CHAPTER V
Lionel awoke early. He was lying in his own bed—at home. For the moment nothing else mattered. Soon he would get up, and scurry round his old haunts before breakfast. He felt an Eton boy again, back for the holidays, with no confounded first school ahead of him. His eye rested upon certain framed photographs by Hills and Saunders. He had not distinguished himself very greatly at Eton, either in the classrooms or in the playing fields, but he had enjoyed himself and held his own. At Sandhurst, later on, he had been even happier, although his health had provoked anxieties.
He glanced out of the window. A capital morning for fishing! He knew that the Squire had duties, never neglected, upon the bench of magistrates. Old Fishpingle would be available as a companion. They would make a day of it. His mother would come down to the river for luncheon. Then his thoughts flitted to the Vicarage. What a jolly girl Joyce Hamlin was! No nonsense about her. Rosy as a Ribstone pippin and as sound at core. She might make a fourth at luncheon and square a charming circle. He had half expected to see her on the lawn to welcome him, but she was full of tact—bless her! She guessed, of course, that his father and mother would want him to themselves, and she couldn’t be dismissed like a tenant. He’d just nip in and shake her hand before breakfast.
With this happy thought percolating through his mind, he jumped out of bed, and rang for Alfred, who appeared grinning as usual. Lionel chaffed him, asking innumerable questions, amongst them this: “Had he secured a sweetheart?” Alfred, who bore to his young master something of the affection which had linked together the Squire and Fishpingle, unbosomed himself promptly. Yes; he and Prudence had made it up to get married, but the Squire was hostile. Lionel, much surprised, asked more questions, and elicited all the story.
“He’ll come round,” affirmed Lionel, alluding to his father. “And, perhaps, I can slip in a word. First cousins be damned! You and little Prue are the star couple of Nether-Applewhite.”
“Thank ’ee, Master Lionel. We be fair achin’ to earn money.”
“What d’ye mean, Alfred?”
“Sir Geoffrey, he give a pound for every child born in parish, an’ five pounds so be as God A’mighty sees fit to send twins.”
“I say, the sooner you earn that money, the better.” Half an hour afterwards, he was inhaling deep breaths of air fresh from the downs. The usual round engrossed him. A visit to the stables, a glance at the cricket pitch in the park, a squint at the river, and lastly—the Vicarage.
He found Joyce where he expected to find her, in the garden. No embarrassment showed itself on either side. They met, as they had parted, good friends, pals, as Lionel put it. He was as unaffectedly glad to see the maid, as she was to see him. But from her, without design on her part, came further corroboration of straitened means.
Lionel had said ingenuously: “I do hope, Joyce, that Squire and Parson pull together a little better than they did?”
Joyce answered as frankly: “As to that, Lionel, you can judge for yourself. Father thinks, as he always has thought, that if something is really wanted, he has only to ask for it, without”—she laughed not too mirthfully—“without any preliminary beating of bushes.”
“Your father is dead right about that. He’s the last man to ask for what isn’t really wanted.”
When Lionel insisted upon concrete information, Joyce told him the story of the chancel repairs, now in hand, thanks to Lady Pomfret’s promise. She ended dismally:
“Father, somehow, won’t realise that Sir Geoffrey is terribly cramped for ready money.”
Lionel muttered as dismally:
“Is it as bad as that?”
She nodded.
He went on excitedly: “This is a nasty jar, Joyce. I swear to you that it’s bad news for me. I never suspected it. He ought to have told me.”
A faint derision informed her next words.
“You ought to have guessed.”
“Ought I?”
He considered this, frowning. Then they talked of lighter matters, each enchanted to note the changes in the other. Betore they parted, after a half promise from Joyce that she might wander to the river, Lionel said abruptly:
“You are happy, Joyce? You look happy, but——”
“But?”
“There isn’t much to amuse you here.”
“I love the place and the people.”
This statement of fact was weighed and not found wanting as Lionel hastened back to the Hall. Joyce was now a woman of twenty, but she retained the freshness and bloom of a girl of seventeen. Lionel guessed that she had filled her mother’s place admirably. He compared her to his own mother. When a young man does this, he ought to see and recognise the road he is travelling. Lionel had no such sense of direction. He decided hastily that Joyce, being often in his mother’s company, had grown delightfully like her.
He whistled as he strode along.
At breakfast, he told the tale of his wanderings. At mention of the Vicarage, the Squire remarked irritably:
“Joyce is well enough, a good girl, but Hamlin is gettin’ impossible. He does a lot of mischief in the village.”
