The du Mauriers, page 19
Sometimes a longing for Paris would come over him, and he would walk down to London Bridge and watch the boat leave for Boulogne, feeling like an exile on an alien shore as the steamer drew away with smoke pouring from her squat funnel. He yearned to break French bread again, tear the burnt brown crust; drink coffee black with chicory; cut a large slice of gruyère cheese. He ached to tread cobblestones once more, idle on the quays, stare up at the white face of Notre-Dame; and, when evening came, listen once more to those elusive Paris murmurs, the stir of life, the little throb of gaiety.
Louis-Mathurin and Ellen began to worry about him. He was silent these days, heavy-browed and pensive, and began to smoke furiously, far more than was good for him. Ellen tried nagging at him, and he looked up at her with puzzled, wistful eyes and made no answer, so that she was forced to desist, disturbed by his expression, and would go off and scold Isabella at her practice in order to relieve herself.
She was disappointed in her children. They lacked drive and concentration. Here was Kicky, supposed to be training for chemistry, and instead of reading up his subject he would wander to the British Museum and try to discover something about the Busson pedigree. This was a new craze, lately come into his head. He declared that the Bussons belonged to the wild wet soil of Brittany, or further inland into Maine or Sarthe—Ellen did not really know; but at any rate he had discovered something in a book at the Museum about a château, and an old Parc Maurier, and was full of it, according to Isabella. He did not say much to his parents. Louis-Mathurin declared he was wasting his time, and was a little annoyed. There was a château somewhere, but he did not think his father had ever lived in it, and why did not Kicky take more interest in science instead of poring over old books in the British Museum?
Isabella, too, was not as serious-minded as Ellen could have wished. She scraped somehow through her lessons, but was constantly going out to tea with her school friends, and chattering nonsense, and thought a great deal more about the colour of a new dress than of practising her piano.
Very different from herself at that age. She had not depended on friends for amusement. Ellen was glad to see that, now Isabella was no longer a little girl, Louis-Mathurin was more severe with her. She was not to go out unaccompanied, and Kicky must take her to and from school. He said he believed in supervision, and strict supervision at that, which Ellen found rather surprising.
She had known, of course, for years that when they were poorer than usual he invariably introduced a little note of pomposity into his relations with everybody. Secretly influenced, perhaps, by Kicky’s researches in the British Museum, he dropped the ‘Busson’ here in Pentonville, and called himself du Maurier.
‘I will not have Miss du Maurier walking in a crocodile like a charity orphan,’ he said magnificently. ‘If Kicky cannot fetch Isabella from school, then I will go myself’; and he would wait sometimes, much to his daughter’s confusion, just outside the school gate, a strange figure in a flapping cape, and, more often than not, sheltering beneath his scarlet umbrella.
‘And pray who is this?’ he would enquire, staring down at a dark, leggy child hanging on to Isabella’s arm, and swinging a satchel of books; and Isabella, blushing for her father’s memory, for she had introduced the child twenty times already, would stammer in reply, ‘Why, papa, this is my great friend Emma Wightwick. Surely you remember?’
‘Miss Wightwick must forgive me,’ he would answer, with exquisite courtesy. ‘In future we will recognise one another.’ And, with a flourish of his red umbrella and a toss of his cape, he would stride away down the street, talking to himself perhaps, while Isabella pattered after him in great embarrassment.
Gyggy, of course, was causing his family the usual worry and concern. Louise wrote from Versailles to say that she had had an interview with Monsieur Froussard as to the boy’s future, and Monsieur Froussard had been perfectly frank with her and told her that her godson was an incorrigible idler and good-for-nothing and so far as he could see he was not fitted for any career. She did not say that the schoolmaster had also told her that the boy was something of a psychological problem, and that his frivolous disposition was probably the result of misunderstanding by his parents. He had a warm, affectionate nature, and nobody had ever responded to it. A careless superficiality was the consequence. Gyggy himself, when questioned, said that there was only one thing he wanted to do, and that was to join the French Army. Neither his father nor his mother cared to have him in England; he quite understood that. They could not afford to keep him, and of course Kicky and Isabella must come first. Therefore let him become a soldier—take service under the Emperor—and he would visit foreign lands and enjoy himself. Louise was very doubtful whether Louis-Mathurin would give his permission, and at first there were violent letters exchanged between London and Versailles.
