The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode Part 29

With the sweetness of a bell, with the invitingness of a beckoning hand, the English countryside summoned the gentleman to come out to it, to explore and penetrate for himself. He gazed charmed and entranced at the expanse of rippling meadow where, enclosed by the curtains of soft old trees, the thatch of the eaves lifted their breast to the sun and mist, and chimneys black with immemorial fires indicated the farms of Westboro', rich, homely and respectable, as they left upon the landscape harmonious color and history of thrift. To the east was the dim suggestion of the little town, and some few miles in a hollow lay the farmlands known as The Dials, and each second growing more distinctly visible in the deepening light rose the towers of Penhaven Abbey.

At the Duke's urging, Bulstrode had been led to stop on at Westboro'

Castle after the house party had dissolved at the end of their week's sojourn; and there had since been many long tramps across country, with the dogs at his heels and by his side the Duke, for the time diverted from his semi-melancholy, semi-egotistical cynicism, and transformed into an enthusiastic sport.

The Duke of Westboro' was a _desenchante_, more truly speaking a victim of other peoples' temperaments. There were, however, not a few little scores in the character of moral delinquencies which at least, so he felt, he had been called upon quite fully to discharge.

The American man gave himself over to his host, and from the time Westboro' put out a bait of "Oh, you're decidedly not turning in at this hour, old man?" he flanked the Duke on the opposite side of the fireplace in the East Library, there after coffee to wear away half the night. During the following fortnight, Bulstrode found that he had tallied up with his friend very closely the scores of the last few miserable years.

Westboro's friends.h.i.+p with him dated back some ten years. Bulstrode had first known the Englishman at Newport where, then not a young man, he had come obviously and frankly in search of an American wife. The search was unusual in that it was not for money, but, as Westboro' put it, for type and race. His mother had been an American. He had adored her, and wanted an American mother for his children. The woman herself--and how Bulstrode saw it as he followed the deserted husband's narrative--the woman had been a secondary thing. He recalled easily the summary and conventional courts.h.i.+p and the vulgar brilliance of the wedding. He had been one of Westboro's ushers, and his smaller part of the affair left him with the distressing idea that he had a.s.sisted at a sacrifice.

It would be euphemistic to say that Westboro' poured out his heart to Bulstrode; Englishmen do not have such refreshments. Little by little, rather in short curt phrases, a cynical word whose mocking fellow only followed after some moments' silence--little by little, whilst the smoky wreaths of the men's cigars veiled their confidences, the Duke slowly told the story of ten years of married life. In this intimacy he disclosed the history of the separation which formed at the moment the subject of general public comment. Jimmy was relieved when the moment came that the Duke thought opportune to say:

"There, old chap, you have the whole story! It's this cursed tradition of marriage, and you're a lucky fellow to be free. I have never spoken to any one before--you know it. I don't need to tell you so, but you were in, as it were, at the start, and what do you think of the finish?"

Bulstrode reserved his opinion.

Westboro' Castle had been built in the sixteenth century by a lover of the Virgin Queen. The stones were paved with memories. In the Picture Hall the ardent gentleman three hundred years before had for one sole hour entertained Elizabeth at a feast. She left him, obdurate and unyielding, and he went crazy and followed the royal coach to the park gate, weeping, his hands before his face; and there on the ground, his fair curls torn, and the dust from the departing vehicles alone of the glory that touched him, his people found him.

"How they prate of inequality, and of the crime of grafting the American rose on these old stalks," Bulstrode mused. The beauty of Frances, d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro', he had himself been one of the first to concede; a portrait of her by Lehnbach did not to his eyes do her justice. The fresh purity of her type had not been seized by the German. She would be an ideal d.u.c.h.ess, he had said of her when the mission of Westboro' to America had been bruited, and Westboro' had thought: "She's a strong, fine woman, and will bear me beautiful children."

She had borne him two. Bulstrode, in pa.s.sing through the house, had seen the low gates at the doors of two sunny rooms, the toys spread as they had been lain. His own were the only apartments in that wing of the castle, and the silence at the end of the hall was never broken.

When Westboro' had come to this part of his narrative, he had waited quiet so long that his companion had naturally taken the evening to be at its end. The Duke had thrown his cigar away, and lifting from the table near him a leather case, opened it and handed over to Bulstrode the photograph of two little bare-legged boys in sailor clothes. They stood hand in hand, a pretty pair. Looking at it, and gently turning it over on the other side, Bulstrode read:

"Frederick Cecil John Edward, Marquis of Wotherington, three years old.

Guy Perceval, Lord Feversham, aged two years."

Westboro's voice had a dull sound as he took the case from his friend's hand.

"They are Westboro's I think, neck and crop. Scarlet fever--in three days, Bulstrode--both in three days."

And that had been all.

Bulstrode had left the Duke and gone up-stairs. On the other side of his cheerful rooms the empty nurseries in the ghostly moonlight held their doors wide open as if to welcome at the low gates those bright heads if they should come.

Jimmy, whose sentimentality consisted in his acting immediately when anything was to be done, mixed a whiskey and soda from the array of drinks that always exists at an Anglo-Saxon's elbow, and after a turn or two in his dressing-room brought practically out:

"It's ridiculous! Sheer nonsense. There should be children here. The woman is selfish and puritanical, and the man is no lover--_that's_ what's the matter! But Westboro' certainly loves her in his big, cold, affectionate way." Jimmy smiled at his own fas.h.i.+on of putting it. And how any woman, with a mind and common-sense, could help loving Westboro' Castle and countryside, as well as Cecil, tenth Duke of the line, the American visitor failed to see.

