Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 4

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The Chaddesbourne brook was in flood on the day when they buried old Mr. Ombersley in March, nineteen hundred and twenty-two. Rain had teemed—as, heaven knows, it can teem in those hills—for three days on end. At some farms they lost lambs. Little sodden bodies were washed down and wedged the foaming sluices at Chaddesbourne Mill, where Eli Lydgate the miller and his man were busy dragging sacks of meal into safety. They could hear the angry water roaring and bubbling outside as they worked, ankle-deep; but below that solitary obstruction the flood grew silent; released, it spread over the drowned fields in a lake with a lapping edge fringed with froth and dead leaves and broken twigs, beneath whose surface the stream itself ran unperceived till, meeting its next obstruction, the stone bridge on the road to Wychbury, it grew noisy again. The stone bridge lay nine inches awash at either end, and farmers’ wives who had come from the Wychbury side “to see the vault opened,” were forced to turn back for fear of wetting their petticoats and catching their deaths of cold. “One funeral makes many,” old people say in those parts. To this day, though neither had fatal consequences, Mr. Ombersley’s funeral is remembered by that flood and the flood by his funeral.

His death, as Berrow’s Journal proclaimed, marked an epoch, the end of an era. The old man—he was eighty-eight when he died—was in himself a museum piece, removed by no more than two lives, and a spiritual gap even smaller, from that other Worcestershire squire, Sir Roger de Coverley. The vault, about which the countryside was so curious, had actually not been opened for forty-five years on the day when Miles Ombersley (“the Colonel,” as they called him) succeeded to a home which in formal dank desolation was not unlike it, a thousand odd acres of land, for the most part neglected, and a staggering load of death-duties, for which, characteristically, his father had made no provision.

When Colonel Ombersley heard of the old man’s death he had just been transferred from his regiment, in the Army of Occupation at Cologne, to a staff job at Aldershot. The news reached him a few hours after he had signed an agreement for the lease, at an exorbitant rent, of a furnished house on the outskirts of Farnham. As soon as he heard it he got leave and set off for Chaddesbourne, leaving his wife behind to collect the two children and follow him.

As a soldier’s wife Helen Ombersley was accustomed to alarms and excursions. Indeed, in her twenty-five years of married life she had rarely known the delights of a permanent home, and this new convulsion seemed a mere jolt to her.

She had married Miles, then a captain in the Thirtieth Hussars, on the eve of his sailing to fight in South Africa, and her two elder boys, Dick and Roger, both born under the shadow of one war, had reached manhood in time to lose their lives in the next: Dick, the heir, a mere child, on the Somme, and Roger, the younger, at Gheluvelt, with the Worcesters. These two blows, falling one on another, still numbed her and deprived her of the capacity of feeling. She had long since reached a state of mind in which it seemed relatively unimportant where she went or what she did, so inured to the idea of death, that to be packed off to another funeral appeared to her the most natural thing in the world.

It did seem a pity, in a way, that the two younger children—Catherine, now a girl of twenty, slender and precocious (and what wonder!), and Jack, who, escaping the holocaust by bare months, was now at Oxford—should be snatched out of their comparatively cheerful lives to assist at such a sombre affair; but the precise mind of Miles had declared their presence necessary, and had arranged for it with an admirable and typical piece of staff-work in black and white. She knew, and respected, the strength of his sense of duty, and never questioned the rightness of his judgment in matters of propriety; in addition to which she herself had been born a D’Abitot and reared in a school as careful of tradition as his.

So, apparently self-possessed and unhurried, though her life still moved in a dream, Helen Ombersley set about packing and sending telegrams, and thanked heaven that, anyway, she wouldn’t have to worry about mourning, since Jack had a tail-coat, a relic of his last half at Eton, and Catherine and herself were already provided with black. Then she shut up the Farnham house and sent the two servants she had just engaged on a holiday, and set off with Catherine to Brown’s Hotel in London, where Jack had been told to join them. She went up to town third-class, as was her custom unless she was travelling with her husband; but her luggage had printed labels: The Hon. Mrs. H. Ombersley, and railwaymen, even when they didn’t notice this, always treated her with particular respect: there was something fine and gentle and proud about her calm face, her steady eyes, her body, so erect and remarkably slim for her age.

