Читать книгу Ancestors - Gertrude Atherton - Страница 21

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor, in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal’s five girls, and himself; the hideous reiteration of “your lordship” by the obsequious servants, that reproduced in his mind the slow deep notes of the passing bell, tolled in the village for his grandfather and cousin.

A letter from Julia Kaye had fluttered in like a dove of promise, but he had never been able to recall anything in the six pages of graceful sympathy but her allusions to the dead as “the marquess” and “the earl.” He told himself angrily that his brain must have weakened to notice a solecism at such a time, but it is in moments of abnormal mental strain that trifles have their innings; and during the beautiful service in the chapel he caught himself wondering if any woman of his own class could have made such a slip. Always deaf to gossip, he had no suspicion that his Julia had been laughed at more than once for her inability to grasp all the unwritten laws of a world which she had entered too late. With an ear in which a title lingered like a full voluptuous note of music, she was blunt to certain of the democratic canons of modern society. Although it gave her the keenest pleasure to address the highest bulwarks of the peerage off-handedly as “duke” and “duchess,” there had been moments of confusion when she had lapsed naturally into “your grace.” And it would have seemed like a lost opportunity to have alluded to a titled foreigner without his “von” or “de,” even where there was a more positive title to use as often as she pleased. It was the one weak spot in a singularly acute and accomplished mind.

But of all this Gwynne knew nothing, and he was dully wondering if a great love could be affected by trifles, and if his brain and character were of less immutable material than he had believed, his mental vision still straying through the insupportable gloom of the past week, when he heard a light foot-fall beyond the door. He sprang to his feet, cursing his nerves, and was by no means reassured upon seeing the long figure of a woman, dressed entirely in white, a candle in her hand, approaching him down the dark corridor. He had never given a moment’s thought in his active life to psychic phenomena, but he was in a state of mind where nothing would have surprised him, and he had turned cold to his finger-tips when a familiar voice reassured him.

“I am not Lady Macbeth,” said Isabel, with a tremor in her own voice, as she entered and blew out the candle. “But I felt like her as I braved the terrors of all those dark corridors and that staircase in my wild desire to talk to a living person. I had arrived at that stage where all your ancestors gibbered at the foot of my bed. Flora has been sleeping with me, but your mother wanted her to-night, and I am deserted.”

“What a lot of babies you are!” Gwynne was delighted to wreak his self-contempt on some one else, but glad of the interruption, and unexpectedly mellowed by the sight of a pretty woman after the red noses and sable plumage of the past week. It was true that he had seen Isabel at dinner, but like Flora she had worn a black gown out of respect to the family woe, and he hated the sight of black.

Now she wore a gown of soft white wool fastened at the throat and waist with a blue ribbon; and even her profile, whose severity he had disapproved, having a masculine weakness for pugs, was softened by the absence of the coils or braids that commonly framed it: her hair hung in one tremendous plait to the heels of her slippers.

“I see that you have no more sleep in you than I have,” he said. “Let us make a night of it.”

It had rained all day and he was suddenly alive to a sense of physical discomfort. He rang and ordered a servant to make a fire and bring the tea-service.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked Isabel, when they were alone again.

“I felt that you were, but I went first to your room and tapped. I was quite capable of waking you up. Thank heaven I summoned the courage to come down. This is delightful.”

The fire was crackling in the grate, the water boiling in the big silver kettle. Isabel made his tea almost black, but diluted her own, lest she should be left alone before she too was ready for sleep.

“You have had a beastly time these last days,” he said, for he was genuinely hospitable. “I am sorry you did not happen to come a month earlier. Have you seen anything of Hexam? He was going on to Arcot.”

“He rode over, or walked over, every day. We should have fallen a prey to melancholy without him, although you may believe me when I assure you that we thought more of you than we did of ourselves. I am your own blood-relation, so I have a right to feel dreadfully sympathetic—may I have a cigarette?”

