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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
In "The Great Skene Mystery," Bernard Capes unfolds a tale steeped in atmospheric intrigue and psychological depth, blending elements of crime fiction with Gothic sensibilities. Set in the shadowy landscapes of early 20th-century England, Capes employs a meticulous narrative style rich in vivid descriptions and a suspenseful, almost haunting tone. The novel deftly navigates themes of human obsession, moral ambiguity, and the enigmatic nature of truth against the backdrop of an unraveling crime that captivates and unsettles alike. Capes, known for his fascination with the intersection of the macabre and the mundane, draws upon his extensive experience as both a novelist and playwright to illustrate a world where the supernatural often melds with the everyday. His interests in mysticism and the psychological dimensions of crime reflect the anxieties of his time, particularly as they pertain to societal norms and the human psyche. This mystery showcases Capes' ability to probe deep into the motivations of his characters, revealing their inner dark recesses. This book is recommended for aficionados of classic mysteries and those intrigued by the darker corners of human nature. "The Great Skene Mystery" not only promises an enthralling narrative but also invites readers to ponder profound philosophical questions about morality and the nature of reality. Capes'Äô craftsmanship makes this work an essential addition to any literary collection.
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The great Skene mystery
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE.EDITORIAL. MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
I
Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads; had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms” beyond—before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains—and, thence shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse bushes of the open common to the south.
Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood. Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its élite. How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was sacred from the police.
Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit—a one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the hallowed mysteries of the tu-tu and the dancing sandal. She was a superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her present.
The fog made her eyes smart on this February evening, sootily exaggerating on their rims the work of the “make-up” pencil, which had not ceased to be a cherished equipment of her ignoble maturity. It imparted, moreover, a sort of livid iridescence to the pearl powder smearing her haggard cheeks, which suggested, in their unwholesome “fishiness,” the under parts of a dead and stale mackerel. Her “front” was false, her—— Sha! the horrible, sick old spectre of vanity!
But if a spectre, she was by no means dead to her own worldly interests. Those possessed her, in exact proportion as her watching and waiting at this moment were turned to the possession of the soul of another, the latest, and not the least difficult, subject of her ancient lures. Reversing the accepted ghostly procedure, she was intent on procuring, instead of revealing, a treasure. Her persistency, in matters of mean acquisition and blackmailing, was great for so frail a creature. It had triumphed over decay, infirmities, disenchantment in the past; yet, after all, she had withdrawn from public life at a late hour, with a competence which—to be properly in keeping with her long self-exposure—was only a bare one. That she resented, of course. Her days were all punctuated with petty resentments and malevolences, the fruits of a small, greedy vanity which had been pensioned to retire—through a conspiracy of jealousies, she would have told you. Wherefore she had since sought to augment her pittance by a vicious exploiting—at second-hand—of the arts which had procured it for her.
The rumble of distant omnibuses vibrated in her ears and in the walls, from which latter gloomed down, dingy and faded, old daguerreotypes of herself, smirking and ogling in the tights and kid boots and wreaths of a vanished era—rosy, immoral young life of twenty years past, of which this dry, stark immortelle was the spectre. As she sat waiting, she leaned her elbows on the table, and stared at the solitary candle alight before her, like an old, sharp-eyed hen half hypnotised by the glow. Yet, if she were asleep, she talked in her sleep, small and chuckling, as anyone, stooping his head, might have detected.
“Mark! Mark Dalston, O, Mark! O, my dear!” ran the thin strain. “Are you going to think well of it, Mark—think well of it, Mark Dalston? Have you started on your way to come and compound with Mother Carey, Mark, my love? You’ve answered Yes to her message, haven’t you?—but you aren’t always a gentleman of your word, you know, Mark. Best to be it in this case, O, my dear, my dear! I could get my teeth into you here, nicely, now—couldn’t I?”
Suddenly she came alert, pricking her ears to the sound of a quick, soft footstep outside.
II
Mr Mark Dalston, a young man of particular ambitions and passions, had also that hospitability of conscience which can welcome and reconcile the most antagonistic emotions. He never suffered material self-interests and moral scruples to fall at odds within himself, but was the tactful and charming host to all that came to be entertained within his breast. There one might see grossness and reason, sensualism and intellectuality, the virtuoso and the Vandal, all table couples at once, and at perfectly harmonious discourse. They met on the common ground of sociability, and forbore all destructive criticism of one another so long as Mark’s lights shone upon their differences. He was extraordinarily popular with quite a number of divergent familiars—a man without prejudices, and always ready to entertain a new emotion.
