs move too quickly for me in my old age. The young woman whom I now have the honour to call daughter-in-law is all that could be wished from the point of view of health and high spirits, and I have nothing against her. But I do not feel impelled to hang an extra seven thousand pounds' worth of pearls round her neck. If that is a criticism on her, so be it. But she is not Joan. She is very far from being Joan.

I have much news for you, my dear Edward, which only my inveterate habit of procrastination has caused to be left till now.

The woman fastened upon Mary at Harrogate. This must have been after she had given up all idea of getting anything out of you. No doubt she followed her to that invigorating resort, and it is unfortunate that my poor wife should not be able to drink her waters of bitterness without being frightened out of her five wits by that resurrection. Fortunately I was within hail, and arrived on the scene in time to deal with the situation. I gathered from her account of her interview with you—my poor friend, what you must have gone through!—that you had very loyally exonerated me from all possibility of blame or misunderstanding, and I was pleased to be able in some sort to repay that loyalty. I did not lie, Edward—at least not to her. What fine adjustments of veracity one may have made later, in connubial intimacy, let no man presume to sit in judgment upon. I had received your first letter. I said neither yea nor nay, but rang the changes upon a monotonous charge of her having tried to extort money from you. It was the first line of defence, and I had no other. But she never got behind it. There is a bland but dogged persistency in my nature which ought to have carried me far. It carried me to the point of driving her to uncontrollable rage, which is something of a triumph in itself. To Mary I said before her, "This lady may not have stolen your necklace. You have her word for it. I have the word of my friend, Edward Clinton, that she asked him for money to stop her from spreading the report that his daughter-in-law stole it. She is dead and cannot defend herself. Also, Edward Clinton refused to give her any money. These two facts are enough for me. I recognise this lady's existence for the last time. I do not presume to dictate your actions, but if you are wise I think you will do the same."

We got rid of her, and she left Harrogate the next morning. I let her know, by the bye, that you held a letter from her admitting the fact that she had made demands on you and that you had refused them; and you may tell your son that she probably regrets having written that letter as much as any she ever wrote. It is a master weapon.

Well, that is the attitude I shall take up—my wife too, although she will talk a great deal, and be swayed by whatever opinion may be held by whatever person she talks to. There is bound to be talk, and a great deal of talk. You cannot help that. But it will die down. Deny nothing, admit nothing, except that you refused to pay her money. That is my advice to you.

They say that Colne is going to marry her. Birds of a feather! He is, at any rate, hot—spirituously so—in his defence of her, and in his offence against you and yours. I met him passing through London; for the sins of my youth I still belong to the Bit and Bridle Club, and I went there for the first time for I should think twenty years, and fell upon him imbibing. Rather, he fell upon me, and I fell upon my parrot-cry. "If you have any influence over that lady," I said to him, "I should advise you to advise her to keep quiet. She would have kept quiet—for money. It is known that she asked for it, and the less it has cause to be stated, the better for what reputation she has."

I left my lord in the maudlin stage, crying out upon the world's iniquity, of which he has considerable first-hand knowledge; but when he comes to what senses he still possesses he will, I hope, remember my advice. Let him marry the lady, by all means. She will have what protection she deserves, and there will be some who will accept her. They will cross neither my path nor yours, for our orbits and those of Colne do not intersect.

Finally, my old friend, set your teeth against what must come, and never lose sight of the fact that it will pass. You have been remarkably tried, and have escaped more pit-falls than could have been expected of any fallible mortal. There are no more in front of you, and all you have to do is to walk straight on with your usual stride.

Ever very sincerely yours,
SEDBERGH.

This letter gave the Squire some comfort. It contained almost the first definite news he had had. He had been living in that uncomfortable state in which the mind is wrought up to meet trouble which is bound to come, and the trouble tarries. Every morning he had arisen with the anticipation of the storm breaking; every night he had lain down, having lived through such a day as he might have lived at this season of the year for the last forty years. The storm had not broken yet.

Was it too much to hope that it would, after all, pass over?

He looked up from the letter with that enquiry in his mind. But his face soon clouded again. Though not in the full downpour, he was already caught by it.

