Читать книгу The Fortress - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

Table of Contents

It might be claimed that in spite of all that happened to him afterwards, the most important years of Adam Herries’ life were from 1822 to 1826, from the age of seven to the comparative maturity of eleven.

It was true that the French years and the Watendlath years were important, but it was Mr. Rackstraw who really woke him into active conscious life, and Mr. Rackstraw didn’t come to Uldale until after the riot at the beginning of 1822.

The five years that followed had for Adam three outstandingly influential personalities—his mother, Mr. Rackstraw and John. Looking back, in later years, he sometimes fancied that everything that he did afterwards, all the things that brought him into trouble, all the things that gave him happiness, sprang in reality from those three people. At least, it is true that afterwards one person only was to influence him so deeply, and for two others only was he to care with such strong endurance as he did for his mother and for John Herries. But it was his character that was, in the main, to settle the result of events for him, as it does with all of us. What he was he was partly born, partly formed by people and events, partly fashioned by his own free will.

During those five years he lived, as all small boys do, a kind of under-water life with his own particular anemones, sea-horses, coloured weeds and stones for his absorbed attention. Of the traffic of the waters above his head he knew nothing; it mattered to him not at all, of course, that Mr. Canning, staying with John Gladstone in his Liverpool home, watched a small boy called William Ewart playing on the lawn, or that there was a skirmish at Missolonghi, or that taxation grew ever higher and higher, that men and women cursed the machines that were taking the bread from their mouths, that the word ‘Reform’ was becoming an ever-louder battle-cry on men’s lips. . . .

He was always to have a great capacity for choosing at once the things that would, he thought, be useful to him and rejecting all the rest. From the very first he went his own way, and this independence was the beginning of all his trouble with his mother.

On the first occasion when he went off for a whole day without warning, indeed without word to anyone, he was on his return in the evening, tired, dirty and triumphant, beaten, and by his mother. She could not but remember, as she watched him adjusting his small trousers, the occasion so long ago when David Herries had beaten herself, hating it more than she did. The memory made her catch Adam to her breast and cover his face with kisses, an act of sentimentality that was to be, on the occasions of these punishments, her last. For she saw that he thought poorly of her for relenting, and for a day or two despised her a little.

She fought her first serious battle with him over this affair. He would neither tell her where he had been nor would he promise her not to do it again. For an awful week it seemed to her that her whole relationship with him was broken to pieces, until she discovered that she was now more intimate with him than ever before. For, when she said that she no longer wished to hear where he had been, he told her everything. He had been in the woods beyond Ireby, had had food with a farmer, had stroked a wild dog that everyone else feared, had found birds’ eggs and fought a boy about tying a cat to a log and throwing stones at it. He told her everything and then tried to convey to her that he would always do so, but that he must have his freedom. He was to be always very inarticulate, and when now he found that she did not understand what he wanted, he simply fell into a complete and unyielding silence.

She explained to him that if he really loved her he could not give her anxiety and unhappiness by disappearing without telling anyone first. He wanted to say that if he told anyone he would be prevented from going and that therefore it was plain that no one must be told, but this was too deeply complicated for him, so he said nothing. Then she, the least sentimental of women, descended, in her distress, to the desperate expedient of asking him whether he loved her or no, and he, who loved her with all his being, disliked so profoundly to speak about his feelings that he said nothing at all. He, being seven, was not, of course, aware of his reasons for these things. He simply knew that he was hungry, that his posterior was sore where his mother had struck him, that he hated to be questioned, that he had had a grand day, and that he would go off again in a similar manner as soon as opportunity offered itself.

Judith was a sensible woman and she had an especial talent for understanding other people. This was not ‘other people’ but her own flesh and blood, and, just as forty years ago she had climbed out of the window and ridden away to Uncle Tom Gauntry at Stone Ends, so now her son Adam must also be free.

She did the wisest thing—she left the whole matter to Mr. Rackstraw. This was, in fact, very remarkable on her part, for at this time in England the great parental movement for the proper discipline and benefit of the children was just beginning to achieve force and power. All the children of England were learning to say ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’ to their parents, never to speak before they were spoken to, and to ask questions in the manner of Little Henry—but Judith was never like other people, and their ways would never be hers.

