The Rough Road

In Durdlebury he began to feel himself appreciated. The sleepy society of the place accepted him as a young man of unquestionable birth and irreproachable morals. He could play the piano, the harp, the viola, the flute, and the clarinet, and sing a very true mild tenor. As secretary of the Durdlebury Musical Association, he filled an important position in the town. Dr. Flint – Joshua Flint, Mus. Doc. – organist of the cathedral, scattered broadcast golden opinions of Doggie. There was once a concert of old English music, which the dramatic critics of the great newspapers attended – and one of them mentioned Doggie – “Mr. Marmaduke Trevor, who played the viol da gamba as to the manner born.” Doggie cut out the notice, framed it, and stuck it up in his peacock and ivory sitting-room.

Besides music, Doggie had other social accomplishments. He could dance. He could escort young ladies home of nights. Not a dragon in Durdlebury would not have trusted Doggie with untold daughters. With women, old and young, he had no shynesses. He had been bred among them, understood their purely feminine interests, and instinctively took their point of view. On his visits to London, he could be entrusted with commissions. He could choose the exact shade of silk for a drawing-room sofa cushion, and had an unerring taste in the selection of wedding presents. Young men, other than budding ecclesiastical dignitaries, were rare in Durdlebury, and Doggie had little to fear from the competition of coarser masculine natures. In a word, Doggie was popular.

Although of no mean or revengeful nature, he was human enough to feel a little malicious satisfaction when it was proved to Durdlebury that Oliver had gone to the devil. His Aunt Sarah, Mrs. Manningtree, had died midway in the Phineas McPhail period; Mr. Manningtree a year or so later had accepted a living in the North of England, and died when Doggie was about four-and-twenty. Meanwhile Oliver, who had been withdrawn young from Rugby, where he had been a thorn in the side of the authorities, and had been pinned like a cockchafer to a desk in a family counting-house in Lothbury, E.C., had broken loose, quarrelled with his father, gone off with paternal malediction and a maternal heritage of a thousand pounds to California, and was lost to the family ken. When a man does not write to his family, what explanation can there be save that he is ashamed to do so? Oliver was ashamed of himself. He had taken to desperate courses. He was an outlaw. He had gone to the devil. His name was rarely mentioned in Durdlebury – to Marmaduke Trevor’s very great and catlike satisfaction. Only to the Dean’s ripe and kindly wisdom was his name not utterly anathema.

“My dear,” said he once to his wife, who was deploring her nephew’s character and fate – “I have hopes of Oliver even yet. A man must have something of the devil in him if he wants to drive the devil out.”

Mrs. Conover was shocked. “My dear Edward!” she cried.

“My dear Sophia,” said he, with a twinkle in his mild blue eyes that had puzzled her from the day when he first put a decorous arm round her waist. “My dear Sophia, if you knew what a ding-dong scrap of fiends went on inside me before I could bring myself to vow to be a virtuous milk-and-water parson, your hair, which is as long and beautiful as ever, would stand up straight on end.”

Mrs. Conover sighed.

“I give you up.”

“It’s too late,” said the Dean.

The Manningtrees, father and mother and son, were gone. Doggie bore the triple loss with equanimity. Then Peggy Conover, hitherto under the eclipse of boarding-schools, finishing schools and foreign travel, swam, at the age of twenty, within his orbit. When first they met, after a year’s absence, she very gracefully withered the symptoms of the cousinly kiss, to which they had been accustomed all their lives, by stretching out a long, frank, and defensive arm. Perhaps if she had allowed the salute, there would have been an end of the matter. But there came the phenomenon which, unless she was a minx of craft and subtlety, she did not anticipate; for the first time in his life he was possessed of a crazy desire to kiss her. Doggie fell in love. It was not a wild consuming passion. He slept well, he ate well, and he played the flute without a sigh causing him to blow discordantly into the holes of the instrument. Peggy vowing that she would not marry a parson, he had no rivals. He knew not even the pinpricks of jealousy. Peggy liked him. At first she delighted in him as in a new and animated toy. She could pull strings and the figure worked amazingly and amusingly. He proved himself to be a useful toy, too. He was at her beck all day long. He ran on errands, he fetched and carried. Peggy realized blissfully that she owned him. He haunted the Deanery.

