Part 5 (1/2)
They spoke with a faded propriety, dropped their final ”g's,” and specialised in the abbreviation ”ain't.” They stayed for a quarter of an hour exactly by the French clock on the mantelpiece, contriving, in this calculated period, to make it quite clear that they were on terms of intimacy with the Halbertons, and they invariably finished by inviting the Considines to lunch.
In this way Gabrielle became familiar with a number of dining-rooms furnished in mahogany and horsehair and hung with opulent studies of still life in oils and engravings after Mr. Frith. The meal was usually served by the whiskered coachman, who wore, for the occasion, a waistcoat decorated with dark blue and yellow stripes, and there was always cake for lunch. After the port, which generally made her feel sleepy, Considine would be taken off to see the stables, and Gabrielle conducted to a walled garden, heavy with the scent of ripening fruit, where there was no shade but that of huge apple trees, frosted with American blight, that reminded her, in their pa.s.sive mellowness, of the people who owned them. Nothing more violent than archery, in its old and placid variety, ever invaded the lives of these county families.
If it had not been for the headaches with which their society always afflicted her, Gabrielle would have been tempted time after time to scandalise them, but the example of Considine, who was always frigidly at ease, restrained her, and so she allowed herself to be lulled to sleep, recovering slowly as they drove back through the green lanes to Lapton.
Her symptoms of boredom were taken, in this society, for evidence of her good breeding, and since she was too tired to be scandalous, Gabrielle became a social success. Her success is important, not because it changed her in any way, but because it paved the way for the development by which she became acquainted with Mrs. Payne, and the most intriguing episode of her life began.
It was notorious that Considine's parochial labours occupied very little of his time. The parish was small and scattered, Lapton Huish itself being a mere hamlet, and the neighbouring farmers so soaked in respectable tradition and isolated from opportunities of vice that their souls lay in no great danger of d.a.m.nation. The activities of Considine were practically limited to his Sunday services, but though the softness of the climate might eventually have transformed him into a likeness of the ancient automaton who had preceded him, it was not in his nature to take things easily. He came of a vigorous stock. The clear, thin air of the Wilts.h.i.+re downland that his ancestors had breathed makes for energy of temperament. At Roscarna he had given vent to this in the education of Gabrielle, the acquisition of his doctor's degree, and the management of his father-in-law's estate. His capacity for management, of which he had shown evidence in his winding-up of the Roscarna affairs, appealed to Lord Halberton, and it was not long before he proposed a series of improvements to the Lapton property that took his patron's fancy. In Considine's ideas there was not only imagination, but money, and Halberton was getting rather tired of his own expensive agricultural experiments.
The big house of the parish, Lapton Manor, had lain for several years unoccupied, for no other reason apparently but that it was isolated and out of date. To Lord Halberton it represented at least a thousand pounds a year in waste. When Considine had been at Lapton Huish for a little more than six months this deserted mansion suggested itself to him as an outlet for his energies. He told Gabrielle nothing of this--he was not in the habit of discussing business matters with Gabrielle--but he rode over to Halberton House one day with an elaborate and practical paper scheme. He proposed, in effect, to vacate the Rectory, and take over Lapton Manor as it stood.
The idea had been suggested to him at first by one of the consequences of Gabrielle's social success. The wife of a neighbouring baronet had fallen in love with her--the fact that her husband had followed suit made things easier. This woman was the mother of two sons, of whom the elder, the heir to the t.i.tle, was delicate. She did not wish to separate the boys, and realising that it was impossible to send them together to an ordinary preparatory school, the notion had come to her of asking the Considines if they would take them into their house at Lapton. Doctor Considine, no doubt, would find time to equip them with a good cla.s.sical education, while Gabrielle could supply the feminine influence which was so essential to real refinement. She was not only tired of tutors--their equivocal social status was so tiresome!--but sufficiently Spartan to feel that her sons would be better away from home for a little while. Away, but not too far away. Gabrielle had thought it would be rather fun to have a couple of boys, even dull boys like the Traceys, in the house. She had told Considine that she would like the arrangement if only the Rectory were bigger. As it was they couldn't possibly entertain the proposal.