Lionel retorted warmly: “Father, he is incapable of that.”
Lady Pomfret winced. But she hastened to add:
“Your dear father doesn’t accuse Mr. Hamlin of making mischief deliberately.”
At that, the Squire “took the floor.” He spoke vehemently, with a feeling and emotion that surprised and confounded his son. Hamlin, first and last, was a Rad, with a Rad’s pestilent notions about property. He stuck his nose into every pie in the parish. He positively exuded Socialism. The fellow was of the people and with the people. All his ideas were impossible and Utopian. Did he do mischief deliberately? Perhaps not. But, unconsciously, he set class against class. He was importunate in his demands—demands, b’ Jove! which no landowner could grant without hostilising his farmers. Take wages. Concede, if you like, that wages were low in Wiltshire, about as low as the intelligence of the peasants. Concede, also, that in special cases a landowner might pay higher wages to his own outdoor servants, under-gardeners and the like. Concede all that, and then try it! And every farmer on your property would besiege you with protests, because they—poor devils!—couldn’t pay higher wages. Outsiders never understood these things. It was like arguing about sport with fellows who weren’t sportsmen. Hamlin had played cricket for his ’Varsity, but he wasn’t a sportsman. There you had it in a nutshell.
Under the table, Lady Pomfret gently pressed her son’s foot. Wisely, he attempted no defence of the parson. The Squire recovered his good humour with a second rasher of home-cured bacon. As he rose from the table, he smiled genially at wife and son.
“I spoke my mind just now, the more strongly because I have to suppress such feelings. It comes to this, Lionel, when a fellow is making sacrifices, when he is paring down expenses right and left, when he is doing his damndest to ‘carry on,’ it is exasperating to be pestered for the extra inch when you have cheerfully given the ell.”
He blew his nose with violence and left the dining-room.
“Dear fellow!” murmured Lady Pomfret. “He has been horribly worried during the last four years.”
Lionel looked and felt dazed. He supposed that Lady Pomfret invariably sided with her husband. Not out of any insincerity or moral weakness, but because she was of his generation and shared his views which were in all honesty focussed upon his duties and responsibilities. As much could be said of Hamlin. Lionel’s mind remained quite clear on this point. What confused and distressed him was the sudden realisation of cheese-paring, of sacrifice, of anxieties which he had ignored till this moment.
“Then it is true,” he murmured.
“What is true, my dear?”
“That we are much less well off than I had ever suspected.”
“I am afraid that is true, Lionel.”
“Surely you know, mother?”
“Not everything.”
“Good Lord!”
“The mortgage has always eaten into his peace of mind.”
“The mortgage? I never knew there was a mortgage.”
“That is why I sit with my back to the portrait of your great-grandfather.”
She explained matters to a wondering son. He listened impatiently, tapping the carpet with his foot, irritated perhaps unduly because of his own ignorance and impotence. When Lady Pomfret had finished, he tried, for her sake, to speak lightly—
“If I had known all this, mother, I might have helped him.”
“How?”
“I could have worried along on a less generous allowance. As it is——!” He broke off, with a gesture. She reassured him gently:
“Your father put you into a good regiment, and he has allowed you what he decided was necessary. If you asked him to give you less, he would refuse.”
Lionel exhibited a trace of his father’s obstinacy.
“We shall see about that,” he muttered. Then he kissed her tenderly, stroking her delicate hand.
“It has been beastly for both of you. And you two have always looked so comfy and prosperous.”
Lady Pomfret laughed.
“Call us mummers, Lionel. We have been forced to keep up appearances. Most of our friends are in the same boat. I see the comic side of it all and the tragic.”
Lionel smoked an after-breakfast pipe alone. Tobacco, however, failed to soothe him.
At half-past ten, Fishpingle and he took the path leading to the river. Fishpingle, in a very sporting coat and knickerbockers (which had been discarded by the Squire), might have been mistaken at a short distance for that potentate. He was doubtful about the prospects. The sun had risen high above the clouds and the breeze was dying down. To his astonishment, Lionel displayed indifference, saying incisively:
“I want to have a long yarn with you, old chap. If the trout aren’t on the rise, so much the better.”
Fishpingle stared at him keenly.
“That doesn’t sound like you, Master Lionel.”
“I’m not myself this morning. I’ve a big load that I must get off my chest. We’ll sit under a willow while I do it.”
