Works of Grant Allen, page 398
He slept well at the Schweitzerhof: why try a worse house? It was his intention to proceed next day to England.
But he would do nothing rash. He would keep his own counsel. As Hubert anticipated, he had reached the secretive stage of insanity. Arrived in London, he would consult a solicitor; till then, not one word would he say to any one. Better lock up the great secret in his own safe breast, till he could trumpet it forth in court— “This woman was unfaithful.” He hugged himself at the prospect of that humiliating disclosure. If Julia got wind of his intention too soon, she might manage to evade him. But he would make his case sure, and then burst upon her like a thunderbolt. Ha, ha, ha, what a triumph! That bastard should never be the heir of Milworth!
He whistled it to himself as he drove and lolled. Bastard! bastard! bastard! bastard!
He lingered on the word. But nature’s bastards, as Hubert knew well, are the children of loveless and ill-assorted unions.
CHAPTER XVII.
AT MILWORTH MANOR.
WHILE the hoary old reprobate was maturing his plans, Hubert and his bride were pursuing theirs quietly. Early in November, the Marchese and Fede sat in Mrs. Egremont’s comfortable drawing-room at Milworth Manor, Devonshire.
“There is no reason,” Hubert had said in Switzerland, “why Fede and I should not be married immediately.”
As for the Marchese, he entirely reciprocated that view. He was quite convinced that, in his own parlance, Fede had got hold of “a good thing” in England. The young man was eligible. But, with a person so apparently capricious and fanciful as Hubert, the Italian preferred to see everything signed, sealed and delivered outright with full legal formalities. “Marry them out of hand,” was his plan for the young people. The wedding, it was arranged, should take place (as Cecco had wisely surmised) at the end of November in London. Meanwhile, the Marchese and Fede were to visit Mrs. Egremont for a fortnight at her home in Devonshire.
The Marchese was by no means disappointed in the property. A Georgian house in a big domain exactly suited him. He stood at the bay window of the square brick mansion, looking down upon the valley of the little stream that ran in esses below, admiring the rich green pastures, dotted with ruddled sheep, and the wedge-shaped glen that opened through red cliffs to the purple sea of the South Hams of Devon.
“Isn’t it lovely, papa,” Fede exclaimed, touching his arm—” this beautiful park, and those glorious old oak trees?”
The Marchese took it all in with a comprehensive glance. “Excellent grass land, my dear,” he answered, “and most valuable timber!”
“And these sweet hills and dales!” Fede cried once more. “And the darling fallow-deer huddled together on the ground under the big horse-chestnuts; and the river that flows in such a curve at the bottom; and the gardens and the lawn! Oh, Hubert, it’s lovely!”
Hubert beamed his joy. “I’m so glad you like it,” he said, smiling. “I was afraid after Italy—”
Fede cut him short. “Oh, no,” she answered, “Italy’s a picture-gallery; but England’s a garden.”
“The river bounds your estate, I suppose, Mrs. Egremont?” the Marchese observed, with an underlying note of interrogation in his voice which meant inquiry as to the exact extent of the Property.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Egremont said, pointing vaguely with one hand toward the hills of the horizon, “we go beyond it, Marchese — to the top of the ridge where you see the red plowed fields there.”
“So?” the Marchese repeated. His respect for the family into which Fede was marrying rose visibly each moment. “And in the other direction?”
“In the other direction,” Hubert said, “we go up to the summit of the down that you came over from the station.”
“Indeed!” the Marchese answered. “A very handsome Property. Fede, my dear, you’ll have room to walk about in, I fancy.”
“Everything’s delicious!” Fede said, enchanted; “the house and grounds, and the dear old red church, and the rookery with the elms, and the winding river. Did you ever see a house so pretty as this, papa? I don’t mean outside — though even outside the creepers make it all so snug and cosy — but this charming hall and this delightful, comfortable English drawingroom?”
“My dear,” the Marchese interposed, “I see in this taste of yours the finger of Providence. It’s lucky you’re going to marry an Englishman, for I’m afraid you’re as English and as insular as any of them.”
