Part 1 (1/2)
Ancestors.
by Gertrude Atherton.
PART I
1904
I
Miss Thangue, who had never seen her friend's hand tremble among the teacups before, felt an edge on her mental appet.i.te, stimulating after two monotonous years abroad. It was several minutes, however, before she made any effort to relieve her curiosity, for of all her patron-friends Victoria Gwynne required the most delicate touch. Flora had learned to be audacious without taking a liberty, which, indeed, was one secret of her success; but although she prided herself upon her reading of this enigma, whom even the ancestral dames of Capheaton looked down upon inspectively, she was never quite sure of her ground. She particularly wished to avoid mistakes upon the renewal of an intimacy kept alive by a fitful correspondence during her sojourn on the Continent. Quite apart from self-interest, she liked no one as well, and her curiosity was tempered by a warm sympathy and a genuine interest. It was this capacity for friends.h.i.+p, and her unlimited good-nature, that had saved her, penniless as she was, from the ignominious footing of the social parasite. The daughter of a clergyman in a Yorks.h.i.+re village, and the playmate in childhood of the little girls of the castle near by, she had realized early in life that although pretty and well-bred, she was not yet sufficiently dowered by either nature or fortune to hope for a brilliant marriage; and she detested poverty. Upon her father's death she must earn her bread, and, reasoning that self-support was merely the marketing of one's essential commodity, and as her plump and indolent body was disinclined to privations of any sort, she elected the role of useful friend to fas.h.i.+onable and luxurious women. It was not an exalted niche to fill in life, but at least she had learned to fill it to perfection, and her ambitions were modest. Moreover, a certain integrity of character and girlish enthusiasm had saved her from the more corrosive properties of her anomalous position, and she was not only clever enough to be frankly useful without servility, but she had become so indispensable to certain of her friends, that although still blooming in her early forties, she would no more have deserted them for a mere husband than she would have renounced her comfortable and varied existence for the no less varied uncertainties of matrimony.
It was not often that a kindly fate had overlooked her for so long a period as two years, and when she had accepted the invitation of one of the old castle playmates to visit her in Florence, it had been with a lively antic.i.p.ation that made dismay the more poignant in the face of hypochondria. Nevertheless, realizing her debt to this first of her patrons, and with much of her old affection revived, she wandered from one capital and specialist to the next, until death gave her liberty.
She was not unrewarded, but the legacy inspired her with no desire for an establishment beyond her room at the Club in Dover Street, the companions.h.i.+p of friends not too exacting, the agreeable sense of indispensableness, and a certain splendor of environment which gave a warmth and color to life; and which she could not have commanded had she set up in middle years as an independent spinster of limited income. She had received many impatient letters while abroad, to which she had replied with fluent affection and picturesque gossip, never losing touch for a moment. When release came she had hastened home to book herself for the house-parties, and with Victoria Gwynne, although one of the least opulent of her friends, first on the list. She had had several correspondents as ardent as herself, and there was little gossip of the more intimate sort that had not reached her sooner or later, but she found subtle changes in Victoria for which she could not as yet account.
She had now been at Capheaton and alone with her friend for three days, but there had been a stress of duties for both, and the hostess had never been more silent. To-day, as she seemed even less inclined to conversation, although manifestly nervous, Miss Thangue merely drank her tea with an air of being too comfortable and happy in England and Capheaton for intellectual effort, and patiently waited for a cue or an inspiration. But although she too kept silence, memory and imagination held rendezvous in her circ.u.mspect brain, and she stole more than one furtive glance at her companion.
Lady Victoria Gwynne, one of the tallest women of her time and still one of the handsomest, had been extolled all her life for that fusion of the romantic and the aristocratic ideals that so rarely find each other in the same sh.e.l.l; and loved by a few. Her round slender figure, supple with exercise and ignorant of disease, her black hair and eyes, the utter absence of color in her smooth Orientally white skin, the mouth, full at the middle and curving sharply upward at the corners, and the irregular yet delicate nose that seemed presented as an afterthought to save that brilliant and subtle face from cla.s.sic severity, made her look--for the most part--as if fas.h.i.+oned for the picture-gallery or the poem, rather than for the commonplaces of life. Always one of those Englishwomen that let their energy be felt rather than expressed, for she made no effort in conversation whatever, her once mobile face had of late years, without aging, composed itself into a sort of illuminated mask. As far as possible removed from that other ideal, the British Matron, and still suggesting an untamed something in the complex centres of her character, she yet looked so aloof, so monumental, that she had recently been painted by a great artist for a world exhibition, as an ill.u.s.tration of what centuries of breeding and selection had done for the n.o.blewomen of England.
