HELEN’S brief visit to the country proved to be a rather severe ordeal. It began with a lonely five-mile drive from the station in an antiquated brougham. And, on arrival at Wyndham about six o’clock on Saturday evening, a general state of tension was not made less when she found that John in obedience to doctor’s orders was keeping his bed, and that his mother had mounted guard over him.
Lady Elizabeth was a dragon “of the old school”; at least, that was the effect she contrived to make upon Helen in the course of their first evening together. A masterful dame of seventy, wonderfully active in spite of growing infirmity, it was clear to the guest, by the time she had spent ten minutes with her fiancé’s mother, that she would have a head full of feudal ideas to contend with. For the mistress of Wyndham, beyond a doubt, was a survival of another age. And to the modern mind of an American it was an age of considerably less enlightenment.
John, for one thing, was her ewe lamb. And she had no thought of surrendering him lightly. Far from approving his politics or his revolutionary coquettings with “new ideas,” of all things the most deadly in his mother’s opinion, she seemed to regard him still as only fit for the nursery. He knew little about life, he knew even less about women.
In their first quarter of an hour together over the drawing-room teacups Helen was amused, irritated, surprised, confounded by the calm assumptions of Lady Elizabeth Endor. All her standards of life and conduct were based on a rather remote past. John, who had humor enough to make due allowance for the old lady’s antique flavor, had done his best to prepare Helen for a shock; all the same, a lively sense of the comic was needed in Helen herself to make tolerable that first evening at Wyndham.
Not the least trying circumstance was Lady Elizabeth’s complete and resolute charge of the patient. If he were able to get a good night’s rest and his cut and bruised head became no worse, he might be allowed “up” for a short time on the morrow. Meanwhile, no one, not even his affianced, must venture to disturb the peace of his chamber.
Helen liked not the ukase but she had to submit. She had also to submit to dressing for dinner in a fireless but moldily magnificent bedroom. Moldy magnificence seemed, in fact, to be the note of that cheerless house. It even extended to the dinner itself. Long before that function was through, Helen felt that it was the most depressing and unsatisfying meal she had ever eaten.
Behind the old lady’s chair was a solemn pontiff in the form of a butler: a lord in waiting to a lady in waiting to Good Queen Victoria. A lovely bit of mahogany was before them; wonderful old silver, fine napery and divers articles of “bigotry and virtue” that excited Helen’s cupidity, lay all around; and yet the whole scheme had such an air of historical solidity that it might have come from Madame Tussaud’s, the Wallace Collection, or the Ark.
The fare was so scant that Helen would have had qualms about taking a full share had not her hostess appeared to subsist on hot water and dry toast. Moreover, it was ill cooked, sauceless, uninspired; and although claret was offered with an air that conferred the monarchy of all vintages upon it, the guest regretted that she had not been content with a humble but safe alternative in the form of barley water.
So much for the meal. As for the spirit which informed it, Helen soon found that it was hopeless for a mere “American newspaper person” of no particular social credentials, to penetrate the chevaux de frise of Lady Elizabeth’s class consciousness. To begin with, judging by a stray remark the old woman let fall, it seemed a source of mild surprise to find that “an American” was not necessarily “a nigger” and that “a newspaper person” was not necessarily “a printer.” All the same, when the best had been said and every allowance made for the march of progress for any woman to be actively engaged in earning her own living was to place her in the governess category if not actually to consign her to the lower depths with Mossop the butler, and his highly trained subordinates, Charles and John.
Had Helen been less troubled in spirit, a keen sense of humor would have been frankly charmed by this almost perfect specimen from the backwoods. John himself always alluded to his mother as “a genuine Die-hard.” It was her austere, yet not altogether unenlightened feudalism, he declared, that had made England the country it was. Cherishing her as he did, and the wonderful old island of which she was the flesh and the bone, he certainly claimed for her many fine qualities. She was honest, she was wise in her own generation, she was fearless, she had a downright way of expressing herself, and according to her lights, she was just. All the same, her limitations were many and they were abrupt.
Charm, beauty, information, wit, Helen had her share of these and she used them modestly, but so far as John’s mother was concerned, they made no impact. From his early days at Eton she had mapped out a matrimonial career for her only surviving son. Money he would need and money he should have, even if he must go outside his own class to look for it. No doubt some well-born heiress would come along—Lady Elizabeth might despair of the country but she was an invincible optimist in all matters relating to herself and family—she had heard, in fact, of a nice young heiress in the next county, and John, although his “radicalism” annoyed her deeply, being his mother’s son had merely to cast the handkerchief.
Poor Helen was to learn in the course of the evening that it would not be with the consent of her hostess if she ever became Mrs. John Endor. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb. John simply couldn’t afford to marry under ten thousand a year; he had a little, only a very little, of his own, and Wyndham was one of those ramshackle old places, although good of its kind, that was really so expensive to keep up.