Mark was of that good nature, in short, that he could never say No to himself, however much the interests of other people might be affected by the partiality. His sympathies were wide, but their application was close. Like the centre of a venous system, he was all heart, and gave nothing but what he was sure to receive back at compound interest. Fortune having condemned him, for a brief period, to an ushership at a suburban grammar school, he had not repined over his lot, but had sought, quite naturally and amiably, an amelioration of its prosy conditions in the pursuit of such supernumerary pleasures and self-indulgences as its off hours could be made to yield. It was always his principle to eschew consequences until they were upon him, and insistent. And then he would set his fine wits and intellect at work to neutralise them.
The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many visés to the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date, Clapham had not seen him for six months or more.
It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him.
The message—Mother Carey’s—referring to this difficulty, had reached him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a suppressio veri; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.
The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and still—incurious—not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate. And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.
As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him whisperingly.
“Well, sir; all in train?”
Mark nodded, smiling.
“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience may sleep sound to-night—as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t wake her—don’t let her wake, rather—to a sense of her loss, you comprehend, till I return.”
“Quite so. The vis inertiæ—the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us, sir, depend upon it.”
“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our plans, rest sure of that.”
He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely, questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers, with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.
The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the pale little nurse spoke for the first time.
“Are we nearly there?”
“Nearly there, my child.”
“Your child!”
She raised the little bundle in her arms to her breast. The pressure seemed to convey abroad from it a waft of that warm, milky nidor inseparable from newly born infants. Mr Dalston’s white teeth glimmered through the fog.
“For the dozenth time,” he said softly, “I must assure you, little Ellen, that grave issues hang upon the preservation of the tiny life in your arms. That life is threatened only so long as I fail to convince a certain person of its actuality. You mustn’t ask me how or why. It embraces matters above your comprehension.”
“I can’t help it—I’m frightened,” was all she could find voice to whisper.
He put his arm confidently about her. She shivered, but let herself settle into it.
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to be frightened about? I shall do nothing but take it in, show it, and return with it to you.”
“Why do you want me at all?” she protested, half whimpering. “You might have brought it by yourself.”
“What!” he said, “and had Dr Blague questioning my sanity? Do fathers generally take their new-born babies for an airing in cabs? You are to witness, Ellen, if the necessity should ever arise—which, however, there is not the least probability of its doing—that I returned it to you sound as I had taken it.”
“Why should it arise? O, Mark, don’t mean me any evil!”
He sighed, shrugging his shoulders. The crawling cab drew up with a jerk.
“Now,” he said quickly, taking the girl’s burden from her, “stop here till I return with it. I shall be back before you can count a hundred.”
III
Mother Carey raised her bleary face with a start, and looked round. The owner of the name she had been apostrophising stood in the room beside her. She twisted an involuntary little shriek into a titter.
“Well, I’m sure,” she said, “to take me like that, in a moment, and anything possible! Was the door ajar?”
“Still ajar,” said Mark, with a smile—“and the trap still baited as of old, I suppose?”
“Always the same quick gentleman,” she chuckled venomously. “What has my lovey got in his arms there?”
“Something for your discounting, old mother,” he said. “I’ll show you in a minute.”
“My discounting!” she echoed. Her lips tightened on the word. She looked at him evilly—searchingly. “What do you mean? You got my message?”
“Yes; I got your message.”
“And you’ve come to answer it?”
“To answer it, yes.”
“That’s as well for you. You know what I want?”
“Do I?”
“And what I mean to have, or show you up, my gentleman?”
“Well, I can guess. I’m to be bled, I suppose?”
“Ah!” she gave a snapping laugh. “You never spoke a truer word.”
“Well,” he said, as cool as she was malevolent, “I’m here to be bled, but on hard and fast conditions. Understand that, you old Jezebel, or understand nothing.”
She made as if to claw him, but mumbled away her rage. Better than many worthier she could see into his terrific places.
“I’ll be fair to fair,” she said, cowed and scowling. “You’re married?”
“Yes,”
“A fine match?”
“Yes.”
“It would go hard with your honeymooning if I spoke out?”
“Harder with you, I think.”
“Ah, I’m salted, my man!”
“You’d need to be. Is she here?”
“Isn’t she!”
“Where?”
“In her bed.”
“Ill?”
“A touch of the fever. She’ll get over it.”
“Very well,” he said. “Now, attend. Look at this.”
She followed the motion of his hand, as, very gently, it lifted a corner of the wrappers on his arm.
