Chapter Twenty Four
Sir Francis Orlebar
Claxby Court, Sir Francis Orlebar’s seat, was a snug country box, rather modern in architecture and unpretentious of aspect. A long, winding carriage-drive led up to the front portico, entering which you found yourself in a spacious central hall, lit from above by a skylight. The effect of this hall, with its carved furniture and quaint oak cabinets, its walls covered with weapons and trophies of many lands, was extremely good. A gallery ran round it above, and the dining and drawing-room, morning-room and library, opened out from it on the ground-floor.
The stabling and gardens were of proportionately modest dimensions. The house stood in a park of about fifty acres, and, being on a slight eminence, commanded a charming view of field and woodland stretching away to a line of green downs to the southward. The estate consisted of about three thousand acres, but it was not all good land, and there was always a farm or two lying unlet. The former possessor had been a careful man, but although times were better in his day, he had found it all he could do to steer clear of serious embarrassment. The present one found it hardly less difficult, but he had two things in his favour. He was a man of simple and inexpensive tastes, and, with the exception of one son, he was childless. His liability was, therefore, a strictly limited one.
Sir Francis Orlebar stood in his library window, thinking. It was a bright summer morning – bright and cheerful enough to have exercised a corresponding effect upon the spirits. Yet in this instance it did not seem to.
He was a slight, well-proportioned man of medium height, but his slight build and erect carriage made him seem taller than he really was. There was a look of almost ultra-refinement in his face, and he was still strikingly handsome. His hair and moustache were grey, but his eyes looked almost young. Not in their light-hearted expression, however, for there was a tinge of melancholy never wholly absent from them, but in their wonderful penetrating clearness. It was a most contradictory face, and withal, to the student of physiognomy, a most provoking one, for as a set-off to the high forehead and straight, clear eyes there was a shade of weakness, of over-sensitiveness in the set of the lower jaw. But it was the face of a many-generation-descended gentleman.
As we have said, there was nothing in this bright, mellow summer morning to conduce to depression. Yet the cloud upon the thinker’s face deepened.
It would be safe to hazard a conjecture that the cause of his melancholy was purely subjective. His was just the temperament which delights in retrospect, which is given to tormenting its owner with speculative musings upon what might have been – to raising the ghosts of dead and buried events.
He looked back upon his life and derived no pleasure from the process. With his opportunities – always with the best intentions – what a poor affair he seemed to have made of it! Better indeed for him had those intentions been less free from alloy, since nothing which borders on perfection has the slightest chance in this world of snares, and pitfalls, and rank growths. Best intentions, indeed, had been his undoing all along the line. His own inclinations were rather against the profession of arms, but he had sacrificed them and accepted a commission, in accordance with his father’s strongly expressed wish. He had married his first wife from motives of chivalry rather than affection – out of pity for the life of toil and grinding poverty otherwise mapped out for her. Then had followed disillusion, unappreciativeness, ingratitude, misery, till her early death freed him from the ill-assorted and blighting tie. Caught at the rebound, his too soft heart and aesthetic nature had led him into an intrigue which proved disastrous to all concerned – but, there, he did not care to dwell upon that. Again, in a fit of disgust and sensitiveness, brought about by the éclat and scandal, he had sold out – always with the best intentions – where another would simply have shown a bold front until the nine days’ wonder had abated, and was left early in life without a profession. He had embarked in literature, always of a delicate, not to say dilettante nature; had dabbled in art, and a little in a science or two, but had never got his head above the level of the swaying, striving, pushing – shall we say cringing? – multitude of heads, all fighting for that proud and lucrative pre-eminence. But he had always the interests and occupations of a country gentleman to fall back upon, and perhaps, on the whole, these suited him as well as anything else. And then, after about twenty years wherein to reflect on the scant advantages which he had reaped from his former matrimonial venture, he had suffered himself to be again bound with the iron chain, and his second partner – as is curiously enough not unfrequently the case under the circumstances, presumably through some ironical freak of Nature which decrees that when a man of an age and experience to know better does make a fool of himself he shall do it thoroughly – possessed neither attractions, nor wealth, nor suitability of temperament to recommend her. And having arrived at this stage of his retrospection, poor Sir Francis could not but own to himself – we fear, not for the first time – that in taking this step to counteract the growing loneliness of advancing age he had performed the metaphorical and saltatory feat popularly known as “jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
But there was one bright influence shining in upon the shaded events of his anything but cheerful introspection, and its name was Philip. The baronet’s heart glowed with pride at the thought of his fine, open-hearted, handsome son, upon whom he lavished an almost feminine affection. Here again came in that fatal motor, “best intentions.” Better, perchance, had a little more steel and a little less velvet gloved the hand which had had the bringing up of that sunny-natured youth. But Sir Francis was the last person to whom this was likely to occur, and now, as he thought that the time for his idolised son’s return could not be very far distant, there stole over his features an unconscious smile of pleasurable anticipation.
