The Country House

“Evenin’, Squire; nice evenin’. Faine weather fur th’ hay!”

The voice was warped and wavery.

‘This is my Squire,’ it seemed to say, ‘whatever ther’ be agin him!’

Mr. Pendyce’s hand went up to his hat.

“Evenin’, Hermon. Aye, fine weather for the hay! Mrs. Pendyce has gone up to London. We young bachelors, ha!”

He passed on.

Not until he had gone some way did he perceive why he had made that announcement. It was simply because he must tell everyone, everyone; then no one could be astonished.

He hurried on to the house to dress in time for dinner, and show all that nothing was amiss. Seven courses would have been served him had the sky fallen; but he ate little, and drank more claret than was his wont. After dinner he sat in his study with the windows open, and in the mingled day and lamp light read his wife’s letter over again. As it was with the spaniel John, so with his master – a new idea penetrated but slowly into his long and narrow head.

She was cracked about George; she did not know what she was doing; would soon come to her senses. It was not for him to take any steps. What steps, indeed, could he take without confessing that Horace Pendyce had gone too far, that Horace Pendyce was in the wrong? That had never been his habit, and he could not alter now. If she and George chose to be stubborn, they must take the consequences, and fend for themselves.

In the silence and the lamplight, growing mellower each minute under the green silk shade, he sat confusedly thinking of the past. And in that dumb reverie, as though of fixed malice, there came to him no memories that were not pleasant, no images that were not fair. He tried to think of her unkindly, he tried to paint her black; but with the perversity born into the world when he was born, to die when he was dead, she came to him softly, like the ghost of gentleness, to haunt his fancy. She came to him smelling of sweet scents, with a slight rustling of silk, and the sound of her expectant voice, saying, “Yes, dear?” as though she were not bored. He remembered when he brought her first to Worsted Skeynes thirty-four years ago, “That timid, and like a rose, but a lady every hinch, the love!” as his old nurse had said.

He remembered her when George was born, like wax for whiteness and transparency, with eyes that were all pupils, and a hovering smile. So many other times he remembered her throughout those years, but never as a woman faded, old; never as a woman of the past. Now that he had not got her, for the first time Mr. Pendyce realised that she had not grown old, that she was still to him “timid, and like a rose, but a lady every hinch, the love!” And he could not bear this thought; it made him feel so miserable and lonely in the lamplight, with the grey moths hovering round, and the spaniel John asleep upon his foot.

So, taking his candle, he went up to bed. The doors that barred away the servants’ wing were closed. In all that great remaining space of house his was the only candle, the only sounding footstep. Slowly he mounted as he had mounted many thousand times, but never once like this, and behind him, like a shadow, mounted the spaniel John.

And She that knows the hearts of men and dogs, the Mother from whom all things come, to whom they all go home, was watching, and presently, when they were laid, the one in his deserted bed, the other on blue linen, propped against the door, She gathered them to sleep.

But Wednesday came, and with it Wednesday duties. They who have passed the windows of the Stoics’ Club and seen the Stoics sitting there have haunting visions of the idle landed classes. These visions will not let them sleep, will not let their tongues to cease from bitterness, for they so long to lead that “idle” life themselves. But though in a misty land illusions be our cherished lot, that we may all think falsely of our neighbours and enjoy ourselves, the word “idle” is not at all the word.

Many and heavy tasks weighed on the Squire at Worsted Skeynes. There was the visit to the stables to decide as to firing Beldame’s hock, or selling the new bay horse because he did not draw men fast enough, and the vexed question of Bruggan’s oats or Beal’s, talked out with Benson, in a leather belt and flannel shirt-sleeves, like a corpulent, white-whiskered boy. Then the long sitting in the study with memorandums and accounts, all needing care, lest So-and-so should give too little for too little, or too little for too much; and the smart walk across to Jarvis, the head keeper, to ask after the health of the new Hungarian bird, or discuss a scheme whereby in the last drive so many of those creatures he had nurtured from their youth up might be deterred from flying over to his friend Lord Quarryman. And this took long, for Jarvis’s feelings forced him to say six times, “Well, Mr. Pendyce, sir, what I say is we didn’t oughter lose s’many birds in that last drive;” and Mr. Pendyce to answer: “No, Jarvis, certainly not. Well, what do you suggest?” And that other grievous question – how to get plenty of pheasants and plenty of foxes to dwell together in perfect harmony – discussed with endless sympathy, for, as the Squire would say, “Jarvis is quite safe with foxes.” He could not bear his covers to be drawn blank.

