Limitations: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

His house, Applethorpe Manor, he rented from the owner, who was in straitened circumstances; he refused to buy it, for, as he said, he would probably not live much longer, and it was more than possible that Tom would not want to keep it, and would very likely sell it for much under its value. But Tom might have been well content to keep such a place; it stood admirably, surrounded by its own grounds, and a park of some six hundred acres stretched away from halfway up the gentle slope in front of the house to the top of the down. Behind, the hill-slope declined rapidly away to the bottom of the valley, in which lay the little red-roofed village, overlooked by a church, in which a nineteenth-century architect had accomplished his wicked will, dealing death to early Norman work. On the other side of the village another down rose in gentle slopes of yellowing autumn fields, planted here and there with beech and oak woods. At intervals, the chalky sub-soil came to the surface like the bleached bones of the world, but for the most part a thick loamy earth hid the underlying barrenness.

South of the house lay a level lawn, dominated by a large cedar-tree, the horizontal fans of whose branches formed an effectual protection against sun, and even against rain; flower-beds arrayed in fantastic patterns, having for the centre of their system an Italian stone vase, stretched out to one side of this tree, while to the other the lawn lay steeped in summer suns, or grew rank and mossy under autumn rains. A terrace festooned with virginia-creeper and low-growing monthly roses bounded the lawn to the south, below which lay a long strip of flower-bed, and beyond, a broad hayfield, stretching down as far as the village.

But on the 1st of September, two days after the arrival of Tom and Markham, there were other guests in the house. Mr. Carlingford’s sister had married a peer, who privately considered his wife’s brother rather low, but tolerated him for the sake of his partridge-shooting, about which the most fastidious could not possibly be depreciatory. Lady Ramsden was a tall, sallow, and fretful woman, who literally enjoyed rather bad health, though not so bad as she imagined. In fact, her bad health only manifested itself in intermittent medicine-taking, stopping in bed for breakfast, and not going to church on Sunday. She was one of those women about whom people say, when they are yet in their teens, that they are sweetly pretty, but very delicate-looking; when they are about thirty, that they will not wear well; and when they are thirty-five, “Poor dear.” Lady Ramsden was forty, and her cup of ineffectiveness was full.

Her husband was clearly English, almost brutally English. The name of his nationality was, as it were, written in red ink all over his body and his mind, and he dressed, so to speak, in Union Jack. He was tall, well set up, had once represented his native borough in the House of Commons in his youth, and now in middle age, having repeatedly failed to get into the Lower House, had been awarded the Consolation Stakes, and sat in the Upper. He was fond of shooting, but shot badly, had several shelves in his library full of parliamentary blue-books, which he sent periodically to be bound up, but which were never looked at either before or after that operation, spent five months every year in London, and half the day in all those five months in the bow-window of his club, and the other seven months in the country, and told rather long-winded stories. The point of these stories was always well defined, because he himself always began to laugh just before he got to it, which was a very convenient habit.

The other two guests were Miss Wrexham, who had been staying near the Markhams a fortnight ago, and her brother Bob, who was in every respect like a young gentleman from Woolwich. He had been at Eton with Tom, and they had kept up a sort of acquaintance since: Tom had stayed with him, and he with Tom. In the intervals they never wrote to one another, but were extremely glad to see each other again. Tom had, to a superlative degree, the power of picking up a friendship at the point where it had stopped, and of carrying it forward as if there had been no interruption.

The shooters, consisting of Tom, Bob Wrexham, and Lord Ramsden, started soon after breakfast on the first; Markham had claimed the fulfilment of Tom’s promise, and had taken himself off to the smoking-room when they went out, and presumably spent a profitable though solitary morning there. The two ladies, Mr. Carlingford and he were going to walk out about half-past twelve, to a cottage some mile and a half off, and join the shooters at lunch. Lady Ramsden established herself at a writing-table in the drawing-room, wrote several unnecessary letters in a tall, angular hand, and Miss Wrexham, who always made a point of doing the paying thing, went out for a short ride with her host, and took an intelligent interest in all he said.

The shooting-party had already arrived at the luncheon-place when the others came, and were clamouring for food. Lord Ramsden, it was noticed sat a little apart, and was smoking a cigarette with an isolated and reserved air.

“Oh, what a sweet little cottage!” said Maud Wrexham, as they entered. “Mr. Carlingford, if I were you, I should come and live here. Why, there’s a warming-pan! Do you know, I don’t think I ever saw a warming-pan before. How clever it was of me to know it was one, wasn’t it? That’s what they call intuitive cerebration. I shall write to the Physical Research about it.”

Tom considered.

“Is it intuitive cerebration when one crosses the Channel for the first time, and sees the coast, to know that it is France? You have never seen it before, you know.”