Mary Cholmondeley

A bachelor's an unfinished thing ... He wants somebody to listen to his talk.

—Eden Phillpotts.

Reader, do you know Barford, in Hampshire? If you don't, I can tell you how to get to it. You take train from Victoria, and you get out at Saundersfoot. There is nothing at Saundersfoot, except a wilderness of lodgings and a tin station and a high wind. It need not detain an active mind beyond the necessary moment of enquiring by which road it may be most quickly left. I cannot tell you who Saunders was, nor why the watering-place was called after his foot. But if you walk steadily away from it for five miles inland, along the white chalky road between the downs, you will arrive at the little village of Barford.

There is only one road, so you cannot miss your way. Little twisty lanes fretted with sheep-tracks drop down into it now and then from the broad-shouldered downs on either side, but take no notice of them. If you persevere, you will in due course see the village of Barford lying in front of you, which, at a little distance, looks as if it had been carelessly swept into a crease between the downs, while a few cottages and houses on the hillside seem to have adhered to the ground, and remained stuck where they were when the sweeping took place.

After you have passed the pond and the post office, and before you reach the school, you will see a lodge, and an old Italian iron gateway, flanked by a set of white wooden knobs planted in the ground on either side, held together by chains. The white knobs are apparently there in order to upset carriages as they drive in or out. But very few carriages have driven in or out during the last two years, except those of the owner of Barford Manor, Wentworth Maine. Wentworth, since he inherited the place from his uncle five years ago, had always led a somewhat secluded life. But during the last two years, ever since his half-brother, Michael, had been sentenced and imprisoned in Italy, Wentworth had withdrawn himself even more from the society of his neighbours. He continued to shoot and hunt, and to do his duties as a magistrate and as a supporter of the Conservative party, but his thin, refined face had a certain worn, pinched look, which spoke of long tracts of solitary unhappiness. And the habit of solitude was growing on him.

The old Manor House, standing in its high-walled gardens, its sunny low rooms looking out across the down, seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of ancient peace, which consorted as ill with the present impression of the place as does old Gobelin tapestry with a careful modern patch upon its surface. The patch, however, adroitly copied, is seen to be an innovation.

The old house, which had known so much, had sheltered so much, had kept counsel so long, seemed to resent the artificial peace that its present owner had somewhat laboriously constructed round himself, within its mellow, ivied walls.

There is a fictitious tranquillity which is always on the verge of being broken, which depends largely on uninterrupted hours, on confidential, velvet-shod servants, on a brooding dove in a cedar, on the absence of the inharmonious or jarring elements which pervade daily life.

Such an imitation peace, coy as a fickle mistress, Wentworth cherished. Was it worth all the trouble he took to preserve it, when the real thing lay at his very door?

On this February morning, as he sat looking out across the down, white in the pale sunshine, the current of his life ran low. He had returned the night before from one of his periodical journeys to Italy to visit Michael in his cell. He was tired with the clang and hurry of the long journey, depressed almost to despair by the renewed realisation of his brother's fate. Two years—close on two years, had Michael been in prison.

In Wentworth's faithful heart that wound never healed. To-day it bled afresh. He bit his lip, and his face quivered.

Wentworth was not as handsome as Michael, but, nevertheless, he was distinctly good to look at, and the half-brothers, in spite of the fifteen years' difference between their ages, bore a certain superficial resemblance to each other. Wentworth was of middle height, lightly and leanly built, with a high bridge on a rather thin nose, and with narrow, clean grey eyes under light eyelashes. He looked as if he had been made up of different shades of one colour. His light brown hair had a little grey in it, his delicately cut face and nervous hands were both tanned, by persistent exposure to all kinds of weather, to nearly the same shade of indeterminate brown as his hair.

You could not look at Wentworth without seeing that he was a man who had never even glanced at the ignoble side of life, for whose fastidious, sensitive nature sensual lures had no attraction, a man who could not lie, who could not stoop, whose mind was as clean as his hand, and, for an Englishman, that is saying a good deal. He was manly in a physical sense. He rode straight, he shot well. He could endure bodily strain with indifference, though he was not robustly built. He was sane, even-tempered, liable to petty resentments, mildly and resolutely selfish, except where Michael was concerned, a conscientious and just master—at least, just in intention—a patient and respectful son where patience and respect had not been easy.

The strain of scholar and student in him was about evenly mixed with that of the country gentleman. The result was a certain innate sense of superiority which he was not in the least aware that he showed. He had no idea that he was considered "fine," and "thinking a good deal of himself," by the more bucolic of his country neighbours. No one could say that Wentworth was childlike, but perhaps he was a little childish. He certainly had a naÏf and unshakable belief that the impressions he had formed as to his own character were shared by others. He supposed it was recognised by his neighbours that they had a thinker in their midst, and always tacitly occupied the ground which he imagined had been conceded to him on that account.

His mother, a beautiful, foolish, whimsical, hard-riding heiress, the last of a long line, had married the youngest son—the one brilliant, cultivated member—of a family as ancient, as uneducated, and as prosaic as her own. Wentworth was the result of that union. His father had died before his talents were fully recognised: that is to say, just when it was beginning to be perceived that he was a genius only in his own class, and that there were hordes of educated men in the middle classes who could beat him at every point on his own ground, except in carriage and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted. Still, in his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died, and was mourned as a genius.

After many years of uneasy, imprudent widowhood, the widow of the great man had made a disastrous second marriage, and had died at Michael's birth.