Poor little Joan! She knew. She was going about the house, trying hard to be as bright as usual. Sometimes he heard her singing. That was when she passed the door behind which he was sitting. She came in to him much more freely than she had ever done, and sat and talked to him. His daughters had never done that, nor his sons very frequently, with the exception of Dick. It was an empty house now. He and Joan and Mrs. Clinton were a good deal together. Joan had even persuaded him to take her out cubbing. None of the Clinton girls had ever been allowed to ride to hounds; but there were so many horses in the stable, and so few people to ride them now, that he had given way. But he had only been out cubbing twice himself this season. He was getting too old, he said. He had never said that of himself before, about anything, which was why Joan had pressed him to take her. But three times it had happened that she had risen at dawn, and Mrs. Clinton had come in to her and said that her father had not slept all night, but was sleeping now, and had better be allowed to sleep on.

Joan had heard nothing from her young lover since the letter had been written asking him to postpone his visit. She said nothing to anybody about him, but went about the house as usual, singing sometimes.

There had been one day amongst the young birds, in which Sir Herbert Birkett, Jim Graham, and Walter only had assisted from outside Kencote. The Squire could not bring himself to ask his neighbours to shoot, nor to shoot with them. The strain was too great. On his tall horse by the covert-side, in those early meets of the hounds, he had always been on the look-out for suspicion and avoidance, and fancied them when they had not been there. But the news might come at any moment, filtering through any one of a score of channels to this retired backwater of meadow and wood and stream, and darkening it, to him whose whole life had been spent in its pleasant ways, with shameful rumour.

It had been settled that life was to go on as usual at Kencote. But he had lost the spring of his courage. Even if no one outside knew of his dishonour, he knew of it himself. When the trouble came he would face it with what courage he could. In the meantime he kept more and more to the house, where he sat in his room, over the fire, reading the papers, or doing nothing.

His half-brother, the Rector, came often to see him. He was some years the younger of the two, but for years had looked the older, until now. The Squire was ageing under his trial. He had lost his confident, upright bearing, shambled just a very little when he walked, and carried his head a trifle forward. His face was beginning to lose its healthy ruddiness, and his beard was whiter, or seemed so.

The two men had always been good friends, but were as unlike in character and pursuits as possible. The Rector was gentle and retiring, a little bit of a scholar, a little bit of a naturalist, gardener, musician, artist. He had no sporting tastes, but liked the country and lived all the year round in his comfortable Rectory. He was not a Clinton, but had been so long in their atmosphere that their interests were largely his. He had been one of the first to be told of the catastrophe. He had made no comments on it, but had shown his sympathy by many kind but unobtrusive words and acts.

He came in as the Squire was sitting with Lord Sedbergh's letter in his hand.

"Well, my dear Edward," he said, "it is such a lovely morning that I was tempted out of my study. It is my sermon morning, and I shall have a good one to preach to you on Sunday. I was in the vein. I shall go back to it with renewed interest."

"I've had a letter that may interest you," said the Squire. "In a way it seems to shed a gleam of light. But I don't know. Things are black enough. It's this waiting for the blow to fall that is so wretched. I had rather, almost, that everyone knew."

The Rector read through the letter carefully and handed it back.

"If nothing but the truth is to be told...!" he said.

"You mean that won't be so bad for us. It does look as if there might be a chance of her not telling more than the truth, for her own sake. If she is going to marry that creature! Colne! Bah! What mud we're mixed up with! To think it rests with a man like that to keep her quiet!"

"Is he so bad?" enquired the Rector.

"Bad! The sort of man that makes his order a by-word, for all the world to spit upon. I should think even you must have some knowledge of him. His first wife divorced him; his second died because he ill-treated her."

"Is that known?"

"Yes. In the way these things are known."

"He was Hubert Legrange, wasn't he? He was in my tutor's house at Eton—after your time. He wasn't bad then—high-spirited, troublesome, perhaps—that was all. But warm-hearted—merry. I liked him."

