CHAPTER XXVIII.
HEATHCOTE’S CAREER.
HEATHCOTE MOUNTFORD went with his cousins to London, and when he had taken them to their house, returned to his chambers in the Albany. They were very nice rooms. I do not know why an unmarried man’s lodging should be called chambers, but it does not make them at all different from other rooms which are not dignified by that name. They were very comfortable, but not very orderly, with numbers of books about, and a boot or two now and then straying where it had no right to be, but also with the necessary curiosities and prettinesses which are now part of the existence of every well-bred person, though these were not shown off to the full advantage, but lost among a good deal of litter scattered here and there. He was not a man who put his best foot foremost in any way, but let his treasures lie about, and permitted his own capacities and high qualities to go to rust under the outside covering of indifference and do-nothingness. It had never been necessary to him to do anything. He had very little ambition, and whatever zeal for enjoyment had been in his life, had been satisfied and was over. He had wandered over a great part of the earth, and noticed many things in a languid way, and then he had come home and gone to his chambers, and, unpacking the treasures which, like everybody else, he had taken some trouble to ‘pick up’ here and there, suffered them to lie about among all sorts of trifling things. He had Edward to care for, his younger brother, who made a rush upon him now and then, from school first, and then from Sandhurst, always wanting money, and much indulgence for his peccadilloes and stupidities: but no one else who took any interest in himself or his possessions: and Edward liked a cigar far better than a bronze, and among all his brother’s possessions, except bank notes and stray sovereigns, or an occasional cheque when he had been more extravagant than usual, cared for nothing but the French novels, which Heathcote picked up too, not because he liked them much, but because everybody did so—and Edward liked them because they were supposed to be so wrong. Edward was not on the whole an attractive boy. He had a great many tastes and a great many friends who were far from agreeable to his brother, but he was the only real ‘object in life’ to Heathcote, who petted him much and lectured him as little as was possible. There seemed to be scarcely any other point at which his own contemplative, inactive existence touched the practical necessities of life.
He came back to London with the idea that he would be very glad to return again to the quiet of his chambers, where nothing ever happened. He said to himself that excursions into the outer world, where something was always happening, were a mistake. He had but stepped out of his hermitage without thinking, once in a way, to pay a visit which, after all, was a duty visit, when a whole tragedy came straightway about his ears—accident, death, sorrow, injustice, a heroine, and a cruel father, and all the materials of a full-blown romance. How glad he would be, he thought, to get into his hermitage again! Within its quiet centre there was everything a man wanted—books, an occasional cigar, an easy chair (when it was clear from papers and general literature) for a friend to sit in. But when he did get back, he was not so certain of its advantages: no doubt it was everything that could be desired—but yet, it was a hermitage, and the outlook from the windows was not cheerful. If Park Lane was brighter than the view across the park at Mount, the Albany, with its half-monastic shade, like a bit of a male béguinage, was less bright. He sat at his window, vaguely looking out—a thing he had never had the slightest inclination to do before—and felt an indescribable sense of the emptiness of his existence. Nor was this only because he had got used to the new charms of household life, and liked a house with women in it, as he had suggested to himself—not even that—it was an influence more subtle. He took Edward with him to Park Lane, and presented that hero, who did not understand his new relations. He thought Rose was ‘very jolly,’ but Anne alarmed him. And the ladies were not very favourably moved towards Edward. Heathcote had hoped that his young brother might be captivated by them, and that this might very possibly be the making of him: as the friends of an unsatisfactory young man are always so ready to hope. But the result did not justify his expectation. ‘If the little ‘un were by herself, without those two old fogeys, she might, perhaps, be fun,’ Edward thought, and then he gave his brother a description of the favourite Bet Bouncer of his predilections. This attempt having failed, Heathcote for his part did not fall into mere aimless fluttering about the house in Park Lane as for a time he had been tempted to do. It was not the mere charm of female society which had moved him. Life had laid hold upon him on various sides, and he could not escape into his shell, as of old. Just as Cosmo Douglas had felt, underneath all the external gratifications of his life, the consciousness that everybody was asking. ‘What Douglases does he belong to?’ so Heathcote, in the stillness of his chambers, was conscious that his neighbours were saying, ‘He is Mountford of Mount.’ As a matter of fact very few people knew anything about Mount—but it is hard even for the wisest to understand how matters which so deeply concern themselves should be utterly unimportant to the rest of the world. And by-and-by many voices seemed to wake up round him, and discuss him on all sides. ‘He has a very nice old place in the country, and a bit of an entailed estate—nothing very great, but lands that have been in the family for generations. Why doesn’t he go and look after it?’ He did not know if those words were really said by anyone, yet he seemed to hear them circling about his head, coming like labels in an old print out of the mouths of the men at his club. ‘Why doesn’t he look after his estate? Is there nothing to be done on his property that he stays on, leading this idle life here?’ It was even an object of surprise to his friends that he had not taken the good of the shooting or invited anyone to share it. He seemed to himself to be hunted out of his snug corner. The Albany was made unbearable to him. He held out as long as the ladies remained in Park Lane, but when they were gone he could not stand it any longer—not, he represented to himself, that it was on their account he remained in London. But there was a certain duty in the matter, which restrained him from doing as he pleased while they were at hand and might require his aid. They never did in the least require his aid—they were perfectly well off, with plenty of means, and servants, and carriages, and unbounded facilities for doing all they wanted. But when they went away, as they did in February, he found out, what he had been suspecting for some time, that London was one vast and howling wilderness, that the Albany was a hideous travesty of monasticism, fit only for men without souls, and lives without duties; and that when a man has anything that can be called his natural business in life, it is the right thing that he should do it. Therefore, to the astonishment and disgust of Edward, who liked to have his brother’s chambers to come to when he ‘ran up to town’—a thing less difficult then than in these days of stricter discipline—Heathcote Mountford turned his back upon his club and his hermitage, and startled the parish out of its wits by arriving suddenly on a rainy day in February at the dreary habitation which exercised a spell upon him, the house of his ancestors, the local habitation to which in future his life must belong, whether he liked it or not.
And certainly its first aspect was far from a cheerful one. The cook, now housekeeper, had made ready for him hastily, preparing for him the best bedroom, the room where Mr. Mountford, now distinguished as the old Squire, had lain in state, and the library where he had lived through his life. It was all very chilly when he arrived, a dampness clinging to the unoccupied house, and a white mist in all the hollows of the park. He could not help wondering if it was quite safe, or if the humid chill which met him when he entered was not the very thing to make a solitary inhabitant ill, and end his untimely visit in a fever. They did their very best for him in the house. Large fires were lighted, and the little dinner, which was served in a corner of the dining-room, was as dainty as the means of the place would allow. But it would be difficult to imagine anything more dreary than the first evening. He sat among ghosts, thinking he heard Mr. Mountford’s step, scarcely capable of restraining his imagination: seeing that spare figure seated in his usual chair, or coming in, with a characteristic half-suspicious inspecting look he had, at the door. The few lamps that were in working order were insufficient to light the place. The passages were all black as night, the windows, when he glanced out at them behind the curtains, showing nothing but a universal blackness, not even the sky or the trees. But if the trees were not visible, they were audible, the wind sighing through them, the rain pattering—a wild concert going on in the gloom. And when the rain ceased it was almost worse. Then there came silence, suspicious and ghostly, broken by a sudden dropping now and then from some overcharged evergreen, the beating of a bough against a window, the hoot of the owl in the woods. After he had swallowed his dinner Heathcote got a book, and sat himself down solemnly to read it. But when he had read a page he stopped to listen to the quiet, and it chilled him over again. The sound of footsteps over the stone pavements, the distant clang of a hansom driving up, the occasional voices that passed his window, all the noises of town, would have been delightful to him: but instead here he was at Mount, all alone, with miles of park separating him from any living creature, except the maids and outdoor man who had been left in charge.