The trout were not feeding, as Fishpingle had predicted. There might be a nice “rise” later on. Lionel glanced up and down the stream. Joyce was not on the “rise” either. A clump of willows was found, and the men sat down, Lionel wasted no time.
“I’ve had a shock, Fishpingle. I never knew till this morning that there was a crippling mortgage on this property. I never knew that father was pinched and pinching. What did he get for the shooting, eh?”
Fishpingle, who knew the exact amount, answered cautiously:
“Several hundred pounds.”
“Now, sit tight! I’m going to give you a shock, I owe several hundred pounds, and I must tell father at the first decent opportunity.”
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Fishpingle. “Several hundred pounds!”
“No excuses to you, you dear old man! I raced a bit out there and backed losers. I played polo. And bridge. I spent last year’s leave in Kashmir. Between ourselves, I had no idea I was so dipped. The bets had to be settled on the nail; so I went to the natives. Before I started for home they dunned me. I had to tell my colonel. Before I go back these debts must be settled in full. Believing my father to be a comparatively rich man, I assured my chief that they would be. I’ve had a thumping good allowance and I feel this morning about as sick as they make ’em. Now—you’ve got it.”
“Several hundred pounds,” repeated Fishpingle.
“Call it five—a monkey.”
“Oh, dear—oh, dear!”
“Don’t look so miserable! I can get the monkey from Cox’s, my agents, but they insist upon a guarantee from my father. Of course I could go to the Jews!”
“No, no, Master Lionel. But this will upset the Squire terribly.”
“Don’t rub that in!”
Fishpingle got up, shaking his head dolorously and making gestures with his hands, a habit of his when distressed. At any other time, Lionel would have laughed, and with his powers of observation whetted to a finer edge in India might have deduced from these antics that here was an old friend of the family, who—by virtue of his relation to that family—had been constrained all his life to suppress speech which found expression in these very gestures. He not aware that a struggle against other habits was raging. But he knew—had he recalled it—that Fishpingle had the reputation of being what servants called “close.” He saved his money. Nobody guessed how much he had saved, or what he had done with his savings. Only Fishpingle himself realised that the habit of saving had taken a grip of him. He was curiously dependent, and yet independent of the Pomfrets.
He could not envisage life apart from the family whom he had served so devoutedly, but his mind could and did dwell with satisfaction upon the securely invested money which assured to him, in extremity, ease approximating to affluence. In a big way, he could be generous. He had helped the mother of Prudence Rockley and others, but he had never touched the ever-increasing main hoard.
He said in a strangled voice:
“Don’t tell the Squire, Master Lionel. He has trouble enough. I—I will give you the money gladly.”
Lionel leapt up. Many surprises, during the past twenty-four hours, had prepared him for others, but this was the greatest.
“You dear old chap,” he gasped, “what are you saying? Give me five hundred pounds?”
“With all my heart.”
Volubly, he continued, protesting with uplifted finger against interruption. Lady Alicia Pomfret had left him a thousand pounds. He had never touched the interest on this nest egg, reinvesting it year after year. For a man in his position he was rich—rich! He wanted to help. It was his pleasure and his duty to help those to whom he owed everything. Lionel, for the second time that morning, felt dazed and stupid. He could understand, easily enough, Fishpingle’s wish to help, but his ability to do so involved other issues. If he were rich, if, for example, the nest egg were four times its original size, why, in the name of the Sphinx, had he remained in his present position? Why hadn’t he cut loose long ago, married, and set up a snug business of his own? These thoughts chased each other through his mind till Fishpingle stopped speaking. Lionel grasped his hand.
“I shall remember this all my life,” he began. “But I couldn’t take five hundred from you, Fishpingle, either as a gift or a loan. And, believe me, I shall have no difficulty in raising the money with a guarantee from my father. I made a clean breast of it to you, because I thought that together we might work out the best way of breaking beastly news to him. It is beastly to find out that he has been pinching while I have been squandering. He put the thing in a phrase at breakfast. Wait! Let me get his own words. They sunk in. I can promise you. Yes; I have ’em. ‘It is exasperating to be pestered for the extra inch, when you’ve given the ell cheerfully.’ Asking for his guarantee is just that extra inch clapped on to the ell of my allowance. Now—tackle him I must. Together we’ll settle the where and the when and the how. But you’re a topper, the very best in the world!”
He gripped his hand fiercely.
Fishpingle accepted the situation. He perceived that here was a point of honour and principle. No Pomfret could be swerved from that. So he said simply:
“If the Squire must be told, Master Lionel, tell him to-night, after dinner, when he is sipping his port.”
