An Act in a Backwater. E. F. Benson
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true about his place in Dalton’s,” said Mrs. Raymond, “I suppose he will have a few hundred a year. His father cannot have left him nothing.”
“A few hundred a year!” said Colonel Raymond. “If I were to say that his income was a hundred and fifty all told, I should be overstating it. And what’s that to a young fellow who has been brought up with every luxury that wealth and rank can supply? Eh?”
“I thought you said they were as poor as rats,” remarked Mrs. Raymond, in the same even, colourless voice.
The argument—or, rather, the string of assertions—was not worth continuing, and Colonel Raymond only snorted contemptuously in reply. The three daughters had long been fidgeting on their seats and struggling against the twitchings of sleepiness. They were not yet of an age to dine with their parents, but Colonel Raymond insisted on their presence at dinner till bedtime came. Sometimes they were regaled with a grape or two, but usually they had to sit silent and unoccupied. Their father said he saw so little of them during the day, which was not surprising, since the first rule of the house was that he must never be disturbed. Occasionally he took them out for a walk, and then he might be seen stalking over the downs outside the town, stopping occasionally to revile them for lagging behind, followed by a string of small figures in various stages of labour and distress, panting and trotting after him. These nightmare excursions were part of Colonel Raymond’s system. A good, quick walk he considered the panacea of all childish ailments, particularly tiredness, which was synonymous with laziness, and he did not approve of coddling. Consequently their mother coddled them in private, and their father walked them off their legs in public. The happy mean did not result from this treatment, and they were growing up peaked and thin, and their father had to confess that even the best blood in England had a tendency to run to seed.
It was the habit of Mrs. Raymond to retire early, and on the entry of the tray with whisky and soda at ten o’clock she usually went to bed, leaving her husband to console himself for her absence by a drink of that invigorating mixture, another cigar, and his own thoughts. These latter were as straightforward as himself, and he usually ran over in his mind his gains and losses at whist, and, twirling his mustache, lived over again the moments in which he had assumed an interesting appearance. It must be understood that we are following the Colonel into the innermost sanctum of his being, and are recording what he scarcely recorded consciously himself. Probably he did not know how much he was absorbed in these two subjects, but the truth of the matter is he thought about little else except them and the aristocracy. To-night, however, the aristocracy held a dominating place in his reflections, and the quality of his meditations was not agreeable. That in-a-propos remark of his wife, in fact, returned again and again to his mind, and he could not help thinking that if Arthur Avesham came to live in Wroxton his habitual conversation about his noble relative, Arthur’s father, would have to be curtailed or, still worse, corrected.
CHAPTER II
In spite of the Colonel’s settled belief to the contrary, it was perfectly true that, only a few months before his noble relative’s death, Lord Avesham had bought for Arthur, his second and youngest son, a share in Dalton’s brewery in Wroxton, and he was to enter it the following September. Arthur had only just left Oxford, where he had shown an almost remarkable distaste for study and indoor pursuits, and a notable tendency not to get through examinations, and he had welcomed the brewing prospect with alacrity. The diplomatic service, for which he had been intended, had been closed to him through a couple of complete and graceful failures to compete successfully with other candidates, and he had dreaded that the gradual closing of other careers would eventually land him, as it had landed so many others at that terrific faute de mieux, the bar. But he was a very long way from being stupid, or, rather, his stupidity was of most limited range—of the range, in fact, which only comprises dates, idioms, and fractions, a small part of life. But when this is joined to an incapacity for continued application amounting almost to paralysis, parents and guardians would be wise to reconcile themselves to the fact that those they love will never distinguish themselves in examinations. As long, however, as that immemorial fiction is held up before the young that the object of education is to enable them to rise triumphant over examinations, so long dateless and unidiomatic children will continue to feel that they are disappointing their parents.
Arthur had felt this at times acutely, but he had accepted the inevitable with such success that Lord Avesham had written him down indifferent as well as stupid, and what was in him only great sweetness of disposition was credited as insouciance. This, too, he bore with equanimity.
Harry, his elder brother, his sister Jeannie, and himself had come down to Morton with their mother’s sister, Miss Fortescue, for the funeral of Lord Avesham, and were going to stop there for the present. Family councils had to be held about the disposition of affairs, and one was in progress on a morning in July about a fortnight after Lord Avesham’s death. They were certainly a remarkably handsome family, and it was to be conjectured that their good looks were a heritage—perhaps the most valuable he had bequeathed them—from their father, for the most that could be said about Miss Fortescue was that she had a very intellectual expression. Harry was sitting at a desk with some papers before him, and Miss Fortescue was sitting opposite him. Jeannie lounged in the window-seat, and Arthur was resting in a chair so long and low that all that could be seen of him was one knee and a great length of shin. The position of his head was vaguely indicated by a series of smoke-rings which floated upward at regular intervals. There had been silence for a few moments. Miss Fortescue’s baritone voice broke it.
“Well, what does the black sheep say?” she demanded.
There was a pause in the smoke-rings, and a voice asked:
“Do you mean me, Aunt Em?”
“Yes, dear. Whom else?”
“I thought you must mean me, but it was best to ask,” said the voice. “I’m not a black sheep, though; I’m only a sheep.”
Harry looked up, half impatient, half amused.
“Oh, Arthur, don’t be so trying,” he said. “It really rests with you.”
“I’d much sooner somebody settled for me,” said Arthur.
“But they won’t; speak, sheep,” said Miss Fortescue.
The chair in which Arthur sat creaked, and he struggled to his feet.
“I’m not good at speaking,” he said; “but if you insist—well, it’s just this. Harry, you’re a brick to suggest that we should all live here, but I think you’re wrong about it. In the first place, we’re poor, and if you keep Morton open we shall be all tied here, and we sha’n’t be able to fill the house with people, and we shall not be able to keep up the shooting; and here we shall be with this great shell over our heads, like bluebottles or some other mean insect which lives in palaces. In the second place, you will probably marry, and that will cramp you still further. In the third—this is from my own point of view, purely—if I live here, I know perfectly well that, with the best intentions in the world, on wet mornings when I don’t want to go out, and on fine ones when I do, I shall persuade myself that I am far from well, and not go to Wroxton and the brewery. Fourthly, you yourself will miss not being in London horribly. You’d bore yourself to death here. But you’re a brick for suggesting it. And—and that’s all.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“So the sheep has spoken,” said Jeannie. “Well done, sheep. But I thought you said you were wholly indifferent?”
“I know I did. But you drove me into a corner.”
Miss Fortescue looked at Arthur approvingly.
“For so stupid a boy, you have glimmerings of sense,” she said.
“Oh, I’m a sharp fellow,” said Arthur.
“Really, Arthur, I