“Oh, no,” Fede cried, “you mustn’t say that, papa! I love England, and I love Hubert, and I love you, dear mother, and I love this beautiful place, and I love Oxford; but I won’t forego my birthright of having been born a Florentine. I’m proud of Florence, and proud of Italy; I shall never give up my Italian ancestry. It’s something, after all, to be by descent a Tornabuoni!”
“And I love Italy, Fede,” Hubert answered, “and I love an Italian girl. I don’t think I could have loved her quite so well if she weren’t — well, just what she is, Fede.”
Fede quieted his too demonstrative affection with a look. “Now, papa,” she said, “you haven’t half admired the drawing-room enough. This exquisite Morris paper, and the old brocade curtains, and the Chippendale chairs — are they heirlooms, dear mother?”
Mrs. Egremont smiled. “My ancestors have been here for ten generations, Fede,” she answered, “and almost everything in the house has descended from them — especially the silver and the old oak furniture.”
The Marchese surveyed it all with amused approbation. “And as clean as a new pin,” he interposed—” in spite of its age! It’s only in England one ever gets that delightfully incongruous juxtaposition of antiquity and cleanliness. ’Tis your national passion — next after religious and moral complacency. Most of your people imagine, I believe, that “Cleanliness is next to godliness” comes out of the Bible. They take their own proverb for a text of Scripture.” He was glancing at the bookshelf, where a certain number of poets rubbed shoulders with moral and religious treatises. “A wonderful nation!” he went on, musing. “The Christian Year; The Book of Job — Bradley! In the field of commercial enterprise, nothing succeeds like soap. In literature, the staple industry of your principal writers is the production of tracts. Your greatest artists combine both tastes, and paint alternately Rebekah at the Well and advertisements for Pears. You are a great people! For mixed cleanliness and godliness, there is nobody to touch you!”
The Marchese was remarkable himself for the scrupulous personal neatness of the Italian gentleman, and his delicate white nails and irreproachable shirt-cuffs gave him a right to criticise. Hubert smiled at his strictures; but Sir Emilius, whose distinguishing characteristics were British patriotism and unwaving devotion to the creed of the tub, intervened with an objection. “Look at our sanitation, though, Marchese,” he cried. “The decrease in our death-rate through judicious drainage! Whereas at Naples—”
The Marchese shrugged his shoulders. “At Naples,” he said, “they produce opera and cholera; at Florence, Michael Angelo, typhoid, and Dante. I grant you all you ask. You are the cleanest and the best-drained nation in Europe. I only suggest that main drainage is not everything: to be merely clean does not sum up in itself the whole gospel of perfection.”
Sir Emilius was dumfounded. When a foreigner found anything to criticise in England, he set it down at once to envenomed envy.
Mrs. Egremont interposed to save Sir Emilius’s wounded feelings. “Look at my Botticelli, Marchese,” she said; “that charming Madonna! It’s a sweet thing, isn’t it? You see, we are not wholly given over to Rebekahs!”
The Marchese scanned it attentively. “A school piece, I should say,” he answered after a pause; for he was a bit of a connoisseur: “not a genuine work of the master.” He had more than one specimen of his great countryman’s handicraft on his own walls in Florence.
“I bought it as a Botticelli,” Sir Emilius said warmly, “and gave it to my sister. I believe it’s genuine. I know I paid a genuine price for it.”
Pictures, unfortunately, were the one object on earth for which the Marchese did not accept a money value as ultimate. “Botticelli as imported, perhaps,” he replied, with a smile and a doubtful accent. “The Botticelli of commerce. Not the sort of article we consume in Florence.”
“Why shouldn’t we go out for a stroll in the grounds, Hubert?” Fede put in, apprehensive. “The morning’s so lovely.”
“And yet, I’m sorry you should see Milworth first in November fogs,” Hubert answered, with a darted glance. “It looks so different, you know, when the leaves are on the oaks and the rhododendrons in the shrubbery are one blaze of crimson.”
