Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 14

Table of Contents

Brent wondered how his grandfather would take it. He must tell him now—it was going to be jolly hard. He ought to have said it long ago. But somehow he hadn’t realised it himself until the last half. Lord! it was going to be stiffer than that last five minutes in the Wall Game.

The first syllable of his surname was the only gay thing there was or ever had been about Sir Raymond. He had been a solemn baby, a grave child, a strenuous soldier from Sandhurst to Whitehall, to retirement and austere old age. But it was whispered in the servants’-hall that the stern, unbending, ungenial man was wax in “Master Brent’s” young hands. But that was as may be, for it never had been tested. Whatever the other servants suspected and gossiped, Topham, the white-haired butler, knew that Sir Raymond loved the grandson fiercely and not less tenderly.

Topham probably knew Sir Raymond better than anyone else now living did.

Topham had not been born to “service.” He had succumbed to it painfully. He had been born at Aldershot in “married quarters,” had been a drummer boy before he was young Raymond Gayford’s batman. He had risen step by step to sergeant-major. He had and cherished no mean line of medals. The bravest thing he ever had done was becoming a house-servant, forcing himself to become an efficient and impeccable butler.

Topham had signalled a footman to remove the cloth, and had placed the excellent port at Sir Raymond’s right hand. Then Topham noiselessly left the dining-room.

The General filled his port glass and pushed the decanter towards Brent.

The Priory dining-room might have been beautiful and was ugly. It was in scrupulous order. Topham saw to that. If Topham had not, the General, attached as he was to Topham, would have sacked him. The dark, massive furniture would have brought two or three thousand pounds at Christie’s. Cut glass sparkled on the table and on the sideboard. The silver, of different periods, all was splendid. The six life-sized portraits were too fine to be greatly injured by their ponderous, preposterous, costly ornate frames; one was a Raeburn, two were Lelys; and the dead Gayfords whom they pictured all had been more than good-looking. But the big room was all wrong. There were no softened, shaded candles on the table; three lustre chandeliers, beautiful in themselves, were too large even for the large room; and hung too high; they were fully lit, and poured a garish blaze of light down on all the room, showing and intensifying every one of its defects. The room needed the charity of soft lighting, it needed the right flowers and laughter. There were flowers on the table—Topham had selected and arranged them—and they were the unkindest cut of all in the ill-used room. There were four kinds of fruit on the table, arranged and placed with military precision by Topham. When Raymond Gayford had brought his bride home to the Priory the dining-room curtains, hangings, chair-upholsterings, the rugs and wallpaper had been a soft, lovely rose. All had faded now. Being of different textures they had faded into clashing shades of sick mauves and hideous pink-purple greys. Brent’s mother had longed to replace them all. But no one could have dared ask Sir Raymond to discard what had been put here for his bride’s homecoming. He had been her lover to their end, and when she left him after more than twenty years he never had known that her eyes were a trifle dimmer, the gold a little faded in her hair.

It was an ugly room, and every year would see it uglier, unless some day Brent Gayford brought a bride home to direct Topham, and to coax the General into lovelier ways.

But the Gayfords canvased on the faded walls were good to look at, and so were the two Gayfords sitting with the port decanter between them; tall, well built, clear eyed, clean featured, direct of glance.

They were not altogether unlike. Both were soldierly. Brent’s brown eyes had a quick trick of Sir Raymond’s blue ones. Their small ears set flat against heads of almost identical shape. Both had strong, well-kept, athletic hands. The man’s fingers were square cut at the ends, his thumbs were wide and heavy, his dull nails were flat and square. The boy’s slender fingers were well cushioned, his thumbs were shaped and proportioned to match them, his bright rounded nails were rosy. Raymond Gayford’s hands were a soldier’s; Brent Gayford’s were an artist’s. But the younger hands were as sturdy as they were fine and beautiful.

Both faces were proud and strong. Brent’s had a wistful sweetness that the General’s lacked, and a fuller, more sensitive mouth.

The General gestured the grandson to fill his glass.

“I envy you, my boy. You have the best life in the world before you—the only life for a Gayford. And I know you’ll honour it—all the Gayfords have. And all the Brents, too,” he added hastily. “You’ll pull through at Sandhurst, as you did at Eton. Nobody wants you to do more than that. Got to go through Sandhurst, of course. And you’ll have a damned good time there. But his regiment is an officer’s only school—the only school that ever teaches him anything. Active service is better still. You’ll have a better time after you get your commission, in your regiment, than you will have at Sandhurst, and—as I have said—you’ll have a damned good time at Sandhurst.”

“I can’t go to Sandhurst, sir.”

“Huh?”

“I never can be a soldier.”

Brent expected an explosion, and was confident that it would be a terrific one.

General Gayford only blinked at him through sharp old eyes that suddenly had grown dull and fish-like. If his ears had heard the boy’s words, his mind had not. But presently as the boy spoke on, determined to get his message through now that he had nerved himself to broach it, Sir Raymond began to understand dimly, dully.

Brent told it all. He must live by music, as he lived in music. The old man’s lips trembled before they curled. He could not apply for a commission, or accept one if it were offered him. If war came again, a great war, more than the regular army and the navy could cope with, if ever England were invaded—the General spluttered an ugly laugh—he would volunteer. He would fight for England in her need—Sir Raymond sneered—but he could not go to Sandhurst. He was going to be a musician—because he must.

General Gayford reached for the decanter to refill his empty glass. It hurt Brent to see the man’s hand shake. Sir Raymond poured the wine, missing the glass; the port ran in pools and trickles of ruby on the clothless table. The man’s face flared redder than the wine, then went corpse-white. He rose up stiffly and went not too steadily from the room. Brent dared not follow. He rang for a footman to wipe the wine from the table, and went out into the garden.

Brent Gayford’s heart was heavy. His young throat ached.

Was it worth it? Could he persist? Hurt his grandfather almost to the death? To the death, perhaps! He had seen and sensed what the General was suffering; half had expected him to fall when he rose jerkily from his chair.

Was music worth it? All the music in the world worth it? Did he have to make music? He could hear it—good music—at least sometimes. He could play a little now and then. Who was he, what was music, that he should sacrifice the fine old fellow who always, in his own soldier-way, had been mother-good to him, an old, old man whose all he was?

It was morning when Brent Gayford slipped back into the house, up to his own rooms, and filled his bath.

But he knew.

And he was suffering less than the grandfather was, only because youth cannot experience the torture of age defeated.