Immersed in such congenial musing, he hardly heard the subdued knock at the door, the almost noiseless footsteps of the well-trained butler. The latter bore some letters on a salver.
“Put them on the table, Karslake,” said the baronet, unwilling to be disturbed in his pleasant reverie.
“Beg pardon, Sir Francis,” said the man, who was of long standing and privileged – “beg pardon, Sir Francis, but I think one of ’em’s from Mr Philip.”
The change in the baronet’s demeanour was striking.
“Eh – what?” he cried, wheeling round and making what almost amounted to a snatch at the letters. Then, having pushed the others contemptuously aside, he resumed his position in the window, hurriedly tearing open the envelope.
The butler meanwhile was busying himself about the room, putting things tidy that had got out of their places or were otherwise disarranged. A quick gasp of dismay which escaped his master caused him to pause in his occupation.
“Karslake,” said the latter, in explanation, for the old butler was, as we said, privileged, having been in the household almost since Philip’s birth, “you will be sorry to hear that Mr Philip has met with an accident – climbing those infernal mountains,” he added, more to himself than the servant.
“Not serious, I trust, Sir Francis?” said the latter, in real anxiety, for Philip was a prime favourite in the Claxby household, save with one, and that not the least important member of it.
“No, thank God! He got hit by a falling stone, and can’t put his foot to the ground. Confined to his room, he says.”
“I hope he’ll be properly taken care of in them foreign parts, Sir Francis,” said Karslake, shaking his head in John Bull-like scepticism as to any such possibility.
“Oh, yes. There’s an English doctor attending him as well as the foreign one. Thank Heaven it’s no worse. Is her ladyship down yet? But never mind – I’ll find her anyhow,” he added to himself, going to the door. And as he did so it was noticeable that he walked with a slight limp.
Lady Orlebar was up but not down, which apparently paradoxical definition maybe taken to mean that, arrayed in a dressing-gown, she reposed comfortably in a big armchair by her bedroom window. Her occupation was of a twofold character, in that she was assimilating coffee and reading Truth.
In externals she was a large well-built woman of middle age, handsome after a coarse, rubicund fashion, though a purplish hue which had succeeded in her cheeks the roseate flush of youth, would almost excuse the severe verdict of that hypercritic who should define her charms as somewhat “blowsy.” Her temper could not even be described as “uncertain,” for there was no element of uncertainty about it, as poor Sir Francis had already realised, to his sorrow. Her disposition was domineering and exacting to the last degree, and she would do nothing for herself that she could get anybody else to do for her – presumably to make up, if somewhat late in the day, for half a lifetime spent in perforce doing everything for herself. From such a one as this it was hardly likely Sir Francis would meet with much sympathy in the flurry and anxiety into which the news of his son’s accident had thrown him.
“Mercy on us! Is that all?” was her comment as soon as he had given her particulars. “Here you come bursting in upon me regardless of my poor nerves, and I in such pain all night, as I always am. You come rushing in upon me, I say, as if the house was on fire.”
The fact being that Lady Orlebar was as strong as a horse. The only pain she ever suffered from was of that nature, which a daily hour’s walk, combined with a little discrimination at table, would have conjured away like magic. But it was a useful affectation to assume that life was a perpetual martyrdom – a highly efficient buttress to her ascendency.
“And all about what?” she went on. “Merely to tell me that an idle, good-for-nothing boy, who ought to be hard at work earning his living instead of skylarking about the world amusing himself, has sprained his ankle. Really, Francis, I wonder the absurdity of it doesn’t strike even you!”