"Ah, my dear Tom! That's the sad thing, when you get to our age. To see the men you've known as boys—how some of them turn out! I've sometimes thought lately that I ought to have been more grateful to God Almighty for keeping me free from a good many temptations I might have had. I married young; I settled down here; it was what suited me. But I see now that those tastes were given to me for my good. If it hadn't been for that I might have gone wrong just as well as another. I had money from the moment I came of age. I could have done what I liked. Money's a great temptation to a young fellow."

The Rector hardly knew whether to be pleased or sorry at this vein of moralising that had lately come over his brother. It showed his mind working as he might have wished to see it work, towards humility and a more lively faith; but it also showed him deeply affected by the waves that were passing over his head; and the waves were black and heavy.

"What you say is very true," he said. "God keep us all faithful, as He kept you, Edward. You were tempted, and you were upheld. You see that now, I think."

"I thought," said the poor Squire after a pause, "that God was working to avert this disgrace from me. Everything seemed to have been ordered, in a way that was almost miraculous, to that end. It was just when I was shaking off the last uncomfortable thoughts about it, when everything seemed most bright for the future, that the blow fell. Well, I suppose it was to be, and it will come right for us all in the end; though I don't think I shall know a happy moment again as long as I live. I was living in a fool's paradise. I don't quite understand it, Tom."

The Rector thought he did. A fool's paradise is a paradise that the fool makes for himself, and when he is driven out of it blames a higher power. He was not inclined to think his brother the worse off, in all that really mattered, for having been driven out of his paradise. But it was a little difficult to tell him so.

The necessity was spared him for the moment. Dick came in, and was shown the letter.

"I think that is the way things will work," he said. "She will be repulsed by decent people, and she will come to see that whatever mud she stirs up, more than half of it will stick to her. If she marries Colne—or even if she only clings on to him as her champion—he'll come to see, if he has any sense, that the less she talks the better."

"He would want to see her cleared," said the Rector.

"Yes, and that's our difficulty. Sedbergh is very good; but I don't like it, all the same."

"Don't like what?" asked the Squire.

"I wish to God we could come out into the open." He spoke with strong impatience. "She's in the wrong. Yes. Scandalously in the wrong—a blackmailer, everything you like to say of her. But she's also in the right, and that's just where she can hurt us—where she is hurting us."

"Has anything happened?" asked the Squire anxiously.

"Yes. It's reached us at last. It's creeping like a blight all over the country—above ground, underground. It will crop up where you never could have expected. And what satisfactory answer can we give, without telling the truth, and the whole truth?"

"Tell us what has happened," said the Squire.

"I went into Bathgate, to Brooks, the saddler. I always have a talk with the old man, if he's in the shop; and he was there alone. He hummed and ha'd a lot, and said there was a story going about that he thought I ought to know of. And what do you think the story was? Humphrey stole the necklace and gave it to Mrs. Amberley. Susan found it out and it killed her. You gave Humphrey money on condition he never showed his face in England again. That's the sort of thing we are up against."

The Squire's face was a sight to see. The Rector relieved the tension by laughing, but not very merrily.

"That story won't hurt us," he said.

"That's all very well, Tom," said Dick. "It wouldn't hurt us if there was nothing behind. But what can you say? It's a lie. Yes. And you say so. What do you look like, when you say it? Brooks didn't believe it, of course. But he knew well enough there was something, or he wouldn't have told me. How did it come? Who knows? He heard it in the 'George.' They were talking of us. They'll be talking of us all over Bathgate; then all over the country. Trace that story back, and you'll get something nearer the truth. That will spread into another story. There will be many different stories."

"They will contradict one another," said the Rector.

"Yes. And everyone who hears or tells us of them will want to know exactly where the truth lies. It will all go on behind our backs; but every now and then somebody, out of real consideration to us, as I think old Brooks told me, or out of impudent curiosity, will bring it to our notice. Then what are we to say? Oh, why can't we tell the truth?"

"We can't," said the Squire, rousing himself. "We can only contradict the lies. Well, now it has come, I am ready for it. I'll go to Brooks. I'll talk to him. I'll go and sit on the Bench. I've been sitting here doing nothing—shirking. I'm glad it has come at last."