I
IT is all very well and worthy to devote a lifetime, or part of it, to the study of foreign architecture. But a friend reproachfully reminded Fred Luffington that English minsters are worth a glance. Fred did not dispute it. There was a certain charm in the novelty of the idea. So he packed his portmanteau, and took the boat to Dover, to assure himself a pleasant surprise.
At York he bethought himself of an amiable old Flemish priest, in whose company he had studied a good deal of Antwerp at a time when Antwerp wore for him the colours and glory and other attendant joys of paradise. The priest, he remembered, was settled hard by, as the chaplain of a Catholic earl. He would take the opportunity of studying village life as well as the minsters of England; and smoke a pipe of memory, and drink big draughts of the beer of other days, with his friend, the Flemish priest.
Fendon was as comfortable a little village as any to be dreamed of out of Arcadia. Its warm red roofs made a cosy circle under the queerest of rural walls, round a delightful green. A real green, a goose common, with an umbrella tree in the middle, and a village pump under an odd grey dome of stone supported by rough pillars. All the houses were buried in trees, and all the palings overgrown with honeysuckles.
Fred Luffington sniffed delightedly. Though it was June, there was plenty of damp in the air, and lovely moist smells came from the hedges and fields. Yes; this was enchantment, a whiff of pure sixteenth century, the very thing described by old-fashioned writers as ‘Merrie England.’ It did not look very merry, to be sure; rather sleepy and still. But it was not difficult to swing back upon imagination into the days of Good Queen Bess.
Fred’s glance grew vague, and the lyrical mood was upon him. He mused upon may-poles, foaming tankards, and the rosy maids and swains of the centuries when there was ‘love in a village.’ There were no rosy maids or sighing swains about, but he imagined them along with the rest of Elizabethan decorations, evoked confusedly by remembrance of past readings.
Everything combined to keep him in good humour. The name of his inn, the only inn, was ‘St. George and the Dragon.’ Who but a scoffer or a heathen could fail to sleep well at an inn so gloriously named? As an archæologist, Fred was neither, so naturally he slept the sound sleep of the believer, somebody infinitely superior to the merely just man. Anybody may be just, but it takes a special constitution to believe, in the proper manner. Fred Luffington was all that is most special in the way of constitutions, so after a charmed inspection of the sign-board—a rude picture of the saint in faded colours on a semi-effaced horse with a remarkable dragon at his feet—he sauntered in through the porch to be confronted with a perfectly ideal buxom landlady. This was more than heaven, he devoutly felt, and said his prayers on the spot to the god of chance, who so benevolently watches over the humours of romantic young men.
Mrs. Matcham, spick and span and respectable, beamed him welcome of a mediæval cordiality. He felt at once it was good to be with her, and took shame to himself for having been so long enamoured of foreign parts, and unacquainted with the pleasant aspects of English country life. She deposited his bag on a table at the bottom of a red-curtained four-poster, and remarked that she was granting him the privilege of occupying the room of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. There was such a full accompaniment of condescension and favour in her smile, and so complete a signification of the importance and fame of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, that Luffington felt abashed by his own ignorance of the personality of the local great man, and kept a discreet silence.
When he descended to the dining-room, his delightful landlady, entering with the tray, paused in critical survey of the table.
‘I have placed your seat before the fireplace, sir. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy always prefers it so. But perhaps you would like to sit in front of the window.’
Luffington seized the fact that any taste but that of the mysterious great man’s would be evidence of inferiority. But it was necessary to make a stand for originality. The expected docility fired revolt in his veins. At the price of consideration, he decided for the window in front, instead of the fireplace behind. The pleasures and pangs of our life depend upon little things, and the little thing in question gave a silly satisfaction to Luffington, and disproportionately pained the good landlady.
After his late lunch, Luffington strolled forth to pick up rural sensations on his way to the Flemish priest’s. He encountered glances of dull interest, but nowhere the rosy village maid and her pursuant swain that his studies in pastoral literature had taught him to expect as the obvious decoration of a quiet rustic scene.
‘There is nothing so misleading as literature, unless, perhaps, history,’ he observed, in a fond retrospect of the centuries. ‘The disappointments of the present build for us the illusions of the future,’ he added incoherently.