One evening after dinner the Dean said:

“I am going to play the heavy father. How are things between you and Peggy?”

Marmaduke, taken unawares, reddened violently. He murmured that he didn’t know.

“You ought to,” said the Dean. “When a young man converts himself into a girl’s shadow, even although he is her cousin and has been brought up with her from childhood, people begin to gossip. They gossip even within the august precincts of a stately cathedral.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Marmaduke. “I’ve had the very best intentions.”

The Dean smiled.

“What were they?”

“To make her like me a little,” replied Marmaduke. Then, feeling that the Dean was kindly disposed, he blurted out awkwardly: “I hoped that one day I might ask her to marry me.”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” said the Dean.

“You haven’t done it yet?”

“No,” said Marmaduke.

“Why don’t you?”

“It seems taking such a liberty,” replied Marmaduke.

The Dean laughed. “Well, I’m not going to do it for you. My chief desire is to regularize the present situation. I can’t have you two running about together all day and every day. If you like to ask Peggy, you have my permission and her mother’s.”

“Thank you, Uncle Edward,” said Marmaduke.

“Let us join the ladies,” said the Dean.

In the drawing-room the Dean exchanged glances with his wife. She saw that he had done as he had been bidden. Marmaduke was not an ideal husband for a brisk, pleasure-loving modern young woman. But where was another husband to come from? Peggy had banned the Church. Marmaduke was wealthy, sound in health and free from vice. It was obvious to maternal eyes that he was in love with Peggy. According to the Dean, if he wasn’t, he oughtn’t to be for ever at her heels. The young woman herself seemed to take considerable pleasure in his company. If she cared nothing for him, she was acting in a reprehensible manner. So the Dean had been deputed to sound Marmaduke.

Half an hour later the young people were left alone. First the Dean went to his study. Then Mrs. Conover departed to write letters. Marmaduke advancing across the room from the door which he had opened, met Peggy’s mocking eyes as she stood on the hearthrug with her hands behind her back. Doggie felt very uncomfortable. Never had he said a word to her in betrayal of his feelings. He had a vague idea that propriety required a young man to get through some wooing before asking a girl to marry him. To ask first and woo afterwards seemed putting the cart before the horse. But how to woo that remarkably cool and collected young person standing there, passed his wit.

“Well,” she said, “the dear old birds seem very fussy to-night. What’s the matter?” And as he said nothing, but stood confused with his hands in his pockets, she went on. “You, too, seem rather ruffled. Look at your hair.”

Doggie, turning to a mirror, perceived that an agitated hand had disturbed the symmetry of his sleek black hair, brushed without a parting away from the forehead over his head. Hastily he smoothed down the cockatoo-like crest.

“I’ve been talking to your father, Peggy.”

“Have you really?” she said with a laugh.

Marmaduke summoned his courage.

“He told me I might ask you to marry me,” he said.

“Do you want to?”

“Of course I do,” he declared.

“Then why not do it?”

But before he could answer, she clapped her hands on his shoulders, and shook him, and laughed out loud.

“Oh, you dear silly old thing! What a way to propose to a girl!”

“I’ve never done such a thing before,” said Doggie, as soon as he was released.

She resumed her attitude on the hearthrug.

“I’m in no great hurry to be married. Are you?”

He said: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. Just whenever you like.”

“All right,” she returned calmly. “Let it be a year hence. Meanwhile, we can be engaged. It’ll please the dear old birds. I know all the tabbies in the town have been mewing about us. Now they can mew about somebody else.”

“That’s awfully good of you, Peggy,” said Marmaduke. “I’ll go up to town to-morrow and get you the jolliest ring you ever saw.”

She sketched him a curtsy. “That’s one thing, at any rate, I can trust you in – your taste in jewellery.”

He moved nearer to her. “I suppose you know, Peggy dear, I’ve been awfully fond of you for quite a long time.”

“The feeling is more or less reciprocated,” she replied lightly. Then, “You can kiss me if you like. I assure you it’s quite usual.”

He kissed her somewhat shyly on the lips.

She whispered: “I do think I care for you, old thing.” Marmaduke replied sententiously: “You have made me a very happy man.” Then they sat down side by side on the sofa, and for all Peggy’s mocking audacity, they could find nothing in particular to say to each other.

“Let us play patience,” she said at last.

And when Mrs. Conover appeared awhile later, she found them poring over the cards in a state of unruffled calm. Peggy looked up, smiled, and nodded.

“We’ve fixed it up, Mummy; but we’re not going to be married for a year.”

Doggie went home that evening in a tepid glow. It contented him. He thought himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading Manon Lescaut– he had bought a cheap copy haphazard – and taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it.

“It’s like reading about a lunatic,” replied the bewildered Doggie. “Do such people as Des Grieux exist?”

“Ay, laddie,” replied McPhail, greatly relieved. “Your acumen has pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It’s just a silly, rotten book.”

“I’m glad you’re of the same opinion as myself,” said Doggie, and thought no more of the absurd but deathless pair of lovers. The unprincipled McPhail, not without pawky humour, immediately gave him Paul et Virginie, which Doggie, after reading it, thought the truest and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation of the Valkyrie.

So Doggie Trevor went home perfectly contented with himself, with Peggy Conover, with his Uncle and Aunt, of whom hitherto he had been just a little bit afraid, with Fortune, with Fate, with his house, with his peacock and ivory room, with a great clump of typescript and a mass of coloured proof-prints, which represented a third of his projected history of wall-papers, with his feather-bed, with Goliath, his almost microscopic Belgian griffon, with a set of Nile-green silk underwear that had just come from his outfitters in London, with his new Rolls-Royce car and his new chauffeur Briggins (parenthetically it may be remarked that a seven-hour excursion in this vehicle, youth in the back seat and Briggins at the helm, all ordained by Peggy, had been the final cause of the evening’s explanations), with the starry heavens above, with the well-ordered earth beneath them, and with all human beings on the earth, including Germans, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks – all save one: and that, as he learned from a letter delivered by the last post, was a callous, heartless London manicurist who, giving no reasons, regretted that she would be unable to pay her usual weekly visit to Durdlebury on the morrow. Of all days in the year: just when it was essential that he should look his best!

“What the deuce am I going to do?” he cried, pitching the letter into the waste-paper basket.

He sat down to the piano in the peacock and ivory room and tried to play the nasty crumpled rose-leaf of a manicurist out of his mind.

Suddenly he remembered, with a kind of shock, that he had pledged himself to go up to London the next day to buy an engagement-ring. So after all the manicurist’s defection did not matter. All was again well with the world.

Then he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just and perfect man living the just and perfect life in a just and perfect universe.

And the date of this happening was the fifteenth day of July in the year of grace one thousand nine hundred and fourteen.

CHAPTER III

The shadow cast by the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the end of the Deanery garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the afternoon sun, and divided the old red-brick wall into a vivid contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No outside convulsions could ever cause a flutter of her calm wings. As it was thirty years ago, when the Dean first came to Durdlebury, as it was three hundred, six hundred years ago, so it was now; and so it would be hundreds of years hence as long as that majestic pile housing the Spirit of God should last.

Thus thought, thus, in some such words, proclaimed the Dean, sitting in the shade, with his hands clasped behind his head. Tea was over. Mrs. Conover, thin and faded, still sat by the little table, wondering whether she might now blow out the lamp beneath the silver kettle. Sir Archibald Bruce, a neighbouring landowner, and his wife had come, bringing their daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already started on the court some little distance off – the players being Dorothy, Peggy and a couple of athletic, flannel-clad parsons. Marmaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey shirt, socks and tie, and grey suède shoes. He had a weak, good-looking little face and a little black moustache turned up at the ends. He was discoursing to his neighbour on Palestrina.

The Dean’s proclamation had been elicited by some remark of Sir Archibald.

“I wonder how you have stuck it for so long,” said the latter. He had been a soldier in his youth and an explorer, and had shot big game.

“I haven’t your genius, my dear Bruce, for making myself uncomfortable,” replied the Dean.

“You were energetic enough when you first came here,” said Sir Archibald. “We all thought you a desperate fellow who was going to rebuild the cathedral, turn the Close into industrial dwellings, and generally play the deuce.”

The Dean sighed pleasantly. He had snowy hair and a genial, florid, clean-shaven face.

“I was appointed very young – six-and-thirty – and I thought I could fight against the centuries. As the years went on I found I couldn’t. The grey changelessness of things got hold of me, incorporated me into them. When I die – for I hope I shan’t have to resign through doddering senility – my body will be buried there” – he jerked his head slightly towards the cathedral – “and my dust will become part and parcel of the fabric – like that of many of my predecessors.”

“That’s all very well,” said Sir Archibald, “but they ought to have caught you before this petrification set in, and made you a bishop.”

It was somewhat of an old argument, for the two were intimates. The Dean smiled and shook his head.

“You know I declined – ”

“After you had become petrified.”

“Perhaps so. It is not a place where ambitions can attain a riotous growth.”

“I call it a rotten place,” said the elderly worldling. “I wouldn’t live in it myself for twenty thousand a year.”

“Lots like you said the same in crusading times – Sir Guy de Chevenix, for instance, who was the Lord, perhaps, of your very Manor, and an amazing fire-eater – but – see the gentle irony of it – there his bones lie, at peace for ever, in the rotten place, with his effigy over them cross-legged and his dog at his feet, and his wife by his side. I think he must sometimes look out of Heaven’s gate down on the cathedral and feel glad, grateful – perhaps a bit wistful – if the attribution of wistfulness, which implies regret, to a spirit in Paradise doesn’t savour of heresy – ”

“I’m going to be cremated,” interrupted Sir Archibald, twirling his white moustache.

The Dean smiled and did not take up the cue. The talk died. It was a drowsy day. The Dean went off into a little reverie. Perhaps his old friend’s reproach was just. Dean of a great cathedral at thirty-six, he had the world of dioceses at his feet. Had he used to the full the brilliant talents with which he started? He had been a good Dean, a capable, business-like Dean. There was not a stone of the cathedral that he did not know and cherish. Under his care the stability of every part of the precious fabric had been assured for a hundred years. Its financial position, desperate on his appointment, was now sound. He had come into a scene of petty discords and jealousies; for many years there had been a no more united chapter in any cathedral close in England. As an administrator he had been a success. The devotion of his life to the cathedral had its roots deep in spiritual things. For the greater glory of God had the vast edifice been erected, and for the greater glory of God had he, its guardian, reverently seen to its preservation and perfect appointment. Would he have served God better by pursuing the ambitions of youth? He could have had his bishopric; but he knew that the choice lay between him and Chanways, a flaming spirit, eager for power, who hadn’t the sacred charge of a cathedral, and he declined. And now Chanways was a force in the Church and the country, and was making things hum. If he, Conover, after fifteen years of Durdlebury, had accepted, he would have lost the power to make things hum. He would have made a very ordinary, painstaking bishop, and his successor at Durdlebury might possibly have regarded that time-worn wonder of spiritual beauty merely as a stepping-stone to higher sacerdotal things. Such a man, he considered, having once come under the holy glamour of the cathedral, would have been guilty of the Unforgivable Sin. He had therefore saved two unfortunate situations.

“You are quite an intelligent man, Bruce,” he said, with a sudden whimsicality, “but I don’t think you would ever understand.”

The set of tennis being over, Peggy, flushed and triumphant, rushed into the party in the shade.

“Mr. Petherbridge and I have won – six – three,” she announced. The old gentlemen smiled and murmured their congratulations. She swung to the tea-table some paces away, and plucked Marmaduke by the sleeve, interrupting him in the middle of an argument. He rose politely.

“Come and play.”

“My dear,” he said, “I’m such a duffer at games.”

“Never mind; you’ll learn in time.”

He drew out a grey silk handkerchief as if ready to perspire at the first thought of it. “Tennis makes one so dreadfully hot,” said he.

Peggy tapped the point of her foot irritably, but she laughed as she turned to Lady Bruce.

“What’s the good of being engaged to a man if he can’t play tennis with you?”

“There are other things in life besides tennis, my dear,” replied Lady Bruce.

The girl flushed, but being aware that a pert answer turneth away pleasant invitations, said nothing. She nodded and went off to her game, and informing Mr. Petherbridge that Lady Bruce was a platitudinous old tabby, flirted with him up to the nice limits of his parsonical dignity. But Marmaduke did not mind.

“Games are childish and somewhat barbaric. Don’t you think so, Lady Bruce?”

“Most young people seem fond of them,” replied the lady. “Exercise keeps them in health.”

“It all depends,” he argued. “Often they get exceedingly hot, then they sit about and catch their death of cold.”

“That’s very true,” said Lady Bruce. “It’s what I’m always telling Sir Archibald about golf. Only last week he caught a severe chill in that very way. I had to rub his chest with camphorated oil.”

“Just as my poor dear mother used to do to me,” said Marmaduke.

There followed a conversation on ailments and their treatment, in which Mrs. Conover joined. Marmaduke was quite happy. He knew that the two elderly ladies admired the soundness of his views and talked to him as to one of themselves.

“I’m sure, my dear Marmaduke, you’re very wise to take care of yourself,” said Lady Bruce, “especially now, when you have the responsibilities of married life before you.”

Marmaduke curled himself up comfortably in his chair. If he had been a cat, he would have purred. The old butler, grown as grey in the service of the Deanery as the cathedral itself – he had been page and footman to Dr. Conover’s predecessor – removed the tea-things and brought out a tray of glasses and lemonade with ice clinking refreshingly against the sides of the jug. When the game was over, the players came and drank and sat about the lawn. The shadow of the apse had spread over the garden to the steps of the porch. Anyone looking over the garden wall would have beheld a scene typical of the heart of England – a scene of peace, ease and perfectly ordered comfort. The two well-built young men, one a minor canon, the other a curate, lounging in their flannels, clever-faced, honest-eyed, could have been bred nowhere but in English public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge. The two elderly ladies were of the fine flower of provincial England; the two old men, so different outwardly, one burly, florid, exquisitely ecclesiastical, the other thin, nervous, soldierly, each was an expression of high English tradition. The two young girls, unerringly correct and dainty, for all their modern abandonment of attitude, pretty, flushed of cheek, frank of glance, were two of a hundred thousand flowers of girlhood that could have been picked that afternoon in lazy English gardens. And Marmaduke’s impeccable grey costume struck a harmonizing English note of Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade. The scent of the roses massed in delicate splendour against the wall, and breathing now that the cool shade had fallen on them, crept through the still air to the flying buttresses and the window mullions and traceries and the pinnacles of the great English cathedral. And in the midst of the shaven lawn gleamed the old cut-glass jug on its silver tray.

Some one did look over the wall and survey the scene: a man, apparently supporting himself with tense, straightened arms on the coping; a man with a lean, bronzed, clean-shaven face, wearing an old soft felt hat at a swaggering angle; a man with a smile on his face and a humorous twinkle in his eyes. By chance he had leisure to survey the scene for some time unobserved. At last he shouted:

“Hello! Have none of you ever moved for the last ten years?”

At the summons every one was startled. The young men scrambled to their feet. The Dean rose and glared at the intruder, who sprang over the wall, recklessly broke through the rose-bushes and advanced with outstretched hand to meet him.

“Hello, Uncle Edward!”

“Goodness gracious me!” cried the Dean. “It’s Oliver!”

“Right first time,” said the young man, gripping him by the hand. “You’re not looking a day older. And Aunt Sophia – ” He strode up to Mrs. Conover and kissed her. “Do you know,” he went on, holding her at arm’s length and looking round at the astonished company, “the last time I saw you all you were doing just the same! I peeped over the wall just before I went away, just such a summer afternoon as this, and you were all sitting round drinking the same old lemonade out of the same old jug – and, Lady Bruce, you were here, and you, Sir Archibald” – he shook hands with them rapidly. “You haven’t changed a bit. And you – good Lord! Is this Peggy?” He put his hand on the Dean’s shoulder and pointed at the girl.