“A living baby!”
“It looks like one.”
She discussed him sombrely a minute, then spoke in a shrewd whisper:
“You’ve got some dark game on here, my gentleman.”
He dropped the shawl again.
“A secret—and a proposal, old mother,” he said. “How much, or, rather, how little will you take for helping me to keep it?”
“Do you want me to commit murder? I’m an honest woman.”
“I know; that’s why I can depend on you.”
She fawned with her hands.
“Tell me what it all means, lovey dear.”
“I’m going to. Shut that door first.”
She did as she was told. The listening spirits of the fog were baffled. When the door opened again, Mark was standing in the entry, the burden still in his arms, while Mother Carey pleaded urgently behind him.
“A lump sum, deary. Come!”
“No,” he said; “a pension. A quarterly gag on your tongue, or nothing. You can take or leave.”
“I take!” she whispered shrilly—“I take! Be careful of that step, deary.”
He vanished into the fog. At the mouth of the passage the cab was drawn up by the kerb, watching for him like a squat, red-eyed dragon, and gulping him the moment he appeared.
Half way home the pale little nurse broke suddenly into hysterical panting and weeping.
“Why don’t you give it me back? Why do you always keep it in your own arms?”
“I’m afraid of you, Ellen,” he said quietly. “You look somehow as if you weren’t to be trusted.”
They were passing a lighted shop at the moment. With a quick, unsuspected action she snatched the veil from the baby’s face.
“Ah!” she screamed—“it’s dead! You’ve had it killed!”
For a single instant the naked soul of him looked out—obscene—murderous. But he drove it back.
“You little wild fool,” he said deeply. “Wasn’t I right? Your nerves are anyhow. You aren’t to be trusted, with your fancies.”
She hardly seemed to hear him. All of a sudden she was struggling with the door handle.
“Let me out! I’m fainting! I can bear no more. I will be good—I want to go home—I——”
Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door.
“There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must go on and play the game.”
He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits.
That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason, and looked intently into his eyes.
“Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said.
He bowed his head distressfully.
“By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured.
“It is dead?”
He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside gently but indifferently.
“Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face. Yet I can’t help myself—I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it, you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.”
He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.
“Why are you so bitter?” he said. “Has not Fate after all been considerate with us? You can face the world again now, unsuspected, a spotless wife—no suspicion of our having loved not wisely but too well. Cannot you forgive me yet, Lucy? And after all I have done to safeguard your honour? Yet, if Providence had not thus mercifully intervened, I swear that I would have been a dutiful father to it—have acknowledged my own, and taken all the blame and burden of the sin. I can say no more.”
“Nor I,” she answered. “What does it matter now. The money—my money—that you’ve played to get—it’s all yours to use, and fling away if you like. Treat me as you will—I’m indifferent——” And she lay down resolutely, and composed herself to sleep.
As, chin in hand, he stands pondering her a little, curiously, fondly, cynically, we see the fog droop and engulf him, her, the bed, the room. Not for twenty years does it lift and roll itself up to the flies, to reveal the maturing of a drama of which this chapter is the prologue.
CHAPTER I.AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down en grande tenue by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose, for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.
As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was, legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.
At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire, called her Lady Skene.
As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had contracted a reckless mésalliance with the lady who now bore his name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.
Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination, erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.
I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf, without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact secret of what constitutes the comme il faut. That may be said, broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all things—the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the spiritual evolutions of fashion.
There was an unseemly old heathen visited us once upon a time, who made himself very merry over Lord Skene’s “atonement,” as he called it. This was Sir Maurice Carnac, ex-governor of Madras, who had been an intimate friend of his lordship in the sixties, and who now, on his retirement, after twenty years’ service, came to renew the acquaintance. From him I learned, at discretion, not a few facts hitherto unknown to me: how, for instance, my stepfather, in the matter of his second marriage, had been “cast into a net by his own feet” in their very hope of going astray, which was to imply that he had been caught to matrimony in the act of trying to evade it; how Lady Skene had no sooner conquered him by her beauty, than she had used it to the subjugation of the old Adam she had entertained, by holding it the prize to his strict reformation; how, in short, she had made a tame and orderly spouse out of the most unpromising material possible.
Sir Maurice had no great delicacy, it is to be feared, though he could be mum on some points on which I sought enlightenment. Of Lady Skene’s social status before her marriage he would not speak; though I certainly gathered from him that it was inconsiderable.
“Take Fortune’s gifts, my lad,” he said, “and hold your silly tongue. It’s time to question her when she turns on you.”
