“Saw her once at Newstead Abbey,” yawned Brummell, wearily, dusting his cuffs. “Corpulent termagant and gave George no end of a row. He used to call her his ‘maternal war-whoop.’ My own parents—poor good people!—died long ago,” he added reflectively; “—cut their throats eating peas with a knife.”
CHAPTER VI
WHAT THE DEAD MAY KNOW
Gordon was alone in the vehicle, for Fletcher rode outside. He set his face to the fogged pane, catching the panorama of dark hedges, gouged gravelly runnels and stretches of murky black, with occasional instantaneous sense of detail—dripping bank, sodden rhododendron and mildewed masonry—vivid in a dull, yellow, soundless flare of July lightning. A gauze of unbroken grayness, a straggling light—the lodge. A battlemented wall plunging out of the darkness—and Gordon saw the Abbey, its tiers of ivied cloisters uninhabited since Henry the Eighth battered the old pile to ruin, its gaunt and unsightly forts built for some occupant’s whim, and the wavering, fog-wreathed lake reflecting lighted windows. This was Newstead in which the bearers of his title had lived and died, the gloomy seat of an ancient house stained by murder and insanity, of which he was the sole representative.
What was he thinking as he sat in the gloomy dining-room, with Rushton, the footman he had trained to his own service, standing behind his chair? Of his mother first of all. He had never, even as a child, distinguished a sign of real tenderness in her moments of tempestuous caresses. His maturer years had grown to regard her with a half-scornful, half good-humored tolerance. He had shrugged at her tempers, dubbing her “The Honorable Kitty” or his “Amiable Alecto.” His letters to her had shown only a nice sense of filial duty: many of them began with “Dear Madam”; more had been signed simply with his name. Yet now he felt an aching hope that in her seclusion she had not seen the unkindest of the stories of him. His half-sister—now on her way from the north of England—absorbed with her family cares, would have missed the brunt of the attacks; his mother had been within their range. He recalled with a pang that she had treasured with a degree of pride a single review of his earliest book which had not joined in the sneering chorus.
He pushed back his chair, dismissed the footman, and alone passed to the hall and ascended the stair. At the turn of the balustrade a shaded lamp drowsed like a monster glow-worm. In his own room a low fire burned, winking redly from the coronetted bed-posts, and a lighted candle stood on the dressing-table. He looked around the familiar apartment a moment uncertainly, then crossed to a carved cabinet above a writing-desk and took therefrom a bottle of claret. The cabinet had belonged to his father, dead many years before. Gordon thought of him as he stood with the bottle in his hand, staring fixedly at the dull, carved ebony of the swinging door.
His father! “Mad Jack Gordon” the world had called him when he ran away with the Marchioness of Carmathen to break her heart! Handsome he had been still when he married for her money the heiress of Gight, Gordon’s mother. A stinging memory recalled the only glimpse he had ever had of that father—a tall man in uniform on an Aberdeen street, looking critically at a child with a lame leg.
Gordon winced painfully. He felt with a sharper agony the sensitive pang of the cripple, the shame of misshapenness that all his life had clung like an old-man-of-the-sea. It had not only stung his childhood; it had stolen from him the romance of his youth—the one gleam that six years ago had died.
Six years! For a moment time fell away like rotten shale from about a crystal. The room, the wine-cabinet, faded into a dim background, and on this, as if on a theater curtain, dissolving pictures painted themselves flame-like.
He was back in his Harrow days now, at home for his last vacation.
“George,” his mother had remarked one day, looking up from a letter she was reading, “I’ve some news for you. Take out your handkerchief, for you will need it.”