Autocracy dies hard, and it is probable that long after Leagues of Nations have decreed the abolition of all Rulers, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table will still, in the most inveterate Republics, issue, unquestioned, his unalterable edicts, with his coat-tails monopolising the dining-room fire, and the family income concentrated in his cheque book. Dick Talbot-Lowry's pigheadedness was at the root of the downsliding of Mount Music. Having faced, undaunted, deputations of his tenants; deputations of public bodies; ("Damned interfering blackguards, who ought to be taught to mind their own business!"), having made light of advice from his friends, and of anonymous threatening letters from, presumably, his enemies, he still held fast, and refused to sell the property that had come to him from the men whose portraits had looked down on him from the old walls of Mount Music, all the days of his life. It was, perhaps, the solitary strand of romance in his nature, the feudal feeling that the Mount Music tenants were his, as they had been his ancestors', to have and to hold, to rule, to arbitrate for, and to stand by, as a fond and despotic husband rules and stands by an obedient wife, loving her and bullying her (but both entirely for her good). He had, moreover, the desire to disparage and to disprove new ideas, that is a sign of a mind incapable of originality, and anxious to assert itself negatively, since it must otherwise remain silent.
"But Dick," his friends would say, "there isn't a property this side of the county that isn't sold, except your own!"
"What's that to me?" says Dick, as stubborn and stupid a King Canute as ever sat with the tide nearing the tops of his hunting-boots; "I don't care a damn what anybody else does! And what's more," he would add, gloomily, "I can't afford to sell at seventeen years' purchase. Anyhow, what's mine's my own! I'll be shot if I'll be bullied!"
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were!" the friends would reply darkly.
To sell at seventeen years' purchase, was what Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger had done, following the advice of his agent and solicitor, Mr. Bartholomew Mangan, and his cousin, and late guardian, Major Talbot-Lowry, had found it hard to forgive him. The business had been arranged while Larry was in Paris, and the expostulations that might have prevailed if delivered viva voce, failed of their effect when presented on foreign paper, in Cousin Dick's illegible scrawl. It was all very fine for Larry, ran the illegible scrawl, to talk of selling at such a price, but he ought to see what a hole his doing so put his neighbours in! Larry hadn't a squad of incumbrances, and charges, and mortgages, hung round his neck like leeches (and no fault of the Major's). He had had to find money in a hurry to pay off one of these cursed things only the other day, and if he hadn't had the luck to mention it to a friend, who was kind enough to come to the rescue (of course on good security) the Major would have been in a hat, or a hole, Larry couldn't quite read which.
These grievances, and much more, illegibly scrawled on foreign paper, with a quill pen. Larry, swallowed up in the absorbing, isolating life of a Paris studio, would put the letters half-read, in his pocket, and would immediately forget all about them. After all, he couldn't interfere with Barty; he was the man at the helm, and mustn't be talked to. Also it was idiotic to keep a dog and bark yourself. Proverbial philosophy is a recognised sedative; Larry gave himself a dose or two, and straightway forgot Cousin Dick, forgot Ireland, forgot even that gratifying nomination of himself as Nationalist candidate for the Division, and plunged back into the burning atmosphere of art, wherein models and professors, cliques and cabals, glow, and seethe, and exist intensely, and with as little reference to the affairs of the outside world, as if they were the sole occupants of a distant and much over-heated star.
There are many people who have been endowed with one master-passion, that "like Aaron's serpent swallows up the rest," but Larry's ingenuous breast harboured a nest of such serpents. During his three years at Oxford, he had stormed from one enthusiasm to another; he had rowed, and boxed, and spouted politics, and, beginning with music, had stormed on through poetry and the drama, to painting.
Having taken a moderate degree, he had rushed in pursuit of this latest charmer to Paris, and the waters of the Quartier Latin then closed over him. Occasionally a bubble would rise from those clouded deeps, and a letter to Aunt Freddy, or to Barty Mangan, would briefly announce his continued existence. Sometimes he wrote to Christian, and would expand a little more to her; telling her of how one Professor had remarked of his work that it was now presque pas mal, and that this dizzying encomium had encouraged him to begin a Salon (its subject described at length, with elucidatory sketches); further, that he had taken a very jolly atelier, and "dear old Chose" was "on the Jury," and would try and get him accepted, with much more to the same effect, music, politics, horses and hounds, forgotten as though they had never been.
Christian received these effusions with a characteristic mixture of respect for the artistic effort that they described, and of amused, almost pitying comprehension of the enthusiasm that they revealed. It was three years since Larry had left Oxford and gone to France, and during those years Christian had learned more of life than Larry had acquired, or would ever acquire, in spite of the three years' start of her with which he had begun the world.
Judith had been induced to close her brilliant career as a buccaneer, by a perfectly, even—from the buccaneering point of view—depressingly satisfactory marriage with Mr. William Kirby, and her departure had forced her younger sister into the front rank of domestic combatants. At Mount Music, where once the milk and honey had flowed with effortless abundance, each year brought increasing stress. The rents grew less, the expenses greater, that large and omnivorous item, known as "keeping up the place," was as exacting as ever, the minor problems of household existence more acute. There had been a time when the Mount Music tenants had vied with one another in the provision of sons and daughters for service in the Big House, when bonfires had blazed for the return of "the young gentlemen," and offerings of eggs had greeted "the young ladies." Now the propitiatory turkey that heralded a request, the goose that signalised a success, gained with the help of the hereditary helpers, had all ceased. Alien influences had poisoned the wells of friendship. Such rents as were paid were extracted by the hard hand of the law, and the tenants held indignation meetings against the landlord who refused to resign to them what they believed to be theirs, and he was equally convinced was his. Major Dick still shot and fished, as was his right, over the lands and waters that were still in his name, but the tenants, whose fathers had loved him, had renounced the old allegiance. The partridges were run down by the greyhounds that had killed off the hares; the salmon were poached; worst of all, Derrylugga Gorse, the covert that Dick had planted twenty-five years ago, on Carmody's farm, in the middle of the best of the Broadwater Vale country, was burned down, and a vixen and her cubs had perished with it.