“Right! I will.”
“You made no excuse to me, make none to him.”
“Right again, you, you—sage.”
Fishpingle pointed to the river. “A trout is rising just beyond that stump. He lies under it, a whopper.”
“Is he? Do you know, Fishpingle, there are moments when sport seems to me a poor substitute for other and more exciting things. You’ve excited me. You have come up from under your stump, and you’re a whopper. And I want to throw my fly over you.”
Fishpingle betrayed slight uneasiness. The young man confronting him with keen sparkling eyes had lost his look of irresolution. His firm chin stuck out aggressively, he spoke with the authority of his father.
“As you please, Master Lionel.”
Lionel hesitated, picking his words, but joyously sensible that his mind had become clear again.
“I suppose,” he began tentatively, “that the truth is just this. I have changed, not you dear people. I used to take certain things and persons for granted, you, for instance. It seemed to me, before I went to India, that you were part of the general scheme, a sort of keystone to the arch. I really thought that you wallowed in being our butler and general factotum.”
“So I do.”
“Fishpingle—that’s a whopper, too. I’m not quite the innocent fool I was. Men serve others, cheerfully enough, if they’re the right sort, but they do it because they have to. I never met a fellow yet, old or young, who didn’t want to be his own, if he could manage it. I supposed that you couldn’t manage it. But you can. More, you could have managed it long ago. That’s as clear as our water is to-day.”
“I wanted to stay on.”
“But why—why?”
“This is my home, Master Lionel.”
“You’re a wily old trout, you are. But it isn’t your home. If anything happened to father and me, where would you be? You ought to have married and had some jolly kids. Nether-Applewhite is famous for its pretty girls.”
Fishpingle was cornered, but his humour rescued him. He said slyly:
“Pretty, yes; but not very highly educated, Master Lionel.”
“I see. We’re getting to grips now. My great-grandmother, so I have heard, made a bit of a pet of you. She saw to it that you got a better education than our girls. Obviously, she intended you to profit by that and cut loose. For some inscrutable reason you didn’t. If that education, old chap, made a bachelor of you, it was rather a questionable blessing, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
Fishpingle’s face had assumed the impenetrable mask of the highly trained English servant. Lionel glanced at him.
“Ah! You refuse to rise?”
“The trout, Master Lionel, are fairly on the feed now.”
He pointed to the river, with many rippling circles upon its surface. Lionel had tact enough to say no more. He picked up his rod, sticking out of the ground beside him.
“Try a May fly,” suggested Fishpingle.
Lionel did so. The pair separated, Fishpingle taking the upper reaches, above the village. Lionel fished diligently without much success, possibly because his heart was not in his work. From time to time he glanced down stream at a spot where the road shone white above the meadowsweet and rushes. Joyce Hamlin might float into sight at any minute, but she didn’t. Lionel felt slightly piqued as the sun rose to the zenith. Surely, upon his first day at home, she might have come. His Colonel, a man of the world, had impressed this maxim, upon his subaltern: “Women do what they like. Many of ’em undertake thankless jobs. That is because the spirit of self-sacrifice warms ’em to the core.”
Was Joyce that sort of woman?
He began to think of her as a woman. A pal, so he interpreted the word, would have joined another pal. And if some definite duty kept her from him, she would have mentioned it before breakfast. Deliberately, she had let him think that she would come. And she hadn’t. Some woman’s reason accounted for her absence.
At luncheon Lady Pomfret joined the anglers. Fishpingle had grassed two brace of fat trout. Lionel had only one fish. The luncheon was very jolly, the sort of thing you gloated over during hot, sleepless nights in India. Below the willows, where the lobster and other good things were spread upon a snowy cloth, gurgled the weirs to the north of the village. Lionel remembered a famous run of the buckhounds from Bramshaw Telegraph to Nether-Applewhite, an eight-mile point. The buck had swum the Avon and the big hounds followed. Half a dozen had just escaped drowning in the sluices. Lionel helped to rescue them. Behind the willows stretched the water-meadows, where he had learnt to hit snipe. He recalled the Squire’s injunction: “Say to yourself—Snipe on toast—before you pull trigger. That’ll steady your nerves.” On the rising ground bordering the park, just where hill met sky, was a low belt of firs, the best stand of that particular partridge beat, where the “guns” could take the birds as they topped the belt. Lionel had covered himself with glory at that stand, downing two in front and two behind, a notable performance in any company. And when his father had acclaimed this feat with proud insistence, Lionel had to confess that the two behind had fallen to one shot! Look, in fine, where he would, the young man could recall some happy or amusing incident of his youth, and never once, during those rosy hours, had he reflected that he was amazingly fortunate, that the lines of his life meandered, like the placid Avon, through pleasant places. As he put it to Fishpingle, he had taken things and persons for granted. He had ranked sport as a pursuit of the first magnitude.
