Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

Oh! the sorrows of a young heart, how strong they are and how terrible! penetrating, agonising, possessing themselves of the whole being, and turning the rich, prolific life into a wilderness! We speak of childhood as the time of cloudless joys, of unsullied happiness; but it is also the time when sorrow is most helpless, and the anguish of an hour is as that which endures eternally.

Harry Venniker returned to bed and slept. In the morning he made no allusion to the incident of which the pale moon, throned in heaven, was the sole arbitress. Never since has he referred to it in conversation with Gerald Eversley; nor is there anyone who has learnt from him or will learn what took place.

CHAPTER II
TWO HOMES

It has been cynically remarked that the young have no faults; they have only the faults of their parents or their teachers. Certain it is that the knowledge of parents is a clue to the understanding of their children. Without that knowledge the teacher enters upon the study of character as upon a property that has never been surveyed. For we are creatures of circumstances; we are what others who live before us have made us; nor is it possible for any man, however chequered his life may be, to emancipate himself from the determining influences of his home life.

Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were alike the creatures of their homes. But how different were those homes! It is a strange thought that men and boys may live side by side, and may see each other every day, and yet be as far apart as if they were dwellers in opposite continents.

Harry Venniker was the elder son of an English peer, who possessed a stately ancestral seat at Helmsbury, in one of the Midland counties, and a house in Grosvenor Square. His father’s time was divided between Parliamentary attendance, which he regarded sometimes as a relaxation, but more frequently as a bore, and sport, which he considered to be the serious business in life. If Lord Venniker lived a good part of the year in town, he was never at home there. He remembered a few words of an old Horatian stanza, which he had learned by heart as a schoolboy—something about fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ; it was his solitary Latin quotation, and he was fond of making use of it to express his satisfaction at escaping from the business and bustle and vaporous fogs of the great city into rural peace and felicity. It is possible that he had not realised all the causes which rendered London distasteful to him. One of them was that he was unconsciously intolerant of a place where there were people who did not know him or salute him. At Helmsbury he was everybody’s friend and everybody’s master. He deserved his popularity and enjoyed it. His family had been settled in that part of England since the Revolution; and the house, which had been built in Queen Anne’s reign, had scarcely been altered, except in some of its sanitary details, during two centuries. When he drove his four-in-hand along the country roads, the silver bells jingling upon the necks of his handsome bays, the villagers would come out of their cottages and bow or curtsy in the doorways, and in answer to his kindly greeting would say, ‘Good morning to you, my lord; God bless your lordship!’ It would in those days have seemed as unnatural, as contrary to the established and recognised system of human affairs, that they should not be respectful to him and his family as that he should not be just and generous to them. His social superiority was taken for granted by them as much as by himself. It was the foundation of society in Helmsbury. Could it be denied or disputed, the world would come to an end; so he thought, and so his neighbours thought with him. But he was alive to the duties as well as to the rights of landownership. It was his boast that he knew the names and histories and had set foot in the farmhouses or cottages of all the tenants on his estate. One touch of feudal or patriarchal distinction he jealously retained. He was fond of arriving just a minute late on Sunday morning at the village church, in the hope that the rector, out of deference to his rank and dignity, would allow him a little grace and would not begin the prayers until he had taken his seat, after burying his face for two or three seconds in his tall hat and then depositing it on the cushion, when he would give a sort of nod to the reading-desk, as much as to say, ‘I am ready now.’ The long avenue of chestnuts stretches from the Hall to the Park gates, and the church is just outside them across the road, so that the sexton, who was set to keep watch, could see ‘my lord’s party’ coming churchwards and could give the signal for the rector to leave the vestry. Lord Venniker never failed—not even in the worst weather—to occupy his seat at the morning service in the square, tall family pew with its red baize cushions and hassocks, and the little grate in which his lordship, if the sermon were too long, would somewhat ostentatiously poke the fire, and the hatchments of the Venniker family looking down from the walls above it. He was a good and worthy man, Lord Venniker, but he believed in the world as it was, with a noble Venniker always supreme at Helmsbury Hall. He hated what he called ‘ideas,’ though it would seem that the opinions of the lord of Helmsbury were not ‘ideas.’ He belonged politically to the country party, and all Helmsbury, including its voters, belonged to him. There were three epithets which he was in the habit of hurling at such persons as were the objects of his animosity or aversion, and it was believed that the epithets represented ascending degrees of iniquity; but he did not always use them with a nice discrimination. If a person of different political or economical views gave him offence (as was generally the case if they came into contact with him at all), he would probably call him an ‘agitator.’ If the offence was aggravated, he would call him a ‘Chartist’; for he remembered the days of blazing hayricks and farm-buildings, and it was his conviction that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to crush the early symptoms of revolution. But there was a worst epithet of all not often employed, but reserved for such outrageous persons as presumed to dispute the natural right of the lords of Helmsbury to rule and homage in their own domains: Lord Venniker would speak of them as ‘atheists.’

His family consisted of Lady Venniker, two sons, the elder Harry, whose full Christian name was Henry Alfred Brabazon, and a younger boy, now six years old, and the daughter Etheldreda, or, as she was always called, Ethel, whose portrait has been already mentioned as adorning (along with the stag’s head and other trophies) the wall of her brother’s study at St. Anselm’s.

If Lord Venniker’s influence was visible everywhere, as, indeed, I think it was, in the village of Helmsbury, it was the influence of his wife that gave charm and character to the home. Lady Venniker was one of those rare beings who seem born to diffuse happiness without knowing it. It would have surprised her to be told that she did good; she would have said that her ill-health, limiting her activities, made it impossible. But she did good in the only way in which it is sure to be done—by being good. Her personal beauty, marked as it was with that wonderfully sanctifying transparency which nothing but congenital delicacy can impart, was irradiated by the light of virtue. There are some faces, women’s faces especially, that excite an unwilling admiration; we look at them, and look again, but we do not care to remember them. Other faces there are—not so beautiful, perhaps, theoretically—that linger as sweet memories in the mind and heart. Lady Venniker’s was a beauty, not of feature only, but of expression. Though she was generally confined to her couch, yet her interest in her family and household and in her neighbours never failed. No word of complaining, no word even of recognising her own sufferings, escaped her lips. Her thought was for others, not for herself. It was not without reason that the villagers, who seldom saw her unless illness or misfortune drew them to her side, would speak of her as ‘the good lady.’

But upon no one was Lady Venniker’s sweet influence felt so powerfully as upon her husband. He had loved her when she was a girl of seventeen, the only daughter of a country gentleman in the same county, and as a lover he loved her still. Time had wrought no change or lessening of his affection. Between him and her no cloud had ever spread. Her pleasure was the law of his life. She did not bend him to her will; he did not need to be bent. Abrupt and imperious as he was at times in his dealing with others, it seemed as if his manner were softened and his voice subdued when he came into her presence. There are marriages which preserve to the end the dream—who will dare to call it a delusion?—of the wedding morning, and such had been his. In his eyes she was still the same as when he had seen and loved her sixteen years before. She was still the same when she died. She has long been dead now; but the villagers of Helmsbury, some of whom never saw her, still speak of ‘the good lady.’ No one so good, no one so beautiful, has been known to them since.

Harry, her eldest born, in face and manner resembled his father. The mother’s beauty, something too, perhaps, of her delicacy, reappeared in her daughter. There was the same pale lustre, the same transparency, the same (yet not the same) foreshadowing of death. A stranger looking at either of them would have said that she was one of those whom the gods love too well. To her children, as to her husband, Lady Venniker seemed ever as a vision of delight—a being too good, too fair, too sensitive for earth.