“Scruples,” I began.
“Scruples be damned,” said he. “What has a ranker need of scruples? Ain’t you promoted for your mother’s son?”
That was the truth of it, and, to confess myself, the sorrow. I was not a loved child, conscious of rights or merits. I was an “encumbrance.” A dreamy, rather morbid temperament oppressed me with the weight of my own burden on the situation.
Not that I was ever treated unkindly; but there is an endurance that is harder than neglect. It might be thought that Lady Skene would have wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family. She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her. We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain carving a brand that is destined for the burning.
I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft, monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless—an angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits.
At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect—one thing in especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the detectives.
CHAPTER II.I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION
Lord Skene was, as things go, a poor man—poor for an ex-judge, and poor for a nobleman. His estate was much embarrassed at the time when his lady started a resolution to nurse it. It was reduced then to the mansion and demesne of Evercreech, a fair enough property in its way, but largely neglected, and, in places, fallen to waste. I think that even her ladyship’s management could do little more than preserve it to the succession—a vain economy, it seemed; but the seed of woman is hope. Much before her time the house in Berkeley Square had been let away on a lengthy lease; and a family hotel must serve her and my lord on their periodic visits to town.
Evercreech had to serve me, summer and winter, the year round; and in those young, untroubled days it was enough. There was a plenitude of beauty, and romance, and antique quietude for my utmost needs. I never realised what I was, or what I signified, to the couple most concerned in my existence. I think it would have puzzled them as much to define me—whether for son, or servant, or ward. Perhaps my position nearest approached that of a donzel in feudal times, attached to the service of some high relation as his apprentice in arms and chivalry, and broke to self-reliance by a discipline of self-help. Certainly I read of spoiling and mothers’ anxious love; but I never knew them out of books, which were from the first my joy and solace.
Save during my schooldays, I led a curiously solitary life. I was neither invited nor expected to take a part with his lordship in the daily interests of his condition. I did not dine at his table, nor ride with him with the hounds, nor shoot his sparse coverts, nor whip his unprofitable streams. He was very tolerant of me, and made me even a generous allowance, the most of which I hoarded indifferently, having no use of it but for books. I know that at this pregnant period of which I write I was the possessor of some hundreds of pounds, a veritable little treasure chest of gold, which had accumulated to me during the years of growth. May all my savings return such an account of interest as did these.
I had my meals with the steward, one Comely, a fellow as excellent as his name, but comically guarded in his attitude towards me, whether for respect or familiarity. I had liberty to take my piece from the gun-room, and spend any whole day, if I chose, in blazing away amongst the small game of the unpreserves. The stables, the library, the whole “run,” in short, of Evercreech were free to me on the queer unspoken condition of “sufferance.” I was always like a “poor relation” let to holiday in a great mansion during the absence of its owners.
Nor was I ever invited to a more familiar conduct by Lady Skene herself. Somehow, whatever the reason, I was alien to her trust and affections. I could have thought she looked upon me as an encumbrance indeed—even, from the date of the betterment of her fortunes, as a veritable changeling, who had no inherent right to her motherly consideration. Well, perhaps I had not.
Evercreech lay back from the highroad between Footover and Market Grazing in north-west Hampshire—a wild and haunted country, sharing itself between dense woods and lonely downs. There were enough of both contained within the estate to serve a young solitary spirit for its ample wilderness—for day-long wanderings, and fantastic chancings by stream and thicket, and pretty pastorals won out of high folds on hillsides, and all the sting and honey of romance. There one might walk or ride, a squire of the Grael, and taste a county’s venture in an acre. From farm to ruined byre, from box-hedged garden to the infinite wild tangle of hedgerows, from stately culture to nature in her poignant naked savagery, one might pass and play one’s fancy, quite secure from the banter of the prosaic. There were family legends, too, each one enough to make a transatlantic reputation. The two that most occur to me illustrate the terror and the sweetness of such old-time traditions. The first had its locale in Hags Lane, a lonely, deep-sunk furrow in the pastures, but after all libelled in its name; for hag or aggart in Hampshire means nothing less fragrant than hawthorn. But the figure associated with it was of odour to make spectral amends, being that of a man astride a great dark horse, which leapt the hedge in ghastly gloamings before the eyes of any chance pedestrian, and went tearing up the road on soundless hoofs. Story connected this apparition with a past lord of Skene, who, riding to wreak vengeance on a faithless spouse and her paramour, had manœuvred the guilty couple to their death over the edge of a chalk quarry, and thereafter had taken the disillusioned Sultan Schahriar for his model, though with the limited despotism that his more civilised age enjoined upon him, since the moral ruin of his victims must content him without their throttling. He was rather a rotten pippin on a tree of comfortable fruit; for the Skenes altogether had been an easy roguish race, hot-tongued but affectionate, and, when caught stumbling on a betrayal of virtue, generally ready to make the amende honorable. Accordingly, perhaps, they had shown a tendency to mésalliances, which had procured them, nevertheless, such a succession of vigorous heirs, as to extend their main line unbroken from times prehistoric. Yet, it seemed, at last, that Fate was to intervene for a diversion. But of that in a moment.