The Flemish priest was tending his bees, with a thick blue veil tied over his felt hat, when he heard the garden gate swing upon its hinges. He looked up and saw an elegant young man pointing, as he came along, a meditative cane in the neighbourhood of his dearest treasures, a row of white and blue irises.
‘Santa Purissima! Can these sons of perdition not learn to keep their shticks and their long limbs from ze borders if they must invade our gardens?’
He slipped off his veil and showed a fat yellow face streaked with the red of anger. Luffington held out his hand, laughing.
‘By all that’s holy! My young friend of Antwerp. Welcome, welcome! Ah, my boy! how many, six, eight years ago! What a lad you were then with your dreams of love and fame! And how have they fared, those dreams—eh? Gone ahead, or dropped behind, as ’tis the way with young dreams? Hein!’
Luffington nodded sentimentally, like one rocked upon sudden waves of regret. The dreams had dropped behind with the years, and it was an effort to recall them to vivider shape than a cloud with a sunny ray upon it.
‘Have you any of the old tobacco?’ he asked. ‘A pipe might lead us over the forgotten ground again, and revive the dead persons of that little Antwerp drama. You’ve added bees to botany, I see. Could you get up a massacre of the drones while I am here? I’ve never been able to put full faith in all the astounding stories we have of the bees, and might be converted by a practical demonstration.’
‘Come along inside, and leave my bees alone, you insolent sceptic of the world. That’s your French air—the very worst to breathe. I suppose you take brandy and mud in your literature, too. I heard you talk of Dumas once, and thought it bad, but now, of course, you’re down with the naturalists, the symbolists, and the philosophers of insanity.’
‘Not a bit. I haven’t got beyond dear old Dumas, where you left me. And here I am, anchored momentarily in Arcadia, among the bees and the flowers, under the protection of St. George, with a mighty minster near at hand.’
Under the congenial influences of Pilsener and a certain French tobacco affected by the pair, they sat in a book-lined study and talked of many things. It was only at table, later, that Luffington, over his soup, remembered to mention the name of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy.
‘An old friend of the family,’ the priest explained, meaning the earl and his wife. Upon the Harborough estates there could, of course, be only one family in all conversation.
The priest walked back to the inn with Luffington, and accepted a glass of rum punch from the hand of Mrs. Matcham.
‘Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy always says that nobody can make rum punch like me,’ she remarked, not without the hue of modesty upon her cheek at sounding her own praises; and her glance sparkled to Luffington’s upon his acknowledgment of the truth.
‘There are drawbacks to a sojourn upon the vacant hearth of a god,’ he said, when the door closed upon her exit. ‘His worshippers are invidiously reminiscent, and you court unfavourable comparison whether you sit, sleep, eat, or drink.’
But the punch was good, the bed excellent, the quiet conducive to dreamless sleep. Luffington was abroad early next morning, indifferent to the thought of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as he sipped the dew with a shower of song in his face, and the light at his feet ran along the grass and through the trees in dimpled rivers of gold. The priest had told him that the earl loved his trees like children. Fred did not wonder, as he hailed them ‘magnificent,’ and went his way among them in full-eyed admiration.
It was a placid, even scene, such as one dwells on in loving memory when homesick in far-off lands. Lordly oaks and beeches and sentimental firs beshadowed the well-trimmed lawny spaces. The air played freely round and about them, and the light was broad and soft. If you stepped aside from the lawn and level avenues, you might lose yourself in the pleasant woods, alive with the chatter of birds, in the midst of fragrance and gloom. Water was not absent, and if you crossed the deer-park, you could follow its lazy way to Fort Mary, where the earl had a summer residence, aptly named by the French governess, ‘Le Petit Trianon.’ Luffington liked the notion. It was all so artificial, so costly, so preposterously pastoral, that his mind willingly went back to Versailles, and the musked and scarlet-heeled century. The ground was green velvet, unrelieved by as much as a daisy. It demanded Watteau robes, and periwigged phrases and piping strains of Lulli and Rameau. The boats were toys upon an artificial lake, and it was like hearing of children’s games to learn of regattas held here every summer. The idea of a Venetian fête was more appropriate to celebrate the birth of the heir, and lords and ladies in rich Elizabethan disguises grouped upon the velvet sward, upon the balcony of the ‘Trianon,’ or making pictures of glitter and sharp shadow upon the breast of dark water in the gleam of variously coloured lamps.