Mr. Rackstraw had from the first a strong influence over Adam. He was a man made up of very striking opposites. In appearance he was a little, wiry fellow with a face like a slumbering coal, red, dusky and shadowed ash-colour. He had a broken nose and sparse sandy hair. No beauty, but with clear bright eyes and a lively mouth. He wore always rough country clothes, his legs were a little bowed, and did he wear a straw in his mouth would have been the perfect hostler. Nevertheless, he was beyond mistake or question a gentleman. His rather sharp voice that would crack in moments of excitement, his eyes, the way that he carried his head, and the fine aristocratic shape of his hands told you that. He was, in fact, of a very good family, the Rackstraws of Rackstraw Manor in Rutlandshire, and his elder brother was Sir Wilfred Rackstraw, 14 Mount Street, London, and some minor official in the Foreign Office. He told you these things if you asked him, said the Rackstraws were poorer than mice, and that he had also a brother a smuggling trader on the Whitehaven coast. Whether this last were so no one ever knew. But he certainly had some very odd friends and some very mixed tastes. There was not a farmer, hostler, stable-man, huntsman, poacher in the district he didn’t know. But he was on social terms too with the County families—the Osmastons, the Derricks, the Tennants. He was an intimate friend of old Miss Pennyfeather, and they cracked jokes continually: he often took a dish of tea with Mr. Southey and, they said, knew as much about his library as he did himself. There was not a cock-fight, a football match, a boxing match that he did not attend, and yet he gave himself nobly to the two boys, John and Adam. His passion was for Homer, and Adam owed that at least—that the Iliad and the Odyssey were to be ever friendly companions to him because of Roger Rackstraw. He had a pretty sense too of the virtues of Virgil, Horace, Thucydides and the Greek dramatists, and could make them live under his fingers. He had a poor opinion of contemporary English Letters, although he said a good word for the Waverley romances and told everyone that there was a young poet, John Keats, who would be remembered. For Mr. Wordsworth he had more praise than was locally considered reasonable, but when alone with a friend confessed that he thought Southey’s poetry ‘fustian.’

However, his great and abiding passion was for this country in which he lived, and it was here that he and Adam had their great meeting-place. He was not a local bumpkin, of course, and his principal charm for Jennifer was that he seemed to have ever at his fingers’ ends all the London gossip. He was always very courteous and tender to Jennifer, as though he felt that she needed protection and guarding. It might be too that she appealed to him, for, over fifty though she was, she was yet beautiful in a sort of tumbling-to-pieces, letting-herself-go fashion, and he would say, to the end of his days, that he never anywhere else saw dark hair and fair complexion to match Jennifer Herries’.

He would sit in the parlour and tell her things, how Brougham after the Queen’s death, defending his not going with the body to Brunswick, had said: ‘It was well known through the whole of the business he had never been much for the Queen’ (and a dirty tyke Brougham was, said Mr. Rackstraw); how Castlereagh’s suicide was because of a pernicious blackmail that he had suffered under, how the King now is become an awful bore and talks about nothing but his old age, how Lady Holland persecuted her guests with her odious cats that were for ever scratching and clawing, how the King was seen somewhere walking with his arm round Canning’s neck, how scarcely anyone went now to Lady Jersey’s parties, and that the gambling saloon in St. James’ Street was the most splendid ever known and that young William Lennox and others were certainly being ruined there. . . .

These were Jennifer’s happiest hours, when lazily sitting before the fire, warming her beautiful hands, she could, without moving, transport herself into a world where indeed she did not wish herself to be, but about whose movements she was never weary of hearing.

Nevertheless, it was to Adam and Judith that Rackstraw was closest. He seemed to understand Judith exactly, submitted to her domination but treated her with a sort of quizzical honesty that she found delightful.

It was Adam, perhaps, whom he really loved, although he never showed him much liking, treated him often with roughness, lost his temper with him completely (and then he would shout and swear like a trooper) and ordered him about when he wished as though the boy were his slave. He understood, however, the child’s passion for independence, and it was he who persuaded Judith to buy him his pony, Benjamin, and never, after one of the boy’s disappearances, did he reproach or punish him. It was the rule, as Adam well understood, that if he went off alone he must be always back again by nightfall. He made, himself, many expeditions with the boy. These were the grandest occasions of Adam’s life. Rackstraw taught him to see the country rightly. It was a country, he said, of clouds and stones. Stone walls, grey clouds, stone-coloured seagulls on dark fields like fragments of white stone, streaks of snow in winter thin cloth of stone, and above these stony crags pinnacles of stone, needles of stone, piercing a stony sky. He learnt to see a small imprisoned valley, wind-swept, as a living thing subject to growth and decay like himself. Through this vale twisted the mountain torrent, fighting with stones, letting its life be dominated by these piling stones that heaped themselves one on another, that fell in showers down the hillside, that at length perhaps choke the life of the stream and form a stony pathway that leads at last to new shapes of grass and moss and fern. The clouds feeding the streams, the streams fighting the stones, life moving ceaselessly from form to form, from pattern to pattern.