Catherine, sitting beside her, presented an immature version of the same distinction. She was as tall as her mother, and as erect, but even slimmer, with the angularity of youth. She had the same candid eyes, too young to have known real pain, dark grey, at once gentle and fearless, beneath brows that were so slightly curved as to give the forehead a swift, impetuous air. The skin of her face had the pallor and fine texture of a creamy petal; her mouth was the mouth of a child, generous, passionate, innocent, and the hair which appeared beneath her black felt hat was the colour of beeswax. During the journey they rarely spoke to one another, and then so quietly that nobody heard what they said; but when their eyes met, the hurt eyes and the unhurt, they smiled, and sometimes their gloved hands touched in little instinctive sudden gestures of affection. The people in the compartment took them for a war-widow, recently bereaved and pathetically courageous, with her younger sister. Such sights were common enough in those days; but this one commanded respect.

Miles Ombersley, meanwhile, had reached Chaddesbourne on the previous evening. Mr. Healey, the agent, who combined the management of Chaddesbourne with that of a number of smaller estates, had sent a high dog-cart to meet him at Wychbury Station. This was the only vehicle in the stables in a passable state of repair; the brougham and the closed wagonette had gone moth-eaten through disuse, and the old squire had always set his face against motor-cars.

Miles Ombersley was chilled to the bone but, as usual, observant. He was pleased by the salute which the station-master, a stranger, gave him, and by the fact that the wooden platform smelt just the same and was lit by the same bleary oil-lamps as in the days, long ago, when he used to come home from school. The lane leading to Chaddesbourne was as rough and narrow as ever, with its cuttings of damp sandstone and clipped holly-hedges, whose wet leaves shone in the beam of the dog-cart’s lamps. “Here at least nothing changes, thank God!” he was telling himself, when, approaching the brook and expecting the shade of an avenue, he saw, on either side of the road, like the track of a hurricane, huge elms lying prostrate where they had been laid by the axe.

“What’s this?” he asked sharply. Though it wasn’t on Ombersley land, the tops of the avenue had been visible from the Hall gates, and anything that happened so near to Chaddesbourne concerned him.

“Beg your pardon, sir?” The groom was asleep.

“What’s all this?”

“Them old trees, sir? Why, that’s Mr. Hackett, that is.”

“And who’s Mr. Hackett?”

“The gentleman what’s bought Green Hill. A gentleman from North Bromwich.”

“A gentleman from North Bromwich!” Miles Ombersley thought. “That’s a contradiction in terms.” He said: “What’s he felled the trees for?”

“Well, that I can’t rightly tell, sir. He’s pulled down the farm, and they say he’s building a mansion.”

“A mansion on Green Hill? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Putting in ten bathrooms, they say, sir, and a garridge for six. It’s a rare slice of luck for Chaddesbourne, they say, a gentleman like Mr. Hackett coming and settling here. It’ll liven things up no end. There’s a great dearth of real gentry in these parts compared with what used to be, more’s the pity; and this Mr. Hackett—well, they say that money’s no object.”

Colonel Ombersley grunted. Of course this disaster was only to be expected. He had urged his father again and again to buy Green Hill. Æsthetically that smooth upland, with its fringe of poor woods and the half-derelict black-and-white Tudor farm on the top of it, was an integral element in the Chaddesbourne landscape; as a mere piece of property it should have “rounded off” the Chaddesbourne estate; but, of late years, the old man had rarely troubled to answer his letters, during the war sterner duties had erased the project from his mind; and now some damned profiteer—the type was implicit in every word the groom had spoken—had stepped in with his “money no object” and snapped up the coveted morsel from under his nose. He could see Mr. Hackett with his “mansion,” his “ten bathrooms,” his “garage for six!” The fact that from ignorance or caprice he could fell that fine avenue spoke for itself. “If I’d been on the spot,” Miles Ombersley thought, “I’ld have managed to stop him. I must get to know the fellow and take him in hand....”

