CONCERNING LADY DURWENT'S FAMILY.

I.

Lady Durwent was rather a large woman, of middle age, with a high forehead unruffled by thought, and a clear skin unmarred by wrinkles.

She had a cheerfulness that obtruded itself, like a creditor, at unpropitious moments; and her voice, though not displeasing, gave the impression that it might become volcanic at any moment. She also possessed a considerable theatrical instinct, with which she would frequently manoeuvre to the centre of the stage, to find, as often as not, that she had neglected the trifling matter of learning any lines.

She was the daughter of an ironmonger in the north of England, whose father had been one of the last and most famous of a long line of smugglers. It was perhaps the inherited love of adventure that prompted the ironmonger, against his wife's violent protest, to invest the savings of a lifetime in an obscure Canadian silver-mine. To the surprise of every one (including its promoters), the mine produced high-grade ore in such abundance that the ironmonger became a man of means. Thereupon, at the instigation of his wife, they moved from their little town into the city of York, where he purchased a large, stuffily furnished house, sat on Boards, became a councillor, wore evening-dress for dinner, and died a death of absolute respectability.

Before the final event he had the satisfaction of seeing his only child Sybil married to Arthur, Lord Durwent. (The evening-clothes for dinner were a direct result.) Lord Durwent was a well-behaved young man of unimpeachable character and family, and he was sincerely attracted by the agreeable expanse of lively femininity found in the fair Sybil.

After a wedding that left her mother a triumphant wreck and appreciably hastened her father's demise, she was duly installed as the mistress of Roselawn, the Durwent family seat, and its tributary farms. The tenants gave her an address of welcome; her husband's mother gracefully retired to a villa in Suss.e.x; the rector called and expressed gratification; the county families left their cards and inquired after her father, the ironmonger.

Unfortunately the new Lady Durwent had the temperament neither of a poet nor of a lady of the aristocracy. She failed to hear the tongues in trees, and her dramatic sense was not satisfied with the little stage of curtsying tenantry and of gentlefolk who abhorred the very thought of anything theatrical in life.

On the other hand, her husband was a man who was unhappy except on his estate. He thought along orthodox lines, and read with caution. He loved his lawns, his gardens, his horses, and his habits. He was a pillar of the church, and always read a portion of Scripture from the reading-desk on Sunday mornings. His wife he treated with simple courtesy as the woman who would give him an heir. If his mind had been a little more sensitive, Lord Durwent would have realised that he was asking a hurricane to be satisfied with the task of a zephyr.

They had a son.

The tenants presented him with a silver bowl; Lord Durwent presented them with a garden fete; and the parents presented the boy with the name of Malcolm.

Two years later there came a daughter.

The tenants gave her a silver plate; Lord Durwent gave them a garden fete; and he and his wife gave the girl the name of Elise.

Three years later a second son appeared.

There was a presentation, followed by a garden fete and a christening.

The name was Richard.

In course of time the elder son grew to that mental stature when the English parent feels the time is ripe to send him away to school. The ironmonger's daughter had the idea that Malcolm, being her son, was hers to mould.

'My dear,' said Lord Durwent, exerting his authority almost for the first time, 'the boy is eight years of age, and no time must be lost in preparing him for Eton and inculcating into him those qualities which mark'----

'But,' cried his wife with theatrical unrestraint, 'why send him to Eton? Why not wait until you see what he wants to be in the world?'

Lord Durwent's face bore a look of unperturbed calm. 'When he is old enough, he must go to Eton, my dear, and acquire the qualities which will enable him to take over Roselawn at my death'----

At this point Lady Durwent interrupted him with a tirade which, in common with a good many domestic unpleasantries, was born of much that was irrelevant, springing from sources not readily apparent. She abused the public-school system of England, and sneered at the county families which blessed the neighbourhood with their presence. She reviled Lord Durwent's habits, princ.i.p.ally because they _were_ habits, and thought it was high time some Durwent grew up who wasn't just a 'sticky, stuffy, starched, and bored porpoise--yes, PORPOISE!' (shaking her head as if to establish the metaphor against the whole of the English aristocracy). In short, it was the spirit of the Ironmonger castigating the Peerage, and at its conclusion Lady Durwent felt much abused, and quite pleased with her own rhetoric.