He learnt that it was impossible to live in this country, loving it, without having always in his heart the colour and shape of clouds. When, later, the drive of his life carried him to the South, he brought the clouds with him: he was never again to be rid of them. He knew all their patterns, forms and vagaries. He knew the clouds that flew in flags and pinions of flame and smoke over the brow of the hill, driven forward as though by gigantic bellows, he knew the moth-coloured clouds that with soft persistence gathered like great boneless birds around the peak of a hill, he knew the clouds of rose and silver that lay in little companies against a sky of jade in winter above sun-drenched snow, he knew the fierce arrogant clouds of jet and indigo that leapt upon a pale sky and swallowed it, he knew the gay troops of cloud that danced and quivered around the sun, he knew the shining clouds that the moon, orange-ringed, gathered round her on a frosty night when the hoar glittered on the grass and the only sound under the black trees was the chatter of the running streams. The clouds were of themselves reason enough why this country was first for him in the world.

But Rackstraw taught him also detail and reality. He learnt to know ash and oak, birch and thorn, holly and hazel. He knew about the cutting of the coppice woods for firewood and for ‘spills’ and how it was ‘coaled,’ and what was a ‘stander’ and what a ‘yarding,’ and from what woods houses of ‘crucks’ were made, and what ‘dotard’ oaks were. He learnt to know every variety of rain, from the stampede when it comes down like animals rushing a thicket to the murmur and whisper of a hesitating shower. He knew how sudden gusts would come as though someone threw a bucket of water at you, and again how it would be as though you walked down a staircase of rain, catching your breath for a pause, slowing up on the step’s very edge while the water trickled under you.

During those five years he went on many rides with Rackstraw, and sometimes they would be away two nights, sometimes three, and once and again a whole week, he on Benjamin, and Rackstraw on his bony ugly horse Satan. He remembered all that he saw. He had in his heart and brain for evermore the Brathay, set in its circumference of meadowland, the view like a crumpled handkerchief from Pike o’ Stickle, the cold, haunting loneliness of Black Sail, the glassy perfection of Small Water, the fall of screes from Melbreak, the sudden flight of birds so that the sky seemed darkened at Ravenglass, the long stretch of shore pale and lucent towards Whitehaven, the evil cleft of Simon Nick whose ghost seemed ever to be watching from the thin darkness, the great view from Yewdale to the Old Man, the Roman Fort on Hard Knott, the grand silence of Waswater where the Screes, the proudest of all the hills, plunge scornfully into unknown depths—these and hundreds more were to be his companions for ever.

He knew the dalesmen, their wives, sons, daughters, dogs, horses and cows; he knew the Herdwick sheep as though he were one of them. He knew the birds, the golden eagles, soon to be gone for ever, the osprey, the dull heavy kite, the redshanks and larks, the fishing cormorant. He felt like his own the flight of the peregrine, the black-and-white wheatear, and the mocking little cry of the sandpiper as it flitted in front of him along the Lake’s edge. The kingfisher and the moorhen spoke to him, one of rushing water, the other of pools so still that the reflection of a cloud on their surface was like a whisper.

And all the singers—the willow-wren, the chiff-chaff, the blackcap, the whitethroat, the tree-pipit—he mocked and imitated and whistled to.

From all this life there came three lives—one, the life of the outer country; two, the life of his home, the building of Fell House, the village and the moor; three, the personal life with the human beings around him; and from all the events that occurred to him during those five years three were of particular importance. One, the affair at Watendlath, was the matter of a moment—and it was thus.

In all these five years he went over only on three occasions to Watendlath. This abstention was proof of itself of his love for his mother; it was because of her that he did not go more often, for he loved Watendlath more than any other place on earth. Judith never once told him that she did not wish him to go, but he knew from the first that it made her unhappy. Why, he wondered, would she herself never go? She cared for Charlie Watson and the Ritsons and the Perrys. Once, looking out of window and he standing at her side, after some trouble that she had had with Mrs. Quinney, she burst out: ‘Why am I tied here? I am missing my whole life!’ and he knew that she was thinking of Watendlath. She never mentioned the place. Once or twice Charlie Watson rode over to Uldale, but his visits were very brief. He seemed constrained, and even to Adam he was sharp and curt.