This set Considine thinking, and from his deliberations emerged the much more ambitious scheme of taking over Lapton Manor, and equipping it as a special school for the education of really expensive boys. He decided that he would not take a greater number than he could educate by himself. His pupils must all be well-connected or wealthy. He would teach them not only the things with which a public school might reasonably be expected to equip them, but the whole duty of a landed proprietor. The neglected Manor lands, already a drag on the Halberton property, should be his example. His pupils should see it recover gradually with their own eyes. The fees they paid should go to its development, and provide at the end of three or four years' work the satisfaction of a model and profitable estate.
All Considine's heart was in the plan. He loved teaching, and he loved the land. He had a natural apt.i.tude for both, and the opportunity of developing them seemed too good to be missed. Lord Halberton agreed.
A lease was signed in which Considine, paying a nominal rent for Lapton Manor, undertook to restore the lands and house to the condition from which they had fallen. Both landlord and tenant were delighted with their bargain. In six weeks the Rectory had been vacated and relet to an old lady from the north of England who wanted to die in Devons.h.i.+re, and the Considines had moved to the Manor, under the benignant eyes of Lady Halberton. In another fortnight the first pupils, the Tracey boys, arrived, and Considine was advertising in _The Morning Post_ and _The Times_ for three at fees that even Lord Halberton considered outrageous. ”There's plenty of money in the country,” said Considine.
With the insight of genius he added to his advertis.e.m.e.nt, ”Special care is given to backward or difficult pupils.”
XI
When Mrs. Payne had the good luck to stumble on Considine's advertis.e.m.e.nt--for, in spite of the strange complications that ensued for the Considines the occasion was certainly fortunate for her--that remarkable person was at her wits' ends. If she had not been a woman of resource and character as well as a devoted mother I think she would have given up the problem of Arthur as a bad job long before this; but it was literally the only thing that really mattered to her in life, and if she had abandoned the struggle I do not know what would have become of her.
By ordinary canons Mrs. Payne could not be considered an attractive woman. The only striking features in her plain, and rather expressionless face were her eyes, which were of a soft and extraordinarily beautiful grey. She had large hands and feet, no figure to speak of, and she dressed abominably. She possessed in fact, all the virtues and none of the graces, and was, in this respect at any rate, the diametrical opposite of her son. Her appearance suggested that life had given her a tremendous battering, a condition that would have been pitiful if it were not that she also gave the impression of having doggedly survived it; and for this reason one could not help admiring her.
Her husband had been a business man of exceptional brilliance, of a brilliance, indeed, that was almost pathological, and may have accounted in part for the curious mentality of Arthur. In a short, but incredibly active life, he had ama.s.sed a fortune that was considerable, even in the midlands where fortunes are made. I do not know what he manufactured, but his business was conducted in Gloucester, and the Overton estate, which he acquired shortly before his death, lay under the shadow of Cotswold, between its escarpment and the isolated hill of Bredon, within twenty miles of that city. Mr. Payne had died of acute pneumonia in a sharp struggle that was in keeping with his strenuous mode of life. Seven months after his death his only child, Arthur, was born.
In the care of her son, and the control of the fortune to which he would later succeed, Mrs. Payne, who was blessed with an equal vocation for motherhood and finance, became happily absorbed. Everything promised well. The business in Gloucester realised more than she could have expected, and she settled down in the placid surroundings of Overton with no care in the world but Arthur's future.
He was a singularly beautiful child, fair-haired, with a skin that even in manhood was dazzlingly white, and eyes that were as arresting as his mother's: a creature of immense vitality, who shook off the usual diseases of childhood without difficulty, and developed an early and almost abnormal physical perfection. He was not, it is true, particularly intelligent. He did not begin to talk until he was over three years old; but this slowness of development was only in keeping with his mother's physical type, and his early childhood was a period of sheer delight to her in which no shadow of the imminent trouble appeared.
By the time that he had reached his seventh year, Mrs. Payne was beginning to be worried about him. His bodily health was still magnificent, but there was a strain in his character that worried her.
It appeared that it was impossible for him to tell the truth.
