Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (430 page)

“But hang it all,” the major said, “you did it so confoundedly well. When you talked about parting for ever there were tears in your eyes.”

“Oh well, Teddy,” Miss Delamare said, with a little hurt air, “you seem to forget sometimes that I
am
an actress.”

Mrs. Kerr Howe suddenly cut in with what appeared to be a victorious snicker:

“Your half-brother,” she said, “has been telling me the most romantic story about your relationships.”

Miss Delamare exclaimed:

“My half-brother!” and then she looked at the major and got from his face one of her brilliant inspirations.

“Oh, Teddy you mean!” she said. “I thought you meant that old gentleman who might have been an uncle to me. Well, I hope Teddy hasn’t been saying things against me behind my back.”

And the major sank down into his corner with a sigh of deep relief. He couldn’t now have any doubt that Flossie Delamare wouldn’t give Mrs. Kerr Howe any kind of a handle against him, and he just said:

“The times we’ve seen!”

“Yes, the times we’ve seen, Teddy!” Miss Delamare said with a little regretful sigh, and then, immediately afterwards, Mrs. Kerr Howe was all over her like a wave with her projects for the New Theatre. The major never got another word in. Mrs. Kerr Howe explained the plot of her play. She dilated on the high-mindedness of all the characters except the villain. She explained how the play would help on the reform of conventional marriage. The major never got a word in, and at last he took from the pocket of his rainproof coat a volume called
The Sacred Fount,
and began to puzzle over its contents. The Westinghouse brake, which had been strained by the sudden stopping of the train, burst about a quarter of an hour later, and by the time the train had slowed down a little, one of the carriages about three ahead of them took it into its head to run off the line. It was nothing like a serious accident, but it jolted them a good deal. But Mrs. Kerr Howe talked on steadily about her play, and although it was a quarter to eleven before they reached Basildon Manor she was still talking about it.

CHAPTER III
.

MRS. ARTHUR FOSTER — Major Brent Foster’s aunt — was anxiously seeing to the warmth of his bedroom in Basildon Manor at about half-past ten that night. It is true that it was nearly June, but she was convinced that, after many years in one tropic and another, he would find it cool enough. A fire burned in the grate; there was a hot bottle in the immense and shadowy four-post bed. And all the room wavered between shadowiness and warmth. The fireplace was as large as a London pantry; the dogs on the hearth were as large as a London umbrella stand; the burning logs were as big as Mrs. Foster’s husband’s portmanteau; the velvet curtained bed was as big as she imagined desert islands to be, and the immense picture of Ancestors that faced the foot of the bed was at least as large as the immense folding-doors between the front and rear dining-rooms of The Pines, Hornsey. And Mrs. Arthur Foster was a little afraid of this picture—”the Panel,” her Ladyship’s Own Maid called it. It represented three fierce men in broad-brimmed and plumed hats; three ladies in velvet, pearls, low necks and fringes; one little boy with long curls and a slouch hat; three little girls in low necks, one of whom held a parrot, another a monkey, and the third attended on by a greyhound. A baby, also in a lownecked dress, sprawled on the ground in the attempt to reach a parti-coloured ball. All these people were represented as standing in the open air, in a group like a wall, as people stand nowadays to be photographed, and, with the exception of the baby, gazed fiercely, mildly, or with unseeing glances at Mrs. Arthur Fotser.

Having done all she could for the major’s room she had to pause and look round, and those eyes irresistibly drew her glance. She really shivered, and then she said to her Ladyship’s Own Maid:

“Dear me, Miss Nancy Jenkins, my dear, wouldn’t you say they were asking me how I dared to be in their room?”

“No, I shouldn’t, ma’am,” her Ladyship’s Own Maid replied; “you’re nothing to the people they did see in their own rooms when they were alive.”

“No, poor dears, I daresay not,” Mrs. Foster said. “And I daresay they’d know how respectful and how like an intruder I feel.”

“Now you needn’t, ma’am,” Miss Nancy Jenkins said kindly. “I’m sure the last thing her Ladyship would want you to feel is anything but entirely at home. Her Ladyship begged me to make you and Major Brent feel absolutely and entirely as if the place belonged to you. Her Ladyship begged me particularly to ask you to remember, if there isn’t any other way of making you see it, that if it wasn’t for your taking the place in the summer she could not afford to live in it for the spring and autumn. She would have to sell it and all the dear old things.”

Mrs. Foster looked timidly at her Ladyship’s Own Maid.

“Dear me, Miss Nancy Jenkins,” she said, “did her Ladyship really ask you to say that?”

“It’s what her Ladyship particularly wishes you to understand,” the maid answered. “Particularly. More than anything else. She loves the old things, and she wants them to make people happy.”

