The carriage stopped at the near end of the village, by a creepered house backed by the hill and faced by the river, and Deb, in the road, held out a firm hand.
“You’re not coming in,” she said decidedly. “Brathay knows a hundred times more about hounds than father. This is good-bye between me and Crump—you don’t need telling that. You want to pat me on the head, and I won’t have it—not with all the best intentions in the world! So say good-bye quickly, and go, for there’s quite sufficient anathema in store for me, without Clark adding that I kept his horses out in the rain.”
He dislodged her gently, and opened the gate. Then he took the hand he had ignored.
“Of course I can’t come in if you won’t have me,” he said, “but you shan’t always shut me out. Please remember me very kindly to Mr. Lyndesay. And there’s no good-bye between Kilne and Crump, you know that as well as I do.”
He dismissed the brougham at the turn to the stables, and walked up the steep incline until the avenue had swallowed him whole. Above him the knit branches rocked and wrestled as the wind tore at their crests. It was pitch-dark under their swaying canopy. Now and then a sweep of rain caught him in the face round some monster trunk. He stood still in the narrow, sheathed road, looking up and thinking. How strange it was that Slinker should be gone, and he himself in his place! It was hard luck on Slinker, he thought, to have been cast out of life so soon and so sharply by the stroke of a whirling slate—to have sped his soul on a tempest-night such as this. Slinker was the sort to have crept out of existence unnoticed, leaving the world uneasily doubtful that he might not reappear at any moment. The countryside had not christened him “Slinkin’” Lyndesay for nothing.
Apart, however, from this touch of half-satiric sympathy, he felt little human sorrow for his half-brother. The bond between them had generally been strained to the snapping-point of extreme dislike. He had a hundred times more feeling for his young cousin, Lionel Lyndesay of Arevar, a mile or two over the river, on the far side of Cantacute. Slinker had been unbearable—always. Crump had meant nothing to him but the money it stood for, and the pleasure that ran with the money. He had often gloated over the amount certain fairy woods represented, speculated lightly upon the price of certain farms that he was free to sell. Christian looked through the dark to where Dockerneuk, he knew, lay in the arm of the fell, and thought of the peril that had come so near. It had been within an ace of sale, but it was saved now. Dixon of Dockerneuk, at least, would be glad that Slinker was dead.
Yet the County—(always with a capital)—had approved of Slinker. Slinker had always made a point of turning up at the right place in the right suit with the right buttonhole. He knew what was due to his position, so Christian had been told—often. Christian himself was supposed to be deficient in this quality—so-called. Christian, home from college, had been the friend of the farmers, made a name in the wrestling-ring, played football and ridden at the shows. “Lakin’” Lyndesay, they called him—the same clear-witted judges who had framed their delicate sobriquet for his brother. Slinker had merely sat on Grand Stands and distributed prizes, clapped hands and crooked an arm for the principal lady present. No wonder the County had thought a lot of Slinker! He had been so careful about his conduct—in public.
Theirs was a race with a shadow on it, cursed and foredoomed, proud with age and old in pride. Their mother came of the Devonshire branch, and had early married Egbert de Lyndesay of Crump, who had died two years later, leaving William, his cousin and former heir, as guardian of his six-weeks child. Within three years William had married the widow, and then Christian was born.
Nominal owner for so long, William never had to face the humiliation of deposition, for he died a few months before Stanley came of age, little thinking that in ten years’ time the young man would have followed him to the grave. But now Stanley, too, was gone, and Christian and his mother were left in the old house to find what other mutual ground they might.
She had always hated him, he reflected, almost unemotionally. The situation was too old for new pain. As an affectionate child he had broken his heart over her attitude, but in the end he had come to accept it. Nor had his father shown much feeling towards him, either. Occasionally he had looked at him with whimsical eyes, as if meditating some advance, but his mother’s presence had always stultified any growth of happy intimacy. He had been sent to school early, and William Lyndesay, to whom life had given most things at second hand except a certain bitter sense of humour, had been content to remain outside his child’s heart, busying himself with ordering the estate of his supplanter. Yes, they had all worn masks, Christian thought: his father, smilingly impersonal and aloof; his mother, obstinately and apparently unreasonably cruel; he, himself, puzzled and hurt but finally acquiescent; while as for Slinker—he laughed rather cynically—it would appear that Slinker had worn as many masks as a troupe of mummers!