CHAPTER VIII.
THE MARQUESS.
Next morning Beavis Worthivale walked to Court Royal. He had access to the house at all times. His sister was there permanently, and he had been about it since he was a boy.
The house was large, forming a quadrangle, with the state rooms on the garden side. The Duke had his own suite of apartments; so had the Marquess, so also Lady Grace, and so also Lord Ronald. Indeed, the Archdeacon had his own rooms there kept for him, to which he could come when he liked, and be at home. He was a married man without a family, and he found life dull at his Somersetshire parsonage, with only three hundred people to instruct in honour and obedience to the powers that be. He had an admirable, managing wife, and a safe curate, very ladylike, absolutely transparent, whom he could trust to do nothing to surprise or shock anyone, so perfectly good and colourless was he. The Archdeacon’s health suffered in Somersetshire, and he was nowhere so well as at Court Royal, where the sea air and the society and good entertainment agreed with him. Moreover, he was the man whom the whole family consulted in every difficulty, and he was thought and believed himself indispensable to his brothers.
The Marquess had his own valet and groom, and sitting-room, and bed-room, and smoking cabinet. He was a man of considerable taste, and he and his sister had amused themselves in fitting up his apartments in the most perfect modern style. The walls of the sitting-room were gilt, with peacocks’ plumes, spread, painted on the gold. The curtains were peacock blue, sprinkled with forget-me-nots.
The carpet was an unfigured olive drugget with blue, green, and gold-coloured mats and rugs cast about it. He had a fancy for old Chelsea figures, and for Plymouth ware, and his cabinets and chimney piece were crowded with specimens bought at a time when Chelsea was run up by the dealers, and fetched fancy prices. His sister kept his room gay with flowers. That was her special care, and she fulfilled her self-imposed task well. The Marquess always pretended to distinguish between her bouquets and those arranged by other hands during Lady Grace’s absence. He told her so privately, that he might not hurt poor Lucy Worthivale, on whom the obligation devolved when her friend was from home.
Lord Saltcombe’s cabinet was not invaded or interfered with. There he kept his hunting-whips, his guns, his fishing-rods, and the walls were adorned with the heads and brushes of foxes, tiger skins, and antlers of red deer. In one corner was an easel, for he sometimes painted. Against the wall a cottage piano, which he sometimes played. Also a rack of budding-knives and grafting tools, for he sometimes gardened. In the window hung a cage with a canary, which he sometimes fed, sometimes starved, and sometimes overfed. One wall was occupied by his library, a mixed collection of books: Rabelais, S. Thomas à Kempis, Jean Paul, Spielhagen, Herbert Spencer, ‘The Lyra Messianica’ and Algernon Swinburne, Victor Hugo, Emile Souvestre, Zola, The Duke of Argyll, Thackeray, ‘Explorations of Africa,’ and ‘Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible,’ with ‘Cometh up as a Flower’ and ‘Is Life worth Living?’ thrust in between the volumes, and a pamphlet on Poultry upon the top of it.
Beavis Worthivale had known the Marquess from childhood, but it cannot be said that he understood him. In fact, no one understood him, yet everyone liked him. He resembled an audience-chamber, accessible to all, containing a closet of which no one possessed the key. He spent his time in reading or in out-door pursuits, yet he had no favourite study and no darling occupation. He was accomplished, knew several languages, was a fair classic, fond of history, and liked books of travel. He read whatever came in his way, changing his style, and subject, and language for the sake of contrast. He skimmed the work he took in hand, but never studied it. Reading with him was a distraction, not a pursuit; a narcotic which enabled him to forget life and its burdens.