As the Duke of Westboro' thought of the members of his recent house party--the women of it pa.s.sed before his mental mirror. There were several images of an American lady whose frocks and hats, whose wit and grace, whose dark beauty had made her stay at Westboro' brilliant and memorable. Possibly the remembrance of Mrs. Falconer, one night at dinner, was what most persistently lingered in the Duke's mind. She had sat on his left in a gown he remembered as becoming, and her jewels had shone like fire on her bosom. He had particularly remarked them in thinking of the idle jewels of his own house, left behind by the flight of the d.u.c.h.ess. Mary Falconer had been more brilliant than her ornaments, and Westboro' had thoroughly enjoyed his guest. He had asked this woman especially because she charmed him; without forming the reason he had a latent hope that she might do more than charm. He wanted to forget and to be eased from the haunting memory that stung and never soothed. From his first tete-a-tete with Mrs. Falconer he had at once seen that there was nothing there for him.

Bulstrode had said that Westboro' was not a lover. Reserved as far as all feeling was concerned, he had made no advances to the beautiful American, but contented himself with watching her. She could not be in love with her brutish husband who, out of the week spent at Westboro'

was visible only two days. Then Bulstrode had come. Pictures of the two talking in the long twilights, riding together, walking on the terrace side by side, came vividly to Westboro's recollection.

"That," he decided, "is a real flesh-and-blood woman, the kind of woman I should have married. Bulstrode is a lucky devil."

"A chap," Westboro' said to Jimmy in a mild unpretentious mood of philosophy, "is, of course, a husband; more naturally than people give him credit for, a father; but first of all--and that's what so few women take into consideration--_he is a man_."

The Duke had fallen into the habit of breaking through the silences when each man, following his own thoughts, would forget the other. And remarks such as these his companion knew, referred in sense and detail to the long talks whose intenser personalities had ceased.

This day Westboro' brought out his little paragraph as, between the hedges of a lowland lane, the two rode at a walk after a long hard canter from Penhaven, some eight miles behind them on the hill. On either side the top of the thorn was veiled with rime. Down the hedge's thickness from his seat on his horse, Bulstrode could look into the dark tangled interstices of the thicket and its delicious browns and greens. Into the thorns here and there dried leaves had fallen, and from the hedge as well as from the country, clouded and gray with mist, came a sharpened sweetness; a blended smell of fields over which early winter had pa.s.sed; a smell of woods over which the fires cast smoky veils. In the freshness and with the eager exercise, Bulstrode's cheeks had reddened. He sat his horse well, and his enjoyment of life, his ease with it, his charming spirit, shone in the face he turned to the Duke. For some miles given over to the sympathetic task of managing his horse, he had enjoyed like a boy, and during the ride had thought of nothing but the physical delight of the open air and the motion.

"Yes," he returned to his friend's remark, "as far as any point of interest goes, we may grant you that we began as men. I mean to say that monkeys aren't useful in one's deductions for emotional hypotheses, at any rate. I'll grant you for our use that we were men to begin with."

"d.a.m.n it all," said his host, "aren't we just as much so to-day, for all our civilization?"

"Well, we don't primarily knock on the head a woman whose physique has pleased us, and carry her off while she's unconscious."

"It might in some cases be a good thing if we did," Westboro' growled.

Bulstrode ran his hand along the silky neck of his horse, from whose nostrils smoke came in little puffs that met the moisture of the air.

"Oh, we're not, you know, so awfully far away from our instincts in anything, old man! There isn't any cast-iron rule about feelings.

They depend on the individual."

"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him, "and you can't, you know----"

The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after all, have his own point of view."

"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so much."

"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."

And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a mistress."

And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of challenge in his voice.

"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the d.u.c.h.ess should take you for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"

Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his friend's voice.

"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."

"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a d.u.c.h.ess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."

"Well," Westboro' turned about in his saddle and faced his earnest friend. "What then, in your opinion, might I have been?"

"You might have been from the start," Bulstrode said it shortly, "a lover. It's not a bad role. We Anglo-Saxons have no sentimental education. Our puritanism makes us half the time timid at courts.h.i.+p and love."

The gentlemen rode a little on with slackened rein. Westboro's eyegla.s.s cord was almost motionless as he stared out between his horse's ears down the lane.

"Perhaps, after all," he fetched it out slowly, "there's something in what you say."

Whether or not there was any truth in Bulstrode's commonplace remark, it lingered in his host's mind all day. It gave him, for the first time, a link to follow--an idea--and the Duke, entirely unused to a.n.a.lysis, accustomed to act if not on impulse, certainly according to his will and pleasure without concession, harked back in a groping, touching fas.h.i.+on like an awkward boy looking for a lost treasure, upsetting, as he went, old haunts, turning over things for years not brought to the light of day. And it took him all the afternoon and a good part of the evening to reach the place where he thought he had lost originally his joy. Unlike the happier boy, he could not seize his bliss once recovered, and stow it away; it was only remembrance that brought him back, and with a tightening heart as he realized once more the form and quality of his lost happiness--there he must leave it and see it fade again into the past.

Jimmy gave his host a chance to follow his absorbed reflections. He effaced himself, and behind a book whose lightness of touch made him agreeably forget the heavier hand of current and daily events, he sat in his dressing-room reading "The Vicar of Wakefield."