It was on the third occasion—a week after Adam’s ninth birthday—that the strange thing happened. It was early autumn, the hills were on fire with colour above the grey stone, the dead bracken flamed, and the Tarn, rocked by a little wind, was scattered with tiny feathery waves. Adam and Mr. Rackstraw had ridden over and stayed the night with the Ritsons. Charlie Watson never appeared, although the Ritsons said that they had told him that Adam was coming. So it was an unsatisfactory visit, for without Watson Watendlath was only half alive. Moreover, even the Ritsons seemed to be not quite so friendly as they had been. Adam, who was quick for a little boy, fancied that they were offended because his mother had not been to see them, and in arms as he always was if he thought that his mother was attacked, he attempted some sort of defence, but only made things the worse, for Alice Perry smiled and said she knew that Mrs. Paris was busy, she had heard that she had much to do: they all called her ‘Madame’ now, she had heard, a kind of foreign way of calling a person, and, of course, were she busy they could not expect her to come all the way to Watendlath, and so on, and so on. Everyone began to speak of other things.

This made Adam angry and he went down, a rather desolate little figure, in the late afternoon to the Tarn alone. The wind had died; mists were rising. The sky that had been cloudless all day was frosty white, and the amber of the hills was fading into dun. Behind him sheep moved, like a concrete part of the dusk, up the slope. He was cold, lonely and disturbed by a sense of having betrayed his mother in coming here. He wanted to go home: he would rather not stay the night in the farm. The Perry boys, although they had known him since he was a baby, were stiff with him. And where was Charlie Watson? Why had he not ridden over? He wanted to go home.

Standing there, looking at the Tarn, he had the sense for the first time (it was to return to him very often) of being outside himself. He could see every movement that he made and he felt that, if that boy threw himself into the Tarn and disappeared, Adam Paris would still be there, nor would he feel any loss. It went so far that he pinched his arm to see whether he were real. Then he threw stones into the Tarn. The noise of the splash echoed in his ears, but even that was unreal—as though someone else, far from himself and having no relation to himself, had thrown the stones.

It was then that directly in front of him, rising from the Tarn, he saw a figure on a white horse. While he looked the figure grew clearer—a man in odd clothes, a black hat, and under the hat a wig. He wore a long, heavy, purple riding-coat, and down one spare thin cheek ran a deep scar. This man was quite clear to him in every detail to the silver buttons on his coat. He was not looking at Adam but away, gravely, up into the hills. Neither horse nor rider made any movement. They were like coloured shapes painted on the mist. Then they vanished. That was his grandfather, who had lived, years ago, below the hills at Rosthwaite. He had talked of him to his mother so often and had asked so many questions about him that he knew exactly how he would look, and in later days he might realise that it was his own imagination, at that moment of loneliness and longing for his mother, that had conjured up the figure.

But now he was only a small boy who believed in ghosts and pixies, warlocks and witches. So for once in his life he took to his heels and ran and ran until he arrived breathless in the warm and lighted kitchen.

He never told anyone of what he thought he had seen, but that night in bed, listening to the snores of Mr. Rackstraw, he was comforted as though he had made a new friend.

The second affair concerned John, and this was one of the most dreadful half-hours of Adam’s life, dreadful because he was not at this time old enough to meet the emotion that he encountered. When mature things break in upon childhood a picture is broken, a view destroyed; the picture and view never quite return.

Adam was nearly ten when this thing happened, and John seventeen and a half.

Their friendship had by now grown so close that they were more than brothers. They had the intimacy with that edge of strangeness and interest belonging to a friendship that has no blood relationship.

John had caught and held Adam in the only way that he could catch and hold him—by demanding his protection. He did not consciously demand it: this had grown out of Adam’s fearlessness and John’s sensitiveness. John was handsome beyond all ordinary standards; he was the best-looking young fellow, it was generally admitted, in the County. He was tall, slender, fair, with a straight carriage and an air of such breeding that when he moved both men and women unconsciously watched him, feeling perhaps that he was of a different strain from the rest of mankind.