Luffington stopped to chat with a loutish fellow who was rolling the ground down to the minute pier, and chopping off the heads of the innocent daisies, along his path.
‘The notion of improvement is inseparably wedded to that of destruction,’ Fred mused, as he placidly surveyed the process, and dived his stick among the layers of massacred innocents. The thought opened his lips, but the lout lent an uncomprehending ear to his speech, shook his head as at obvious eccentricity of reflection, and rolled on with his look of gross stupidity. This proceeding disconcerted the traveller, who wanted to talk, and imbibe at the founts of rustic wit. He glanced around, and spied a little boat swaying among the rushes. Could he use it? The lout looked up sideways, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and offered his daughter as ferryman. At that moment Fred heard a thin unmusical sound, like that of a string drawn flat:
‘Friends, I’ve lost my own true lover,
Tra la la la la la la.’
Through a clump of noble trees a little maid approached, not more beautiful to the eye than was her flat, tuneless voice to the ear. She assented without any eagerness to row him across the lake, and had nothing more interesting to communicate than that Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was very fond of Fort Mary.
‘Decidedly I must see this fellow if I have to wait a month,’ thought Fred, with a pardonable feeling of irritation.
On his way back, he hailed his friend among the flowers and bees, and stood leaning over the gate to acquaint him with his intention to start at once upon exploration of the neighbourhood. The Flemish priest stood in the blaze of sunshine, and mopped his forehead repeatedly before urging him to wait another day, when he would be able to offer the advantage of his own trap and himself as guide.
‘I can’t go to-day,’ he said, with an air of importance. ‘Her ladyship has appointed this afternoon to come and consult with me about the schools.’
It was evident to Mr. Luffington, as he went off in search of lunch, that after Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, the Countess of Harborough was the figure of importance. The defection of his friend and the absence of romance among the villagers turned him to misanthropy, and as, late in the afternoon, fatigued after a long walk through the woods, he entered the inn porch, he told himself emphatically that he would leave Fendon on his way to the cathedral, and thence return to London.
He found the inn in a state of unwonted flurry, which was explained to him by a telegram announcing the arrival of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy upon the last train.
‘And I’ve the great man’s room,’ said Fred to himself, laughing, as he set out for the priest’s cottage.
The dinner was good, the wine not execrable, the tobacco best of all; and in excellent spirits, quite restored to his belief in men and women, Fred started off alone for ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ under a suspicion of moonlight just enough to send a quiver of silver through the trees, and show the darkness of the road, but not enough to send reason distraught down sentimental byways and insistently urge the advantages of open air meditation. He reached his inn sane and safe, and bethought himself of unanswered letters. Suddenly he was disturbed in the glow of composition by the sound of swift steps on the stairs and the ring of violent, angry speech.
‘A stranger in my room, Mrs. Matcham! Tut, tut. This is what I cannot permit. Instantly order him to clear out.’
Luffington looked up inquiringly as the door opened with an aggressive bang, and a queer attractive-looking fellow stood eyeing him imperiously upon the threshold. He had imagined Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy a respectable English gentleman, florid, prosperous, eminently aristocratic. He was confronted with the reverse. Before him stood in a threatening attitude, and frowning hideously, a man almost too dark for English blood, too small and too vengefully passionate of feature and expression. His hair, which curled, was of a dusty black, as if it had lain in ashes. His lips were full and red, covered with the same dust-hued shadow, and teeth so white, nostrils so fine and sharp, brows so low and oddly beautiful, surely never belonged to the respectable English race. His eyes were long, of a liquid blackness, through which red and yellow flames leaped as in those of an untamed animal, and his hands were brown and small, like the hands of a slender girl.
‘Do you hear, sir? This is my room,’ he cried.
There was a foreign richness in his voice that matched the quaint exterior, and was equally in puzzling contrast with his pretensions as an Englishman.... Luffington was convinced he had to do with some adventurer over seas, and he curtly replied that for the present the room was his. Mrs. Matcham, scared and anxious, shot him a glance of prayer over the shoulder of her domineering customer.
But Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was not to be silenced or turned out by the superior airs of a strolling jackanapes. He paced the room in his quick, light way, opened familiar drawers and presses, inquired after missing objects, and never stopped in a running murmur upon the impudence of travellers and the insolence of intruders.