The Marquess was already forty, was full of the vigour and beauty of manhood, but it was easy to see that life was to him without object; that he exacted of it little, and cared little for it. Always amiable, cheerful, agreeable, with plenty of conversation and pleasant humour, he was attractive in society, but was unattracted by it. He could enter into an argument, but was indifferent to the side on which he argued. He argued to kill an hour, not to convince an opponent. His uncle, the Archdeacon, was sometimes alarmed about him, lest he should become a sceptic; but he was deficient in the earnestness of purpose which would make him take a line. He accepted traditional creeds, religious and political, and customs social and domestic, without consideration, with an undercurrent of doubt. He never hurt anyone’s feelings, never transgressed a canon of good taste. His eyes were open to the errors and follies of men, and to the virtues of humanity, but the former roused in him no indignation, the latter no admiration. Although he was cheerful in society, this cheerfulness carried with it an appearance of artificiality, and when he was alone he lapsed into melancholy or indifference.
He now and then made an excursion to Brittany or Switzerland; he had been even to Brazil and South Africa. He came back with embroidered kerchiefs and carved spoons, lion skins and stuffed humming-birds, and a good deal to say about what he had seen, but with no ambition to ascend peaks or explore wildernesses. In politics he took no interest. He rarely visited relatives and acquaintances, disliking the trouble. He professed, and no one doubted his sincerity, that he was happier at home than anywhere else; and more content lounging out a purposeless existence than making an effort to observe and please among strangers and in strange places.
This had not always been the case. He had been in the army, though never on active service. The few years in which he was in the army formed the one epoch in his life in which he had been lost to the sight of his family. The young Marquess, who had been somewhat spoiled at home, with great personal beauty, fascinating manners, a kindly disposition, little knowledge of the world, and a ducal coronet hanging over his head, had suddenly been transferred from the quiet of Court Royal to the vortex of the whirlpool of life. The Duke, owing to his heart disease and advancing years, had been obliged gradually to withdraw from town, and to retire from an active part in the social and political spheres to which he belonged. Lady Grace was always with him; she would not leave her father for long, consequently the world of Court Royal had become a very quiet and a very small world. The temptations to which a young man like the Marquess would be exposed on entering the army were hardly realised by his father and by the Archdeacon. His sister had not the vaguest suspicion of them. ‘He is a Christian and a gentleman,’ said the Duke, ‘and a Christian and a gentleman, put him where you will, does nothing unbecoming.’
At Court Royal none knew how he fared, whether he fought or whether he fell. His father heard, indeed, that he was greatly admired by the ladies and liked by his brother-officers, and accepted this as his due. Then the Duke found that his son was unable to live on the annual sum allowed him. He heard that the Marquess was in debt, and he wrote him a stately reprimand, but he said to Lord Ronald, ‘It is natural. He must live up to his name and title. It is unfortunate that the property is so burdened and shrunk.’
After that, rumours got abroad that Lord Saltcombe had been entangled in an intrigue which was not creditable—with an actress according to one version, with a married woman according to another. Nothing very definite was known, and it was sedulously kept from the ears of the Duke, Lord Edward, and Lady Grace.
Lord Ronald alone knew the particulars, but he was reserved. He never mentioned the matter to anyone.
Presently the news came that the Marquess was ill at Palermo. ‘I did not know that he had gone abroad,’ said the Duke. ‘Ah! I see there have been signs of activity in Etna, no doubt he went to witness an eruption.’
A few months after, Saltcombe returned home, with the General, who had gone out to him.
Lord Saltcombe was greatly altered, apparently a broken man.
He had been brought to the edge of the grave by typhoid fever, ‘owing,’ explained the Duke, ‘to the absence of sanitary arrangements, which are indeed deficient in the best Continental hotels. I sent out our own medical attendant, otherwise Saltcombe would have been bled to death by those Italian Sangrados.’
Gradually the Marquess recovered from his illness, but though his physical health was restored, his elasticity of spirit, his energy of character, were gone. He remained a prey to apathy, and, as he made no effort to shake this off, habit made it permanent. No one inquired into the truth of the rumours that had circulated, the best-disposed persons rejected them as slanderous gossip.
