CHAPTER XXII
BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks by the dial over the stable-tower of Pellesley Court had accustomed themselves to give the place its new name of High Thorpe. These were for the most part the folk of peculiarly facile wits and ready powers of adaptation, like pushing small tradesmen, and the upper servants in county houses. An indolent and hazy compromise upon Pellesley Thorpe had drifted into use by perhaps a larger number. To the puzzled conservatism of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil—the round-backed, lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming garden—it seemed safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.
It stood proudly upon what was rather a notable elevation for those flat parts—a massive mansion of simple form, built of a grey stone which seemed at a distance almost white against the deep background of yews and Italian pines behind it. For many miles seaward this pale front was a landmark. From the terrace-walk at its base, one beheld a great expanse of soft green country, sloping gently away for a long distance, then stretching out upon a level which on misty days was interminable. In bright weather, the remote, low-lying horizon had a defining line of brownish-blue—and this stood for what was left of a primitive forest, containing trees much older than the Norman name it bore. It was a forest which at some time, no doubt, had extended without a break till it merged into that of Epping—leagues away to the south. The modern clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had served as a curiously effective barrier—more baffling than the Romans and Angles in their turn had found the original wildwood. No stranger seemed ever to find his way into that broad, minutely-cultivated fertile plain which High Thorpe looked down upon. No railway had pushed its cheapening course across it. Silent, embowered old country roads and lanes netted its expanse with hedgerows; red points of tiled roofs, distinguishable here and there in clusters among the darker greens of orchards, identified the scattered hamlets—all named in Domesday Book, all seemingly unchanged since. A grey square church-tower emerging from the rooks' nests; an ordered mass of foliage sheltering the distant gables and chimneys of some isolated house; the dim perception on occasion that a rustic waggon was in motion on some highway, crawling patiently like an insect—of this placid, inductive nature were all the added proofs of human occupation that the landscape offered.
Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October, yawned in the face of this landscape—and then idly wondered a little at the mood which had impelled him to do so. At the outset of his proprietorship he had bound himself, as by a point of honour, to regard this as the finest view from any gentleman's house in England. During the first few months his fidelity had been taxed a good deal, but these temptations and struggles lay now all happily behind him. He had satisfactorily assimilated the spirit of the vista, and blended it with his own. Its inertia, when one came to comprehend it, was undeniably magnificent, and long ago he had perceived within himself the growth of an answering repose, a responsive lethargy, which in its full development was also going to be very fine. Practically all the land this side of the impalpable line where trees and houses began to fade into the background belonged to him; there were whole villages nestling half-concealed under its shrubberies which were his property. As an investment, these possessions were extremely unremunerative. Indeed, if one added the cost of the improvements which ought to be made, to the expenditure already laid out in renovations, it was questionable if for the next twenty years they would not represent a deficit on the income-sheet. But, now that he had laid hold of the local character, it pleased him that it should be so. He would not for the world have his gentle, woolly-minded, unprofitable cottagers transformed into “hustlers”; it would wound his eye to see the smoke of any commercial chimney, the smudge of any dividend-paying factory, staining the pure tints of the sylvan landscape. He had truly learned to love it.
Yet now, as he strolled on the terrace with his first after-luncheon cigar, he unaccountably yawned at the thing he loved. Upon reflection, he had gone to bed rather earlier the previous evening than usual. He had not been drinking out of the ordinary; his liver seemed right enough. He was not conscious of being either tired or drowsy. He looked again at the view with some fixity, and said to himself convincingly that nothing else in England could compare with it. It was the finest thing there was anywhere. Then he surprised himself in the middle of another yawn—and halted abruptly. It occurred to him that he wanted to travel.
Since his home-coming to this splendid new home in the previous January, at the conclusion of a honeymoon spent in Algiers and Egypt, he had not been out of England. There had been a considerable sojourn in London, it is true, at what was described to him as the height of the Season, but looking back upon it, he could not think of it as a diversion. It had been a restless, over-worked, mystifying experience, full of dinners to people whom he had never seen before, and laborious encounters with other people whom he did not particularly want to see again. There had been no physical comfort in it for him, and little more mental satisfaction, for Londoners, or rather people in London, seemed all to be making an invidious distinction in their minds between him and his wife. The fact that she continued to be called Lady Cressage was not of itself important to him. But in the incessant going about in London, their names were called out together so often that his ear grew sensitive and sore to the touch of the footmen's reverberations. The meaning differentiation which the voices of the servants insisted upon, seemed inevitably reflected in the glance and manner of their mistresses. More than anything else, that made him hate London, and barred the doors of his mind to all thoughts of buying a town-house.
His newly-made wife, it is true, had not cared much for London, either, and had agreed to his decision against a town-house almost with animation. The occasion of their return from the hot bustle of the metropolis to these cool home shades—in particular the minute in which, at a bend in the winding carriage-way down below, they had silently regarded together the spectacle uplifted before them, with the big, welcoming house, and the servants on the terrace—had a place of its own in his memory. Edith had pressed his arm, as they sat side by side in the landau, on the instant compulsion of a feeling they had in common. He had never, before or since, had quite the same assurance that she shared an emotion with him.
He was very far, however, from finding fault with his wife. It was in the nature of the life he chose to lead that he should see a great deal of her, and think a great deal about her, and she bore both tests admirably. If there was a fault to be found, it was with himself for his inability to altogether understand her. She played the part she had undertaken to play with abundant skill and discretion and grace, and even with an air of nice good-fellowship which had some of the aspects of affection. He was vaguely annoyed with himself for having insight enough to perceive that it was a part she was playing, and yet lacking the added shrewdness to divine what her own personal attitude to her role was like. He had noticed sometimes the way good women looked at their husbands when the latter were talking over their heads—with the eager, intent, non-comprehending admiration of an affectionate dog. This was a look which he could not imagine himself discovering in his wife's eves. It was not conceivable to him that he should talk over her head. Her glance not only revealed an ample understanding of all he said, but suggested unused reserves of comprehension which he might not fathom. It was as if, intellectually no less than socially, she possessed a title and he remained an undistinguished plebeian.
He made no grievance, however, even in his own thoughts, of either inequality. She had been charmingly frank and fair about the question of the names, when it first arose. The usage had latterly come to be, she explained, for a widow bearing even a courtesy title derived from her late husband, to retain it on marrying again. It was always the easiest course to fall in with usage, but if he had any feelings on the subject, and preferred to have her insist on being called Mrs. Thorpe, she would meet his wishes with entire willingness. It had seemed to him, as to her, that it was wisest to allow usage to settle the matter. Some months after their marriage there appeared in the papers what purported to be an authoritative announcement that the Queen objected to the practice among ladies who married a second time, of retaining titles acquired by the earlier marriages, and that the lists of precedency at Buckingham Palace would henceforth take this into account. Lady Cressage showed this to her husband, and talked again with candour on the subject. She said she had always rather regretted the decision they originally came to, and even now could wish that it might be altered, but that to effect a change in the face of this newspaper paragraph would seem servile—and in this as in most other things he agreed with her. As she said, they wanted nothing of Buckingham Palace.