The Wooden Horse

by Hugh Walpole

Clare Trojan was having her breakfast in her own room. It was ten o'clock, and a glorious September morning, and the sparrows were twittering on the terrace outside as though they considered it highly improper for any one to have breakfast between four walls when Nature had provided such a splendid feast on the lawn.

Clare was reading a violent article in the National Review concerning the inadequacy of our present solution of the housing problem; but it did not interest her.

If the world had only been one large Trojan family there would have been no problem. The trouble was that there were Greeks. She did dimly realise their existence, but the very thought of them terrified her. Troy must be defended, and there were moments when Clare was afraid that its defenders were few; but she blinded herself to the dangers of attack. "There are no Greeks, there are no Greeks." Clare stood alone on the Trojan walls and defied that world of superstition and pagan creeds. With the armour of tradition and an implicit belief in the watchword of all true Trojan leaders, "Qui dort garde," she warded the sacred hearths; but there were moments when her eyes were opened and signs were revealed to her of another world—something in which Troy could have no place; and then she was afraid.

She was considering Harry, his coming, and his probable bearing on present conditions, and she knew that once again the Trojan walls were in danger. It seemed to her, as she sat there, cruelly unfair that the son of the House, the man who in a little while would stand before the world as the head of the Trojan tradition, should be the chief instrument in the attempted destruction of the same. She had not liked Harry in the old days. She had always, even as a girl, a very stern idea of the dignity of the House. Harry had never fulfilled this idea, had never even attempted to. He had been wild, careless, undisciplined, accompanying strange uncouth persons on strange uncouth adventures; he had been almost a byword in the place. No, she had not liked him; she had almost hated him at one time. And then after he had gone away she had deliberately forgotten him; she had erased his name from the fair sheet of the Trojan record, and had hoped that the House would never more be burdened by his undisciplined history. Then she had heard that there was a son and heir, and her one thought had been of capture, deliverance of the new son of the House from his father's influence. She was not deliberately cruel in her determination; she saw that the separation must hurt the father, but she herself was ready to make sacrifice for the good of the House and she expected the same self-denial in others. Harry made no difficulties. New Zealand was no place for a lonely widower to bring up his boy, and Robin was sent home. From that moment he was the centre of Clare's world; much self-denial can make a woman good, only maternity can make her divine. To bring the boy up for the House, to tutor him in all the little and big things that a Trojan must know and do, to fit him to take his place at the head of the family on a later day; all these things she laboured for, day and night without ceasing, and without divided interests. She loved the boy, too, passionately, with more than a mother's love, and now she looked back over what had been her life-work with pride and satisfaction. She had tried to forget Harry. She hoped, although she never dared to face the thought in her heart, that he would die there, away in that foreign country, without coming back to them again. Robin was hers now; she had educated him, loved him, scolded him—he was all hers, she would brook no division. Then, when she had heard that Harry was to come home, it had been at first more than she could bear. She had burst into wild incoherent protests; she had prayed that an accident might happen to him and that he might never reach home. And then the Trojan pride and restraint had come to her aid. She was ashamed, bewildered, that she could have sunk to such depths; she prepared to meet him calmly and quietly; she even hoped that, perhaps, he might be so changed that she would welcome him. And, after all, he would in a little time be head of the House. Robin, too, was strongly under her influence, and it was unlikely that he would leave her for a man whom he had never known, for whom he could not possibly care.

It was this older claim of hers with regard to Robin that did, she felt, so obviously strengthen her position, and now that Harry had really returned, she thought that her fears need not trouble her much longer—he did all the things that Robin disliked most. His boisterousness, heartiness, and good-fellowship, dislike of everyday conventionality, would all, she knew, count against him with Robin. She had seen him shrink on several occasions, and each time she had been triumphantly glad. For she was frightened, terribly frightened. Harry was threatening to take from her the one great thing around which her life was centred; if he robbed her of Robin he robbed her of everything, and she must fight to keep him. That it would come to a duel between them she had long foreseen, she had governed for so long that she would not easily yield her place now; but she had not known that she would feel as she did about Robin, she had not known that she would be jealous—jealous of every look and word and motion. She had never known what jealousy was before, but now in the silence of the golden, sunlit room, with only the twittering of the birds on the lawn to disturb her thoughts, she faced the facts honestly without shrinking, and she knew that she hated her brother. Oh! why couldn't he go back again to his sheep-shearing! Why had he come to disturb them! It was not his environment, it was not his life at all! She felt that they could never lead again that same quiet, ordered existence; like a gale of wind he had burst their doors and broken their windows, and now the house was open, desolate, to the world.

She went up to her father's room, as was her custom every morning after breakfast. He was lying at his open window, watching, with those strange, restless eyes of his, the great expanse of sea and sky stretching before him. His room was full of light and air. Its white walls and ceiling, great bowls of some of the last of the summer's roses, made it seem young and vigorous and alive. It was almost a shock to see that huddled, dying old man with his bent head and trembling hands—but his eyes were young, and his heart.

As she looked at him, she wondered why she had never really cared for him. At first she had been afraid; then, as she grew older and a passionate love for and pride in the family as a conservative and ancient institution developed in her, that fear became respect, and she looked up to her father from a distance, admiring his reserve and pride but never loving him; and now that respect had become pity, and above all a great longing that he might live for many, many years, securing the household gods from shame and tending the fire on the Trojan hearth. For at the moment of his death would come the crisis—the question of the new rule. At one time it had seemed certain that Robin would be king, with herself a very vigilant queen-regent. But now that was all changed. Harry had come home, and it was into his hands that the power would fall.

She had often wondered that she knew her father so little. He had always been difficult to understand; a man of two moods strongly opposed—strangely taciturn for days together, and then brilliantly conversational, amusing, and a splendid companion. She had never known which of these attitudes was the real one, and now that he was old she had abandoned all hope of ever answering the question. His moods were more strongly contrasted than ever. He often passed quickly from one to the other. If she had only known which was the real one; she felt at times that his garrulity was a blind—that he watched her almost satirically whilst he talked. She feared his silences terribly, and she used often to feel that a moment was approaching when he would reveal to her definitely and finally some plot that he had during those many watchful years been forming. She knew that he had never let her see his heart—he had never taken her into his confidence. She had tried to establish some more intimate relationship, but she had failed; and now, for many years, she had left it at that.

But she wanted to know what he thought of Harry. She had waited for a sign, but he had given none; and although she had watched him carefully she had discovered nothing. He had not mentioned his son—a stranger might have thought that he had not noticed him. But Clare knew him too well to doubt that he had come to some definite conclusion in the matter.

She bustled cheerfully about the room, humming a little tune and talking to him, lightly and with no apparent purpose. He watched the gulls fly past the open window, his eyes rested on a golden flash of sun that struck some shining roof in the Cove, but his mind was back in the early days when he had played his game with the best and had seen the bright side of the world.