‘May I point out that you are condemning yourself?’ Luffington dryly remarked, as he watched him in wonder. ‘Intrusion can never be other than insolent.’
‘Then why the devil are you sitting here, sir?’
‘For the simple reason that I slept here last night, and the room is mine as long as I stay at this inn.’
‘Mrs. Matcham, you had no business to let this chamber when there are others unoccupied in the house. You know I am liable to turn up at any moment, and that I cannot sleep in any room but this.’
There was something so boyish in the tone of complaint, that Luffington insensibly softened to the odd and ill-mannered creature, and smiled broadly.
Mrs. Matcham was affirming the comforts of a back room, when he stopped her shortly with a protest that this was information for Mr. Fitzroy, whom the matter concerned.
‘I tell you, sir, I will not give up my room,’ shouted Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy.
Luffington shrugged, and made a feint of resuming his writing, upon which Mr. Fitzroy plumped down into an arm-chair, crossed his slim legs savagely, and ordered the landlady to bring in his carpet bag, and produce glasses and two bottles of his special port. Luffington said nothing, but smiled as he continued to write, and took a sidelong view of his strange enemy. The more he looked, the more he wondered at the singular prestige of such a person in a place like Fendon. He had not the appearance of a gentleman, was the reverse of imposing, and according to the Flemish priest, was ‘just one of the poorest dogs in Christendom.’
‘He pays Mrs. Matcham thirty shillings a week, and nobody else anything, and he travels third class like myself,’ the priest added, but Luffington thought that his air was that of a man who holds back something.
‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as if he were pointing a cocked pistol at an antagonist, ‘you have an opportunity of assuring yourself that there is good port to be had in at least one inn in Great Britain.’
‘I am ready to accept the fact upon your statement, but I am no judge of port. It’s a wine I never drink.’
‘Claret, I suppose? Abominable trash, but there’s good stuff of that sort too, eh, Mrs. Matcham? Two bottles of one of their castles—Lafitte, La rose—something in that way.’
He yapped out his words like the spoken barks of an angry terrier, and poured himself out a glass of Harborough port, which he fondly surveyed, then tasted with a beatific nod.
‘Nowhere to be had out of England. Bloodless foreigners go to the deuce on their clarets. They’d be content to sit at home, and let their neighbours’ wives alone if they drank port. But then you have to go to an earl’s cellar for anything like this.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fred Luffington, now restored to good humour, and very much amused by his extraordinary companion. ‘But as we all haven’t a key to such cellars, it is safer to stick to the harmless grape-juice than court gout with doctored port. I’m for the foreigners myself, whatever their domestic sins may be. Port is as heavy as your climate, your women, your literature.’
Mrs. Matcham, partly reassured, entered with two bottles and one of those hideous green glasses described as claret glasses. This she placed in front of Mr. Luffington, and taking a bottle from her hand, Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy filled the unsightly chalice. Luffington drank his wine appreciatively, pronounced it rare, and wandered off upon the exciting topic of vintages. He no longer wondered at the prestige of a man who could command such claret.
‘You’re a Londoner, I suppose—an impudent Cockney?’ said Mr. Fitzroy, observing him as he put aside the green glass and stretched behind for his toilet tumbler. ‘Right you are there, my friend. One of the pleasures of good wine is to watch the play of light in its depths of colour. It passes my imagination how such complacent ugliness as this came to be manufactured.’ He took the glass in his fingers, stared at it, shook his head and flung it into the grate.
‘Mrs. Matcham may object to such summary justice,’ laughed Luffington.
‘Mrs. Matcham object to any act of mine, sir? That would be a revolution. I’ve only to say the word, and both Mrs. Matcham and John Graham are ready to take you by the scruff of the neck and plant you in the middle of the common.’
‘Instead, we sit pledging each other in the best of wines, and your antecedent ill-humour is, I hope, carried off, once you have named a continental Englishman, ‘Impudent Cockney’.’
Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy’s sombre eyes were instantly shot with mirth. He smiled delightfully, and as he did so, looked less and less of a Briton. It was the lovely roguish smile of a child that flashed from wreathed lips and ran up like light to the broad brows arched expressively. You would have forgiven him murder on the spot, much less a rude speech. He dipped into his glass, and sipped vigour therefrom for a fresh onslaught.