“If it’s so lovely now,” Fede replied, “I don’t know what it can be in the green and purple of summer. But, indeed, could it be lovelier than the dappled gold of the autumn tints on the beeches, and the blood-red of the maple trees? And those mists over the river, how mysterious they are; how soft! I love the elusiveness of English outlines.”
“Then run and put your hat on, dear,” Mrs. Egremont said, looking at her affectionately. “We’ll take you round the place and show you where all the wild flowers grow in spring. Not even the banks of the Arno in May are lovelier, Fede, than our Milworth woods when the bluebells and primroses carpet the slopes, or when the foxgloves marshal their ranks in great regiments in August.”
The Marchese lingered near the door as if conscious that reparation was due to Sir Emilius. “It’s a most delightful place,” he said; “capital estate, I can see, with good fishing and shooting. After all your English country houses are the cosiest and best-supplied villas in any part of Europe.”
“Eh?” Sir Emilius said hastily, wondering if he had caught so obvious a platitude. “Why, of course they are, Marchese. For show, the Continent’s all very well in its way; but for solid comfort, it’s generally admitted, there’s nothing like England.”
He said it with such British certitude of conviction that the Marchese hardly ventured on the risky repartee, “If only the cooks knew anything of cookery!” For Sir Emilius was one of those true-born Britons who divide the world into two antithetical halves — England and Abroad; believing firmly that the denizens of Abroad, who are called Foreigners, must themselves be conscious of their own vast inferiority to the English people, and must spend their time in deploring the Providence which did not permit them to be born Englishmen. The highest compliment he could pay to any Continental was to say, with warmth, that he was just like an Englishman.
“Cookery,” Sir Emilius repeated, taken aback. “Why, where in Europe can you get a joint of meat such as you get in England?”
“A joint of meat?” the Marchese mused to himself. “Ay, that’s just it: a joint of meat! Your national fetish! Precisely my contention.”
“And our London dinner-parties,” Sir Emilius went on, growing warmer as he proceeded. “The best in the world. What have you to say about our London dinner-parties?”
“Exhibitions of food,” the Marchese replied in a conciliatory tone. “And as such, no doubt, admirable. Material evidences of your national prosperity. The finished form of your famous cattle shows. One shows the raw product, the other the manufactured article. But for cookery, my dear Sir Emilius” — he expanded his palms and raised his shoulders—” excuse my incredulity.”
Fede led him away gently to avoid further complications. The Italian and the Englishman were as oil and vinegar.
“Remarkable the blindness of these Foreigners,” Sir Emilius observed, as the door closed behind them. “Brought up on macaroni, sour wine and frittura, they don’t understand a good piece of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding when they see it! Most singular, really!” And he strolled out into the hall for his hat and umbrella — the latter a talisman which he carried through life with religious exactitude, in no matter what climate.
Hubert and Mrs. Egremont were left alone, awaiting their guests’ return to go out into the park. Just at that moment a servant entered with a card, which he passed to his mistress. Mrs. Egremont took it carelessly from the salver, hardly darting a glance at it. “Who brought it, Reece?” she asked. “Very early to call.” Then the name caught her eye. She changed color at once. But she did not betray herself before the servant. She passed it on to Hubert. Her son glanced at it, and held his breath. “Colonel Walter Egremont.” So he had kept his word! He had followed them to Milworth!
Hubert was equal to the occasion. Above all things, the Tornabuoni must not know of this visit. The Colonel’s apparition in Switzerland had alarmed Fede not a little; if she knew he was at Milworth, it would certainly terrify her.
“Show the gentleman into the library, Reece,” he said, with the utmost calmness. “I will come there to see him.”
The man withdrew to do as he was bid. Mrs. Egremont glanced at Hubert with a face of agony. “Oh, what shall we do?” she cried. “What shall we do? It is my fault, Hubert. I blurted it all out! And now he has followed us, and he will tell all, and disinherit you.”