Louise, with a soft spot in her heart for her godson, was in favour of the scheme. He was fond of horses and the open air, and could join a régiment de chasseurs. She could see no disgrace in it at all. Besides, as his master said, he was fitted for nothing else. His father, on the other hand, declared that no Busson du Maurier had ever been a common trooper, and why should his son lower himself by cleaning officers’ boots and shovelling horses’ dung—which, he insisted, would be Eugène’s portion through life if he joined the Army.
Nonsense, Louise replied, with unusual firmness; there was every chance that Eugène would rise from the ranks and get a commission—men were doing it every day—and then he might attain to the highest position. It was a man’s life, anyway, and would be the best means of developing the boy. She would undertake to spare him a little dividend from her income, and his father and mother need not worry on that account. This letter certainly calmed and mollified the indignation of Louis-Mathurin, and after a few weeks he gave his consent in the following declaration, signed and sealed at the Mansion House:
‘I, the undersigned Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, of 5 Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, City of London [this was his office address] do solemnly and sincerely declare that my son, Alexandre Eugène Busson du Maurier, was born at Brussels, in Belgium, on the ninth of February, 1836, and that he was educated in France at the school of Monsieur Froussard, in Passy. And, giving way to his decided inclination for a military career, I hereby give him my consent and authority to enlist into the service of His Majesty the Emperor of the French Nation.’
So the cheerful, happy-go-lucky, and sadly neglected Gyggy became a chasseur du ligne, for better or worse, and went off to Sarreguemines to join his regiment, his pockets well lined by his considerate godmother, and his new uniform paid for into the bargain.
Ellen sent him two guineas, which she told him she had great difficulty in scraping together, and she said to Louise, in another letter, that she would endeavour to do this from time to time, but he must not depend upon it.
‘If he is steady,’ she said, ‘he will manage very well, and as he now will have to depend entirely on himself, being away from his relations, he will soon leave off his boyish tricks and apply himself earnestly to learning his profession. His first care must be of his health, so that he is strong and fit enough to bear all the hardships that will necessarily come his way. Kicky says that as soon as he makes any money from his chemistry he will make Eugène an allowance, but I very much doubt Kicky ever earning enough to keep himself, let alone his brother.’
Poor, irritable, disillusioned Ellen, why must every one of her letters bear trace of her own disappointment in life? There is a sting on the tail of each, a certain sourness. Those letters of hers, crossed and over-crossed, almost impossible to decipher, penned with a sharp black nib—they betray, every one of them, a sort of mental indigestion, as though there were annoyances buried inside her that would not pass away, but must come forth, now and again, with stale, unpleasing bitterness.
It was almost as if she had a grudge against mankind, and saw her fellow-beings through dark-tinted spectacles. Louis-Mathurin was impossible, no doubt; he had failed her in a hundred different ways—borrowed her money, spent it, and borrowed again. He had fulfilled no early promise; he had achieved nothing. Yet he was the same man who had loved her over twenty years ago, who had won her with his charm, sung to her, cajoled and amused her. He had been tender to her always, faithless never. Eccentric, perhaps, even a little mad—but, then, she knew that when he had stared at her for the first time with his light-blue eyes and sang Schubert’s Serenade as it had never been sung before.