“I feel afraid of them really,” Mrs. Foster said. “I would not like people to know it. But they’re all so old and so stern and so precious that sometimes I’m afraid to turn round for fear of breaking them. And sometimes — oh! I really wish I was back in my own drawing-room at Hornsey, where there’s nothing really valuable except the Berlin wool-work screen that was worked by the Princess Alice’s own hands for the Great Exhibition of’52.” She stopped and looked almost lovingly at her Ladyship’s Own Maid.

Miss Jenkins smoothed her black alpaca apron.

“I’m afraid,’’ she said,” that it’s her Ladyship’s leaving me that has given you that sort of idea,” she said. “But, indeed, madam, that was not meant as a... as a precaution against yourself. The best of people have now and then a servant that’s a breaker, and her Ladyship values every stick of her house as if it were one of her little fingers.” She stopped, and then added: “But rather than take away from your satisfaction, rather than you should feel that you are being watched upon, I’m perfectly certain that her Ladyship would prefer me to go to-night.”

“Oh, but my dear, my dear Miss Nancy Jenkins,” Mrs. Foster exclaimed on a note of almost painful anxiety, and then she stopped distractedly. “You’re perfectly
certain
,” she asked, “that those cigars are the sort of cigars the major will like?”

“Well, you never can be quite certain what a gentleman will like, ma’am,” Miss Jenkins answered; “but you can be perfectly certain that they’re not the kind of cigars that you need be ashamed of, and that’s the important point. They’re the sort that her Ladyship always has in the house for her gentlemen friends. And they’re the sort that Captain Brent used always to smoke at Holbury before he went away. Of course, there’s no saying that his tastes may have changed.”

“Then there you are, Miss Nancy,” Mrs. Foster said triumphantly. “How could I get on in this great ugly old house if I hadn’t you to back me up? What do I know about gentlemen’s tastes? Of course there’s Mr. Foster — he’s a
true
gentleman; but of course he’s not a real gentleman. I mean not a manly gentleman like the major.”

“Well, of course, you couldn’t have everyone in the world like the major,” Miss Jenkins said, “or there wouldn’t be room to hold us.”

Mrs. Foster’s eyes wandered abstractedly to the panel.

“Now, who did you say all those angry-looking people were?” she asked. “You’ve told me once, but I’ve forgotten. And it would be too silly not to be able to tell the major anything about anything.” Miss Jenkins pointed to the tallest of the three men in slouch hats.

“That was the fourth earl,” she said succinctly. “Fell at Naseby four years after the picture was painted. The two elder sons, Lord Edward, afterwards fifth earl, and Lord Charles fell at the battle of the Boyne. The baby on the ground, Lord James, afterwards sixth earl, was attaindered after the battle in which he took part. The baby’s son, Lord William, was restored to the Barony of Higham, but not the earldom, upon his reconciliation with Queen Anne. He was known as ‘Wild Higham,’ because there was nothing that he would stick at. His portrait is in the long dining room: said to bear a strong resemblance to her Ladyship.”

“That’s what I can’t bear,” Mrs. Foster said, with deep feeling. “Wherever I go all over the house they’re all, all of them, always looking at me, and they’re all alike. And the wife of the eldest son always has that same pearl necklace on, and they all, you feel, all of them, stick at nothing.”

“That’s so, ma’am,” Miss Nancy Jenkins said. “There’s not one of them that ever would. Never stick at anything once it came into their heads — the Wild Highams wouldn’t.”

“Now I don’t know how I feel about that, Miss Nancy,” Mrs. Foster said. “Everything’s always so difficult to get at. In the first place, on principle, I oughtn’t to approve of people who don’t care what they do. But then I can’t help saying that there was my brother-in-law, Admiral Brent, the major’s father — he stuck at nothing, as you put it, and I always used to think he was the finest man I ever met, though of course I shouldn’t like Mr. Foster to hear me talking like that. Not that he’s jealous, but he strongly disapproved of everything the admiral did. But he was a fine man, though what with not paying attention to Mr. Foster’s advice about his speculations, and what with high living and throwing his money out of the window, and charities he couldn’t afford and all the rest of it — he took a racehorse full gallop down some cliffs in India, where they say only ponies went, for a bet. And he won the bet. But he died three weeks after my poor sister — Edward’s mother — and he didn’t leave behind him any money, but eleven hundred and sixty-two pounds’ worth of debt which I paid out of my own jointure, for the sake of the name. Though that made Mr. Foster furiously angry, for he said, what was the name of a dissolute scoundrel to him. And poor dear Edward — the major — paid the money back out of his salary — I mean his pay, because, of course, you ought not to talk of what an officer gets as a salary. But he did his best, poor dear, having put aside fifty pounds a year, which was paid me regularly by the paymaster of the War Office when he was only a captain, and then advancing it to seventy-five pounds a year when he was on active service, when, of course, they get more, as you doubtless know. So that at the present moment he only owes me £433 13s. 4d. with interest. And that was what all the trouble was about,” Mrs. Foster ended suddenly.