“What a brick you are to smoke! I don’t mind being sympathized with for a change. I have had to do so much sympathizing with others in the last week that I have not had time to pity myself. Even my mother went to pieces, for she was fond of Zeal, poor old chap, and her conscience scorched her because she was always rather nasty to my grandfather—she likes and dislikes tremendously, you know; although to most people she is merely indifferent. But when she dislikes—” He blew the ashes from the tip of his cigarette with a slight whistling sound.

Flora Thangue had extracted all the particulars of the death and suicide from Lady Victoria—who knew nothing, however, of the tragic cause of both—and imparted them to Isabel, whose mind, in consequence, was free of morbid curiosity. She had also read the newspapers. The speculations and veiled hints of the sensational sheets had not interested her, but she had pondered deeply over leaders in the more dignified organs, which had abounded in comment upon the changed conditions in the meteoric career of the young man who was no longer Elton Gwynne, but a peer of the realm.

“Do you mind it so awfully much?” she asked, after a short silence during which they had both smoked absently and gazed at the fire.

“What?” Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. “Losing two of the four people I cared most for on earth?”

“Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over. You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging from obscurity for the first time.”

The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy. He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled surface of his brain.

Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: “Oh, God! Oh, God!” although his lips were silent.

But she did not change the subject.

“I suppose you haven’t seen the newspapers,” she said. “I cut out all the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career was a greater political tragedy than Parnell’s or Lord Randolph Churchill’s.”

“Do they say that?” asked Gwynne, eagerly. “Well, God knows, it is a tragedy for me.”

“Don’t you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine, possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a title, especially in such a pretty one as yours; and there is no doubt that you are a more imposing figure in the eyes of the world to-day than you were a week ago. Are you really indifferent to that side of it?”

“Am I? One does such a lot of self-posing and self-imposition. There are few things in this world that gratify a man’s vanity more than being a peer of Great Britain, and, no doubt, had I happened to be born without what you might call a fighting ambition, and certain abilities, I should—barring natural grief—feel that I was one of the favorites of destiny—that is to say if I had a commensurate income. The fact that I must let the Abbey and Capheaton, and after portioning off all the unmarried women of the family, shall have barely enough left to keep up my flat in Charles Street, may have something to do with my absence of enthusiasm. But—yes—I am sure of myself!” he burst out. “I am the most miserable man on earth to-night, and the reason is not that I have lost two good friends, but because my career is ruined, broken off in the middle.”

“You could become a militant Liberal peer.”

“Paradoxes don’t happen to appeal to me. And the only chance for a genuine fighter is the House of Commons. Besides, it is impossible for a man to be a peer and remain a true Liberal. Power, and inherited influence, and exalted social position have a deadly insinuation. I don’t believe any man is strong enough to withstand them. There is never an hour that a peer is not reminded of his difference from the mass of humanity; and human nature is too weak to resist complacency in the end—long before the end. And complacency is the premature old age of the brain and character. If this tragedy had not occurred, even if my grandfather had lived on for fifteen years more, as there was every reason to believe he would, I might have gone on that much longer before discovering weak points in my character. Now God knows what I shall develop.”

“Have you made any plans?”

“Plans? I hadn’t faced the situation until you spoke.”

“You have weak spots like other people, of course. You would be a horrid prig if you hadn’t. But you surely must know if your Liberalism is sincere, ingrained. There is no question that you are a hopeless aristocrat in essentials. But so have been certain of America’s greatest patriots—Washington and Hamilton, for instance. I do not see that it matters. One can hold to what seems to me the first principles of advanced civilization—that hereditary monarchy is an insult to self-respecting and enlightened men—without wishing to associate with those that offend grammar and good taste. Education, intellect, breeding, would create an aristocracy among anarchists on a desert island—supposing any possessed them; and in time it would become as intolerant of liberties as if it harked back to the battle of Hastings. There is no plant that grows so rapidly in the human garden as self-superiority, and it is ridiculous only when watered by nothing more excusable than the arbitrary social conditions that exist in the United States. I don’t see that the qualities you have inherited should interfere with your ability to see the justice and rationality of self-government.”

