The end of the house of Alard

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Peter sought for words and found none. While he was still seeking, Sir John shook the reins, and the grey horse moved off heavily up the side of the field.

§ 14

On the spur of the hill below Barline stands that queer edifice known as Mocksteeple. It has from the distance a decided look of a steeple, its tarred cone being visible for many miles down the river Tillingham. It was built early in the eighteenth century by an eccentric Sir Giles Alard, brother of non-juring Gervase and buyer of Starvecrow. A man of gallantries, he required a spot at which to meet his lady friends, and raised up Mocksteeple for their accommodation—displaying a fine cynicism both towards the neighbours’ opinion—for his tryst was a landmark to all the district—and towards the ladies themselves, whose comforts could have been but meagrely supplied in its bare, funnel-shaped interior.

Today it had sunk to a store-house and was full of hop-poles when Peter approached it from the marshes and sat down to eat his sandwiches in the sunshine that, even on a December day, had power to draw a smell of tar from its walls. At his feet squatted the spaniel Breezy, with sentimental eyes fixed on Peter’s gun and the brace of duck that lay beside it. Peter’s boots and leggings were caked with mud, and his hands were cold as they fumbled with his sandwiches. It was not a good day to have lunch out of doors, even in that tar-smelling sunshine, but anything was better than facing the family round the table at Conster—their questions, their comments, their inane remarks....

It was queer how individually and separately his family irritated him, whereas collectively they were terrible with banners. His father, his mother, Doris, Jenny, George, Gervase—so much tyranny, so much annoyance ... the Family—a war-cry, a consecration. It was probably because the Family did not merely stand for those at Conster now, but for Alards dead and gone, from the first Gervase to the last, a whole communion of saints.... If Conster had to be sold, or stripped to its bare bones, it would not be only the family now sitting at luncheon that would rise and upbraid him, but all those who slept in Leasan churchyard and in the south aisle at Winchelsea.

Beside him, facing them all, would stand only one small woman. Would her presence be enough to support him when all those forefathers were dishonoured, all those dear places reproached him?—Glasseye, Barline, Dinglesden, Snailham, Ellenwhorne, Starvecrow ... torn away from the central heart and become separate spoil ... just for Stella, whom he had loved only a year.

Leaning against the wall of the Mocksteeple, Peter seemed to hear the voice of the old ruffian who had built it speaking to him out of the tar—deriding him because he would take love for life and house it in a Manor, whereas love is best when taken for a week and housed in any convenient spot. But Peter had never been able to take love for a week. Even when he had had adventures he had taken them seriously—those independent, experience-hunting young women of his own class who had filled the place in his life which “little women” and “French dancers” had filled in his father’s. They had always found old Peter embarrassingly faithful when they changed their minds.

Now at last he had found love, true love, in which he could stay all his life—a shelter, a house, a home like Starvecrow. He would be a fool to renounce it—and there was Stella to be thought of too; he did not doubt her love for him, she would not change. Their friendship had started in the troublesome times of war and he had given her to understand that he could not marry till the war was over. Those unsettled conditions which had just the opposite effect on most men, making them jump into marriage, snatch their happiness from under the cannon wheels, had made Peter shrink from raising a permanent relation in the midst of so much chaos. Marriage, in his eyes, was settling down, a state to be entered into deliberately, with much background.... And Stella had agreed, with her lips at least, though what her heart had said was another matter.

But now the war was over, he was at home, the background was ready—she would expect.... Already he was conscious of a sharp sense of treachery. At the beginning of their love, Hugh had been alive and the Alard fortunes no direct concern of Peter’s—he had expected to go back into business and marry Stella on fifteen hundred a year. But ever since Hugh’s death he had realised that things would be different—and he had not told her. Naturally she would think his prospects improved—and he had not undeceived her, though on his last leave, nine months ago, he had guessed the bad way things were going.

He had not behaved well to her, and it was now his duty to put matters right at once, to tell her of his choice ... if he meant to choose.... Good God! he didn’t even know yet what he ought to do—even what he wanted to do. If he lost Stella he lost joy, warmth, laughter, love, the last of youth—if he lost Alard he lost the First and Last Things of his life, the very rock on which it stood. There was much in Stella which jarred him, which made him doubt the possibility of running in easy yoke with her, which made him fear that choosing her might lead to failure and regret. But also there was much in Alard which fell short of perfection—it had an awkward habit of splitting up into its component parts, into individuals, every separate one of which hurt and vexed. That way, too, might lead to emptiness. It seemed that whichever choice he made he failed somebody and ran the risk of a vain sacrifice.