The World From Rough Stones Page 11

  The slight laughter that joined his guffaw was strained and polite, supplied to spare him the embarrassment of laughing alone. Many turned to Dr. Paine to see how he would choose to respond to so studied an insult.

  His was the soft answer: "You may regret that refusal, Mr. Thornton. There's a great deal of money being made in railroads."

  The parson's unexpected mildness annoyed Claude George III, whose favourite gambit was to provoke anger and show his victim up as a humourless curmudgeon. Now he was unsettled enough to forget himself and to slip back into an earlier habit of open sarcasm: "I hardly think…" he began before he realized where he had been manoeuvred. He could not add, as he had intended, "Walter will be among them as are making it." Instead, he finished lamely, "I hardly think it is for me." And then, to fill the silence, he added: "No, by harry!"

  Walter almost felt sorry for him. "No," he agreed. "Nor me. To make a fortune, one must risk a great deal. I'm afraid my small income will just eke out my salary to give starvation wages for a gentleman."

  "What do they pay a young engineer nowadays?" asked Mr. Keating, the workhouse overseer and a man not noted for his tact. He was there as a tenant of the Thorntons, from whom he held a farm.

  "Around four hundred," Walter said quickly, wanting to confine any embarrassment there to young Claude.

  But raised eyebrows and amused smiles had already alerted Keating to his lapse. "Don't mind my asking," he said, turning redder than wind, sun, and rain had naturally made him. "Know a young fellow wants apprenticing in your line of country."

  "Quite. Not at all…" Walter began before Claude George III cut in.

  "Not bad!" he sneered. "Even a gentleman could live very tolerably on that—as long has he never stuck his nose outside the Lancashire Pennines!"

  This time he laughed alone.

  "Well may you laugh, sir!"

  The company turned to see the young man's father, who had joined the group unnoticed, eyeing his son sternly. "And well may you talk! You lost more than that in two days at Newmarket this spring. So talk on! It's cheaper, by harry!"

  The son's discomposure was now complete. If his father had hoped for such a humiliation, he now gave no sign of satisfaction. Disgust was more like it.

  "Walter," he said in tones that were only a degree more kindly.

  "Yes, uncle Claude."

  "Word with ye."

  There was no smile, no nod, no "excuse me" to the company. He strode off, knowing that Walter would follow; a petty despot in his own small manor.

  But for once, Walter did not follow directly. Instead, he walked across the room to Arabella and squeezed her elbow gently. "Time to change," he said, and basked in her answering smile. Its radiance would bear him up through whatever the elder man might say now; and in half an hour, they'd be gone from here for ever. How often had he thought this day would never come!

  He turned to see Claude George II standing impatiently, stooped to pass beneath the sash window that led out, via the ballroom steps, to the gardens. It was typical of the Thorntons that, having added the ornate steps up to the windows and finding that the five-foot eight-inch gap revealed by the sash window was just negotiable, if one stooped, they decided not to alter the fenestration to allow more generous passage between ballroom and lawns.

  The bright sun had discouraged anyone from leaving the shade indoors, so that Walter and his uncle had the garden to themselves.

  "Silly time to be tellin' you this," the elder said as they reached the gravel path. "But what with all this incompetence in the docks I've been so busy. Oh, I shall burst!" He undid his top flies and breathed out with vast relief. "That's better. God's teeth, it's hot out here! May be a break on the way though. Feels thundery. Are the women followin'? Anyone lookin'?"

  Walter glanced about them casually. "No," he said after a careless search. "Only those gardeners."

  His words merged into the sound of a heavy piddle washing down on the gravel.

  "That's better. I was drownin' inside!" He did up the lower four flies again. "Talkin' of gardeners. Is the young 'un there? Wikes?"

  "The one that lives up by the gatehouse?"

  "That's him. Played a trick on him he'll not forget in a hurry." From the moment the two of them had appeared on the steps, backs were bent inches lower and rakes and scythes flashed a little faster than human anatomy makes natural.

