The Great House

by Stanley John Weyman

“Write to me at the Brunswick Hôtel, Dover Street. Sweetheart, I am yours, as you, my darling, are

“Philip’s.

“P. S.—I must put off any communication to your uncle till I can see him. So for the moment, mum!”

Mary read the letter twice; the first time with eager eyes, the second time more calmly. Nothing was more natural, she told herself, than that her spirits should sink—Philip was gone. The walk with him, the talk which was to bring them nearer, and to make them better known to one another, stood over. The day that was to be so bright was clouded.

But beyond this the letter itself fell a little, a very little, short of her expectations. The beginning was charming! But after that—was it her fancy, or was her lover’s tone a little flippant, a little free, a little too easy? Did it lack that tender note of reassurance, that chivalrous thought for her, which she had a right to expect in a first letter? She was not sure.

And as to her uncle. She must, of course, be guided by her lover, his will must be her law now; and it was reasonable that in John Audley’s state of health the mode of communication should be carefully weighed. But she longed to be candid, she longed to be open; and in regard to one person she would be open. Basset had let her see that her treatment had cured him. At their last meeting he had been cold, almost unkind; he had left her to deal with Toft as she could. Still she owed him, if any one, the truth, and, were it only to set herself right in her own eyes, she must tell him. If the news did nothing else it would open the way for his return to the Gatehouse, and the telling would enable her to make the amende.

The letter was not written on that day nor the next. But on the fourth day after Audley’s departure it arrived at Blore, and lay for an hour on the dusty hall table amid spuds and powder-flasks and old itineraries. There Mr. Colet found it and another letter, and removed the two for safety to the parlor, where litter of a similar kind struggled for the upper hand with piles of books and dog’s-eared Quarterlies. The decay of the Bassets dated farther back than the decline of the Audleys, and the gabled house under the shadow of Weaver was little better, if something larger, than a farm-house. There had been a library, but Basset had taken the best books to the Gatehouse. And there were in the closed drawing-room, and in some of the bedrooms, old family portraits, bad for the most part; the best lay in marble in Blore Church. But in the parlor, which was the living-room, hung only paintings of fat oxen and prize sheep; and the garden which ran up to the walls of the house, and in summer was a flood of color, lay in these days dank and lifeless, ebbing away from bee-skips and chicken-coops. The park had been ploughed during the great war, and now pined in thin pasture. The whole of the valley was still Basset land, but undrained in the bottom and light on the slopes, it made no figure in a rent-roll. The present owner had husbanded the place, and paid off charges, and cleared the estate, but he had been able to do no more. The place was a poor man’s place, though for miles round men spoke to the owner bareheaded. He was “Basset of Blore,” as much a part of Staffordshire as Burton Bridge or the Barbeacon. The memories of the illiterate are long.

He had been walking the hill that morning with a dog and a gun, and between yearnings for the woman he loved, and longings for some plan of life, some object, some aim, he was in a most unhappy mood. At one moment he saw himself growing old, without the energy to help himself or others, still toying with trifles, the last and feeblest of his blood. At another he thought of Mary, and saw her smiling through the flowering hawthorn, or bending over a book with the firelight on her hair. Or again, stung by the lash of her reproaches he tried to harden himself to do something. Should he take the land into his own hands, and drain and fence and breed stock and be of use, were it only as a struggling farmer in his own district? Or should he make that plunge into public life to which Colonel Mottisfont had urged him and from which he shrank as a shivering man shrinks from an icy bath?

For there was the rub. Mary was right. He was a dreamer, a weakling, one in whom the strong pulse that had borne his forbears to the front beat but feebly. He was not equal to the hard facts of life. With what ease had Audley, whenever they had stood foot to foot, put him in the second place, got the better of him, outshone him!

Old Don pointed in vain. His master shot nothing, for he walked for the most part with his eyes on the turf. If he raised them it was to gaze at the hamlet lying below him in the valley, the old house, the ring of buildings and cottages, the church that he loved—and that like the woman he loved, reproached him with his inaction.