“Well it’s a pity I said anything about it, I admit,” he answered coldly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have – but – how would you like a trip abroad, Alicia?”
“What, at this time of year, when you have to sit five a side in a railway compartment, and to make one of a clamouring, struggling rabble, beseeching the hotel-keepers to allow you even a garret at a charge that is rather more than would be required to keep a yacht? No, thank you, not for me.”
“Well, I don’t mind a little of that sort of thing, so I think I shall take a run over myself.”
“Over where – may I ask?”
“Over to Zermatt. I should like to be sure the boy is getting proper care – efficient attendance. An injury of that sort, though insignificant in itself, may become serious if not properly taken care of at the time. And Philip is so reckless.”
The colour deepened in Lady Orlebar’s highly coloured face, and the sneer upon her lips was not pleasant to look upon.
“Did I hear you aright, Sir Francis? It cannot be possible that I understood you to say you purposed to leave me alone here – to leave me all alone in my wretched state of health – while you go rushing off to the Continent to look after this boy, who is surely old enough to take care of himself, and who will probably laugh over you and your fussiness with his friends for your pains.”
“Whatever may be your opinion of Philip, you can at least credit him with being a gentleman,” was the icy reply to this rally.
But ice thrown into a boiling copper produces a mighty hissing, a prodigious letting off of steam. And such was the effect entailed upon the lady by this rejoinder. Of indifferent birth herself she imagined the reply to contain a gird at that circumstance, and rushed into the battle – horse, foot, and artillery.
“Pah! An idle, good-for-nothing scamp is what I credit him with being,” she retorted furiously. “A fellow who allows his parents to pinch and starve themselves in order that he may revel in the luxury of idleness. And, I tell you what it is, Francis, I won’t be neglected in any such fashion! I won’t be left alone here! No, that is a thing I will not stand! Isn’t it enough that I am ground down and forced to live on a mere pittance because you choose to spoil your son? Is that not enough, I say? And now you propose to go away and leave me alone for an indefinite time. But you will find I am not to be so easily shelved. I have my rights, and I know thoroughly well how to look after them. And look after them I shall – rest assured of that! Go – go by all means! But the consequences be upon your own head.”
Of attempting to reason with her in this mood, or indeed in any mood, Sir Francis had long since learned the futility. Indeed, at that moment he felt little inclination to attempt anything of the kind. Apart from the coarseness of her temper, which revolted his more refined instincts, her venomous abuse of his son aroused in him the bitterest resentment. He was no match for an adversary of this fibre, for his refined and sensitive nature shrank with loathing and horror from violent scenes. So now he adopted the wise, if somewhat ignominious, course of beating a retreat. He simply walked out of the room.
This was not precisely what his wife desired. Like all women of her kind, and a good many not of her kind, she dearly loved a battle, and the sort of battle she loved most was that wherein victory was assured. By fleeing at the sound of the first gun the enemy had effected a retreat which was three parts of a victory. She returned to the perusal of Truth– an extra pungent number – with an angry frown, yet she could not quite reconcentrate her mind upon the spicy contents of the journal. The slave had shown signs of rebellion. He must be made to feel that rebellion was not going to answer.
Poor woman! Her grievances were very great – very real – were they not? She had brought her husband neither wealth, looks, nor connections when she had condescended to take possession of him and his position and title, yet her convenience was ever to be uppermost, her word law. She claimed the right to control his every movement. She had, we say, brought him not a shilling, yet to rule his means and expenditure was of course her indubitable right. As, for instance, that he should persist in making an allowance to his own son, instead of turning that fortunate youth penniless out of doors and pouring out the cash thus saved at her feet, was an act of flagrant and shameful ill-treatment of her that cried aloud to Heaven for vengeance. But whether Heaven listened, and looked upon it in the same light or not, certain it was that it constituted the sum and crown of all her grievances, and they were not few.