  "Yes. Caught that Wikes mockin' me." They left the gravel to stroll over the lawns. "Imitatin' me to the other outdoor staff. Whole crowd of 'em hootin' with laughter in the pheasant run. Didn't say anythin'. Hah!" His sudden raucous shout made a peacock, which had just broken noisily through a yew hedge nearby, turn around and retrace its steps in feathery alarm. "Let the fella stew till Saturday. Last Saturday, talkin' about. Then said to him—end of the day it was—said to him 'Come with me. Bring your turfin' spade.' Took him down the far end of the avenue."

  His hand pointed over at the limes, matured a century earlier, that stretched in a long ride across the park, between the garden and the woodland away to the west. Fleetingly, Walter thought of the countless fantasies of plague, holocaust, and divine justice that had made him master of this mansion and its acres so many times in these long years now past.

  "Right to the very end. Hard against the woods. Made the fella cut a square foot of sod. Then brought him all the way back, past the house here, right up the long drive to the lodge."

  The engineer in Walter automatically assessed this walk at ten furlongs.

  "All the time, ye see, he's thinkin' Nearer home! Nearer home! Every step nearer home! Ye know how it is when they leave off early on a Saturday. Six o' clock and perhaps a bit of meat waitin' cooked. Heh heh!"

  It suddenly occurred to Walter that his own presence was an excuse, a very flimsy excuse, for his uncle to relive whatever triumph he had wreaked on the wretched gardener.

  "When we got there, I made him cut a square-foot sod from his own lawn and put the one from the avenue in its place. Then"—he dissolved in a cackling fit—"then I told him to take the one from his own lawn all the way back down the drive and all along the avenue and put it where we'd dug the first one up! Should've seen the fella's face! 'And we'll hear no more about Claude George Thornton II and his funny ways,' I told him." And now he hooted and brayed with laughter.

  "He must have been relieved," Walter said when the other was calmer.

  The word startled his uncle. "Relieved! I hope he was greatly put out!"

  "No—I mean not to have been dismissed."

  The bewilderment in the other's face showed that the very thought of dismissal was new. "Oh. Wouldn't dismiss him," he said. "He's one of me own. Been here from birth, young Wikes. Wouldn't dismiss him. Huh! Didn't even consider it. Too softhearted. Like you."

  Inwardly Walter laughed at the comparison. Yet, ungrudgingly, he admitted that thoughts of dismissal (which would have occurred instantly to the third generation) probably had not entered his uncle's mind.

  "I must be going soon, Uncle," he said.

  They had reached the edge of the ha-ha, which separated the lower lawns from the park. Two young red deer, both males, broke from a small dingle of thorn about a hundred and fifty yards away. For a moment both men stood silent in admiration of their grace. Walter had time to observe that one was a two-year-old, a pricket (being a park deer), and the other a three-year-old, a brocket. And, he wondered wryly, what use was such knowledge to a penniless engineer on four hundred a year?

  "Yes," his uncle said at last. "Well—can't put it off any longer. About your trust. Your father left, as you know, fifteen hundred. The interest, reinvested, and the increase in the value of the stock, has made it just over two thousand by now."

  "Oh!" Walter was taken aback. "How splendid!"

  He had known that his uncle had brought him out to talk about the trust; it was the only unfinished business between them. And he had expected that the moment would be postponed as long as possible, for he had been fully convinced that
his relatives had found ways to plunder it over the years. He had expected to be about five hundred pounds poorer, not richer. He looked guardedly at his uncle, who seemed careful not to return the gaze.

  "Point is, me boy—the trust ceases with your marriage. In my view, it should have ceased four years ago when ye came of age. Still. There it is. It's yours now. If ye'll take my advice ye'll leave it in Consols. Good and safe."

  "Very sound advice," Walter said, mentally reserving his offer of a thousand to John Stevenson. "I see I must thank you, Uncle, for your good stewardship."

