Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 6

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Lord and Lady Hengrave had a house in London and a house in the country. The London house was in Portman Square, a gloomy building originally Adam in style, but entirely redecorated in the reign of William IV. Their house in the country, Bramsley, was in Easthamptonshire.

Lord Hengrave had started life by being a younger son, and had been sent into a cavalry regiment. He had spent some years in India, and while serving there his elder brother died. He was recalled home by the death of his second brother, and found himself the heir of a title, two houses and a considerable amount of property. He was at that time thirty years old. He married, the same year he arrived in England, the fourth daughter of a retired admiral, who came from an old Suffolk stock. He had been extremely hard up all his life, and the allowance that he drew and his pay were just enough to enable him to live in the army. The result was, he was heavily in debt. The debts were paid, but no sooner was he married than fresh debts began to accumulate. He was a gambler by nature, and he played cards for high stakes, but, although he was fond of racing, he never betted on the turf. He had an invincible prejudice against the turf as a business, and maintained that it was not a thing a gentleman could do with clean hands.

He was a staunch Tory, but cared little for politics, and never held any public appointment, with the exception of the Lord-Lieutenancy of the county and for a brief period a minor Court appointment. He was a kind husband, unfaithful with discretion and decorum, and he never let his affections interfere with the even tenor of his life. He was fond of country life and of fox-hunting, fonder still of yachting, and at one time possessed a racing cutter, which he was soon obliged to sell.

During his early married life he spent money quickly and carelessly. He entertained; he yachted; he gambled; he bought; he built. He was fairly cultivated, and fond of old pictures and prints. He liked claret and port, and soon became a martyr to gout, which he treated by drinking more port and cursing the doctors. In his youth he had been extremely good-looking, and he maintained a look of great youth through his middle age and beyond.

There soon came a time, as his family increased, when he realised that he was up to his neck in debt. He mortgaged his property, sold some pictures and some furniture, and gave up yachting. Henceforward his life was a perpetual compromise between excessive expenditure and makeshift arrangements for meeting it. He never ceased to be in debt, and nobody understood how the Hengraves managed to make both ends meet. The simple solution was that they didn't. He gave up gambling, and from time to time, in moments of extreme stress, he sold something. This would have been a satisfactory solution if he had not at the same time increased his expenditure by buying something else.

He was always immaculately dressed, and his clothes looked as if they had grown on him. Lady Hengrave was at home to luncheon every day, even in the days when the financial situation was at its worst, and the food there was always better than that at the houses of other people. Lord Hengrave went to the Derby every year, and to the Omnibus Box at Covent Garden. He rode in Rotten Row in the evening. He always wore a white flower in his buttonhole, and his pocket-handkerchiefs were undemonstratively exquisite.

Lady Hengrave faced the uneasy conditions of her married life with calm and determination. She was well aware of her husband's infidelities and ignored them. She accepted his gambling propensities and his extravagance as she accepted the march of the seasons, and she devoted herself to the task of driving the rickety coach of the family fortunes as safely as possible under the conditions. In her youth she had been greatly admired. She was not tall, but beautifully proportioned; she had a fair, dazzlingly white skin, pale blue eyes, fair hair parted in the middle, determined lines of decision round the mouth and chin, and beautiful sloping shoulders. She was an ideal Winterhalter. As a girl she had been a prominent figure in London, and no party had been thought complete without her. It was expected that she would make an ambitious marriage and become a leader in the political world. Her marriage, which on the face of it, at the time it occurred, was a good one, was thought disappointing. She had been strictly brought up by a violent-tempered father and a Continentally educated mother, who had instilled into her an undying respect for the classics in politics, literature, art and music. Lady Hengrave had no talents; she was neither literary nor artistic, but consciously or unconsciously she handed down to her children the traditions of culture and the respect for the classics in all the arts which she had absorbed in her youth. She was sensible and practical, and accepted life with a shrewd, calm philosophy. She was undemonstrative, and with the exception of Gilbert, a "ne'er-do-weel," and Harry, the youngest boy, was not particularly fond of her children. She disliked children in general, and she had been born grown up. She had certain rigid and inflexible standards which concerned small as well as large matters. Certain things could be done, indeed, must be done, certain opinions accepted, and certain books could be read; others could not. When in talking of two people being engaged to be married she would say that "there was no money," one felt the couple in question had somehow been extinguished. When she would talk of some one being poor, but having pretty daughters, one felt that the daughters were being appraised at their exact market value. If she talked of the books from the circulating library, they were divided into three categories: those which were pretty, well written, and disagreeable. The first two categories were read, must be read; those which belonged to the third category were not to be mentioned. And yet in all this there was nothing snobbish or hypocritical, as people who were used to a different layer and a more liberal atmosphere might have thought, and sometimes did think. It was the result of a certain definite, rigid way of looking at things, which was the direct offspring of the eighteenth century, with its worldly wisdom, its sceptical acceptance of the realities of life and the nature of society, and its horror of enthusiasm.