That a man of Sir Francis Orlebar’s temperament should ever have taken such a woman to wife – rather, we ought to say, should ever have suffered himself to be taken possession of by her – was marvellous, would have been incredible but that we know the same sort of thing happens every day. And having once succumbed he was bound hand and foot. No power on earth could save him. A man more coarse fibred would have held his own, even at the cost of a diurnal battle royal. One less sensitive would have cut the knot of the difficulty by the simple expedient of undertaking a tour round the world, or any other method of separation which should commend itself to him. Or one of slippery principle would have laid himself out to effect an emancipation in the method most approved of by the lawyers and by newspaper editors in want of acceptable “copy.” But to Sir Francis each and all of these courses were equally repugnant – the latter, indeed, not to be thought of. His bondage was complete. He was a slave to that most tyrannical of despots – a thoroughly selfish, domineering, coarse-natured woman.
With an instinctive idea of placing it beyond his wife’s power to renew the last encounter he had taken himself out of the house. As he strolled through the park the limp in his left leg became more pronounced, as curiously enough it invariably did whenever he was vexed or agitated, and now he was both.
But by that evening the resolution he had formed to proceed to his son’s bedside was considerably shaken. He had telegraphed, and the replies had been in every way satisfactory. Perhaps his presence there would be unnecessary after all. This might or might not have been the sensible way of looking at it. But continual dropping wears away stones, which for present purposes may be taken to mean that the tongue of a violent woman is a pretty effective weapon against the strongest resolution formed by an irresolute nature. There had been another battle royal, and the baronet had retreated under cover of the satisfactory replies to his telegrams. It was better to avoid any more violent scenes, and accordingly he had succumbed – had yielded for the sake of peace – that is to say, “with the very best intentions.”
But the violent tongue of his stepmother, coupled with his father’s sensitive horror of the same, was destined to work such woe in poor Philip’s eventual fate as even that vindictive matron little dreamed. Strange are the trivialities that combine together for stupendous results. Had Sir Francis adhered to his first and laudable resolve what widespread ruin might have been averted. But he did not. He abandoned it for the sake of peace, of course with the best intentions.
Chapter Twenty Five
Taken at the Rebound
When Philip at length managed to leave his room and hobble downstairs with the aid of a stick and one of the hotel porters he realised to the full that it was high time he did.
He realised further that all thoughts of mountain climbing, for this season at any rate, must be abandoned. Not that he cared about that, however; for after more than a week of confinement to his room, and that in the loveliest of summer weather, all inclination towards the reaping of further mountaineering laurels seemed to have left him. His main ambition now was to get well as soon as possible and move away to fresh scenes. The lovely aspect of mountain and glacier shining in the golden summer sun was now as gall to him, intertwined as it was with recollections of Eden before his wholly unexpected and crushing expulsion therefrom. The bright laughter and cheerful voices of parties setting forth or returning – on sightseeing bent – grated irritably on his nerves, for it brought back to him the time so recent, but now divided by such an impassable gulf, when he himself was among the cheeriest of the cheery. So now as he sat in his comfortable cane chair – his injured foot propped up on another – in a sunny spot outside the hotel, his thoughts were very bitter.
Needless to say they ran upon the subject which had afforded him ample food for reflection during these long days of his irksome and enforced stagnation. To the first blank and heart-wrung sense of his loss had succeeded by degrees a feeling of angry resentment. Alma had meted out to him very harsh measure. She had allowed him no opportunity of explanation, and surely he was entitled to that amount of consideration, not to say fair play. But no. She had condemned him unheard. After all Fordham was right. The less one had to do with the other sex the better. It was all alike. And a very unwonted sneer clouded the beauty of the ordinarily bright and sunny face.
This, no doubt, was very good reasoning – would have been had the reasoner but numbered a dozen or so more years of life. In that case it would doubtlessly have afforded him abundant consolation. As things were, however, he was fain to own to himself that it afforded him very little indeed. However he might pretend to himself that Alma was not worth wrecking his life over, the poor fellow knew perfectly well that were she to appear at that moment before him with but one kind word on her lips, all his rankling resentment and cynical communings would be scattered to the winds. Those wretched Glovers – underbred, shop-keeping adventurers as they were – to come there wrecking his life by their infernal malice! And then as in a mental flash he compared the two girls, the pendulum swung back again, and he reflected that however harsh and peremptory had been Alma’s way of looking at things, he had got no more than he had deserved. But this idea, while it brushed aside the flimsy attempts he had been making to harden his heart towards her, left him rather more unhappy than before.