Fishpingle, you may be sure, was asked to join the party at luncheon. Lionel, watching him, noted his good manners, or rather his unstudied ease of manner. He displayed, too, for Lady Pomfret’s benefit, a remarkable fund of Arcadian lore, that intimate knowledge of wild birds and beasts gained at first hand. Lionel decided that he talked better than the Squire, who prided himself upon his powers of speech.
Why had such a man been content to serve the Pomfrets?
After luncheon, at Fishpingle’s earnest request, the anglers changed beats. Lady Pomfret accompanied her son to the upper reaches. But he showed little keenness although more fly was on the water, and the prospects of good sport much better. The mother remarked this:
“Are you tired, my dear?”
His laugh allayed that anxiety.
“Tired? I’m consumed with curiosity—that’s all.”
“What is biting at you?”
“Fishpingle.”
“Oh!”
“Mother, read the riddle of Fishpingle to me.”
She shook her head. The riddle of her son challenged attention. How greatly he had changed, this boy who had been so absurdly boyish and cut to pattern, who had accepted everything and questioned nothing. Long after he had joined his regiment, she looked in vain for any shades of expression in him. If he liked a play or a book, it was “priceless” or “tophole.” If he disliked it, one word flew from his lips like a projectile—“Tosh!” She remembered taking him to a concert, where a famous virtuoso had entranced a large audience. Lionel announced presently that he was bored to tears. She had said gently, “Do you think, Lionel, that is your fault or the fault of Pachmann?” And he had stared at her, startled out of his complacency but utterly misapprehending the humour and purpose of her question.
She said tranquilly:
“I can’t read that riddle. I have always believed that poor Ben’s father was a gentleman. Your great-grandmother may have known who he was. If she did, she carried the secret to her grave. Anyway, she educated Ben, and left him some money. She was very fond of Ben’s mother, her maid. Ben became your father’s servant. You know, Lionel, that men and women run in grooves. And the longer you remain in a groove, the harder it is to get out of it. Above and beyond all this remains the fact of Ben’s affection for us. I have never doubted the enduring quality of that. For the rest, I know no more than you do.”
“It’s a mystery,” declared Lionel.
After this talk, fishing really engrossed him. He returned home to tea in high spirits with five good fish in his creel. Alone in his room, changing his clothes, he remembered that he had not spoken to his mother about Joyce. And he had intended to do so, to invite her judgment upon the riddle of sex. As he pulled off his wet boots, he thought with keen anticipation of many delightful talks with her. What a gift she had of inviting confidence! And withal, a woman of exasperating reserves. It was not easy to “get at her.” Her graciousness, her tranquillity, disarmed attack.
The Squire had returned from the Bench, when Lionel sauntered into the Long Saloon. He greeted his son boisterously and listened to a recital of the day’s sport. Each fish had to be hooked and played all over again. And then, as he proposed a stroll round the Home Farm, he said to Lady Pomfret:
“By the way, I have heard from Lady Margot. She will be happy to come to us after the Eton and Harrow match. That will be about three weeks from now.”
“And who is Lady Margot?” asked Lionel.
The Squire chuckled:
“You wait and see, my boy. She’s a dasher—a dasher.”
Lionel wondered whether this was the nice little girl with a bit of money.
“What does she dash at?” he asked.
Lady Pomfret answered him:
“Everything and everybody.”
The Squire, not quite satisfied, hastened to assure Lionel that the young lady was perfectly charming in face, figure, and intelligence.
Lionel’s eyes twinkled, but he asked gravely enough:
“Has she money, father?”
The Squire flushed, as he answered quickly: “A hatful.”
Presently, father and son took the road to the Home Farm. The Squire noticed that Lionel seemed slightly preoccupied, that he praised perfunctorily the Shorthorns and Suffolk Punches. Being an impassioned optimist—except upon the subject of estate management—the Squire hoped that his heir’s thoughts had flown away in the direction of Lady Margot. We may hazard the conjecture that Lionel was concerned rather with the difficulties of breaking “beastly” news to a generous but choleric sire.