She had been given three children, who were neither more selfish nor more inconsiderate than any other person’s children. Yet she must nag at them, worry at them, intrude upon their young lives with infuriating fingers, prodding the soft spots, scratching the tender places. ‘If Kicky disappoints me, I shall be in despair,’ she told Louise. ‘He has no initiative, no energy. He sits about and dreams. Always a pencil in his hand—and I think of the money wasted on his education.’ But was that perhaps just another excuse on paper? Was a little grain of fear at the back of it all? Kicky was idle; an idle youth became a wasted man, a good-for-nothing, a dilettante. Gyggy had already taken the downward path. Would Kicky go in the same direction? And what about Isabella and her superficial girlish vanities? Would all her children show that same strain of carelessness, that lack of principle, which she had been at such desperate pains to avoid? With a blind, unreasoning fear of heredity she saw her mother as the cause of it all. She looked back to the beginning of the century, back to her own girlhood, and she had only to concentrate a moment on the past and there stood her mother, at the height of her notoriety, smiling her brilliant, superficial smile, throwing morals to the four winds and tearing respectability to shreds. As a child she had perceived the froth and the glamour, but now, a mature woman of fifty-five, she saw nothing but the sordidness, the bargaining, the reckless gamble of her mother’s life. And she shuddered and was afraid.
A gay laugh from Isabella, and she would watch her with suspicion. A witty remark from Kicky, scrawled under one of his disgraceful caricatures, and she heard again her mother’s voice, the quick repartee, the pointed tongue.
You could not fight against heredity; it was too strong for you. Sometimes it strangled you in the end. She thought of Kicky, and Gyggy, and Isabella, and their children, and their children’s children, strolling through life with a shrug of the shoulder and a fluttering eyelid, singing all the summer with a yawn and a laugh, like the grasshopper in the fable, forgetting that winter came, when the sun had gone. She saw her mother pointing at her in derision—‘Poor Ellen, so round-shouldered and plain, that’s why she has never had a sense of humour’—and she was aware of a sense of frustration, of futile anger, whenever she remembered those swimming brown eyes, that high-pitched cackle of laughter.
When George’s letter came at breakfast, in the late autumn of 1852, to say that their mother had died in the night, very suddenly, and was being buried there to-day, in Boulogne, Ellen turned very pale, and said ‘Thank God’ in a funny strangled voice, hardly aware that she had spoken; then she got up and left the table and went out of the room. The letter lay open on her plate. Kicky and Isabella stared at one another, alarmed and a little uncomfortable, and Isabella said, ‘I think mamma cannot be very well,’ and looked anxiously at her father. Louis-Mathurin, who had been reading the financial page of The Times with deep concentration, glanced up vaguely, and perceived for the first time that Ellen had left the room. ‘What is the matter with your mother?’ he began, and then, seeing the letter in George’s handwriting on her plate, he leant over and read the first page.
‘My dearest Ellen,—It is with a sorrowful heart and many tears I take up my pen to write to you this day, but I am confident you will bear the blow with your usual fortitude. Our dear mother has left us. She passed away very suddenly on Friday night, and to the best of our belief she suffered no pain, but went in her sleep. She had been her usual cheerful self during the day, and had even driven out with Georgie and the baby in the afternoon. She complained of a little indigestion before retiring, but as this was usual after her glass of porter, we thought nothing of it. “It is high time we had another party,” she said, as she kissed Georgie and myself good night, and I have no doubt that these were her last words. When her maid went to her about twelve o’clock, as was her custom, with a cordial, she was lying across her bed, still dressed, and breathing heavily. We were summoned, and I went out myself for the doctor, but all of no avail. She never regained consciousness, and was dead by a quarter past three.