“Well, Mr Orlebar, I am glad to see you down at last,” said a very pleasing feminine voice, whose owner suddenly appeared round an angle of the house.
“You’re awfully good, Mrs Daventer,” he replied. “But if you’re only half as glad to see me down as I am to be down, why then you’re – you’re – er – still more good.”
“It must be delightful to feel yourself out of doors again, after being shut up all that time,” she went on. “Still, it won’t do to hurry matters. You must make up your mind to have a little patience.”
“Just what I’m doing. Job isn’t in it with me for that quality.”
She laughed – and a very attractive laugh it was. So Phil thought, and he reckoned himself a judge. “A devilish nice woman, and a devilish nice-looking one,” had been his verdict to Fordham, and he saw no reason to retract any part of it now.
“I shouldn’t give you credit for much of the quality at any rate,” she said. “You seem far too impulsive. For instance, just now you were looking anything but philosophical. However, it is slow work being a prisoner, and a lonely prisoner too. What has become of your friend?”
“Who? Fordham? Oh, he’s away for a few days. He and Wentworth have gone over to Chamounix by the glacier route. I miss the chap no end. I believe he’d have put it off if I had wanted him to, but, as it is, I’ve been feeling a selfish dog keeping him in the best part of the day yarning to me, when he might have been having a high old time on his own account. I tell you what it is, Mrs Daventer, he’s a rare good chap is Fordham.”
This was amusing – rich, in fact. She did not even turn away her head to conceal a bitter curl of the lips, for she flattered herself she was past showing the faintest sign of feeling. But a ruling passion is difficult to conceal entirely, especially when it consists of a surging, deadly hatred.
“Is he?” she said vacantly.
“Rather. I see you don’t believe it though. But, between ourselves, he is a good bit of a woman-hater. So I suppose the sex instinctively reciprocates the compliment. But, I say, Mrs Daventer. It was awfully good of you to come and see me as you did – and the other people too,” added Phil, in the half-shamefaced way in which nineteen men out of twenty are wont to express their thanks or appreciation as regards a kindness rendered.
“That was nothing. Mrs Wharton’s very nice, isn’t she? I’m very sorry they’re leaving to-morrow.”
“Are they? I hope I shall see them again before they go. Wharton’s a rare good sort although he’s a parson. Don’t look shocked. I’m afraid I don’t get on with ‘the cloth’ over well. I daresay it’s my own fault though.”
“I daresay it is,” she returned with a laugh.
During the latter days of his captivity Philip had not been without visitors. The British subject, when outside his (or her) native land, is the proprietor of a far more abundant and spontaneous fount of the milk of human kindness than when hedged around by the stovepipe-hat-cum-proper-introductions phase of respectability within the confines of the same. Several of the people sojourning in the hotel had looked in upon the weary prisoner to lighten the irksomeness of his confinement with a little friendly chat, and foremost among them had been Mrs Daventer.
“Are you doing anything particular this morning, Mrs Daventer? Because, if not, I wish you’d get a chair – I can’t get one for you, you see – and sit and talk to me,” said Phil, in that open, taking manner of his that rendered him almost as attractive to the other sex as his handsome face and fine physique.
“Well, I suppose I must,” she answered with a smile.
“It would be a real act of Christian charity. And – ”
He broke off in confused amazement, caused by the arrival of a third person upon the scene. “A good-looking girl,” was his mental verdict. “Wentworth was right, by Jove!”
“Laura, dear, see if there are any chairs in the hall,” said Mrs Daventer. “Thanks, love,” she went on, as her daughter returned, bearing a light garden-chair. “Mr Orlebar claims that it is a Christian duty on our part to sit and gossip with him. I suppose one must concede him the privileges of an invalid.”
“I am glad your ankle is so much better,” said the girl, quite unaffectedly, but with the slightest possible tinge of shyness, which added an indescribable piquancy to her rich Southern type of beauty. “It must be so hideously trying to see every one else going about enjoying themselves, while you feel yourself literally chained.”
“That’s just how it is,” assented Philip. “And they say it’s the best climbing season that has been known for ten years.”
