The Shuttle Part 29

he said, "but it was not like this. Savagery in savage days had its excuse. This is the beast sunk into the gibbering, degenerate ape."

Penzance came and spent hours of each day with him. Part of his rage was the rage of a man, but he was a boy still, and the boyishness of his bitterly hurt youth was a thing to move to pity. With young blood, and young pride, and young expectancy rising within him, he was at an hour when he should have felt himself standing upon the threshold of the world, gazing out at the splendid joys and promises and powerful deeds of it--waiting only the fit moment to step forth and win his place.

"But we are done for," he shouted once. "We are done for. And I am as much done for as they are. Decent people won't touch us. That is where the last Mount Dunstan stands." And Penzance heard in his voice an absolute break. He stopped and marched to the window at the end of the long room, and stood in dead stillness, staring out at the down-sweeping lines of heavy rain.

The older man thought many things, as he looked at his big back and body. He stood with his legs astride, and Penzance noted that his right hand was clenched on his hip, as a man's might be as he clenched the hilt of his sword--his one mate who might avenge him even when, standing at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he must fall.

Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its way, or fails to sweep a path before it. The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as unchangeable. Much of it stood before him embodied in this strongly sentient thing. In this way the Reverend Lewis found his thoughts leading him, and he--being moved to the depths of a fine soul--felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.

He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre. He said, at last, in a sane level voice:

"Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan."

After which the stillness remained unbroken again for some minutes.

Saltyre did not move or make any response, and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a book, and they spoke of other things.

When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger son succeeded, there came a time when the two companions sat together in the library again. It was the evening of a long day spent in discouraging hard work.

In the morning they had ridden side by side over the estate, in the afternoon they had sat and pored over accounts, leases, maps, plans. By nightfall both were f.a.gged and neither in sanguine mood.

Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time. The pair often sat silent.

This pause was ended by the young man's rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.

"It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few years ago," he said. "It has just come back to me."

Singularly enough--or perhaps naturally enough--it had also just arisen again from the depths of Penzance's subconsciousness.

"Yes," he answered, "I remember. To-night it suggests premonition. Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan."

"In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all," answered the other man. Then he suddenly threw out his arms in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been difficult to describe. There was a kind of pa.s.sion in it. "I am the last Mount Dunstan," he harshly laughed.

"Moi qui vous parle! The last."

Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without living in it. He presently shook his head.

"No," he said. "I don't see that. No--not the last. Believe me."

And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at him without speaking. The eyes of each rested in the eyes of the other. And, as had happened before, they followed the subject no further. From that moment it dropped.

Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to America. Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews with him and restraining expression of their absolute disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources, knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places. The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter writing with the corners of his elderly mouth hard set.

Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return. In the library they sat and talked it over, and, having done so, closed the book of the episode.

He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere. It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.

When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a servant, his face wore the look his friend would have been rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.

Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some casual talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make him forget such things as it is not good to remember. That is what we have done many times in the past, and may find it well to do many a time again.

He begins with talk of the village and the country-side. Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the countryside are sometimes--not always--interesting. Tom Benson's wife has presented him with triplets, and there is great excitement in the village, as to the steps to be taken to secure the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for this feat. Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking a fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it has been suggested that the parochial authorities in charge of the "Union," in which he must inevitably shortly take refuge, may interfere with his rights as a citizen. The Reverend Lewis has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at once irate and obdurate.

"Vicar," says old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no man. Law won't let him." Such refusal, he intimates, might drive him to wild and riotous living. Remembering his last view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his white smock, his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff his bent body leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little. He did not smile when Penzance pa.s.sed to the restoration of the ancient church at Mellowdene.

