The great Skene mystery

by Bernard Capes

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.