Abington Abbey: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

He had enjoyed those week-ends at Abington more consciously than he had enjoyed anything for years. And yet there was 'nothing to do,' as he was careful to inform everybody whom he asked down. He would have hesitated himself, before he had bought Abington, over spending two and sometimes three and four days in the week in a country house, in late spring and early summer, with no very good golf links near, no river or sea, nothing, specially interesting in the way of guests, or elaborate in the preparations made to entertain them. While the children had been growing up he had paid occasional visits to quiet country houses, in this way, and since Caroline had left the schoolroom they had sometimes paid them together. But once or twice in the year, outside the shooting season, had been quite enough. There were more amusing things to be done, and he had been so accustomed to skimming the cream off every social pleasure that he had always been on the lookout for amusing things to be done, though he had not cared for them when he did them much more than he enjoyed other parts of his easy life.

It was all too much on the same level. Special enjoyment only comes by contrast. Grafton's work interested him, and he did not do enough of it ever to make him want a holiday for the sake of a holiday, and seldom enough on any given day to make him particularly glad to leave it and go home. He liked leaving it, to go home or to his club for a rubber. But then he also rather liked leaving his home to go down to the City, in the mornings. When he had been to the City for four or five days running, he liked to wake up and feel he was not going there. If he had been away for some time, he was pleased to go back to it, though perhaps he would have been equally pleased to do something else, as long as it was quite different from what he had been doing. He liked dining out; he also liked dining at home. If he had dined alone with his family two or three times running, he liked having guests; if he had dined in company four or five times running, he preferred to dine alone with his family. It was the same all through. The tune to which his life was played was change: constant little variations of the same sort of tune. He would never have said that he was not satisfied with it; it was the life he would have chosen to go back to at any time, if he had been cut off from it, and there was indeed no other kind of life that he could not have had if he had chosen to change it. But it held no great zest. The little changes were too frequent, and had become in course of time no more than a series of crepitations in a course of essential sameness.

His buying of Abington Abbey had presented itself to him at first as no more than one of these small changes which made up his life. Although he had had it in his mind to buy a country house for some years past, he had not exerted himself to find one, partly for fear that it would reduce the necessary amount of change. The London house was never a tie. You could leave it whenever you wished to. But a country house would make claims. It might come to be irksome to have to go to it, instead of going here, there, and everywhere, and if you forsook it too much it might reproach you. Other people's country houses would never do that.

But ownership had had an effect upon him that he would never have suspected. The feeling of home, which had hitherto centred entirely in his family, still centred there, but gained enormously in richness from the surroundings in which he had placed them. The thousand little interests of the place itself, and of the country around it, were beginning to close in on them and to colour them afresh; they stood out of it more, and gained value from their setting. His own interests in it, too, were increasing, and included many things in which he had never thought of himself as taking any keen interest. He did not, as yet, care much for details of estate management, and left all that to Worthing, who was a little disappointed that a man who filled a big position in the financial world was not prepared to make something of a hobby of what to him was the difficult part of his work, and ease his frequent anxieties about it by his more penetrating insight. But Grafton did not leave his bank parlour in Lombard Street on Friday afternoon in order to spend Saturday morning in his Estate Office in Abington. Nor did he go far afield for his pleasures. The nearest golf links worth his playing over, who was used to the best, were ten miles away, which was nothing in a car, but he preferred to send his guests there, if any of them wanted to play golf, and stay at home himself, or play a round on the nine-hole park course at Wilborough. He took interest in the rearing of game, but that was about the only thing that took him even about his own property. For the present, at least, in the spring and early summer the house and the garden were enough for him, and a cast or two in the lengthening evenings over one or other of the pools into which the river that meandered through the park widened here and there.

Nothing to do! But there was an infinity of little things to do, which filled his days like an idle but yet active and happy dream. The contrasts of the quiet country life were only more minute than those which made the wider more varied life blend into a somewhat monotonous whole. They were there, to give it interest and charm, but they seemed to relieve it of all monotony. The very sameness was its charm. It was enough to wake up in this quiet spacious beautiful house lapped in the peace of its sylvan remoteness, and to feel that the day was to be spent there, it mattered not how. When the time came to leave it, he left it with regret, and when he came back to it, it was to take up its life at the point at which he had left it. He had thought of it only as a holiday house—only as a very occasional holiday house until the autumn should make it something more,—and that a succession of guests would be almost a necessity on his week-end visits, if they were to get the pleasant flavour out of it. But he had arranged for no big party of them during two months of regular visits, and on the whole had enjoyed it more on the days when he had been alone with the family.

He had never liked his family so much as in these days when they were his constant and sometimes sole companions. Hitherto, in London, except for their occasional quiet evenings together, it had always meant going out to do something, and until lately, since Caroline had grown up, it had generally meant inventing something to go out for. In the main, his pursuits had been other than theirs. With Young George, especially, it had been sometimes almost irksome to take the responsibility of finding amusement for him. And yet he loved his little son, and wanted to have him grow up as his companion.

Well, Young George wanted no better one; there was no necessity to find amusement for him at Abington. Abington, with all that went with it, was amusement for both of them, every hour of the day. Young George would follow him about everywhere, chattering effusively all the time, completely happy and at ease with him. He had reached the age at which a boy wants his play to be the play of a man, and wants a man to play it with. When Grafton was up in London he immersed himself in more childish pursuits, with Barbara as his companion, or Jimmy Beckley, who was a constant visitor during the Easter holidays. But his best days were those on which his father was there, and on those days he would hardly let him out of his sight. Grafton felt quite sad when he went back to school. Previously he had felt a trifle of relief when the end of the holidays came.

Miss Waterhouse and Barbara had stayed at Abington ever since they had moved down there. Caroline had only been up to London once for the inside of the week, although the season was now in full swing, and it had never been intended that they should not be chiefly in London until the end of it. The time for moving up had been put off and put off. The country was so delightful in the late spring and early summer. After Whitsuntide perhaps they would move up to London. But it had never been definitely settled that they should do so, and hitherto Caroline had seemed quite content to miss all her parties, and to enjoy her days in the garden and in the country, and her evenings in the quiet house.

Beatrix had been presented, and had been hard at it in London, staying with her aunt, Lady Handsworth, and enjoying herself exceedingly. But she had come down to Abington twice with her father. Abington was home now, and weighed even against the pleasures of a first London season.

The Whitsuntide guests were Lord Handsworth, Grafton's brother-in-law, with his wife and daughter, a girl of about Caroline's age, Sir James and Lady Grafton, the Marquis de Clermont-Lassigny, the Honourable Francis Parry, and one or two more out of that army of Londoners who are to be found scattered all over the country houses of England on certain days of the week at certain times of the year.