He filled a tumbler with soda-water and subsided into his deepest arm-chair, looking lazily round the room, drawing pleasurably at his cigar and wrapping himself in the softest down of contentment. His diary was within reach, and he thought over his abbreviated week-end. Agnes Waring had dropped out of his life; Barbara had never come into it. There was nothing to record but the names of his mother's guests at dinner.…
"There are few things so exhausting as the quiet of the country."—From the Diary of Eric Lane.
CHAPTER FOUR
INTERMEZZO
What hadst thou to do being born,
Mother, when winds were at ease
As a flower of the spring-time of corn,
A flower of the foam of the seas?
For bitter thou wast from thy birth,
Aphrodite, a mother of strife;
For before thee some rest was on earth
A little respite from tears
A little pleasure of life;
For life was not then as thou art,
But as one that waxeth in years
Sweet-spoken, a fruitful wife;
Earth had no thorn, and desire
No sting, neither death any dart;
What hadst thou to do amongst these,
Thou, clothed with a burning fire,
Thou, girt with sorrow of heart,
Thou sprung of the seed of the seas
As an ear from a seed of corn
As a brand plucked forth of a pyre,
As a ray shed forth of the moon
For division of soul and disease,
For a dart and a sting and a thorn?
What ailed thee then to be born?
Swinburne: "Atalanta in Calydon."
1
Moral delinquency in England, if of sufficiently ancient lineage, grows venial with the years and, if carried out with adequate ruthlessness or at least success, may quickly find itself invested with grandeur. No one boasts of his own illegitimacy, but most men like it to be known that an ancestress, whose memory is kept green, once enjoyed royal favour. No man tells his guests that they are eating stolen food from stolen plate in a stolen house; but many will admit, without imposing a bond of secrecy, that their great-great-grandfathers went to India to seek their fortune and apparently found it. "He that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great Nabob," said Burke, without dwelling on the intermediate stages. They will admit almost as readily that their grandfather reluctantly parted with land to the end that railways might be built, or that their fathers ran the blockade and supplied the South and the slave-owners, hazardously and romantically, with munitions of war.
The Neave fortunes had their origin in the character and position of Lord Chancellor Crawleigh; and history has dealt faithfully with him. John, first baron, acquired the Abbey from a misguided supporter of the '15 and left it with sufficient means for its upkeep to his grandson William, the second baron and first viscount, who built on sure foundations. Common sense and a certain practical alertness in the halcyon days of the Enclosure Acts did nothing to diminish the patrimony of Charles, fourth baron, third viscount and first earl, though the estate came to be temporarily encumbered when the good fellowship of John, the second earl, won him the costly regard of the Regent. At a time when the House of Commons was pulling one of its long faces over a periodical schedule of the Prince's debts, a Garter became vacant; and His Royal Highness, with no other means of marking his affectionate gratitude, secured it for his friend with a further step to the coveted rank of marquess. Thereafter the public life of the family was characterized by honour and integrity; and the Garter, re-bestowed as soon as surrendered, became a habit. The second marquess held a sinecure under Lord Aberdeen; another flitted to and fro in shadowy retirement as a Lord-in-Waiting; a third, exploring the United States for the broadening of his mind, married an American wife.