When he came into a place he walked haughtily and seemed proud, his head erect, his mouth sternly set, but at once, when he was in contact with another human being, his smile shone out, lighting up his face. His proud carriage sprang from an intolerable shyness that he could never overcome. It was agony to him to meet new people or anyone of whose kindliness he was not sure. At any unfriendliness he flung on instantly an armour of reserve. With the men and women about the place he was in perfect relations; they all loved him and would do anything for him. His beauty seemed to them something rare and wonderful, and when they knew him also to be so gentle and kind they served him without further question. Nevertheless, he was no commander of men; any tale of distress touched him, however false it might be. He believed what he was told, and when he was deceived thought that it was some wrong in himself that had caused the deceit.

It was here that Adam, whom even when he was so young a child he trusted and loved as he trusted and loved none other, protected him. Adam was uncouth and rough beside him. He did not grow more handsome as he grew older. The darkness of his hair, the brown of his face and body, made him seem someone foreign and apart. He wore always the roughest country clothes. He spoke, when he did speak, with a slight Cumberland ‘burr,’ he was often silent when he ought to speak and would look at people with a sort of frown as though he were summing them up. His worst fault was exactly the opposite of John’s, namely, that he suspected everyone until he had proved his case.

It became plain to him soon that John was his charge. In spite of the difference of their ages he was already wiser about the world than John and, because he was not sensitive and because hostility only made him hostile in return and because he was afraid of no one, he was a good bodyguard.

Only one thing at this time came between the two of them. A chance meeting brought them into contact with Uhland, Walter’s son. Adam had long ago decided that Walter Herries was his enemy and the enemy of all those whom he loved. He was not aware, during these years, of the developing battle between Walter Herries and his mother, but he did know that everything round Westaways was enemy country.

The queer thing was that Uhland, who was Adam’s age, never missed an occasion of an encounter with Adam if one were possible. They met but seldom, in the Keswick street, once and again at the Hunt, at a sheep trial, at a running-match: once when Adam was fishing by himself beyond Crosthwaite Church, Uhland, unattended, came limping through the field. He stood looking at Adam, apparently afraid to speak. Adam would have had nothing to do with him, but the boy was lame, his face was pale, he seemed so sickly that it was a wonder he could move at all. So he spoke, and Uhland came and sat beside him. What followed was most uncomfortable, for Uhland sat there, staring out of large protruding eyes, and said nothing.

At last he felt in his jacket and offered Adam a top, a large one coloured green and crimson. Adam did not wish to take it, but Uhland clambered to his feet and went limping away across the field without another word. . . .

Now John had from the very first the strangest fear of Uhland. There was something about his deformity and sickliness that affected him as though the boy had a disease that he could convey to others. He saw him on the rarest occasions, but he was often conscious of him, would, in the middle of the night, think of that leg longer than the other, those protruding eyes, the little body that seemed to be bent by a head too big for it.

Once he burst out passionately to Adam and wished him to promise never to speak to Uhland again.

‘But I don’t speak to him,’ said Adam, astonished.

‘You meet him. He talked to you in Keswick a fortnight back.’

‘He has a horse,’ said Adam irrelevantly. ‘It is called Caesar. It’s coal black with a white star on its forehead.’

‘I tell you,’ John repeated, ‘you are not to talk with him.’

‘Why not?’ asked Adam.

John could not say. The boy and his father hated them, would do them any harm. . . .

But Adam fell into one of his silences. John would not speak to him for days.

Then came this terrible distressing thing.

It came like a door banging on to a silent room. It was in the early summer. Adam had been riding, had shut Benjamin into his box, stroked his nose and talked some nonsense to him, then very happy, whistling out of tune, had wandered into the house. He had a room to himself now, one that he had chosen, an attic with a slanting roof and a fine view over the moor to the slopes of Skiddaw. He and Skiddaw were now on speaking terms, and there was nothing about Skiddaw that Adam didn’t know—or so he thought.

He had but just sat down upon his bed and was thinking of the coach that had passed him with a fine tantivy and a grand cloud of dust from the horses’ hoofs, thinking perhaps that he would like to see the world a bit, when the door opened and John came in. He stood without moving. He had been paying some visit and was dressed very smartly in a claret-coloured coat, the hips and chest padded, a white frill, his dark chestnut trousers strapped under his boots. Adam remembered then that, urged by Judith, John had been to call on some people with a house on the border of Bassenthwaite Lake. They were called Sanderson and were new arrivals in the neighbourhood.