The rain came down steadily, in torrents; the flood was already lapping the crown of the bridge when the horse splashed through it. At the Hall Dr. Selby, whom the squire had reluctantly summoned to attend him at the end of his illness, and Dudley Wilburn, the family lawyer from North Bromwich, awaited the heir’s arrival. James Langley, the butler, in honour of the event, had lit a heaped fire in the dining-room; but the room itself had not been used since the beginning of the war, and though the flames scorched their calves and made Colonel Ombersley’s damp trousers steam as they stood talking uneasily in front of the blaze and waited for dinner, all the space beyond that fierce radius remained icily cold: the chill of prolonged disuse seeping out of the walls from which the eyes of six frozen Ombersley ancestors contemptuously surveyed them.

Mr. Healey was the only sprightly member of the party. An aura of unabsorbed whisky enveloped his ingratiations. Miles Ombersley, catching a whiff of it, made a note. That would never do. Dudley Wilburn, ponderous at the best of times, wore a worried look. (“That man’s ill,” Dr. Selby thought. “Kidneys, probably. I wonder if he knows?”) He drew Ombersley aside and spoke in an undertone:

“I shall try to have everything ready for you by to-morrow evening. The last will was made over forty years ago, at the time of your mother’s death. All the witnesses, oddly enough, predeceased the ... er ... the testator. Not that that will make any difference; but I do wish he’d made another. There’s a codicil which may surprise you. You will also find a number of charitable bequests, quite reasonable then, which may cause you temporary embarrassment. In those days, as you know, life was easier and he was much better off.”

“We shall have to meet them, however embarrassing they are,” Miles Ombersley replied.

“Oh, of course, of course. It’s a pity, all the same. He was obstinate, if I may say so, increasingly obstinate.”

The last sentence, spoken as he turned, reached the other couple. Mr. Healey sniggered, as if to say, “Don’t I know it!” then cleared his throat loudly to hide the tactless sound. Dr. Selby made no pretence of not having heard. He was a clean-shaven, keen-eyed man on the far side of thirty, with the confidence of four years of war-service behind him.

“It was admirable obstinacy, Wilburn,” he said. “The squire fought for it to the last. As an example of sheer will-power I take off my hat to him. I’ve never seen anything gamer. He had determined to see the war finished and the Germans beaten, and did it, with nearly two years and a half to spare. I’m proud to have known him. If he’d only condescended to take a little more care of himself he’d be alive at this moment. He had a beautiful elastic pulse till the end—the arteries of a man of forty. Well, well, it was a remarkable innings, and he could hit out hard to the end. You realize, Colonel, that he refused to let me send for you?”

“Of course, doctor. You were perfectly right,” Miles Ombersley replied. “A man I can trust,” he thought. “He looks like a soldier and speaks like a gentleman.”

The butler proclaimed the self-evident fact that dinner was served. Miles Ombersley took his seat, for the first time, at the head of that table; they proceeded to eat the kind of meal which had always been served at Chaddesbourne, authentically English, from the gravy soup flavoured with sherry to the admirable port. If he had let down everything else, the old man had kept up his cellar. Every spring, till the war began, he had laid down a year’s supply of sound wine from Bordeaux and Oporto. Miles Ombersley noticed that the butler spared himself the trouble of offering Healey claret, and that Healey pointedly cut short the quantity of whisky the man mechanically poured out for him. Miles Ombersley’s keen eyes were noticing everything that evening; his mind, habitually precise, was quickened by a kind of sombre elation. The moment when he sat down in his father’s chair at the head of the table was, in a manner, climactic: not the end of an ambition, but the beginning. All his life, up to this, had been a period of probation. From this instant he was going to take neither men nor things for granted, and poor Mr. Healey’s too-pointed abstemiousness decided his fate.

When the port had come home for the second time, the doctor said: “I suppose you would like to see him, Colonel? He’s in his old room. Perhaps you’ld rather I came with you?”

Miles Ombersley shook his head. “Thank you, doctor; I know my way. I shan’t be long. Won’t you pass the wine round again? You had better stay here where it’s warm.”