  The two young deer dropped behind a ridge far out in the park.

  "And, too, for your care all these years," he added. Convention had urged him to say "care and kindness" but the words stuck in his throat, refusing to be uttered.

  "Good of ye to put it that way." Embarrassment made his uncle distant, as if his mind dwelled on weightier matters elsewhere, making present conversation a double burden. "Been dashed difficult at times, of course. I know how badly mine have behaved to ye. But ye've come out of it a fine young man, so mebbe it's the tempering ye needed."

  Twice in the one minute his uncle had shattered all expectation and gone against all precedent; first with the news of the swollen trust, and now with what came as close to an apology as the old tyrant could get. Walter felt the stirrings of something close to pity, almost to warmth; but it was the passing impulse of a generous heart. In cold truth, nothing the old man did now could roll back all those years of indifference and neglect.

  "Well," Walter said noncommittally.

  But the other had still more penance to do and Walter had no power to stop him.

  "Did no more than simple family duty. Be honest. Which is what I really wanted to say. Havin' taken up the duty, bad to drop it halfway."

  "Drop it?" Walter wondered what he could mean.

  "No, no! Should treat ye fully as one of me own. Wish ye were, dammit. But ye see what a fine pickle I'm in."

  Many a time in later life Walter was to suffer from—and see others suffer from—ruthless men who, having had their way and having sustained every crumb of advantage to themselves, would assuage what could only be the most rudimentary conscience with a frank, disarming confession. Thanks to his early exposure at the hands of his uncle, whom he knew and detested so deeply, he was never truly deceived—though, as now, it often paid to pretend as much. Always, he was to observe, the confession and apology would have carried more conviction half way through the rape, instead of at its end.

  "Really, Uncle," he said. "There's not the slightest need now to…"

  "Me younger son's an amiable nincompoop and a prig. Me daughter's an empty-headed hoyden and another prig. And me eldest's a licentious spendthrift and ne'er-do-well…"

  "Oh come now—you're very hard. You take their very worst."

  "Plain truth, sir. Best or worst." Claude George II was determined to run his course. "Plain truth. Point is, if the business is to survive, it'll take all we've saved. Survive me own children, I mean."

  Walter, recovering now from the shock of this unprecedented urge to apology, ventured a small experiment—confronting insincerity with its match. "Oh, Uncle!" he said, with a beatific smile that clearly alarmed the other. "I am more than content. You have given me both home and schooling these ten years. Never once, though the impulse to generosity must have been nigh overwhelming at times, never once did you encourage me into any false assessment of my future station. You gave me a good trade. The best of trades. And my inheritance you have raised by a third—five hundred pounds! Could any orphan nephew ask for more! He would be a monster of ingratitude who did so."

  A crafty gleam of content (how transparent are the single-minded, Walter thought) stole into Claude George II's eye. It was dawning on him how glowing his stewardship could be made to appear—for every word that Walter had said was true. "You're very good, me boy," he said as he put a hand to Walter's shoulder and turned back toward the house.

  Then, to keep alive the illusion of this new-kindled warmth, he bumbled all the way with gratuitous advice—the sort that newlyweds must expect from those long initiated. "Don't ever buy land. Not ornamental land, ye follow. Worst thing me father ever did—buyin' this place off Macky. Gives the ladies ideas. Got ten gardeners here now. It's no good. Very bad for them. Help yourself—keep the money in gilt-edged and the women in a townhouse with a kerchief to water for a garden. The two worst diseases of womanhood? A big vista and a landscape architect."

  Anyone but Walter would have taken him for an affable eccentric.

  Arabella had looked conventionally beautiful in her wedding dress, for it had been her maternal grandmother's, the bishop's wife. How sad, everyone agreed, she had not lived to see her granddaughter wear it. Still, at the appropriate moments on that day, Arabella had brought conventional mist to the eyes, conventional gasps to the throats, and conventional flutters to the hearts of all the appropriate people. In a phrase which that same grandmother had often used, to deflate many a proud parent of a newborn baby among her numerous offspring, it was "another little nonesuch" of a wedding.