“I don’t see about what, ma’am,” Miss Nancy Jenkins said, “or what the trouble was.”

“The trouble was,” Mrs. Foster said, “that he blacked his uncle’s eye. Because, of course, Mr. Foster, who’s the kindest and best gentleman in the world, but a little wanting in tact where his brother-in-law the admiral was concerned — Mr. Foster was much more outrageous when Captain Edward started to pay the money back than he was with me for having paid it out — he said that I wasn’t to take money from the pauper son of a bankrupt swindler. But I said, no, let the boy do his duty to his father’s memory! It was right and proper, and it showed a good spirit. Not of course that I was going to take the money, for God knows there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t give the boy, even down to the gold and the false teeth out of my head, though, of course, that’s not a thing I ought to say, but it’s perfectly true. And then, there came that awful trouble, and I never saw my Edward again for ten years.” Mrs. Foster broke off and remarked innocently, “Why, you’re crying, Miss Nancy!”

“You’re crying yourself, ma’am,” Miss Nancy said sharply.

“And well I may be,” Mrs. Foster said, “considering the difference there is in the poor boy.”

“Oh, don’t say that, ma’am,” Miss Jenkins said. “But it’s true,” Mrs. Foster maintained. “There was a time when you could say he didn’t care what he did, like those people there,” and she pointed to the panel. “Now, you can say he doesn’t care what he does — just because he doesn’t care what becomes of him. There’s no spirit left in him.” Miss Jenkins said, “Oh dear! Oh dear!” with so much real concern, that Mrs. Foster was heartened to continue talking about her nephew; for, as a rule, she was too much afraid of boring Miss Jenkins to talk for long about any one subject.

And as, indeed, she was afraid of boring everybody, her conversation was usually extremely disjointed.

Mrs. Foster was the daughter of a Portsmouth ship-chandler in very good circumstances, and it was characteristic of Edward Brent’s father — the gentleman who stuck at nothing — that he should just have sailed in and married her sister, who was a handsome, flashing woman. He was at the time a penniless Irish naval lieutenant. It was not until many years later that Mrs. Foster married Mr. Arthur Foster, at that time a West End baker with five flourishing businesses. It was characteristic of Mr. Arthur Foster that he should have enquired carefully how much money the ship-chandler’s daughter had to her account before he proposed to her. And, with her money, he had been able to turn his business into a limited company, which had twenty-three branches in London and over a hundred in various cities of the United Kingdom and the colonies. So that, until lately, Mr. Arthur Foster had been able to boast himself the largest wholesale baker in the world. Latterly, however, he had come to talk less of being a baker and more of the fact that he was a Common Councilman of the City of London. He even had a hope of an Aldermanship — nay, in his dreams he even passed the Chair.

The lieutenant — later the admiral — quarrelled most ferociously with his wife whenever he was at home. There never, Mr. Foster was accustomed to say, were such scenes. Nevertheless, to the long unmarried sister, Captain Brent had always been held up as the very model of manly virtues — as long as he was at sea. His rapid promotion, his quite splendid service in Western Chinese waters, and the extraordinary facility in slinging out oaths, caused him to be, for the unmarried sister, a sort of splendid terror. And this made her husband — the respectable and wealthy Baptist — detest the admiral even more than he would otherwise have done.

Thus, when the admiral died in debt and Mrs. Foster had paid it off, and Captain Edward announced his intention of paying his aunt back, Mr. Arthur Foster really had called the captain “the pauper son of a bankrupt swindler” to the captain’s face. Mr. Arthur Foster had particular reason to be cock-a-hoop that day, for he had just made arrangements for the opening of the last fifty of his bakers’ shops — in Australasia. He had never been bigger than his boots before, for he had always been a rather timid person. And he certainly never was again, for when the captain knocked him down he got such a shock, that, for the rest of his life, he was humble even to the pay-check girls in the glass cases in his shops. He was simply afraid of getting a harsh word addressed to him by anybody.

But Captain Brent had simply disappeared. He had gone right straight out to India, and they had never heard another word from him. Not a single word! His father, the admiral, had really spoiled him in no ordinary manner — had never grudged him a penny, and had never suggested that he was not to live up to ten thousand a year for the rest of his life. And, since Captain Brent had been gay, reckless, and always in a good humour, he had lived like a fighting-cock in the best of society.