‘Ah, the continent! Generally means France, and France, of course, means Paris, and Paris, by God, means every devilry under the sun. Barricades, Bastilles, Julys, Septembers, baggy red breeches, Cockades, Marseillaises, Communism, Atheism, in a word, hell’s own mischief.’
‘I commend your mental repertory, sir. It is a neat historical survey extending over the past hundred years. We will say nothing of its justice. When our aim is the saying of much in little, we must be content to dispense with justice. But at least permit me to remark that Paris does not mean the continent for me—very much the reverse.’
‘Then you ought to have sense enough to be drinking port instead of one of your washy French castles,’ roared Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, attacking his second bottle after he had thrust Fred’s second under his nose.
The night wore on, and the two men gradually grew to view one another through the rosiest glamour. Luffington was ready to swear that his companion was the most entertaining he had ever encountered, and Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as he subsided into sleep upon his friend’s sofa, knew not whether he was most satisfied in having gained his point about the room—albeit Luffington enjoyed the bed—or in having made the acquaintance of such a remarkably agreeable young fellow—no nonsense, no cockloftiness, no French Atheism, or any other perverse ’isms for that matter, he murmured as he wandered into the devious country of dreams.
Early next morning Luffington walked down to the priest’s cottage, to describe the night’s adventures to his friend. They paced the garden pathway, Fred puffing a cigar, and both were enjoying a hearty laugh over the story, when two figures stood upon the bright edge of meadow that led into the deer-park. Clear and unshadowed in the morning sunshine, it was as pleasant a picture as the eye of man could desire, and to Fred, after his travels, all the pleasanter for being so distinctly English. A fair, handsome lady, in a light tweed dress, a broad-brimmed hat tied under her chin with long blue ribbons; from her arm swung a long-legged child, short-skirted, with an Irish red cloak blown out from her shoulders, upon the swell of which her long bright hair flowed like a sunny streamer. The child was looking up with an urgent charming expression, and talking with extreme vivacity. The lady smiled down upon her, tapped her cheek, and carried her along at a quick pace toward the cottage.
‘Her ladyship and her stepdaughter,’ said the priest. ‘It’s beautiful to see how they love one another. If all mothers were like that stepmother! But the wisest of us talk a deal of nonsense about women. Isn’t she handsome?’
Luffington admitted that she was, in the strictly English way—somewhat empty and expressionless, and feared that forty would find her fat.
The countess stopped at the gate, and chatted most affably. She gave the priest a commission that postponed their projected excursion till mid-day, and kindly invited Luffington to look over the Hall at his leisure. The little girl offered to show him her collection of butterflies, and then skipped away, with her blonde hair and red cloak blown out sideway like a sail.
‘Has the Countess of Harborough no children of her own?’ asked Luffington.
‘No; Lady Alice is the earl’s only child, and both he and the countess adore her.’
The postponement of their excursion drove Luffington alone into the solitary woods. But solitude among trees had no terrors for him; enchantment sat upon his errant mind as fancy led him over dappled sward and under the foliaged arches of mossy aisles. He came upon a bridge, under which a slant of water chattered its foamy way over large stones, and fell into sedate and scarce audible ripples between green banks and a thick line of shrubs. The outer bank he followed in a pastoral dream, to the accompaniment of a pretty consort of bird-song and babbling stream. He discovered that it led straight to Fort Mary, and here he sat on the edge of the pier, dangling his legs over the lake, as he smoked and forgot the hours.
The ‘Trianon’ lay behind, and as he lifted a leg, and sprang upon the gravel, he was conscious of the sound of a stifled sob carried, he believed, from the trees edging the sward, which the lout had rolled the day before. He stepped upon it, and he might have been walking on plush. As he went, the sound of sobs grew heavier, and he could count the checked breaths. He heard a man’s voice say softly: ‘My poor girl! Mary, Mary, courage.’ There was no mistaking that gentle and soothing voice, though he had heard it rasping and angry the night before. A break in the column of trees showed him a picture, the very reverse of the sweet domestic English picture that had charmed him a few hours ago.
The Countess of Harborough was weeping bitterly in Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy’s arms.