He stood there, his face pale, his lips quivering. He crossed to the bed, sat down by Adam, then to Adam’s horror burst out crying, his head in his hands.

Adam put his arm around him and sat there, not knowing what to do or say. He had never seen John cry before, and that a man should shed tears seemed to him an awful thing.

‘What is it? . . . What’s the matter, John?’ he said at last, his voice a funny broken bass from his emotion. For a long while John, crying desperately, made no answer.

Adam stared out of the window at Skiddaw and watched birds flying slowly, dreamily, across the faint glassy sky.

‘This is what it is . . .’ John caught Adam’s hand. ‘My mother——’ He hesitated, then the words poured out of him. ‘I had visited the Sandersons. Young Robert Sanderson was there. He is a friend of Cousin Walter’s, and I could not abide him from the first. He was affronted by something I had said in the house about the Catholics in Ireland, that the Catholic laws were monstrous and that we should have shame for our treatment of Ireland. . . . He answered hotly, and when I left came out with me to my horse. He sneered at something I said. You know how it is—I hate a quarrel. I answered him gently, and then he said something about the fine man Cousin Walter was, and that by what he had heard Fell House here should be his. That was too much for me and I called Cousin Walter what he is—a damnable blackguard. Then Sanderson told me . . . he said . . . he said it was common knowledge that because my mother had been a man’s mistress here and because my father had found them together, therefore my father had killed himself in London. Because my father had been a coward and allowed that man to come to this house, to sleep here . . . he knew of it. The whole world knew . . . I struck Sanderson in the face—and I rode away.’

Telling his story had calmed him. He caught his breath. His face now was as white as a peeled stick, his body trembled, but he wept no longer.

‘Everyone knows—has known for years. Only I didn’t know. . . .’

They were quiet for a long time. Adam’s hand tightened on John’s. He could not bear to feel John’s body tremble. He longed to do anything for him, to rush out and trample on Sanderson, to burn Uncle Walter’s house down, to . . . Oh! he knew not what! But he could neither do anything nor say anything. He was not ignorant, young though he was. He knew—in a child’s way—about men and women, without feeling that all those things, the making of love, the birth of children, were real in a real world. But he understood that this was a disgraceful and terrible thing. Nevertheless his own active feelings were those of rage against Sanderson and a passionate instinct to defend John.

He said at last in a husky voice:

‘I expect he’s a liar. They are all liars, friends of Uncle Walter’s.’

‘No—it’s true. . . . I have known for a long while that mother was afraid, afraid of everything, of Cousin Walter and people in Keswick—and that my father had shot himself in London, but this. . . .’

Then he added, still shivering as though with an intense cold:

‘I must fight Sanderson.’

‘Yes, you must kill him,’ Adam answered eagerly. Here was something that he could do. ‘Mr. Rackstraw shall help us.’

‘Cousin Walter put him on to this. I know he did. Everything we do, everywhere we go, Walter Herries is at our back. Oh, God, if I could do him an injury for all he’s done to us! And now I know. I know why he has so much power over us, why my mother fears him as she does. . . . My father was a coward, my mother. . . .’

He stopped.

‘Adam, you must speak of this to no one. We will settle Sanderson’s affair ourselves. But that everyone should know, that they have known for years. . . .’

Adam said, nodding his head:

‘If it’s pistols, John, you can kill him. Mr. Rackstraw says you’re the best shot with a pistol for your age in Cumberland. We’ll practise in the barn. We’ll go now. . . .’

But nothing came of it then. They learnt that young Sanderson had gone South. He never answered John’s letter, and later, joining his regiment, went abroad. The consequences were not so easily settled. After that summer afternoon nothing was the same again.

Adam’s third affair concerned his mother.

As those years passed, Judith dominated Fell House and its neighbourhood ever more completely.

When Adam was eleven, in 1826, Judith was nearly fifty-two. Now fifty-two was considered in those days a great age for a woman. There were old women like Mrs. Tennant of Ireby who were old women, sat in a chair and had the air of prophetesses. There were old women like Mrs. Summerson in Keswick who played cards night and day but were nevertheless old women. There were old women like Mrs. Clare of Portinscale who rode to hounds, cursed and swore, drank and gambled, chaffed with the stable-boys, but were still old women. Judith Paris was unique. After settling in command at Fell House she seemed with every month to grow younger. Her body, taut, neat, active, appeared not to know fatigue. Her hair, once so lovely an auburn, was now grey, her face, always pale in colour (and she would use no paint as most of the older women did), knew no wrinkle. She rode a horse like a commander. She was austere and direct when about her business, but she could behave suddenly like a girl. She went to dances, card-parties, hunts, balls in Keswick. She was known everywhere as ‘Madame,’ famous for her kindness, her sharp and direct speech, her common sense. She had not changed in her impulsiveness, her attention to business, her loyalty, her childish pleasure in little things. Only those who knew her well were aware that something she had had was now, to all appearance, gone. It might be dead, it might be hidden. Miss Pennyfeather in Keswick knew, Jennifer unperceptively was aware. . . . Jennifer said that Judith was no longer romantic.