John’s destiny, so to speak, was cut and dried—let there be no doubt on that score—although his politics, his general outlook, his “isms” were crosses for his mother’s old age. Indeed, the attitude of Lady Elizabeth to her distinguished son was that of an entirely responsible barndoor hen who, by a whim of the gods, has hatched a peacock. The ideas in which he trafficked were so much colored moonshine, for which she had simply no use at all. She was greatly surprised that Eton and Oxford had failed to knock such pernicious nonsense out of him. Ne sutor ultra crepidam was the motto she believed in. Old as she was, and rather too infirm to wield a stick with the vigor of her prime—the irony of the matter was, that a Spartan parent had always bestowed great pains upon his youth!—she did not despair, even now, of seeing this renegade back in the fold.
At any rate, the renegade’s mother was fain to inform the edified Helen that the knock on the head he had received the previous day from the Hellington miners would do him all the good in the world. “A gentleman has no right to go among the rabble. They have no more use for him, than he should have for them. I hope they’ve hit him hard enough, that’s all.”
Even Helen, a woman of the world, hardly knew whether to be shocked or amused by this downrightness. She compromised by being both. And greatly daring, she ventured presently to take up cudgels for her stricken hero.
Was it possible Lady Elizabeth didn’t realize that one day John might become Prime Minister?
The Die-hard would be surprised at nothing, but in times like these it was little enough to any one’s credit to become Prime Minister.
Helen, a little staggered, yet secretly charmed, did her best to develop the subject, but the old lady would have none of it. Abhorring John’s ideas, she refused to take their owner seriously. The truth was she had never quite got over the shock of his flaunting a red necktie at Christ Church and being called in consequence “Comrade” Endor.
At the back of Lady Elizabeth’s mind, no doubt, lay the hard fact that this Miss Sholto was not the least fantastic of “Comrade” Endor’s “isms.” She had no right to be there, and Helen was quick to penetrate to that cold truth. On occasion, however, she could be mischievous, and by the end of a trying meal she had decided that the only fun that evening was likely to provide would consist in drawing the old lady out.
She fell back, therefore, on tracing relationships. In Helen’s opinion, it was a poor game at best, but it served at least to keep the ball of conversation rolling in the drawing room. Lady Elizabeth’s tree was immensely distinguished; she was the second daughter of no less a personage than the fourth Duke of Bridport.
“My father,” said Lady Elizabeth, “had the name of a very clever man. But his own class never forgave him for introducing what was called The People’s Charter in the House of Lords. He certainly thought too much of the workingman, gave him free education, cheap beer, and so on. My father’s weakness for the masses made him innumerable enemies. People called him Brother Bridport or the Mad Duke. When he left the Tories and went over to Gladstone, even his lifelong friends turned against him, the dear Queen among them.”
“So that was why he was called the Mad Duke!” said Helen. The deadly phrase used by Saul Hartz recurred to her vividly: madness in the mother’s family. Was it possible that the charge was based merely on the reputation of the fourth duke of Bridport? Helen felt a weight lifted suddenly from her mind. And yet, if this theory was sound, it was one rag the more torn from the reputation of a man whom she had implicitly trusted.
“I sometimes think,” Lady Elizabeth went on, “that my unfortunate boy gets his eccentricity from his grandfather. All the rest of the family were so sensible. I can hear my Uncle Edmund saying to my father, ‘Robert, the world is a good enough place as it is, if only fools like you will let it be.’ A shrewd man Uncle Edmund. ‘You’ll put the workingman on top, and then you’ll be happy,’ he used to say. If Uncle Edmund could have had his way he would have hanged poor papa at Hyde Park Corner. And that is how I feel about that wretched boy upstairs.”
Helen was hard set to keep her gravity. But she was just equal to the task. Moreover, with those sinister words of Saul Hartz still in her ears, there was yet a private end to gain. “Your mother’s people”—of malice prepense she paused; it was so important to frame an innocent-seeming question in just the right way—“were much too wise, I suppose, to give away their own?”
“Dear me, yes,” was the emphatic answer. “Canny Scotch folk who knew better than to give away anything.”
“Due in part, no doubt,” said Helen, “to living in a poor country where there may not be much to give. But I am perhaps a bit sensitive on the subject, because you see I happen to have Scotch blood myself.”
The trap was laid with skill and masked with cunning. At any rate Lady Elizabeth walked right in. “My mother’s mother was a Sholto of Bannocksyde.” The proud old woman had an entirely misleading air of stating a fact of really very little importance.
Helen, too, could be adept with the pride that knows how to ape humility. She was content to offer a little mild surprise, and that was all. Everything, so far, was according to plan. She was quite aware that John’s great grandmother was a Sholto of Bannocksyde, but Lady Elizabeth was not aware that the Sholtos of Virginia were a cadet branch of the same ancient line. With becoming modesty, Helen now revealed this interesting fact.
Lady Elizabeth proceeded at once to “sit up and take notice.” It was as if her guest had suddenly “come alive.” Helen could not resist a smile. A strange land, this England! her impious thought.
“Tell me, my dear,” A new note had entered the raven voice of the old Die-hard. “Tell me, did your people go over with Columbus?”
“I forget the year Columbus sailed,” said Helen demurely. “We went over, I believe, in 1680.”
“Burke will tell us,” said Lady Elizabeth with simple faith.
On that point, Burke was hardly so clear as John’s mother expected. Helen was able to convince her, all the same, that in the year 1680 her fathers had settled in Virginia, and that her own parents were still living on the banks of Rose River in a house which had been built by the original pioneer, Douglas Graeme Sholto.