Outside, in the hall, it was certainly deathly cold. An oil-lamp with an opaline globe shed a doleful, subaqueous light on the flags, the dim family portraits, the high ceiling darkened by smoke. Miles Ombersley, guided by an instinct that survived from his boyhood, moved mechanically towards an oak table at the foot of the stairs, where an odd assortment of brass candlesticks stood in rows. He lit one. Accompanied by a moving shadow he climbed the uncarpeted stairs. Though he had not considered them for years, every canvas that lined the staircase-wall was familiar to him, and he paused for a moment to gaze at the portrait of a grey Arab stallion by Stubbs, and the superb presentation by Snyders of a thundery sky, in which a heron on its back fell, driven to earth by two falcons. Both seemed better than he had imagined, and both, he reflected, were valuable: from being mere pictures they had suddenly become possessions. “I must get a new valuation made,” he thought, “and the catalogue revised. I wonder if we’re properly insured against fire.”

At the head of the stairs he found himself faced by a Tompion timepiece whose ticking and resonant chime had been in his boyhood the pulse and voice of the landing. The escapement was silent now. So, seeing that the clock had stopped at five minutes to seven, he re-wound it methodically and, turning the hands to the time as shown by his watch, was startled by the sound of the chime, which his setting released—so startled that, pursuing the habit of years, he found himself tapping at the dead man’s door for leave to enter.

That really, he told himself, was a stupid thing to do; yet the absence of the gruff answering “Come in!” brought home to him, more definitely than anything that had happened before, the reality of death. Up till now his seriousness had been no more than the correct reaction of a grown man of the world. At the moment when, carrying his candle, he walked on tiptoe into that room, Miles Ombersley was moved, deeply moved; and since the prime tenet of his code constrained him to conceal emotion, he felt thankful that he had rejected the doctor’s offer of his company.

What was it that moved him so deeply? Had he ever loved his father? (He had, indubitably, passionately loved his mother. But that was ages ago; he was a mere child when she died.) Their relation, indeed, had never been really intimate: yet no less intimate, now that he came to think of it, than his own with Richard, the boy who had been killed on the Somme. Affection, in the sense of personal tenderness, could never, where the Ombersleys were concerned, be displayed between men—just as their very relationship of father and son, of a man and his heir, precluded, by family custom, any degree of confidence. It was almost an accepted convention that the relations between the Ombersley in possession and his heir should be strained. As a matter of fact these two had not spoken for twenty years. Respect, admiration of a sort... ? That was rather nearer the mark. Yet, even so, the qualities he had admired in his father were not personal: their two natures were far too like each other for that. No, the admiration he felt—and his present emotion showed that this was genuine—was for what his father represented as the vehicle and instrument of a tradition, the incarnation of that sense of duty, that faith—in their Chaddesbourne, in England—which had devolved on every bearer of the name for the last four hundred years. That old man, lying there with his cold features waxen in candlelight, had kept the light burning for the better part of a century. He, Miles Ombersley, was prepared to carry the torch a stage further—into what grim vicissitudes (for the world changed so rapidly nowadays) he could not presume to guess—and the prospect of doing so filled him with the taut enthusiasm he had felt when first he led his squadron into action during the Boer War.

Only one moment of disquietude weakened this iron mood when, slowly lifting his eyes from the contemplation of his father’s face and gazing into vacancy, he became aware of another, his own, which appeared to regard him sardonically from a Chippendale mirror in which it was reflected and, coming into focus, recalled him violently to himself. Perhaps it was a trick of pale candlelight, perhaps of the mirror’s flawed surface; whatever it may have been, Miles Ombersley had the illusion that this face was not his, but a grim simulacrum of the cold features at which his eyes, detached from his brooding mind, had lately been gazing. If that face was indeed his own (as it surely must be, though he had always taken it for granted that he resembled his mother), it was evident that he was more deeply harrowed than he cared to admit. It was white and lined, and shadowed with mortality. The sight of it struck cold on his heart, reminding him that of the short span of human life he had already lived more than two-thirds. Fifteen more years—thirty, perhaps, for the Ombersleys were long-lived. And then ... this. He pulled himself together deliberately, and became, in spite of mirror and candlelight, his soldierly self. Yet when, moving briskly downstairs, he rejoined his guests at the table, he thought it as well to fortify himself with a third glass of port. The doctor, narrowly watching, saw that the hand that tipped the decanter was steady.

“But the fellow looks as if he had seen a ghost,” he thought.

He had; but Miles Ombersley was not the man to be frightened by ghosts, not even the ghost of himself.