Next morning it was fine, which mended matters a little. Fine! he said to himself with a little shiver. But he buttoned up his great-coat and went out, bent upon doing his duty. He went to the Rectory first, feeling that at least this would be an oasis in the desert, and found the clergy sitting in two different rooms, over two sermons, which was not a cheerful sight. The Rector was writing his with the calm fluency of thirty years of use and wont; but poor Charley was biting his pen over his manuscript with an incapacity which every successive Sunday seemed to increase rather than diminish. ‘My father, he has got into the way of it,’ the Curate said in a tone which was half admiring, half despairing. Charley did not feel sure that he himself would ever get into the way of it. He had to take the afternoon service when the audience was a very dispiriting one: even Miss Fanny Woodhead did not come in the afternoon, and the organ was played by the schoolmaster, and the hymns were lugubrious beyond description. As the days began to grow longer, and the winter chill to take ever a deeper and deeper hold, the Curate had felt the mournfulness of the position close round him. When Mount was shut up there was nobody to speak to, nobody to refer to, no variety in his life. A house with only two men in it, in the depths of the country, with no near neighbours, and not a very violent strain of work, and no special relief of interesting pursuits, is seldom a cheerful house. When Charley looked up from his heavy studies and saw Heathcote, he almost upset his table in his jump of delighted welcome. Then there succeeded a moment of alarm. ‘Are they all well?—nothing has happened?’ he cried, in sudden panic. ‘Nothing at all,’ Heathcote said, ‘except what concerns myself.’ And it amused the stranger to see how relieved his host was by this assurance, and how cheerfully he drew that other chair to the fire to discuss the business which only concerned so secondary a person. Charley, however, was as sympathetic as heart could desire, and ready to be interested in everything. He understood and applauded the new Squire’s sentiments in respect to his property and his new responsibilities. ‘It is quite true,’ the Curate said with a very grave face, ‘that it makes the greatest difference to everybody. When Mount is shut up the very sky has less light in it,’ said the good fellow, growing poetical. Heathcote had a comprehension of the feeling in his own person which he could not have believed in a little while ago, but he could scarcely help laughing, which was inhuman, at the profound depression in Charley Ashley’s face, and which showed in every line of his large, limp figure. His countenance itself was several inches longer than it had been in brighter days.
‘I am afraid,’ said Heathcote, with a smile, ‘that so much opening of Mount as my arrival will make, will not put very much light into the sky.’
‘And it is not only the company and the comfort,’ said the Curate, ‘we feel that dreadfully, my father and I—but there is more than that. If anyone was ill in the village, there was somebody down directly from Mount with beef-tea and wine and whatever was wanted; and if anyone was in trouble, it was always a consolation to tell it to the young ladies, and to hear what they thought. The farmers could not do anything tyrannical, nor the agents be hard upon a tenant—nor anyone,’ cried Charley, with enthusiasm, ‘maltreat anyone else. There was always a court of appeal at Mount.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Heathcote, ‘you are thinking of a patriarchal age—you are thinking of something quite obsolete, unmodern, destructive of all political economy.’
‘That for political economy!’ said the Curate, snapping his fingers; his spirits were rising—even to have someone to grumble to was a consolation. ‘Political anything is very much out of place in a little country parish. What do our poor labourers know about it? They have so very little at the best of times, how are they to go on when they are ill or in trouble, without some one to give them a lift?’
‘Then they should have more for their work, Ashley. I am afraid it is demoralising that they should be so dependent upon a Squire’s house.’
‘Who is to give them more?’ cried the Curate, hotly. ‘The farmers have not got so very much themselves; and I never said they were dependent; they are not dependent—they are comfortable enough as a matter of fact. Look at the cottages, you will see how respectable they all are. There is no real distress in our parish—thanks,’ he added, veering round very innocently and unconsciously to the other side of the circle, ‘to Mount.’