Lord Durwent glanced for courage at an ancestor who looked magnificently down at him over a ruffle. He adjusted his own cravat and spoke in nicely modulated accents: 'Sybil, nothing can change me on this point. In spite of what you say, it is my intention to keep to the tradition of the Durwents, and that is that the occupant of Roselawn'----

'What! am not I his mother?' cried the good woman, her hysteria having much the same effect on Lord Durwent's smoothly developing monologue as a heavy pail dropped by a stage-hand during Hamlet's soliloquy.

'Sybil,' said Lord Durwent sternly, 'it was arranged at Malcolm's birth that he should go to Eton. I shall take him next Tuesday to a preparatory school, and you must excuse me if I refuse to discuss the matter further.'

Lady Durwent rushed from the room and clasped her eldest child in her arms. That young gentleman, not knowing what had caused his mother's grief, sympathetically opened his throat and bellowed l.u.s.tily, thereby shedding tears for positively the last time in his life.

When he returned for the holidays a few months later, he was an excellent example of that precocity, the English schoolboy, who cloaks a juvenile mind with the pose of sophistication, and by twelve years of age achieves a code of thought and conduct that usually lasts him for the rest of his life. In vain the mother strove for her place in the sun; the rule of the masculine at Roselawn became adamant.

Life in the Durwent _menage_ developed into a thing of laws and customs dictated by the youthful despot, aided and abetted by his father. The sacred rites of 'what isn't done' were established, and the mother gradually found herself in the position of an outsider--a privileged outsider, it is true, yet little more than the breeder of a thoroughbred, admitted to the paddock to watch his horse run by its new owner.

She vented her feelings in two or three tearful scenes, but she felt that they lacked spontaneity, and didn't really put her heart into them.

During these struggles for her place in a Society that was probably more completely masculine in domination than any in the world (with the possible exception of that of the Turk), Lady Durwent was only dimly aware that her daughter was developing a personality which presented a much greater problem than that of the easily grooved Malcolm.

The girl's hair was like burnished copper, and her cheeks were lit by two bits of scarlet that could be seen at a distance before her features were discernible. Her eyes were of a gray-blue that changed in shade with her swiftly varying moods. Her lower lip was full and red, the upper one firm and repressed with the dull crimson of a fading rose-petal. Her shapely arms and legs were restless, seemingly impatient to break into some quickly moving dance. She was extraordinarily alive. Vitality flashed from her with every gesture, and her mind, a thing of caprice and whim, knew no boundaries but those of imagination itself.

Puzzled and entirely unable to understand anything so instinctive, Lady Durwent engaged a governess who was personally recommended by Lady Chisworth, whose friend the Countess of Oxeter had told her that the three daughters of the d.u.c.h.ess of Dulworth had all been entrusted to her care.

In spite of this almost unexampled set of references, the governess was completely unable to cope with Elise Durwent. She taught her (among other things) decorum and French. Her pupil was openly irreverent about the first; and when the governess, after the time-honoured method, produced an endless vista of exceptions to the rule in French grammar, the girl balked. She was willing to compromise on _Avoir_, but mutinied outright at the ramifications of _etre_.

Seeing that the child was making poor progress, and as it was out of the question to dismiss a governess who had been entrusted with the three daughters of the d.u.c.h.ess of Dulworth, Lady Durwent sent for reinforcement in the person of the organist of their church, and bade him teach Elise the art of the piano. With the dull lack of vision belonging to men of his type, he failed to recognise the spirit of music lying in her breast, merely waiting the call to spring into life.

He knew that her home was one where music was unheard, and his method of unfolding to the girl the most spiritual and fundamental of all the arts was to give her SCALES. He was a kindly, well-intentioned fellow, and would not willingly have hurt a sparrow; but he took a nature doomed to suffer for lack of self-expression, and succeeded in walling up the great river of music which might have given her what she lacked.

He hid the edifice and offered her scaffolding--then wondered.

II.

Elise was consistent in few things, but her love for Richard, the youngest of the family, was of a depth and a mature tenderness that never varied. Doomed to an insufficient will-power and an easy, plastic nature that lent itself readily to the abbreviation 'd.i.c.k,' he quickly succ.u.mbed to his fiery-tinted sister, and became a willing dupe in all her escapades.

At her order he turned the hose on the head-gardener; when told to put mucilage on the rector's chair at dinner, he merely asked for the pot.

On six different occasions she offered him soap, telling him it was toffy, and each time he bit of it generously and without suspicion.

Every one else in the house represented law and order to him--Elise was the spirit of outlawry, and he her slave. She taught him a dance of her own invention ent.i.tled 'The Devil and the Maiden' (with a certain inconsistency casting him as the maiden and herself as the Devil), and frequently, when ordered to go to bed, they would descend to the servants' quarters and perform it to the great delight of the family retainers.