Some years before, a subtle Frenchman had expressed her in such a fas.h.i.+on that while many vowed he had given to the world an epitome of romantic youth, others remarked cynically that his handsome subject looked as if about to seat herself on the corner of the table and smoke a cigarette. The American artist, although habitually cruel to his patrons, had, after triumphantly transferring the type to the canvas, drawn to the surface only so much of the soul of the woman as all that ran might admire. If there was a hint of bitterness in the lower part of the face, from the eyes there looked an indomitable courage and much sweetness. Only in the carnage of the head, the tilt of the chin, was the insolence expressed that had made her many enemies. Some of the wildest stories of the past thirty years had been current about her, and rejected or believed according to the mental habit or personal bias of those that tinker with reputations. The late Queen, it was well known, had detested her, and made no secret of her resentment that through the short-sighted loyalty of one of the first members of her Household, the dangerous creature had been named after her. But whatever her secrets, open scandal Lady Victoria had avoided: imperturbably, without even an additional shade of insolence, never apologizing nor explaining; wherein, no doubt, lay one secret of her strength. And then her eminently respectable husband, Arthur Gwynne, second son of the Marquess of Strathland and Zeal, had always fondly alluded to her as ”The Missus,” and lauded her as a repository of all the unfas.h.i.+onable virtues. To-day, presiding at the tea-table in her son's country-house, an eager light in her eyes, she looked like neither of her portraits: more nearly approached, perhaps, poor Arthur Gwynne's ideal of her; not in the least the frozen stoic of the past three days. When she finally made an uncontrollable movement that half-overturned the cream-jug, Flora Thangue's curiosity overcame her, and she murmured, tentatively:
”If I had ever seen you nervous before, Vicky--”
”I am not nervous, but allowances are to be made for maternal anxiety.”
”Oh!” Miss Thangue drew a deep breath. She continued, vaguely, ”Oh, the maternal role--”
”Have I ever failed as a mother?” asked Lady Victoria, dispa.s.sionately.
”No, but you are so many other things, too. Somehow, when I am away from you I see you in almost every other capacity.”
”Jack is thirty and I am forty-nine.”
”_You_ look thirty,” replied Flora, with equal candor.
”I am thankful that my age is in Lodge; I can never be tempted to enroll myself with the millions that were married when just sixteen.”
”Oh, you never could make a fool of yourself,” murmured her friend.
Then, as Victoria showed signs of relapsing into silence, she plunged in recklessly; ”Jack is bound to be elected. When has he ever failed to get what he wanted? But you, Vicky dear--is there anything wrong? You had a bulky letter from California the day I arrived. I do hope that tiresome property is not giving you trouble. What a pity it is such a long way off.”
”The San Francisco lease runs out shortly. Half of that, and the southern ranch, are my only independent sources of income. The northern ranch belongs to Jack. All three are getting less and less easy to let in their entirety, my agents write me, and I feel half a pauper already.”
”This is not so bad,” murmured Flora.
”Strathland would bundle me out in ten minutes if anything happened to Jack.”
”It would be a pity; it suits you.” She was not referring to the hall, which was somewhat too light and small for the heroic mould of its chatelaine, but to the n.o.ble proportions of the old house itself, and the treasures that had acc.u.mulated since the first foundations were laid in the reign of Henry VI. There were rooms hung with ugly brocades and velvets never duplicated, state bed-chambers and boudoirs sacred to the memory of personages whose dust lay half-forgotten in their marbles; but above all, Capheaton was famous for its pictures. Not only was there an unusually large number of portraits by masters scattered about the twenty rooms that lay behind and on either side of the hall, but many hundreds of those portraits and landscapes from the brushes of artists fas.h.i.+onable in their day, unknown in the annals of art, but seeming to emit a faint scent of lavender and rose leaves from the walls of England's old manor-houses and castles. In the dining-room there was a full-length portrait of Mary Tudor, black but for the yellow face and hands and ruff; and another, the scarlet coat and robust complexion still fresh, of the fourth George, handsome, gay, devil-may-care; both painted to commemorate visits to Capheaton, historically hospitable in the past. But Lord Strathland, besides having been presented with six daughters and an heir as extravagant as tradition demanded, was poor as peers go, and had more than once succ.u.mbed to the t.i.tillating delights of speculation, less cheering in the retrospect. Having a still larger estate to keep up, he had been glad to lend Capheaton to his second son, who, being an excellent manager and a.s.sisted by his wife's income, had lived very comfortably upon its yield. Upon his death Elton Gwynne had a.s.sumed possession as a matter of course; and a handsome allowance from his doting grandfather supplementing his inheritance, the mind of the haughty and promising young gentleman was free of sordid anxieties.
Lady Victoria's satirical gaze swept the simpering portraits of her son's great-aunts and grandmothers, with which the hall was promiscuously hung.