"Restoration" usually meant the tearing away of ancient oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment of smug new benches, suggesting suburban Dissenting chapels, such as the feudal soul revolts at. Neither did he smile at a reference to the gathering at Dunholm Castle, which was twelve miles away. Dunholm was the possession of a man who stood for all that was first and highest in the land, dignity, learning, exalted character, generosity, honour. He and the late Lord Mount Dunstan had been born in the same year, and had succeeded to their t.i.tles almost at the same time. There had arrived a period when they had ceased to know each other. All that the one man intrinsically was, the other man was not. All that the one estate, its castle, its village, its tenantry, represented, was the antipodes of that which the other stood for.

The one possession held its place a silent, and perhaps, unconscious reproach to the other. Among the guests, forming the large house party which London social news had already recorded in its columns, were great and honourable persons, and interesting ones, men and women who counted as factors in all good and dignified things accomplished. Even in the present Mount Dunstan's childhood, people of their world had ceased to cross his father's threshold. As one or two of the most noticeable names were mentioned, mentally he recalled this, and Penzance, quick to see the thought in his eyes, changed the subject.

"At Stornham village an unexpected thing has happened," he said. "One of the relatives of Lady Anstruthers has suddenly appeared--a sister. You may remember that the poor woman was said to be the daughter of some rich American, and it seemed unexplainable that none of her family ever appeared, and things were allowed to go from bad to worse. As it was understood that there was so much money people were mystified by the condition of things."

"Anstruthers has had money to squander," said Mount Dunstan. "Tenham and he were intimates. The money he spends is no doubt his wife's. As her family deserted her she has no one to defend her."

"Certainly her family has seemed to neglect her for years. Perhaps they were disappointed in his position. Many Americans are extremely ambitious. These international marriages are often singular things.

Now--apparently without having been expected--the sister appears.

Vanderpoel is the name--Miss Vanderpoel."

"I crossed the Atlantic with her in the Meridiana," said Mount Dunstan.

"Indeed! That is interesting. You did not, of course, know that she was coming here."

"I knew nothing of her but that she was a saloon pa.s.senger with a suite of staterooms, and I was in the second cabin. Nothing? That is not quite true, perhaps. Stewards and pa.s.sengers gossip, and one cannot close one's ears. Of course one heard constant reiteration of the number of millions her father possessed, and the number of cabins she managed to occupy. During the confusion and alarm of the collision, we spoke to each other."

He did not mention the other occasion on which he had seen her. There seemed, on the whole, no special reason why he should.

"Then you would recognise her, if you saw her. I heard to-day that she seems an unusual young woman, and has beauty."

"Her eyes and lashes are remarkable. She is tall. The Americans are setting up a new type."

"Yes, they used to send over slender, fragile little women. Lady Anstruthers was the type. I confess to an interest in the sister."

"Why?"

"She has made a curious impression. She has begun to do things. Stornham village has lost its breath." He laughed a little. "She has been going over the place and discussing repairs."

Mount Dunstan laughed also. He remembered what she had said. And she had actually begun.

"That is practical," he commented.

"It is really interesting. Why should a young woman turn her attention to repairs? If it had been her father--the omnipotent Mr.

Vanderpoel--who had appeared, one would not have wondered at such practical activity. But a young lady--with remarkable eyelashes!"

His elbows were on the arm of his chair, and he had placed the tips of his fingers together, wearing an expression of such absorbed contemplation that Mount Dunstan laughed again.

"You look quite dreamy over it," he said.

"It allures me. Unknown quant.i.ties in character always allure me.

I should like to know her. A community like this is made up of the absolutely known quant.i.ty--of types repeating themselves through centuries. A new one is almost a startling thing. Gossip over teacups is not usually entertaining to me, but I found myself listening to little Miss Laura Brunel this afternoon with rather marked attention. I confess to having gone so far as to make an inquiry or so. Sir Nigel Anstruthers is not often at Stornham. He is away now. It is plainly not he who is interested in repairs."

"He is on the Riviera, in retreat, in a place he is fond of," Mount Dunstan said drily. "He took a companion with him. A new infatuation. He will not return soon."

CHAPTER XIX