Another thing that everyone knew about her was that she was ‘mad’ about her boy. Of course the boy was illegitimate, although everyone could name his father, but his illegitimacy and the fact that Judith herself was the daughter of old ‘Rogue’ Herries (now a legend: they said that his ghost ‘walked’ in Borrowdale) and a gipsy, made the mother and son something apart. ‘Madame’ was becoming a legend like her father. Every kind of tale was told of her. When she came into a room people stared and whispered. But they invited her, they admired her; she was a ‘character’ and did the neighbourhood a sort of credit.

We are in part what our friends and neighbours make us and, unconsciously, Judith began at this time to respond to the demand for her to be ‘queer.’ Her dress was a little extravagant. Her skirts were very full in the Dutch fashion. She liked gay colours and was often seen in a shawl of red cashmere. She had hats of fine straw worn over a lace cap—far too young for another of her age, but in some way not ridiculous for her. Her turbans of figured gauze at an evening party were magnificent. She already carried the cane of white ivory that was, later, to be so famous. People in Keswick said, ‘Madame is coming,’ and gathered at shop doors and windows to look.

She ruled everyone in Fell House save her son Adam. It was at the beginning of his twelfth year that she put her power over him to the test and failed. This occasion was one of the great crises that marked his boyhood.

No one knew with what passionate emotion she loved this child. Everything else that was dear to her she had surrendered—save her love of power and her love of her son. As he grew her feeling for him developed into a mingling of love, admiration and exasperation. She had always wished for him to be independent and apart from other boys. His father, poor Warren, had had but too little character. Adam seemed to have no resemblance at all to his father; he was his mother and then himself as well. He reminded her continually of what she had been as a child, and it was a curious irony that she should so often feel the same bewilderment and irritation in dealing with him felt long ago by David and Sarah Herries about herself. She learnt, very soon in their relationship, that he hated any kind of demonstration. Did he love her or did he not? She knew that he did, and with all his heart, but any expression of affection silenced and removed him. But he must obey her. When she had surrendered her domination of his movements (no one knew what this cost her) she consoled herself with the right to order him in all other ways.

The exercise of power grows with what it feeds on. People succumbed to her so easily that she came to expect it as her right. Adam always obeyed her when he felt that her demand was just. She had one thing more to learn—that, if he thought her unjust, he was quite beyond her power.

The incident had minute beginnings. One fine morning she had driven with Adam in the chaise to Keswick. Mr. Carrick the haberdasher came on to the pavement to receive her orders, and after he was gone, before she could move forward, tiresome old Major Bellenden must limp forward and, his wide-brimmed hat gallantly in hand (although the day was cold), commence one of his interminable conversations. Major Bellenden, who lived alone on the road to Threlkeld, was a purple-faced old bachelor, tyrannised over by a peevish man-servant. He had served abroad, knew the East, had had an amusing adventure or two, but all these were swallowed up by the fact that he had been actually present at the famous performance on the 13th of February 1820 at the Paris Opera of Le Carnaval de Venise when the Duc de Berry had been assassinated. Nay, more, he had by a lucky chance left the Opera for a moment and returned at the very instant when Louvel planted his dagger ‘up to the hilt,’ had heard the Duke cry ‘What a ruffian!’ and then ‘I have been murdered!’ Later, he had listened to the screams of pain that came from the poor Duke as Dupuytren probed the wound, had seen Decazes enter to examine the murderer, and best of all had even been witness of Louis XVIII. himself as, tossed about between the banisters of the stairs and the wall, they had tried to push his chair that he might get to the Duke. He told over and over again how the Duke, dying, raised himself and said: ‘Forgive me, dear Uncle, forgive me’; and Louis answered: ‘There is no hurry, dear Nephew. We will talk later about this.’ And then how, at the very last, when the Duchess was filling the room with her lamentations, the Duke said: ‘My dearest, control yourself for the sake of our child,’ and so gave France the first news that there would be an heir to the Bourbons. . . .