“They do not!” She seemed to beat his thoughts into their old coherent and logical forms. “Whatever may have been the various motives that impelled me into the Liberal party in the beginning, there is no question that I have become even more extreme and single-minded than I have let the world know. Perhaps it is my American blood, although I never thought of that before. At all events, had the time been ripe I should have devoted all the gift for leadership I now possess, and all the power I could build up, to overturning monarchy in this country and establishing a republic. There! I never confessed as much to a living soul, but I think you have bewitched me, for I never have been less—or more—myself!”

“With yourself as President?”

“Sooner or later—the sooner the better. But I waste no time in dreams, my fair cousin—although I have something of a tendency that way. It was enough that I had a great and useful career before me and might have gone into history as the prime factor of the great change.”

“Well, that is over,” said Isabel, conclusively. “There is only one thing left you and that is to come over and be an American.”

“What?” He stared, and then laughed. “Ah!”

“You will have all the fighting you want over there. You will have to work twenty times harder than you ever did here, for your accent, your personality, the thirty years you have lived out of the country you were born in, all will be against you. You will have to be naturalized in spite of your birth—I happen to know of a similar case in my father’s practice—and that will take five years. In those five years you will encounter all the difficulties that strew the way of the foreigner who would gain the confidence of the shrewd American people—they are most characteristic in the small towns and farming districts. You will win because you were born to win, but you will learn for the first time what it is to stand and fight absolutely alone—for if they learn of your exalted birth they will but distrust you the more; and you will taste the sweets of real success for the first time in your life. In spite of your youth and enthusiasm, there is in you a vein of inevitable cynicism, for you have had far too much experience of the flatterer and the toady. You are too honest not to confess that if you had been born John Smith there would have been no editorial comments of any sort upon the tragic end of your relatives, and the great world would have taken as little notice of your abilities until you had compelled its unwilling attention by many more years of hard work. America will take you for exactly what you are and no more. But you will have to become more American than the Americans; although you may continue to say ‘ain’t it’ and ‘it’s me’ and drop your final gs, because those are all the hall-marks of the half-educated in the United States, and will rather help you than otherwise. Of course you will assume charge of your own ranch, for that will not only give you plenty to do, but it will be the quickest way of becoming one of the people; and after you have been out in all weathers for a year or two, turned a dark brown down to your chest, ridden a loping horse on a Mexican saddle, talked politics on street corners and in saloons, left your muddy or dusty wagon once a week at the Rosewater hitching-rail while you transact business in a linen duster, or yellow oil-skin overalls and rubber boots, you will feel so American—Californian, to be exact—that the mere memory of this formal cut-and-dried Old World will fill you with ennui.”

There was a glint of laughter in Gwynne’s eyes, but they were widely open and very bright.

“I see! You are determined to make a convert of me. You began the night of your arrival. I suspect you of having come over on a crusade.”

“That was the moment of inspiration—that first night. I won’t deny that I have thought a great deal about it since—of little else since I read those editorials.”

He leaned back and regarded the sole of his shoe as if it were a familiar. “That is a large order,” he said, in a moment. “Colossal! There might be worse solutions. And the life of a cow-boy, for a while at least—”

“Don’t delude yourself. You would not be the least bit of a cow-boy. You wouldn’t even look picturesque—if you did you might be sorry. You would just be a plain northern California rancher. Of course you would have all the riding you wanted, but there are no round-ups worth speaking of on a ranch the size of Lumalitas. And probably you would continue to let sections of it to men that wanted to raise cattle or horses on a small scale. You had better devote yourself to the dairy and to raising hay and grain, and turn about five hundred acres into a chicken-ranch—nothing pays like that.”

He threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if death and disaster had never been.

“From the English hustings and the greatest parliamentary body the world has ever known to chickens and butter in California! From Capheaton to Rosewater, oil-skin overalls and a linen ‘Duster!’ Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! But give me a comprehensive idea of the place, in your own inimitable unvarnished diction. That will keep the ghosts off, at all events.”