Hubert rose from his chair, walked slowly across to her, and smoothed her hair with his hand in the gentlest manner. A tinge of gray in those beautiful brown locks made them only prettier and more pathetic. “Dearest mother,” he said, “you need not be afraid. I will take him in hand. He shall not trouble you. Stop here and show Fede and her father round the grounds. Make some excuse for me. I will see him and get rid of him.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
PRIVATE INQUIRY.
ANYBODY who had seen Colonel Egremont in the library at Milworth that morning would hardly have recognized him as the same person who had walked across, in half-ragged clothes, from Goeschenen Station to the Black Eagle in the Rothenthal a few weeks previously. He was dressed in a brand-new tourist tweed suit, a soft felt hat, a clean white shirt, and a collar and cuffs as immaculate as the Marchese’s. Dress makes a marvelous difference, even to such a degraded sot as the Colonel; a week or two in England, a temporary renewal of the disused habit of washing himself daily, and, above all, the consciousness that he was almost the master of Milworth Manor, had wrought an incredible change in the shabby old drunkard. Other circumstances collaborated. Sir Emilius’s five pounds had brought the Colonel safely to London. There, a shady solicitor in low water had been induced, by tempting promises, to take up his case, while a still shadier money-lender (relying on the chance that the wife would pay) had backed it at an extravagant rate of interest for a few pounds of ready money. With the capital thus obtained, the Colonel had proceeded to rig himself out in a suit of clothes fit for a gentleman; and if you had met him in Bond Street in a shiny silk hat and a long black frock coat the day before, you might almost have taken him at first sight for what he had once been — an officer and a gentleman.
Colonel Egremont had not come down to Milworth alone. He brought his suite along with him. As he sat in the library awaiting Hubert’s arrival, he turned to the solemn-looking young man in a respectable black suit who had accompanied him from London.
“Now remember, Fletcher,” he said, in his most impressive voice, gazing at him through the eyeglass, “you come as my valet. Every gentleman of position must have a valet. And I’m not going to stand any damned nonsense in this house, I can tell you. Why doesn’t the young jackanapes hurry up? Eh? eh? Is this the sort of way to treat a person who has borne Her Majesty’s commission?”
The private detective whom he addressed as Fletcher looked at his employer suspiciously. Suspicion is part of the legitimate stock-in-trade of a private detective. It is the armor of the profession. And this particular client was a peculiarly shady one. In the first place, he had not deigned to confide to his employé the nature of the errand upon which he was coming. He merely remarked, with airy generality, that he was going down to Devonshire, and wished to watch a house where his wife was living. “Divorce?” the private detective suggested gently. But the Colonel shook his head with austere disapprobation. “What’s that to you, young fellow!” he said. “You mind your own business.” He had the exaggerated secretiveness of the semi-insane, the private detective fancied; indeed, even to his lawyer and his money-lender he had only confided so much of his suspicions as would enable him to raise the sinews of war for this important expedition. The detective at first more than half suspected some attempt at burglary, and as it is the first duty of every intelligent private inquiry agent to look after Number One, he was prepared to keep a close watch of his own upon the very man who was paying him to keep a close watch upon others. Besides, the employer was clearly more than half mad, so Fletcher also kept an eye upon him as a possible lunatic. Anyhow, there was something to be got out of the job. His chief business was, to draw his salary and to see that his chief got him into no serious trouble.
Hubert did not hurry to go into the library. It was not his policy to flatter Colonel Egremont’s idea of his own importance, or to show such signs of fear as might perhaps be implied by too hasty an entrance, so he loitered purposely. The Colonel fumed and fretted. “Disgraceful, Fletcher, disgraceful!” he said, pacing up and down with uncertain steps, like one who feels his legs after a casual tumble. “I’m the master of this house — the lord of Milworth Manor — and yet, I’m to give way to a whipper-snapper of a boy, who has no more right in the place than you — nor half as much, if it comes to that, for I have brought you here — and he keeps me waiting his pleasure in this abominable fashion. A conceited upstart! A blithering idiot! A cad of an interloper! But I shall make him smart for it.”