So often had the Major told this very long story with all the details of it exactly repeated, that the Duc de Berry’s assassination seemed to many persons to have occurred in Keswick. However, ‘The Old Bore and his Murder’ was the general summary of Major Bellenden.

It chanced that on this very morning the Major mentioned his Duke. Some remark of Judith’s about the weather reminded him. ‘It was weather like this . . . that horrid affair of the Duc de Berry, of which I expect I have told you . . .,’ and looking up caught young Adam smiling at him in a very irritating manner. Adam had heard his mother in her lighter moments, imitating the Major: ‘I had my foot on the stair . . . Louvel must have brushed my arm . . .’ and giving then the very half-choked, half-important guffaw that was the Major’s.

Adam smiled, and the Major saw him smiling. His mother also saw him. The Major was deeply hurt and went limping away.

During the drive homewards Judith scolded him, speaking of reverence to age, of impertinence and other kindred matters.

‘But, Mama, you yourself laughed. . . .’

‘Not to his face. That is bad manners.’

‘I am sorry, Mama. Look, there is Mr. Southey with——’

‘Now listen, Adam. You are to listen. You must apologise to the Major.’

Adam sat grimly silent. Of all things in the world he hated most to apologise. The matter might on an ordinary day have stopped there, but Judith had been irritated by a number of small things, by the failure of Miss Pritchett, the little dressmaker whom she patronised, to have a dress ready; by Mrs. Quinney’s cold; by the customary sluggishness of Jennifer.

So she pursued it.

‘Promise me, then, that you will apologise.’

Adam said nothing. He sat there, his mouth pursed in an exasperating manner.

‘Promise me that you will apologise.’

At last he murmured:

‘It is unfair, Mama. You yourself laugh at him.’

‘That is different. He was not present.’

Then again, as the chaise drew slowly up the hill to the village:

‘Say that you will apologise.’

No answer.

‘Well, then, I must punish you.’

Adam was enclosed in his attic for the rest of the day without food.

In the evening Judith came in to him, her head held high, her heart aching with love. She had been quite wretched all the afternoon. She had realised with a pain that was deeper than any emotion felt by her for many days that without Adam there was nothing. All this business of defying Walter, of managing the house, the servants, Jennifer, of corresponding with various Herries all over the country, of visiting and dining and being sociable—it was all nothing, nothing at all without Adam. She had loved her husband, she loved Adam. There was nothing else. And with a sudden shudder, as though a hateful wrinkled hag in a bonnet had bowed to her in the glass, she saw her old age, of which until now she had scarcely thought—her old age, empty, ugly and cruel.

She came into his room and found him standing looking out of the window, just as, centuries ago, she had stood at her window when David was to beat her. He did not turn. She put her hand on his shoulder. She was, not by much, taller than he, but when he turned her heart leapt, for he was so lovely to her, so utterly her own, so proud and so strong, just as she would have him be.

But he was relentless—and he was utterly beyond her reach. She said something. She asked him to come downstairs. No, he would not come down. Did he not see that he was wrong, that he had hurt the feelings of an old man, that it was proper to offer an apology when one had shown bad manners?

‘I did not show bad manners,’ Adam said, not looking at her.

She did not know it, but he himself was terrified—terrified at this resentment that he felt to her, his rebellion as though he were fighting for something very serious and important. He had never felt like this to her before. He almost hated her.

‘Well, then, you will see it later on. You will see that I am right. Come down now and we will not speak of it.’

But it could not be settled in that way. His dreadful silence which he himself hated dominated him. She put her arm around his neck.

‘Come, Adam.’

He dragged himself away from her and went back to the window, looking out. That infuriated her and she surrendered to one of her old tempests of passion. She stormed and stamped her feet. He was ungrateful, hard, unloving, disobedient. She had done everything for him, and thus he repaid her. Well, he should see. She was not to be insulted by a child. He should be beaten. Maybe that would teach him. . . .

‘Beat me,’ he said, turning round upon her.

They looked at one another, each with hatred. The look was so terrible, so new, so far from anything that either of them had thought possible, that in another moment they would have been in one another’s arms.

But she did nothing, said nothing, and after a moment left the room.

When she had gone he sat, swinging his legs, the unhappiest boy in the United Kingdom.