A favourite haunt of theirs was the stables, where they would persuade the grooms to place them on their father's chargers; and they were frequent visitors at feeding-time, taking a never-ending delight in the gourmandism of the whinnying beasts, and finding particular joy in acquiring the language and the mannerisms of the stablemen, which they would reserve for, and solemnly use at, the next gathering of the neighbouring gentry.

When Elise was ten and d.i.c.k seven, she read him highwaymen's tales until his large blue eyes almost escaped from their sockets. It was at the finish of one of these narratives of derring-do that she whispered temptation into his ear, with the result that they bided their opportunity, and, when the one groom on duty was asleep, repaired to the stables armed with a loaded shot-gun. After herculean efforts they succeeded in harnessing Lord Durwent's famous hunter with the saddle back to front, the curb-bit choking the horse's throat, the brow-band tightly strapped around the poor beast's nostrils, the surcingle trailing in the dust.

With improvised masks over their faces, they mounted the steed and set out for adventure, the horse seeming to comprehend its strange burden and stepping as lightly as its tortures would permit, while the saddle slid cheerfully about its back, threatening any moment to roll the desperados on to the road.

They had just emerged from the estate into the public highway, when a pa.s.sing butcher's cart stopped their progress. The younger Durwent, who had been mastering the art of retaining his seat while his steed was in motion, was unprepared for its cessation, and promptly overbalanced over the horse's shoulder, reaching the road head first, and discharging a couple of pellets from the shotgun into a fleshy part of the butcher-boy's anatomy.

The groom was dismissed; the butcher-boy received ten pounds; Richard (when it was certain that concussion of the brain was not going to materialise) was soundly whipped; and Elise was banished for forty-eight hours to her room, issuing with a carefully concocted plan to waylay the rector coming from church, steal the collection, and purchase with the ill-gotten gains the sole proprietary interests in the village sweet-shop.

There is little doubt but that the _coup_ would have been attempted had not Lord Durwent decided that the influence of his sister was not good for d.i.c.k, and sent him to a preparatory school at Bexhill-on-Sea, there to imbibe sea-air and some little learning, and await his entrance into Eton.

Robbed of her brother's stimulating loyalty, Elise relapsed into a sulky obedience to her governess and her mother. To their puny vision it seemed that her att.i.tude towards them was one of haughty aloofness, and everything possible was done to subdue her spirit. Being unable to see that the child was lonely, and too proud to admit her craving for sympathetic companionship, they tried to tame the thoroughbred as they would a mule.

Only when d.i.c.k returned for holidays would her petulant moods vanish, and in his company her old vitality sparkled like the noonday sun upon the ocean's surface. And if her affection for him knew no variation, his was no less true. The friendships and the adventures of school were forgotten in the comradeship of his sister as, over the fields of Roselawn or on the tennis-court, they would renew their childhood's hours. He taught her to throw a fly for trout, and she initiated him into the mysteries of answering the calls of birds in the woods.

Mounted on a couple of ponies, they became familiar figures at the tenants' cottages, and though the spirit of outlawry mellowed with advancing years, Lady Durwent never saw them start away from the house without the uneasy feeling that there was more than a chance they would get into some mischief before they returned.

In the meantime the elder son was bringing credit to his ancestors and himself. His accent became a thing of perfection, nicely nuanced, and entirely free of any emphasis or intensity that might rob it of its placid suggestion of good-breeding. His att.i.tude towards the servants was one of pleasant dignity, and the tenantry all spoke of Master Malcolm as a fine young gentleman who would make a worthy ruler of Roselawn.

Between him and Richard there was little love lost. The elder boy disapproved of his hoydenish sister, and sought at all times to shame her tempestuous nature by insistence on decorum in their relations.

Richard, who invariably brought home adverse reports from school, could find no fault in his colourful sister, and blindly espoused her cause at all times.

On one occasion, when Malcolm had been more than usually censorious, d.i.c.k challenged him to a fight. They adjourned to the seclusion of a small plot of gra.s.s by a great oak, where the Etonian knocked d.i.c.k down five times in succession, afterwards escorting him to the cook, who placed raw beefsteak on his eyes.

It was characteristic of the worthy Richard that he bore his brother no malice whatever for the punishment. He had proposed the fight, conscious of the fact that he would be soundly beaten, but he was a bit of a Quixote--and a lady's name was involved.