She had a marvellous memory for the genealogies of all the people she knew, and could trace the correlatives of any family of her acquaintance; she always knew who anybody, who had a legitimate claim to her acquaintance, "had been" before her marriage. Here again there was food for misunderstanding, and those who should think of her as one of Thackeray's snobs, poring over the peerage, would be wrong indeed. Lady Hengrave divided people into those you knew and those you didn't know. The genealogies of those she knew were as familiar to her as the multiplication table. She no more bothered about the rest than she did about the Esquimaux.

The Hengraves had a family of six children. The eldest, Edward, was sent to Eton and Cambridge, whence he passed through the militia into the Brigade of Guards. After one of the financial crises which periodically occurred in the Hengrave family, he left the army and obtained a billet in the City, in which he gave satisfaction. He married an American wife, who, although far from being a millionairess, was well enough off, so the problem of Edward's subsistence was satisfactorily settled.

Very different was the fate of the second son, Gilbert, who was said to be Lady Hengrave's favourite child. He was an attractive, sharp boy, and his parents destined him for the diplomatic service. He passed his examination, but unfortunately he had inherited all his father's gambling propensities, and none of his father's rigid principle in such matters. There was a scandal: he was accused--falsely, some said--of cheating at cards; but although it was doubtful whether he had cheated, it was certain that he had lost over ten thousand pounds, which necessitated the sale of the Bramsley Gobelins. He quarrelled with his father, left for Canada and started life on a ranch. His father and mother never set eyes on him again.

Next to Gilbert came two girls--Julia and Marjorie--and after them came Caryl, who from his earliest years was called C. A younger son, Harry, was born two years after Caryl.

After the third of the financial crises which afflicted the family, the Hengraves lived perhaps a little longer in the country, but their London house was never let, and they always spent some months in London, even before the girls came out. The girls, although quite nice-looking and exceedingly well dressed and neat, had no real beauty, whereas the boys were all of them, in different ways, remarkable for their looks.

The two eldest children were brought up by a series of French and German governesses, none of whom stayed long, as they found the naughtiness of the children to be unendurable, and they all of them prognosticated a sad future for Gilbert. Their souls proved only too prophetic. When the two elder boys went to school, Lady Hengrave abandoned for a time the idea of foreign tuition, and engaged an English governess to live permanently in the house, in whom she thought that at last she had found a treasure, relying on outside classes for their French and German. But the treasure, Miss Meredith, left the family, for reasons of her own, after she had been with them for a year, much to Lady Hengrave's annoyance. She was succeeded at first by an Alsatian, Mademoiselle Walter, who was intelligent and violent-tempered, and combined French logic and German discipline.

The Hengraves always spent Christmas at Bramsley. They would go up to London at the beginning of February and stay there till Easter. For Easter they would go back to Bramsley and after Easter come back to London and stay there till the middle of July, and they would perhaps go down to Bramsley for Whitsuntide. From July onwards they remained at Bramsley, sometimes paying a fleeting visit to London in the month of November.