‘We need not argue the point,’ said Heathcote, amused. ‘I am as sorry as you can be that the ladies will not retain possession. What is it to me? I am not rich enough to do all I would, and I don’t know the people as they did. They will never look up to me as they did to my predecessors. I hope my cousins will return at all events in summer. All the same,’ he added, laughing, ‘I am quite illogical’—like you, he would have said, but forbore. ‘I want them to come back, and yet I feel this infection of duty that you speak of. It seems to me that it must be my business to live here henceforward—though I confess to you I think it will be very dismal, and I don’t know what I shall do.’
‘It will be dismal,’ said the Curate; his face had lighted up for a moment, then rapidly clouded over again. ‘I don’t know what you will do. You that have been always used to a luxurious town life——’
‘Not so luxurious—and not so exclusively town,’ Heathcote ventured to interpose, feeling a whimsical annoyance at this repetition of his own thoughts.
‘—— And who don’t know the people, nor understand what to do, and what not to do—it takes a long apprenticeship,’ said Charley, very gravely. ‘You see, an injudicious liberality would be very bad for them—it would pauperise instead of elevating. It is not everybody that knows what is good and what is bad in help. People unaccustomed to the kind of life do more harm than good.’
‘You don’t give me very much encouragement to settle down on my property and learn how to be a patriarch in my turn,’ said Mountford, with a laugh.
‘No, I don’t,’ said the Curate, his face growing longer and longer. The presence of Heathcote Mountford at Mount had smiled upon him for a moment. It would be better than nothing; it would imply some companionship, sympathy more or less, someone to take a walk with occasionally, or to have a talk with, not exclusively parochial; but when the Curate reflected that Heathcote at Mount would altogether do away with the likelihood of ‘the family’ coming back—that they could not rent the house for the summer, which was a hope he had clung to, if the present owner of it was in possession—Charley at once perceived that the immediate pleasure of a neighbour would be a fatal advantage, and with honest simplicity applied himself to the task of subduing his visitor’s new-born enthusiasm. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it’s quite different making a new beginning, knowing nothing about it, from having been born here, and acquainted with the people all your life.’
‘Everybody must have known, however,’ said Heathcote, slightly piqued, ‘that the property would change hands some time or other, and that great alterations must be made.’
‘Oh yes, everybody knew that,’ said the Curate, with deadly seriousness; ‘but, you see, when you say a thing must happen some time, you never know when it will happen, and it is always a shock when it comes. The old Squire was a hearty man, not at all old for his years. He was not so old as my father, and I hope he has a great deal of work left in him yet. And then it was all so sudden; none of us had been able to familiarise ourselves even with the idea that you were going to succeed, when in a moment it was all over, and you had succeeded. I don’t mean to say that we are not very glad to have you,’ said Charley, with a dubious smile, suddenly perceiving the equivocal civility of all he had been saying; ‘it is a great deal better than we could have expected. Knowing them and liking them, you can have so much more sympathy with us about them. And as you wish them to come back, if that is possible——’
‘Certainly, I do wish them to come back—if it is possible,’ said Heathcote, but his countenance, too, grew somewhat long. He would have liked for himself a warmer reception, perhaps. And when he went to see Mr. Ashley, though his welcome was very warm, and though the Rector was absolutely gleeful over his arrival, and confided to him instantly half a dozen matters in which it would be well that he should interest himself at once, still it was not very long before ‘they’ recurred also to the old man’s mind as the chief object of interest. ‘Why are they going abroad? it would be far better if they would come home,’ said the Rector, who afterwards apologised, however, with anxious humility. ‘I beg your pardon—I beg your pardon with all my heart. I forgot actually that Mount had changed hands. Of course, of course, it is quite natural that they should go abroad. They have no home, so to speak, till they have made up their mind to choose one, and I always think that is one of the hardest things in the world to do. It is a blessing we do not appreciate, Mr. Mountford, to have our home chosen for us and settled beyond our power to change——’
‘I don’t think Mrs. Mountford dislikes the power of choice,’ said Heathcote; ‘but so far as I am concerned, you know I should be very thankful if they would continue to occupy their old home.’