Haphazard lying is no uncommon thing in children, proceeding, as it sometimes does, from an excess of imagination and an anxiety to appear startling; but imagination was scarcely Arthur's strong point, and his lies were not haphazard, but deliberately planned.
To a woman of Mrs. Payne's uncompromising truthfulness this habit appeared as a most serious failing. She could not leave it to chance, in a vague hope that Arthur would ”grow out of it.” She tackled it, heroically and directly, by earnest persuasion, and later, by punishments. By one method and another she determined to appeal to his moral sense, but after a couple of years of hopeless struggling she was driven to the conclusion that this, exactly, was what he lacked. It seemed that he had been born without one.
The thing was impossible to her, for his father had been a man of exceptional probity and, without self-flattery, she knew that she herself was the most transparently honest person on earth. As the boy grew older his opportunities for showing this fatal deficiency increased. Whatever she said or did, and however sweetly he accepted her persuasions and punishments, it became evident that she, at any rate, was incapable of keeping his hands from picking and stealing and his tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering. The condition was the more amazing in the face of his great natural charms. All her friends and visitors at Overton found the boy delightful; his physical beauty remained as wonderful as ever; on the surface he was a normal and exceptionally attractive child; but in her heart she realised bitterly that he was a completely a-moral being.
In nothing was this more apparent than in his behaviour towards animals. Overton, lying as it did in the midst of a green countryside, was a natural sanctuary for all wild creatures, in which Arthur, from his earliest years, had always shown a peculiar interest. As a child, he would spend many hours with the keeper, developing an instinct for wood-craft that seemed to be the strongest in his composition. He knew all the birds of the estate, their habits, their calls, their refuges.
Once in the shadow of the woods, he himself was a wild animal, a creature of faunish activity and grace. Mrs. Payne always encouraged this pa.s.sion of his as a natural and admirable thing, until, one day, the keeper, who was no more humane than the majority of keepers, came to her with a shocking story of Arthur's cruelty: an enormity that it would have taken the mind of a devil, rather than a man, to imagine.
When she taxed the boy with it he only laughed. She thrashed the matter out; she pointed out to him that he had done a devilish thing; but in the end she had to give it up, for it became clear to her that he was trying as hard as he could to see her point of view but couldn't, simply because it wasn't in him. She began to realise slowly and reluctantly that it was no good for her to appeal to something that didn't exist. The boy had been born with a body a little above the normal, and a mind a little below the average, but nature had cruelly denied him the possession of a soul, and neither her prayers nor her devotion could give him what he congenitally lacked.
She wondered whether the isolation of his life at Overton had anything to do with it, whether contact with other children of his own age would reduce him to the normal. She took the risk, and sent him at the age of twelve, to a preparatory school in Cheltenham. Before the first term was half over they sent for her and asked her to remove him. The head master confessed that the case was beyond him. On the surface the boy was one of the most charming in the whole school, but his heart was an abyss of the most appalling blackness. Mrs. Payne entreated him to tell her the worst. He hedged, said that it wasn't just one thing that was wrong, but everything--everything. She asked him if he had ever known a case that resembled Arthur's. No, he thanked Heaven that he hadn't. Could he advise her what to do? Lamely he suggested a tutor, and then, as an afterthought, a mental specialist.
The word sent a chill into Mrs. Payne's heart. The idea that this bright, delightful child, the idol of her hopes, was the victim of some obscure form of moral insanity frightened her. But she was a woman of courage and determined to know the worst. She took him to a specialist in London.
Arthur thoroughly enjoyed this desolating trip. The specialist talked vaguely, leaving her nothing but the faintest gleam of hope. There were more things in heaven and earth, he said, than were dreamed of in the philosophy of the most distinguished alienists. He talked indefinitely of internal secretions. It was possible, he said--and underlined the word--possible, just barely possible, that in a year or two--to put it bluntly, at the time of p.u.b.erty--the boy's disposition might suddenly and unaccountably change. He implored her not to count on it, and a.s.sured her that, for the present, medical science could do no more. If, by any chance, his prophecy should be fulfilled, he begged Mrs. Payne to let him know. The case, if she would pardon the use of this objectionable word, was one of the greatest professional interest.