Part 89 (1/2)
One had heard, hadn't one, ages ago, of the famous beauty, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, who had been Abbess, or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at Gueldersdorp, and died of pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot?
That was it, poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her!
We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's--written to her kinswoman when the first mutterings of the storm were yet dulled by distance, and the threatening clouds were beginning to build their blue-black bastions and frowning ramparts on the horizon--had got through at last. The Bawnes, true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty, threw open their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling; and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she warmed to them.
But he gave no encouragement, verbal, written, or tacit to their desire to fulfil the dead woman's wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon Lynette. He had made such provision for her himself as his means permitted. His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a thousand guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas Bendigaid was secured to his wife; and Saxham's life was heavily insured, and the bulk of the sum remaining from the purchase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in Harley Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. Why should strangers interfere with his sole privilege of working for her?
”I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely to my wife,” he said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, with the pompous solemnity distinctive of a young man who takes himself and his position seriously, formally broached the subject.
”Lady Castleclare has--arah!--already approached Mrs. Saxham on the question,” said Lord Castleclare, tapping the s.h.i.+ny surface of the leather-covered writing-table near which he sat with the long, thin, ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, narrow, bluish-tinted nails, that had descended to him--with the peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and punctuated his verbal utterance--from his late father. ”And I regret to hear from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encouragement to the suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally with my wife and my elder step-sister, the d.u.c.h.ess of Broads, to whom the letter was written--the letter that you will understand conveys to the family I represent, the last wishes of one whose memory we hold in the most sacred love and reverence----”
The Right Honourable Privy Councillor had here to stop and dry his eyes, that were frankly overflowing. Though short, and not at all distinguished of appearance, having derived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee Miss Nancy McIleevy, of McIleevystown, County Down, certain personal disadvantages to counterbalance the immense fortune ama.s.sed by her uncle, the brewer, this little gentleman of great affairs possessed the kindly heart, and the quick and sensitive nature of the paternal stock. Now he continued:
”--Under the circ.u.mstances you will permit me to renew the proposal with a slight modification. The sum we proposed to invest in Government securities for Mrs. Saxham's benefit, carrying out a charge that we regard it as a privilege to--to have received--is not large, merely five thousand pounds.” He coughed. ”Well, now it has occurred to me that Mrs. Saxham's objection to receive what she seems to regard as a gift from people upon whom she has no claim--that is how she expressed herself to Lady Castleclare--might be got over--if I may employ the expression, by our settling the money upon your children?”
”Upon our children----”
They were sitting in Lord Castleclare's library at Bawne House, Grosvenor Square. Great books in gilded bindings gleamed from their covered and latticed shelves, and the perfume of Russia leather and cedar mingled with the aroma of rare tobacco in the air. A thin fog hung over the West End, deadening the sound of traffic, and dimming the polish of the tall plate-gla.s.s windows. The fire burned red behind bars of silvered steel, the ashes fell with a little clicking whisper. It seemed to Saxham that he could hear his pierced heart bleeding, drip, drip, drip! But he sat like a man of stone, his white, firm, supple hand clenched upon the carved k.n.o.b of the chair-arm. Then he said, looking the Right Honourable Privy Councillor full in the face with those gentian-blue eyes of his, now sunk in caves that grew deeper day by day:
”Let it be so, my lord. I am willing, if my wife consents, that the money should be settled upon--her children.”
He prescribed, at Lord Castleclare's request, for a political dyspepsia, and took leave in his brusque, characteristic way, and sent away his waiting motor-brougham, and walked home, thinking, by that new light that had flashed upon him.
It was January, the London January of whirling dust clouds below, and racing, murky vapours above. They had been settled in the Harley Street house four months. It seemed to Saxham as though they had lived there for years. The routine of professional life was closing in upon him once again. Patients thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and Inst.i.tutions were open to him as of old; Society courted and flattered him, and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as though that celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown _v._ Saxham, had never developed into ugly, sinister shape under the dirty skylight of the Old Bailey.
He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook Street, thinking as he went. Pretty women in furs, their make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils, nodded to him from motor-broughams and victorias.
Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol was driving brute-power off the streets. The hooting and clanking of the motor-omnibus made Oxford Street hideous. And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway swept under the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had pa.s.sed up New Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or pleasanter to live in for the six years that had gone by.
The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Companies were linking up the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies, progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting traction-engines. Houses and other buildings were being pulled down to make stations; great h.o.a.rdings were up, enclosing s.p.a.ces where work went on all day, amidst clankings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of oily-smelling steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and h.e.l.lish flares that might have been reflections from a burning Tophet, cast upon yet bigger and denser clouds of the oily-smelling steam.
Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the people, affecting all ranks and every cla.s.s, was even greater. There were compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the dissemination of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the attainability, by the poorest, of the n.o.blest productions of literary genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang phrases, common, vulgar, coa.r.s.e, alternating with choice expressions culled from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.
Privacy and reticence had become unfas.h.i.+onable, impossible in this, the era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The barriers of social exclusiveness had given way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide and s.e.xual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and cla.s.s to cla.s.s. Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of G.o.d had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a rank and l.u.s.ty weed, in crude neglected soil that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not yet replaced the Bible in the Board Schools.
Yes, things had changed, and not for the better! There was a tang upon the moral atmosphere that made the material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus almost acceptable by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner, even with that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things had changed; and in the midst of all these changes, the last sands of the Great Victorian Age were running out of the gla.s.s.
That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful, n.o.ble, profoundly touching close, this January of 1901. And its ending had been hastened by the War.
Truly of her it has been said, and shall be; even when scholars of another race and another civilisation, springing from the ashes of this, wrest from the relics of a history of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past:
”She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her people.”
Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley Street. The white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking corner-house bore a solid bra.s.s plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her, should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.
The pract.i.tioner who occupied the house--not the same man who had taken over the lease and fittings from Saxham--was ready to give it up, with all its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock, and had been ruined by the War.
It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Was.h.i.+ngton P. Jukes and Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck n.i.g.g.e.rs, elegantly scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut, danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered bosom, and Ruin in its heart.
Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined.
Publishers publis.h.i.+ng books that n.o.body cared any longer to buy, were ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the green bay-tree.