‘I know, I know. You have spoken most kindly, most generously, exactly as I could have wished you to speak,’ said the Rector, patting Heathcote on the shoulder, as if he had been a good boy. Then he took hold of his arm and drew him towards the window, and looked into his eyes. ‘It is a delicate question,’ he said, ‘I know it is a delicate question: but you’ve been in town, and no doubt you have heard all about it. What is going to happen about Anne?’
‘Nothing that I know of,’ Heathcote replied briefly. ‘Nothing has been said to me.’
‘Tchk, tchk, tchk!’ said the Rector, with that particular action of the tongue upon the palate, which is so usual an expression of bother, or annoyance, or regret, and so little reducible into words. He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand these sort of shilly-shally doings,’ he said: ‘they would have been incomprehensible when I was a young man.’
The same question was repeated by Mr. Loseby, whom next day Heathcote went to see, driving over to Hunston in the Rector’s little carriage, with the sober old horse, which was in itself almost a member of the clerical profession. Mr. Loseby received him with open arms, and much commended the interest which he was showing in his property. ‘But Mount will be a dreary place to live in all by yourself,’ he said. ‘If I were you I would take up my abode at the Rectory, at least till you can have your establishment set on a proper footing. And now that is settled,’ said the lawyer (though nothing was settled), ‘tell me all about Anne.’
‘I know nothing to tell you,’ said Heathcote. ‘Mr. Douglas is always there——’
‘Mr. Douglas is always there! but there is nothing to tell, nothing settled; what does the fellow mean? Do you suppose she is going to forego every advantage, and go dragging on for years to suit his convenience? If you tell me so——’
‘But I don’t tell you so,’ cried Heathcote; ‘I tell you nothing—I don’t know anything. In short, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not discuss the question. I begin to be of your opinion, that I was a fool not to turn up a year sooner. There was nothing to keep me that I am aware of; I might as well have come sooner as later; but I don’t know that anyone is to be blamed for that.’
‘Ah!’ said the old lawyer, rubbing his hands, ‘what a settlement that would have made! Anne would have kept her money, and little Rose her proper place and a pretty little fortune, just like herself—and probably would have married William Ashley, a very good sort of young fellow. There would have been some pleasure in arranging a settlement like that. I remember when I drew out the papers for her mother’s marriage—that was the salvation of the Mountfords—they were sliding downhill as fast as they could before that; but Miss Roper, who was the first Mrs. St. John Mountford, set all straight. You get the advantage of it more or less, Mr. Heathcote, though the connection is so distant. Even your part of the property is in a very different condition from what it was when I remember it first. And if you had—not been a fool—but had come in time and tried your chance—— Ah! however, I dare say if it had been so, something would have come in the way all the same; you would not have fancied each other, or something would have happened. But if that fellow thinks that he is to blow hot and cold with Anne——’
‘I don’t like the mere suggestion. Pardon me,’ said Heathcote, ‘I am sure you mean nothing but love and tenderness to my cousin: but I cannot have such a thing suggested. Whatever happens to Anne Mountford, there will be nothing derogatory to her dignity; nothing beneath her own fine character, I am sure of that.’
‘I accept the reproof,’ said Mr. Loseby, with more twinkle than usual in his spectacles, but less power of vision through them. ‘I accept the reproof. What was all heaven and earth about, Heathcote Mountford, that you were left dawdling about that wearisome Vanity Fair that you call the world, instead of coming here a year since, when you were wanted? If there is one thing more than another that wants explaining it is the matrimonial mismanagement of this world. It’s no angel that has the care of that, I’ll answer for it!’ cried the little man with comic indignation. And then he took off his spectacles and wiped them, and grasped Heathcote Mountford by the hand and entreated him to stay to dinner, which, indeed, the recluse of Mount was by no means unwilling to do.