No one had disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael's father had appointed Wentworth as his son's guardian. If it had been a jealous affection on Wentworth's part, it had also been a deep one. And it had been returned with a single-hearted devotion on Michael's part which had gradually knit together the hearts of the older and the younger man, as it seemed indissolubly. No one had come between them. Once or twice Wentworth had become uneasy, suspicious of Michael's affection for his tutor at Eton, distrustful of the intimacies Michael formed with boys, and, later on, with men of his own age. Wentworth had nipped a few of these incipient friendships in the bud. He vaguely felt that each case, judged by its own merits, was undesirable. Some of these friendships he had not been able to nip. These he ignored; among that number was Michael's affection for his godfather, the Bishop of Lostford. Michael's boyish passion for Fay, Wentworth had never divined. It had come about during the last year of his great uncle's life at Barford, which was within a few miles of Priesthope, Fay's home. Michael had spent many weeks at Barford with the old man, who was devoted to him. Everyone had expected that he would make Michael his heir, but when he died soon afterwards, it was found he had left the place, in a will dated many years back, to Wentworth. If Michael had never mentioned his first painful contact with life to Wentworth, it was perhaps partly because he instinctively felt that the confidence would be coldly received, partly also because Michael was a man of few words, to whom speech had never taken the shape of relief.

There had no doubt been wretched moments in Wentworth's devotion to Michael, but nevertheless it had been the best thing so far in his somewhat colourless existence, with its hesitating essays in other directions, its half-hearted withdrawals, its pigeon-holed emotions. He had not been half-hearted about Michael. It is perhaps natural that we should love very deeply those who have had the power to release us momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while Self, the dingy turnkey, for once slept at his post?

One of the reasons of his devotion to Michael was that Michael's character did not apparently or perceptibly alter. He was very much the same person in his striped convict's blouse as he had been in his Eton jacket. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had ever realised of what materials that character consisted. Wentworth was of those who never get the best out of men and women, who never divine and meet, but only come into surprised uncomfortable contact with their deeper emotions. Michael's passion of service for Fay would have been a great shock to Wentworth had he suspected it. It remained for the duke to perceive the latent power in Michael, and to be taken instantly into his confidence on the matter, while Wentworth, unwitting, had remained for life outside his brother's mind.

Some men and women are half conscious that they are thus left out, are companions only of "the outer court" of the lives of others. But Wentworth never suspected this, partly because he regarded as friendship a degree of intimacy which most men and all women regard as acquaintanceship. He did not know there was anything more. Those from whom others need much, learn perforce, whether they will or no, to what heights, to what depths human nature can climb and—fall. But Wentworth was not a person on whom others made large demands. But if his love for Michael had been his one tangible happiness, it had become now his one real pain.

Contrary to all his habits, he sat on, hour after hour, motionless, inert, watching the cloud shadows pass across the down. He tried to rouse himself. He told himself that he must settle back into his old occupations. He must get forward with his history of Sussex, and write up his diary. He must come to some decision about the allotment scheme on his property in Saundersfoot. He must go over and help Colonel Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way across his property where it joined Wentworth's own land. Colonel Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as a bumble bee bungles into a spider's web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere presence entangled the plainest matter into a confused cocoon, with himself struggling in the middle.

Wentworth must save the old autocrat from putting himself in the wrong, when he was so plainly in the right. Wentworth must at any rate, if he could do nothing else this morning, read his letters, which had accumulated during his short absence.

Without moving from his chair he turned over, with a groan, the pile of envelopes waiting for him at his elbow. Invitations, bills, tenants' complaints, an unexpected dividend. It was all one to him. The Bishop of Lostford—so his secretary wrote—accepted Wentworth's invitation to dine and sleep at Barford that night, after holding a confirmation at Saundersfoot. Wentworth had forgotten he had asked him. Very well, he must remember to order a room to be got ready. That was all. A subscription earnestly solicited by the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman for a parish library. Why could he not be left in peace? Oh! what was the use of anything—of life, health, money, intellect, if existence was always to be like this, if every day was to be like this, only like this? This weary, dry-as-dust grind, this making a handful of bricks out of a cartload of straw, this distaste and fatigue, and sense of being duped by satisfaction, which was only another form of dissatisfaction, after all. What was the use of living exactly as you liked, if you did not like it? Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his distress about his brother's fate.

That wound, never healed, bled afresh. Who felt for him in his trouble? Who, among all his friends, cared, or understood? No one. That was the way of the world.

Fay's sweet, forlorn face, snowdrop pale under its long black veil, rose suddenly before him, as he had seen it some weeks ago, when he had met her walking in the woods near her father's house. She had gone back to her old home after the duke's death. She, at least, had grieved for him and Michael with an intensity which he had never forgotten. Even in her widowed desolation she had remembered Michael, and always asked after him when Wentworth went over to Priesthope. And Wentworth was often there, for one reason or another. Michael, too, had asked after her, and had sent her a message by his brother. Should he go over to-day and deliver it in person? Among his letters was a scrawling, illegible note, already several days old, from Colonel Bellairs, Fay's father, about the right of way. The matter, it seemed, was more urgent than Wentworth had realised. Any matter pertaining to Colonel Bellairs was always, in the opinion of the latter, of momentous urgency.

Colonel Bellairs asked Wentworth to come over to luncheon the first day he could, and to walk over the debatable ground with him.

Wentworth looked at his watch, started up and rang the bell, and ordered his cob Conrad to be brought round at once.