Tower of Ivory: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Cobbs, in a rusty livery, awaited him at the little moorland station, and Ordham made up in the warmth of his greeting for the lack of a more substantial proof of his affections. There was no footman with the wagonette, and while Hines was attending to his boxes, he asked Cobbs if all the old servants were alive and at the castle. He was not surprised to learn that the immense staff kept during his father’s lifetime had been reduced to ten, including those within and without. But at least he should see the older faces, and the prospect cheered him somewhat as he drove through the purple dusk of the moors. For a wave of homesickness had swamped his spirits, then regret, anger, astonishment. For twenty years this beautiful moorland had practically been his, no doubt would come to him in time; but now, now, in the day of his youth, when he most wanted lands and riches and power (it is, until decay sets in, always the immediate time that seems the one desirable period for the great gifts of life), he came as a suppliant to the brother he detested, a man who was even too mean to live as became his position, and who, no doubt, would barely extend to him a welcome. It was a wonder he had sent the wagonette. Ordham had fully expected to go on to the next town and make the rest of the journey in a fly.

Cobbs volunteered the information that the shooting was uncommonly good this year, but Ordham felt no interest in the subject until it occurred to him that if he wished to accomplish the purpose of his journey he must take pains to propitiate Bridgminster in every way. At this detestable thought his haughty crest went up at least two inches. But he had wise moments, as we have seen, and it was seldom he was not capable of cool rational thought. He reflected presently that, after all, he was very young and that it was not only a close relative to whom he had come to ask a good bit of money, but the head of his house, to whom he stood next in succession. Bridgminster should have been a father to his brood of younger brothers, and it was incredible that he did not accept his obligations. It was time he did, and Ordham felt himself in a temper to bring him to his senses.

But as the carriage approached the high fell upon whose broad table-land the castle stood, he felt more keenly still the freak of fortune which had deprived him of his inheritance. That cold, splendid, formal mass of white and sculptured stone, a palace of the Italian Renaissance rather than an English castle, built by Inigo Jones in 1622-26, and raised above the lofty fell again by a triple terrace, surrounded by Italian gardens, and over-looking thousands of acres of moorland, woods and farms, and a hundred little stone villages, was one of the show places of the north, and it was wasted on a boor whose favourite literature was The Pink ‘Un, and who would not even permit others to enjoy what he could not appreciate. There had not been a house party at Ordham since his father’s death, and, no doubt, the lovely gardens were a wilderness, the superb rooms rat-eaten. To-night there was not a point of light in the vast façade. Ordham lowered his eyelids until they covered the unpleasant glitter of his eyes, and drew his lips against his teeth. Hines, covertly watching him, wondered if he were in pain.

The carriage drove through the unlighted tunnel into the courtyard. The old butler, the gardener, and a footman stood at the foot of the grand staircase, and as Ordham, banishing his gloomy thoughts, descended and shook hands with them, asking intimate personal questions of each, the mask of dignified servitude fell from their faces, and they gazed, smiling and tearful, upon the young man who had lorded it over and bewitched them for twenty years. Ordham almost laughed outright as he realized how they yearned to say, “My lord.” He wished to God they could. There was no affected philosophy about Ordham. He longed as ardently to be a peer of the realm as he did for the income of the estates. But after he had convinced them that they had barely left his thoughts during the years of his exile, he added wistfully that he was glad to see the old place again and wished that death might have spared his father. Ordham was always adored by servants. With neither familiarity nor condescension, always kind (save to Hines, who sometimes got the benefit of his tempers), with a smile of peculiar sweetness and an impenetrable reserve, a careless acceptance of devotion, yet with a tacit admission of a minion’s claim to call himself a man, generous, yet never so lavish as to suggest that perhaps his was not the divine right to be waited on hand and foot,—he fulfilled the ideal of the great lord to the most exacting class of mortals in the world. And these old men had all the retainer’s pride in his uncommonly fine manners, in which there was still nothing old-fashioned, in his aristocratic if not strictly handsome face, in the languid but dignified carriage of his well-knit figure.

He followed the footman up the wide marble staircase to his old suite, immense rooms, with lofty frescoed ceilings, and still sparsely furnished with the mahogany pieces he had carved when a boy. He felt a thousand years old and sick at heart. When he saw Felt standing there to greet him, he nearly fell into her great bosom, but contented himself with taking her hand in both his own and shaking it for a full minute. She told him (tearfully) that he had grown and improved, and he bade her invite him for tea in her sitting room on the following day, adding bitterly that he should feel at home nowhere else.

“I suppose there is no company in the house?” he asked, with intention.

“Oh, no, sir. His lordship never entertains. Come four years now we have never had a visitor save her ladyship, and she found it so dull she could never stay long. The first year there was a hunt breakfast, but it was stiff and sad, Mr. Biscom said, and now the county gentlemen don’t even call at the castle. It’s not like the old days, Mr. John.”

“What on earth does he do with himself?” He could surrender something of his reserve to this old woman who had given him many a shaking, and he was anxious to know more of the brother of whom he had seen so little.

Mrs. Felt shook her head. “He mopes terrible, sir. You wouldn’t think it of a man who loves a gun and a horse as he does—but those long evenings all alone! He don’t seem one to read—not like you, Mr. John. He’s changed a good bit, even since he come—and the last six months or so, before the shooting began—” She paused significantly.

“Does he drink?” No one can be as blunt as a diplomatist.