  During the endless fittings needed to adapt this heirloom to its latest wearer (though, for its size, tenant would have been an apter word), Arabella's misgivings hardened into a certainty that this gown would never make quite that stunning impression which all brides yearn for on their wedding day. It was unfashionable, heavy, well mended…and it would never hang about her properly, whatever skill was lavished upon it.

  So the real impression, the memory that all would hold of that day of days, was to be reserved for her carriage costume. Never was a dress so designed, sketched, altered, redrawn, stitched, taken apart, and put together again…never were more bows, braids, lace patterns, rosettes, and tassels held against so many silks, cottons, paduasoys, taffetas, velvets, cords, and worsteds—and still deemed unsuitable. Tempers had frayed faster than any cloth in the months that led up to this great day; and more than once her mother, her dressmaker, and even the upstairs maid, had thrown in their hands with despair.

  Nor had the problems ended at that; there was still the question of the proper staging of her entrance in this marvellous costume. Because of the crush of guests, most of them on the Thornton side, it had been agreed to hold the breakfast at Maran Hill, the Thornton's large country house. As a changing room for Arabella, Mrs. Thornton had originally set aside the gun room, which communicated directly with the main hall via a small door beneath the bold, sweeping curve of the grand stair. It had taken months of diplomatic discussion (for one did not argue with a Thornton) to alter these arrangements so that Arabella would change in the first-floor boudoir and make her return down the stair.

  But Arabella's quiet persistence had, in the end, worn through all opposition. And here she stood, in Mrs. Thornton's own pretty little gothick boudoir, smoothing her perfectly smooth hair, puffing out the perfectly puffed-out lace, straightening the perfectly straight seams of the sleeves, and tightening once more the delicate silk gloves, which already fitted her better than an extra skin.

  "Oh miss!" the maid said, forgetting in her excitement—and for the first time since the wedding—to call her madam, "I never seed anybody look 'alf so bootiful!"

  "I thank you, Alice," Arabella said, surprised at the calm of her voice. "Well"—she turned to the dressmaker—"was it worth all the heartaching?"

  And the dressmaker had to allow that it would have been worth double the arguing to see such a picture.

  Until that moment, Arabella's mother and younger sisters, and Walter's cousin Letty, had all been barred from the room in the interests of calm and speed—an arrangement that only her monstrous persistence could have achieved. Now, by way of reward, they were let in for an especial preview.

  Mrs. Paine had already prepared herself to sweep in with outstretched arms and a long tremolo of joyful surprise. In fact she began before the door was open half an inch, and she continued until her eyes fixed on Arabella. Unfortu
nately, the excitement she had prepared was several degrees too insipid for what she now saw. And what she now saw was—as she put it later—a vision of sheer loveliness. It left her standing, arms outstretched, wide-eyed and voiceless. Behind her the double doors swung fully open to reveal her sisters and Letty, equally transfixed in astonishment and admiration.

  Their unfeigned cries of delight when they at last burst into the room and ran toward her told Arabella how right she had been to insist on her own ideas of style and material. With perfect countenance she stood and let them advance to fuss her. And what strange fussing! Though longing to hug her, none dared even to touch for fear of ruffling some part of that perfectly composed ensemble.

  Mrs. Paine, crying, "Oh child! oh child!" circled her as if she were a bonechina fortress, seeking some safe chink where they might make contact. At length, absurdly, she kissed the fingertips of her gloves and smeared them lightly on Arabella's rosy cheeks. Letty, at a greater distance, darted around her like a distraught fowl, eyes brimming with tears, hands clasping and unclasping in repeated transports. She was not as malicious as the comment in Arabella's journal made her seem—only lazy and rather empty-headed (two easily gained attributes for any wealthy girl). She would always do the straightforward thing—be spiteful if spite were called for, or, as now, almost swoon with unaffected delight.