The Marquess left the army, remained at Court Royal, and settled into the uniform existence of a country gentleman.
When Mr. Worthivale told his son that the marriage of the Marquess was to solve the family difficulties, he expressed his hope and conviction of the entire Kingsbridge family. The Duke was desirous of seeing his son settled before he died, and both the General and the Archdeacon urged him to bestir himself, and find a wife. Lady Grace also, in her sweet, fondling manner, approached the subject and endeavoured to arouse him to the duty of marrying. Lord Saltcombe listened with a smile, turned aside the advice of his uncles with a jest, the entreaty of his sister with a compliment and a kiss, and his father’s injunction with a promise to lay it to heart. There it ended. He took no step to find a wife, and though Lady Grace invited friends to Court Royal with the hope that one of them might arrest the attention of her brother, the heart of Lord Saltcombe remained invulnerable.
He saw through his sister’s schemes and laughed at them. He was warmly attached to her, indeed she was his closest companion. She loved him with equal sincerity and with even greater tenderness. When his foot paced the terrace garden she heard it, came down, linked her hand in his arm, and walked up and down with him as he smoked.
They had plenty to say to each other, but he never allowed her to sound the depths of his soul. The conversation between them concerned the outer life, the events and interests of every day. This association with his sister had a refining and a purifying effect on Lord Saltcombe. She was ignorant of what had occurred during his brief career in the army, and did not inquire. Whatever it was, it had troubled and stained his mind and conscience, and daily intercourse with his sister restored the purity to the mind and the sensitiveness of the conscience, but it did not give him energy and ambition.
Beavis Worthivale was very little younger than the Marquess; they had known each other from childhood, and had always been on familiar and friendly terms. Beavis, as a boy, had shared tutors with Lord Saltcombe, and had been his companion in play. Of late, the friendship had been interrupted; Beavis had been from home, and Saltcombe in the army. Since the illness of the Marquess, Beavis had been unable to recover his place in the intimacy of the young nobleman that he had occupied as a boy.
Mr. Worthivale, in his devotion to the Kingsbridge family, had readily given up his daughter to be the companion of Lady Grace, without considering whether it was to his, her, and his son’s advantage. By surrendering Lucy he had deprived his widowed old age of its chief comfort, his house of its proper mistress, and his son of his best companion. Lucy, moreover, was reared in the lap of luxury, which she could not expect elsewhere; she was not likely to marry anyone of rank, and she was withdrawn from the sphere where she might have found a husband suitable in birth and fortune. She would grow up at Court Royal to be an old maid, a hanger-on of the ducal house, unable to endure the roughs and chills of life outside its walls.
In social intercourse men and women act and react on one another unconsciously. Men’s minds give to those of women the impulse they require, and women’s minds afford a corrective and softening influence to those of men. By daily association women are stimulated to mental activity, and men’s opinions are rounded and smoothed. From the clash of minds, male and female, the latter take body, the former acquire temper. Woman stimulates man’s imagination, man awakes her reason.
Through the Straits of Gibraltar flow two currents—one, setting outward, is warm, and light, and sweet; the other, setting inward, is cold, and heavy, and salt. It is the presence of these opposed currents gliding past each other that saves the Mediterranean from stagnating into a Dead Sea. It is the constant movement of the male and female currents, one giving warmth, the other salt, which preserves civilisation in purity and health. Lucy had suffered by her separation from her brother and father. She had lost mental and moral independence, and Worthivale and his son had lost the comforts of home and the polish which the presence of a lady can alone impart. The steward was unconscious of the sacrifice he had made, but his son saw and regretted it.
As Beavis was walking along the corridor towards Lord Saltcombe’s apartments, the General’s door opened and Lord Ronald appeared in his dressing-gown, a fez on his grey hair, and a pipe in his hand.
‘What, Beavis, you here this morning? No use going on to Saltcombe; he is not out of bed. Here, step into my room and have a chat till the lazy fellow is ready to receive you.’