‘Georgie is much affected, and has scarcely ceased from crying since the calamity. I fear her grief will affect our little son, as today he has refused his food for the first time. By the time this letter reaches you, my dear Ellen, our mother will have been laid to rest, quite quietly and without ceremony, in the English cemetery here. We will, of course, come over to England and discuss the future, once matters are settled here. I am, as you know, provided for, and with my little pension can support my wife and child. Mother’s annuity is now yours for your lifetime. But more of this when we meet…. I am greatly shocked by what has happened, and can scarcely believe that I shall never hear her laugh again, or hold her dear hand in mine. Memories of our childhood come back to me very forcibly, and it seems but yesterday that you and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the drawing-room window in Tavistock Place, and looked down upon our mother, superbly dressed as usual, stepping into a carriage beside a gentleman—Sir Charles Milner I think it was. And as the carriage bowled away, she looked up at the window, and smiled, and waved her hand to us. Whatever charges have been laid against her, and will continue to be laid, as long as her name is remembered in the pages of old scandals, at least we know, you and I, that she was a good mother, and much of what she did was for our sakes. My regards to Louis and the family, and you may expect to see us soon.
‘Your affectionate brother,
‘GEORGE NOEL CLARKE.’
Louis-Mathurin laid the letter back upon the table, thought for a moment, and then, clearing his throat, addressed his son and daughter:
‘Your grandmother is dead,’ he said, and he hesitated, as though he would make a little speech about her suitable for the occasion, but the situation was too much for him; he murmured something in Latin about the swift passage of life, and then took a pair of scissors from his pocket and cut out a long column from the financial news. He glanced at the clock. If he went to his office in the City right away he would be able to get in touch with Hatton at the Stock Exchange and tell him to place that investment after all….
11
The annuity certainly did make a little difference. Ellen bought new curtains for the sitting-room, and had the dining-room chairs re-covered. She laid in a couple of dress-lengths for herself and Isabella, and instructed the principal at Isabella’s school that in the coming term her daughter would take two lessons in German a week instead of only one. On those days she would also take midday dinner at school. Beyond these small extravagances Ellen did not go. Louis-Mathurin, on the other hand, risked the portion that his wife handed over to him in a wild speculation, that luckily for all of them succeeded to a certain extent. At any rate, it brought in enough ready money for him to install Kicky in a laboratory of his own, close to the office in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury. The laboratory was fitted up in the most expensive style, with water and gas laid on in every possible corner, and bottles, chemical stores, and scales reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Louis-Mathurin was like a child with a new toy. The laboratory was supposed to be a surprise, but from his mysterious hints Kicky suspected what his father was engaged upon, and he would have given anything in the world to be able to say, ‘Papa, dear papa, don’t think me ungrateful, but please believe me when I tell you that you are wasting the money you need so badly. I shall never make a chemist. Not even after this training at University College. I have not the brains. I have not the concentration. Let me do anything but chemistry—go to Australia, join the Army, like Gyggy, sing in the street and beg for coppers….’
He tried to screw up his courage to make some sort of declaration, but when he entered the laboratory for the first time, and saw the trouble that had been taken, the care with which everything had been arranged—this was the reason, then, why papa had been home so seldom in the evenings lately—he had not the heart. His father watched him eagerly, his own face wreathed in smiles, and Kicky turned to him, holding out his hand, deeply touched by all that had been done for him, and said, ‘Papa, I can never repay you for this.’
He wanted to bury his head in his hands, he wanted to cry. His father looked so pleased, so happy, so unbearably pathetic. What would he have done had he known his son hated the laboratory, hated the bottles and the scales, hated everything to do with chemistry?
But Louis-Mathurin suspected nothing. He walked round the room, touching the fittings with a loving hand, caressing them almost; and he began to talk excitedly, violently almost, about some invention for fertilising the land that he would give to the world very shortly. Kicky would help him; they would do this thing together. He broke off in the middle to show Kicky the prospectus he had had especially printed in his name—‘G. L. P. Busson du Maurier’—which stated that assays of ore and analyses of minerals, etc., would be most carefully conducted, and all business of that kind attended to, with great steadiness and dispatch.
‘You wait and see,’ he said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Orders will come pouring in. You will have to refuse many, I have no doubt’; and he left Kicky alone in the laboratory and went off to his own office next door, rubbing his hands in tremendous spirits.