If that first legend smacks of midnight and hellebore, the second is to my mind a very dirge of rose petals. It relates how a sensitive little fellow of the race once lost his mother’s wedding-ring, and died of grief to witness her distress. Thereafter, then, his little ghost came haunting a particular bed in the garden—a flower-face caught fitfully among the leaves, or dropping, when one bent to pluck it, in a shower of creamy petals, like a white peony’s. So that the mother, weeping and pitiful, was moved at last to sow love-in-a-mist in the bed, as it were a net to catch that forlorn small ghost for its kissing and reassurance, and for the speaking to it in flower language of how mother did not mind her loss a bit. When lo! upon a shoot of the plant that sprung the following April was found, lifted from the soil wherein it had been lost, the ring, and the flower spectre haunted its pretty parterre no more. The fantastic superstition accorded well, I think, with the traditions of a house which had been notable as much for its rich maternity as for its fruits of over-kindness; and the “Baby’s garden”—as the mossy little pleasance, sacred to the long-vanished phantom, was called—spoke and speaks to me always of qualities better than wisdom.
Wise, excepting in the one instance of my stepfather the judge, the Skenes were not; but they never were lacking, I aver, in the essential poetry of humanity. It neutralised in them, even, the vulgarity of quite commonplace exteriors.
Time alone has the face which is an index to its nature. The best of men’s is but a mask. Round, florid, beaming, my stepfather’s was the face of a vintner. He might have drawn his pedigree from a beer engine, and advertised it, foaming froth, on a sign. None might have guessed from its features its age-long inheritance of gentle breeding.
He was a small man, dapper and a trifle horsey in his dress, but after an older fashion of collar and harness. He wore, typically, a shepherd’s-plaid tie, and his hat at an imperceptible angle. He always smelt fresh, and, somehow, of a genial shrewdness; and his manner towards me was a manner of kindly condescension. It was not until my school time was well over, and my days drifted into the purposelessness of an unattached loafer, that I became first conscious of an alteration in his attitude towards me. And the occasion which produced it was productive of a yet colder alienation from me on the part of Lady Skene, which was as significant of her nature as was his increased consideration for me of his.
One morning his lordship called me into his study. I stood before him, as I had often done before, vaguely on my guard between submission and independence, and he smiled on me, a little nervous and excited.
“How old are you, Gaskett—let’s see?” he said.
I answered: “I have come of age, sir.”
“Any plans for your future?”
“None.”
“Nothing thought of—no direction?”
“What could give them a direction here, sir?”
He looked at me a little, speculating.
“Perhaps we’ve let the question drift too long. Think it over and think it out. We must find a way to independence for you.”
“Thank you, sir. You could do me no greater kindness.”
“What d’ye mean?”
He glanced at me curiously.
“I know I’m here on sufferance, sir,” I said. “I know my presence is an open sore to Lady Skene. I’ve long been wanting to ask you something. I think I could find myself sooner, perhaps, if I were given elbow room. With all your liberality, I feel constrained in Evercreech. Let me have the lodge in the Caddle to fit up for myself and live in for the present, and until I’ve come to some decision.”
He stared a bit and laughed, and set to scraping his chin, his pale blue eyes measuring me.
“You shall have it certainly,” he said suddenly, “for your den, or hermitage, or what the devil you like. But it won’t do to cut the house connection, my boy. You must dine and bed at home. What makes you think you are not welcome here?”
“Not my stepfather, sir,” I said.
He turned to his papers, and dismissed me quickly; but called me back as I reached the door.
“After all,” he said, “perhaps you’re better out of the way just now.” His expression was extraordinarily complex. “Its coming to be the era of pap and flapdoodle—ridiculous, ain’t it, at this date—but——”
“Is that so, sir? I congratulate you.”
“Thank’ee, my boy. Don’t forget I’ve always liked you; and if circumstances—deuced aggravating things——” He broke off, humming, and, kicking up his dapper feet, looked at his boot tips.