“You are a great climber, I suppose?”
“No. A rank greenhorn, in fact. The Rothhorn was the first – the first real high thing – I’ve done, and it seems likely to be the last.”
“We heard about your accident the morning after we arrived. It made quite a little excitement.”
“I suppose so,” said Philip, with a laugh. “‘Terrible tragedy. A cow fell over the bridge and broke one horn,’ as the country reporter put it.”
“Get yourself a chair, dear,” said Mrs Daventer. And as the girl moved away with that intent, Philip could not, for the life of him, keep his glance from following the graceful, lithe gait. She was a splendid-looking girl, he told himself.
“How is it you are not away among the glaciers this lovely day, Miss Daventer?” he asked, when she had returned.
“I don’t know. I suppose I felt lazy. Some of the people near us at table have gone up to the Théodule to-day, and wanted me to go with them. But I should have had to decide last night; besides, they were going to make such a woefully early start. So I didn’t want to tie myself.”
“Quite right,” said Philip. “That early start side of the question takes half the edge off the fun of any undertaking here. Still, once you are squarely out it’s all right, and you feel all the better for it.”
“Always provided you have had a fair night’s rest. But these big hotels are apt to be very noisy – people getting up at all hours and taking abundant pains to render the whole house aware of the fact.”
“Rather,” said Philip. “Every one turns in ridiculously early, but what’s the good of that when just as you are dropping off to sleep somebody comes into the room above you and practices for the next day’s walk during about two hours, in a pair of regulation nail boots? I’ve been having a bad time of late. Getting no exercise in the daytime, I find it hard to sleep at night, and there’s always some one stumping about overhead. I was obliged to ring up the night porter at last and send him up to inform the gentleman overhead that I should take it as very kind of him if he would defer his rehearsal of step-cutting, jumping crevasses, etc, until he could practise upon real ice the next day. Well, the porter went, for I heard his voice through the floor. I asked him in the morning if the gentleman had sworn a great deal or only a little. ‘Gentleman?’ he said, in mild surprise. ‘It was not a gentleman, it was a lady.’”
“Wasn’t she awfully sorry?” said Laura.
“She may have been, but she didn’t seem so. By way of impressing me with the honour I ought to consider it to be lulled to sleep by the tread of her fairy feet, I am bound to record that she made rather more row than before.”
“Who was it? Do you know?”
“I don’t. I had my suspicions, but they were only suspicions.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been either of us,” laughed Mrs Daventer, “for we happen to be on the same floor. But to whom do your suspicions point?”
“I fancy it must have been one of those two grim spinsters who have been keeping me supplied with sacred literature.”
“No – have they?” said the girl, a swift laugh darting from her dark eyes. “I know who you mean, though I don’t know their names. They are dreadful old people. I notice at table they never have the same next-door neighbours two days running. I suppose they force their ideas on that head upon everybody, judging from the scraps of conversation that float across.”
“I ought to be grateful to them,” went on Philip. “Every day I found a fresh tract slipped under my door. The titles, too, were uniformly appropriated to the sojourner in Zermatt. ‘Where are you going to climb to-day?’ or ‘Looking Upward.’ ‘The Way that is Dark and Slippery,’ which reminded me of that high moraine coming down from the Rothhorn the other night. But what really did hurt my feelings was one labelled, ‘On whomsoever it Shall Fall it shall Grind him to Powder.’ It seemed too personal. I felt that they were poking fun at my misfortune, don’t you know, and it didn’t seem kind. But it occurred to me that they meant well. They meant to amuse me, and assuredly they succeeded. By the way, these interesting documents bore the injunction: ‘When done with, pass this on to a friend.’ Wherefore, Miss Daventer, I shall feel it my duty to endow you with the whole lot.”
“I must decline the honour. I couldn’t think of depriving you of so valuable a possession,” was the laughing reply. “But we are wandering dreadfully from the point. Why do you think it was one of those old things who was walking about over your head?”
“It is only bare suspicion, mind, and founded upon circumstantial evidence – acreage, I mean. I have become observant since my enforced detention, and while contemplating the populace – from a three-storey window – I have noticed that nobody else could show such an acreage of shoeleather.”