Then back to a sparing lunch, or perhaps no lunch at all, that he might keep fit and hard; and out again at once on horseback or on foot to the home farm or further, as need might take him, and a long afternoon, with eyes fixed on the ribs of bullocks, the colour of swedes, the surfaces of walls or gates or fences.

Then home again to tea and to the Times, which had as yet received but fleeting glances, with close attention to all those Parliamentary measures threatening, remotely, the existing state of things, except, of course, that future tax on wheat so needful to the betterment of Worsted Skeynes. There were occasions, too, when they brought him tramps to deal with, to whom his one remark would be, “Hold out your hands, my man,” which, being found unwarped by honest toil, were promptly sent to gaol. When found so warped, Mr. Pendyce was at a loss, and would walk up and down, earnestly trying to discover what his duty was to them. There were days, too, almost entirely occupied by sessions, when many classes of offenders came before him, to whom he meted justice according to the heinousness of the offence, from poaching at the top down and down to wife-beating at the bottom; for, though a humane man, tradition did not suffer him to look on this form of sport as really criminal – at any rate, not in the country.

It was true that all these matters could have been settled in a fraction of the time by a young and trained intelligence, but this would have wronged tradition, disturbed the Squire’s settled conviction that he was doing his duty, and given cause for slanderous tongues to hint at idleness. And though, further, it was true that all this daily labour was devoted directly or indirectly to interests of his own, what was that but doing his duty to the country and asserting the prerogative of every Englishman at all costs to be provincial?

But on this Wednesday the flavour of the dish was gone. To be alone amongst his acres, quite alone – to have no one to care whether he did anything at all, no one to whom he might confide that Beldame’s hock was to be fired, that Peacock was asking for more gates, was almost more than he could bear. He would have wired to the girls to come home, but he could not bring himself to face their questions. Gerald was at Gib! George – George was no son of his! – and his pride forbade him to write to her who had left him thus to solitude and shame. For deep down below his stubborn anger it was shame that the Squire felt – shame that he should have to shun his neighbours, lest they should ask him questions which, for his own good name and his own pride, he must answer with a lie; shame that he should not be master in his own house – still more, shame that anyone should see that he was not. To be sure, he did not know that he felt shame, being unused to introspection, having always kept it at arm’s length. For he always meditated concretely, as, for instance, when he looked up and did not see his wife at breakfast, but saw Bester making coffee, he thought, ‘That fellow knows all about it, I shouldn’t wonder!’ and he felt angry for thinking that. When he saw Mr. Barter coming down the drive he thought, ‘Confound it! I can’t meet him,’ and slipped out, and felt angry that he had thus avoided him. When in the Scotch garden he came on Jackman syringing the rose-trees, he said to him, “Your mistress has gone to London,” and abruptly turned away, angry that he had been obliged by a mysterious impulse to tell him that:

So it was, all through that long, sad day, and the only thing that gave him comfort was to score through, in the draft of his will, bequests to his eldest son, and busy himself over drafting a clause to take their place:

“Forasmuch as my eldest son, George Hubert, has by conduct unbecoming to a gentleman and a Pendyce, proved himself unworthy of my confidence, and forasmuch as to my regret I am unable to cut the entail of my estate, I hereby declare that he shall in no way participate in any division of my other property or of my personal effects, conscientiously believing that it is my duty so to do in the interests of my family and of the country, and I make this declaration without anger.”

For, all the anger that he was balked of feeling against his wife, because he missed her so, was added to that already felt against his son.

By the last post came a letter from General Pendyce. He opened it with fingers as shaky as his brother’s writing.

“ARMY AND NAVY CLUB. “DEAR HORACE,

“What the deuce and all made you send that telegram? It spoiled my breakfast, and sent me off in a tearing hurry, to find Margery perfectly well. If she’d been seedy or anything I should have been delighted, but there she was, busy about her dresses and what not, and I dare say she thought me a lunatic for coming at that time in the morning. You shouldn’t get into the habit of sending telegrams. A telegram is a thing that means something – at least, I’ve always thought so. I met George coming away from her in a deuce of a hurry. I can’t write any more now. I’m just going to have my lunch.

“Your affectionate brother,

“CHARLES PENDYCE.”

She was well. She had been seeing George. With a hardened heart the Squire went up to bed.

And Wednesday came to an end…

And so on the Thursday afternoon the brown blood mare carried Mr. Pendyce along the lane, followed by the spaniel John. They passed the Firs, where Bellew lived, and, bending sharply to the right, began to mount towards the Common; and with them mounted the image of that fellow who was at the bottom of it all – an image that ever haunted the Squire’s mind nowadays; a ghost, high-shouldered, with little burning eyes, clipped red moustaches, thin bowed legs. A plague spot on that system which he loved, a whipping-post to heredity, a scourge like Attila the Hun; a sort of damnable caricature of all that a country gentleman should be – of his love of sport and open air, of his “hardness” and his pluck; of his powers of knowing his own mind, and taking his liquor like a man; of his creed, now out of date, of gallantry. Yes – a kind of cursed bogey of a man, a spectral follower of the hounds, a desperate character – a man that in old days someone would have shot; a drinking, white-faced devil who despised Horace Pendyce, whom Horace Pendyce hated, yet could not quite despise. “Always one like that in a hunting country!” A black dog on the shoulders of his order. ‘Post equitem sedet’ Jaspar Bellew!

The Squire came out on the top of the rise, and all Worsted Scotton was in sight. It was a sandy stretch of broom and gorse and heather, with a few Scotch firs; it had no value at all, and he longed for it, as a boy might long for the bite someone else had snatched out of his apple. It distressed him lying there, his and yet not his, like a wife who was no wife – as though Fortune were enjoying her at his expense. Thus was he deprived of the fulness of his mental image; for as with all men, so with the Squire, that which he loved and owned took definite form – a some thing that he saw. Whenever the words “Worsted Skeynes” were in his mind – and that was almost always – there rose before him an image defined and concrete, however indescribable; and what ever this image was, he knew that Worsted Scotton spoiled it. It was true that he could not think of any use to which to put the Common, but he felt deeply that it was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter – he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his fathers had been nasty before him. Mr. Pendyce rode round looking at the fence his father had put up, until he came to the portion that Peacock’s father had pulled down; and here, by a strange fatality – such as will happen even in printed records – he came on Peacock himself standing in the gap, as though he had foreseen this visit of the Squire’s. The mare stopped of her own accord, the spaniel John at a measured distance lay down to think, and all those yards away he could be heard doing it, and now and then swallowing his tongue.

Peacock stood with his hands in his breeches’ pockets. An old straw hat was on his head, his little eyes were turned towards the ground; and his cob, which he had tied to what his father had left standing of the fence, had his eyes, too, turned towards the ground, for he was eating grass. Mr. Pendyce’s fight with his burning stable had stuck in the farmer’s “gizzard” ever since. He felt that he was forgetting it day by day – would soon forget it altogether. He felt the old sacred doubts inherited from his fathers rising every hour within him. And so he had come up to see what looking at the gap would do for his sense of gratitude. At sight of the Squire his little eyes turned here and there, as a pig’s eyes turn when it receives a blow behind. That Mr. Pendyce should have chosen this moment to come up was as though Providence, that knoweth all things, knew the natural thing for Mr. Pendyce to do.

“Afternoon, Squire. Dry weather; rain’s badly wanted. I’ll get no feed if this goes on.”

Mr. Pendyce answered:

“Afternoon, Peacock. Why, your fields are first-rate for grass.”

They hastily turned their eyes away, for at that moment they could not bear to see each other.

There was a silence; then Peacock said:

“What about those gates of mine, Squire?” and his voice quavered, as though gratitude might yet get the better of him.

The Squire’s irritable glance swept over the unfenced space to right and left, and the thought flashed through his mind:

‘Suppose I were to give the beggar those gates, would he – would he let me enclose the Scotton again?’

He looked at that square, bearded man, and the infallible instinct, christened so wickedly by Mr. Paramor, guided him.

“What’s wrong with your gates, man, I should like to know?”

Peacock looked at him full this time; there was no longer any quaver in his voice, but a sort of rough good-humour.

“Wy, the ‘arf o’ them’s as rotten as matchwood!” he said; and he took a breath of relief, for he knew that gratitude was dead within his soul.

“Well, I wish mine at the home farm were half as good. Come, John!” and, touching the mare with his heel, Mr. Pendyce turned; but before he had gone a dozen paces he was back.

“Mrs. Peacock well, I hope? Mrs. Pendyce has gone up to London.”

And touching his hat, without waiting for Peacock’s answer, he rode away. He took the lane past Peacock’s farm across the home paddocks, emerging on the cricket-ground, a field of his own which he had caused to be converted.

The return match with Coldingham was going on, and, motionless on his horse, the Squire stopped to watch. A tall figure in the “long field” came leisurely towards him. It was the Hon. Geoffrey Winlow. Mr. Pendyce subdued an impulse to turn the mare and ride away.

“We’re going to give you a licking, Squire! How’s Mrs. Pendyce? My wife sent her love.”

On the Squire’s face in the full sun was more than the sun’s flush.

“Thanks,” he said, “she’s very well. She’s gone up to London.”

“And aren’t you going up yourself this season?”

The Squire crossed those leisurely eyes with his own.

“I don’t think so,” he said slowly.

The Hon. Geoffrey returned to his duties.

“We got poor old Barter for a ‘blob’.” he said over his shoulder.

The Squire became aware that Mr. Barter was approaching from behind.

“You see that left-hand fellow?” he said, pouting. “Just watch his foot. D’you mean to say that wasn’t a no-ball? He bowled me with a no-ball. He’s a rank no-batter. That fellow Locke’s no more an umpire than – ”

He stopped and looked earnestly at the bowler.

The Squire ‘did not answer, sitting on his mare as though carved in stone. Suddenly his throat clicked.

“How’s your wife?” he said. “Margery would have come to see her, but – but she’s gone up to London.”

The Rector did not turn his head.

“My wife? Oh, going on first-rate. There’s another! I say, Winlow, this is too bad!”

The Hon. Geoffrey’s pleasant voice was heard:

“Please not to speak to the man at the wheel!”

The Squire turned the mare and rode away; and the spaniel John, who had been watching from a measured distance, followed after, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

The Squire turned through a gate down the main aisle of the home covert, and the nose and the tail of the spaniel John, who scented creatures to the left and right, were in perpetual motion. It was cool in there. The June foliage made one long colonnade, broken by a winding river of sky. Among the oaks and hazels; the beeches and the elms, the ghostly body of a birch-tree shone here and there, captured by those grosser trees which seemed to cluster round her, proud of their prisoner, loth to let her go, that subtle spirit of their wood. They knew that, were she gone, their forest lady, wilder and yet gentler than themselves – they would lose credit, lose the grace and essence of their corporate being.

The Squire dismounted, tethered his horse, and sat under one of those birch-trees, on the fallen body of an elm. The spaniel John also sat and loved him with his eyes. And sitting there they thought their thoughts, but their thoughts were different.

For under this birch-tree Horace Pendyce had stood and kissed his wife the very day he brought her home to Worsted Skeynes, and though he did not see the parallel between her and the birch-tree that some poor imaginative creature might have drawn, yet was he thinking of that long past afternoon. But the spaniel John was not thinking of it; his recollection was too dim, for he had been at that time twenty-eight years short of being born.

Mr. Pendyce sat there long with his horse and with his dog, and from out the blackness of the spaniel John, who was more than less asleep, there shone at times an eye turned on his master like some devoted star. The sun, shining too, gilded the stem of the birch-tree. The birds and beasts began their evening stir all through the undergrowth, and rabbits, popping out into the ride, looked with surprise at the spaniel John, and popped in back again. They knew that men with horses had no guns, but could not bring themselves to trust that black and hairy thing whose nose so twitched whenever they appeared. The gnats came out to dance, and at their dancing, every sound and scent and shape became the sounds and scents and shapes of evening; and there was evening in the Squire’s heart.

Slowly and stiffly he got up from the log and mounted to ride home. It would be just as lonely when he got there, but a house is better than a wood, where the gnats dance, the birds and creatures stir and stir, and shadows lengthen; where the sun steals upwards on the tree-stems, and all is careless of its owner, Man.

It was past seven o’clock when he went to his study. There was a lady standing at the window, and Mr. Pendyce said:

“I beg your pardon?”

The lady turned; it was his wife. The Squire stopped with a hoarse sound, and stood silent, covering his eyes with his hand.

CHAPTER VIII

ACUTE ATTACK OF ‘PENDYCITIS’

Mrs. Pendyce felt very faint when she hurried away from Chelsea. She had passed through hours of great emotion, and eaten nothing.

Like sunset clouds or the colours in mother-o’-pearl, so, it is written, shall be the moods of men – interwoven as the threads of an embroidery, less certain than an April day, yet with a rhythm of their own that never fails, and no one can quite scan.

A single cup of tea on her way home, and her spirit revived. It seemed suddenly as if there had been a great ado about nothing! As if someone had known how stupid men could be, and been playing a fantasia on that stupidity. But this gaiety of spirit soon died away, confronted by the problem of what she should do next.

She reached her hotel without making a decision. She sat down in the reading-room to write to Gregory, and while she sat there with her pen in her hand a dreadful temptation came over her to say bitter things to him, because by not seeing people as they were he had brought all this upon them. But she had so little practice in saying bitter things that she could not think of any that were nice enough, and in the end she was obliged to leave them out. After finishing and sending off the note she felt better. And it came to her suddenly that, if she packed at once, there was just time to catch the 5.55 to Worsted Skeynes.

As in leaving her home, so in returning, she followed her instinct, and her instinct told her to avoid unnecessary fuss and suffering.

The decrepit station fly, mouldy and smelling of stables, bore her almost lovingly towards the Hall. Its old driver, clean-faced, cheery, somewhat like a bird, drove her almost furiously, for, though he knew nothing, he felt that two whole days and half a day were quite long enough for her to be away. At the lodge gate old Roy, the Skye, was seated on his haunches, and the sight of him set Mrs. Pendyce trembling as though till then she had not realised that she was coming home.

Home! The long narrow lane without a turning, the mists and stillness, the driving rain and hot bright afternoons; the scents of wood smoke and hay and the scent of her flowers; the Squire’s voice, the dry rattle of grass-cutters, the barking of dogs, and distant hum of threshing; and Sunday sounds – church bells and rooks, and Mr. Barter’s preaching; the tastes, too, of the very dishes! And all these scents and sounds and tastes, and the feel of the air to her cheeks, seemed to have been for ever in the past, and to be going on for ever in the time to come.

She turned red and white by turns, and felt neither joy nor sadness, for in a wave the old life came over her. She went at once to the study to wait for her husband to come in. At the hoarse sound he made, her heart beat fast, while old Roy and the spaniel John growled gently at each other.

“John,” she murmured, “aren’t you glad to see me, dear?”

The spaniel John, without moving, beat his tail against his master’s foot.

The Squire raised his head at last.

“Well, Margery?” was all he said.

It shot through her mind that he looked older, and very tired!

The dinner-gong began to sound, and as though attracted by its long monotonous beating, a swallow flew in at one of the narrow windows and fluttered round the room. Mrs. Pendyce’s eyes followed its flight.

The Squire stepped forward suddenly and took her hand.

“Don’t run away from me again, Margery!” he said; and stooping down, he kissed it.

At this action, so unlike her husband, Mrs. Pendyce blushed like a girl. Her eyes above his grey and close-cropped head seemed grateful that he did not reproach her, glad of that caress.

“I have some news to tell you, Horace. Helen Bellew has given George up!”

The Squire dropped her hand.

“And quite time too,” he said. “I dare say George has refused to take his dismissal. He’s as obstinate as a mule.”