“I’ll put some fellows in,” he said hurriedly, “and have the place made fit for you.”
“You’ve always been kind to me, sir,” I said gratefully. “I hope I sha’n’t trouble you much longer.”
I was going, but he stopped me again.
“Trouble be cursed!” he said. “You must understand that your happiness and welfare are my aim. You’re welcome to the lodge for ever, or so long as you’re convinced that they centre in that bogeyish hole. Only don’t let your fancy run on bitterness. Evercreech is your home.”
I was conscious of an expression in his face, between joy and mystification, as I left him. It was easy, I thought, to interpret it. Here, after all this interval, was an heir to Evercreech expected, and his lady’s long remissness atoned. The thoroughbred was stretching his neck for home; the encumbrance must clear himself from the course. “Sufferance,” having made the pace for “Welcome,” must withdraw in proper pride of his humble share in the event, and be content to eat his oats in abstraction. Double-distilled nonsense, of course; but a mother’s slight is poison, and that venom was in my blood. Not all the investigations of anatomists can connect the heart with the reason.
CHAPTER III.THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
Once, when I was a boy of twelve or so, there had come to stay at Evercreech a little lady whom I hated with all my heart. This was Miss Ira Christmas; but very remote from the charity and goodwill which her name suggested, she had always appeared to me. She was a ward in Chancery, as I understood, and as such committed to the custody of her nearest kinsman, my stepfather. Her mother’s hand, as I came to learn, had once been coveted by him for his son Charlie; but the lady had decided to bestow her fortune elsewhere; and, by the very irony of fate, the residue of her perversity, so to speak, was all that reverted to him from that abortive scheme. Both she and her husband died young, in short, and the orphan Christmas, heiress to an intestate estate, was consigned to his charge for her education and upbringing.
She was with us for only a few months before her transportation to France and elsewhere for her finishing education; but the little interlude of her presence at Evercreech awoke in me such a sense of shame and mutiny as I had never suffered before. I knew nothing of her parents but what might be gathered negatively from their reflection in this detestable child. I call her so with every sense of my responsibility to the present. She had all the instincts of an infantile parvenue, and all the hypocrisy of an embryo Pharisee. Her precocious sharpness was early in discovering the disfavour with which Lady Skene regarded me, and in affecting a sympathy with the reasons for that dislike. I was bad, sullen, one of the unelect on her little tripping red tongue. I had no gratitude for the gifts of Providence in so raising me from the mire to a position which was none of my deserts, and which had come to be mine purely through the instrumentality of an evangelical mother. I should be thankful, on the contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me—a feast, if I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance. She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as prime favourite with the real head of the establishment.
As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy, his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different—might have come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room—a fresh, saucy young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably, but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and help to me in one. And he had been dead—how long? Years piled on years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of his father’s schemes and ambitions for him.
“He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas—“I know: and Lord Skene wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you little low boy?”
“Where would you have been?” I retorted.
“Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t have wanted you.”
“You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?”
“O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to complain of the dreadful language I had used.
She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes. Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is its criterion of loveliness.
This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated—through the instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady—from a suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time, constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. Its spirit, indeed, still so dwelt in him, morally and physically—in his narrow convictions, as in his dismal dyspeptic face, sloping shoulders, and general joyless aspect—that a question as to his well-being might at any time have been answered by him in the words of the notorious Dr Jekyll, “I am very low, Utterson; very low.” Very low a churchman he was, in fact; so low that he crawled, symbolically, in the dust, and called himself a worm. I never disputed that half so much as his calling me one. But his professional terminology gathered no inspiration with the years, and its eternal limitations were, it seemed, satisfying to Lady Skene, who was his main prop and patroness. It began with wrath and the blood of lambs, and foundered in mud among worms and serpents. The principle of pre-election is very comforting to one’s sense of moral responsibility. It narrows it to the consideration of that small body, which, after all, it need not consider, since it is booked for Paradise. It seems a cruelty of supererogation to taunt the unelect with their doom. But Mr Pugsley gave me little hope. I was a worm, a brand; “baptised in fire that I might inherit ever-lasting fire.” I suppose that very early I showed a scorn of his nonsense; and that put his spiritual back up. Moreover I parodied him; and no man, though a priest, likes to be laughed at for his convictions. Sir Maurice Carnac, before mentioned, happened to alight on the stuff without my knowledge; and he made a huge spluttering joke of it. Here it is, founded on a Pugsleyite hymn:
