Troy Chimneys

by Margaret Kennedy

  I see Mary sometimes, when I go into Wiltshire. She succeeds very well as poultry-woman to Mrs. Madden, but she too is greatly changed. She has put on flesh and lost her rosy cheeks. She says little. That surprised look is still there. When I think of the lively girl who laughed at William as she clambered into bed, and meet the blank stare of this stout, pale, silent woman, I feel that she is a stranger. I once asked her if the children did not delight to hear her sing. She said hastily that she never sings now.

  If they came to Troy Chimneys, I doubt if our old intimacy could be resumed. We are all changed. Perhaps they never were quite what my fancy painted them. I suppose that I may have once been a little in love with both, if such a thing is possible, – I mean in love with that composite creature which is a happy couple. To feel a warm friendship for such a dual person is not uncommon. Most men have an attachment of that sort, my feeling for Kitty and Newsome is an example of it. The love I have for each is enhanced because they are united to one another. But with the Hawkers it was more romantic, as though I shared something of their felicity, – shared William’s tenderness for Mary and Mary’s pride in William. I may have overlooked many shortcomings, little rusticities, for the sake of the charm which they exerted upon me. I am sure that all I have said of them is true, but it may not be the whole picture.

  In any case, time will not run back. Not even the river at Troy Chimneys does that, where time runs at his gentlest. Elsewhere he tramps forward.

  KAI CHRONOU PROUBAINE POUS!

  INTERLUDE: 1879-1880

  INTERLUDE: 1879-1880

  Cullenstown, Dec. 27, 1879

  DEAREST FRED,

  We have found three letters, which I enclose. They were in a drawer labelled ‘Miscellaneous’ and must, I think, have been written by Cousin Ludovic. I daresay they were with the Lufton papers originally, but there is nothing to identify them, and whoever put them into the library (I think it was Aunt Honoria) did not connect them with the others.

  Forgive this hasty scribble. We have still our Christmas house-party on our hands. I am afraid you must have been very dismal at Brailsford – I wish you could have been here. Please to tell me how you are, when next you write. You never do.

  Yours affectly,

  EMILY

  Enclosures

  1

  Can you dine with me in Town on Thursday? At A. House of course. I shall be there to see Woodward who is very hopeful about Tito. I believe that we may hear it in London next year. If we do I shall cry Nunc Dimittis! for the efforts of a lifetime will have been rewarded. Pray don’t tell me that you would rather have D.G., for it is indubitably inferior. You never heard it in full, only some airs which I agree to be very fine. But I heard it, as you know, when my father was in Vienna and I can assure you that opera Buffa was not in M’s vein, nor should he ever have stooped to the comic. He excelled in the solemn and the sublime. Come on Thursday.

  2

  Your insulting note has just arrived. I waited dinner for at least five minutes before deciding that you never got mine. What keeps you in Gloucestershire? Oh, I remember! One of your sisters is to be married. An Irish baronet, did you not say? Pray wish her joy from me.

  I could not believe that you were not in Town. Everybody here is in the greatest agitation and I should have expected you to have ‘catched the contagious fire.’ Canning, Castlereagh, Wilberforce, and some saints, deserted last night; the Gvt. defeated 226-213. So much has even forced itself upon my intelligence, and you know how ignorant I manage to be. No quarter is expected from C. House. Perceval however is quite calm and grows almost witty, for he said: ‘I do not think there are many rats, only a few mice.’ My mother, also, refuses to disturb herself. She believes that the K. will get well and we are having all this trouble for nothing. She also says that: Les ministres Jacobins ne seront pas les Jacobins ministres. I believe her to mean that a Prince Regent will not be the same as a Prinney. Perhaps you take the same view? But I wonder you a’nt here, mouse hunting.

  What do you mean by my fantastic precocity? I will allow that I was but five years old when I heard D.G. My opinions upon every subject were formed at that age, and I have seldom found reason to change.

  3

  Thank you for your letter. To your question: Did my mother suffer much during the final stages of her complaint? I must answer that she did. She bore it with the fortitude that you might expect of her. The end was so dreadful that I could not wish her life prolonged by a single instant. I should have prayed for her death, had intercession with the Being who ordains such agony struck me as a rational proceeding.

  What you say of her is very just. She was genuinely fond of you and your progress gave her as much satisfaction as anything in her life. In a way, you were the son I ought to have been. Her disappointment in me was not so bitter when she was making plans for you.

  My father feels it more than I should have expected. I hope that his strongest emotion is one of remorse. He is at Colesworth and at present behaves as he ought. I hope the Beaumonts may keep him in order, for if a certain person is now brought to live openly at B’ford I shall quit the place. I shall not remain under the same roof with one whose existence, so flagrantly recognised, was for years an insult to my mother.

  I cannot but compare my family with yours, that knew a like loss but a few months ago. I think often of your father, and of his desolation. And I envy you, for you can have none save happy memories.

  Brailsford, Jan. 5, 1880

  DEAREST EMMIE,

  Thank you so very much for sending those letters, and for hunting them up. They must certainly have been written by Chalfont to Lufton; the first two I put in 1810-11, the last must have been written in 1816, when his mother died.

  I am getting on famously with Jim’s great-uncle. He has just bought Troy Chimneys. The papers give me some invaluable information about Chalfont. I feel that I quite understand the poor little man. It is a wonder that he was not much madder than that, with such a father. I once read a description of breaking on the wheel, and it gave me nightmares for a week.

  Cunningham is now here with me and is enthusiastically wrestling with the Chalfont boxes, some of which are too heavy for me to lift. We have done wonders in the last day or two. We have waded through a ton of recorded dreams, tailors’ bills, sketches of cottages which he never built, and letters from poets, some famous, some now forgotten. We have kept our eyes open for the name of Lufton, but have found nothing yet.

  Cunningham is now reading the Lufton memoir, the early part. He says that Lufton should have been a Whig – that he would have been perfectly happy if he could have got up a hero-worship for Fox. It was a piece of bad luck that the Amershams were Tories. If he had struck up a friendship with the son of a great Whig family, it would have suited him much better.

  But I don’t know. I imagine that Pronto would have been pretty much the same among the Whigs, though he could have spouted more about Emancipation and Reform. There was that kind of climber on both sides.

  Cunningham says he might have gone in with humanitarian reformers, and instanced Romilly and Whitbread, who were much ahead of their age. I told him that he had not selected very happy examples, for they both succumbed to melancholy. One cut his own throat, I believe, and the other shot himself. Castlereagh was not the only man in public life to commit suicide during the Regency.

  It was a melancholy age. Everything I read convinces me of that. To survive it one had to be thick-skinned, or a fanatic, like Wilberforce, able to hammer away at one point and overlook the rest. Reforms of every kind were overdue, but it was the less sensitive, the men who did not suffer from too much imagination, who took the first steps. The poets secluded themselves, or got out of the country, and the humanitarians blew out their brains.

  I thank heaven that I was born in 1850! So much has been accomplished, that we may be sure the rest will follow. We have got rid of oppression, injustice and tyranny. Another fifty years may see the whole Continent as far advance
d as we, and then we may hope to ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old, – Ring in the thousand years of peace!’ There’s a New Year message for you!

  Your loving brother

  FRED

  THE LUFTON PAPERS (Concluded)

  JOURNAL

  June 12, 1818

  THE PRESENT OBTRUDES upon the Past in a manner which I had not foreseen. I had thought Miles to be quite finished and waiting submissively by the Styx until Pronto joins him. But he grows unexpectedly lively, – as troublesome as ever, else he would not have got the business of Harry Ridding put right. Few though his good deeds may have been, he has at least that one to his credit. Harry and his farm are safe.

  The Past, moreover, obtrudes upon the Present. Things dead and done with don’t lie easy in their graves. A note which I wrote to Edmée fifteen years ago (I had forgotten it, but I must have sent it on that morning when I went to Brailsford to ask for the Ullacombe living) has turned up, or rather been brought up, in a way which might have ended in wigs on the green. If Ned had not chosen to take my word rather than hers, he must have called me out. The sight of those few hurried words, dashed off so long ago by an earlier Miles, affected me so much that I never considered this aspect of it until later. I don’t know if Madam wished us to fight, but she certainly meant us to quarrel.

  My indignation over Harry’s wrongs so grew upon me that I was unable to remain a passive spectator. I went over to Ribstone again and saw him, and offered to pay the arrears of his rent and the next half-year in advance, if we could get some document from Ned accepting this payment, and waiving the forfeiture clause in his lease. Harry refused in a very surly manner. He said that it was as bad to owe money to one gentleman as to another and that, if he was to be ruined, he would sooner be so without accepting charity, etc. I could feel for him. A man used so ill, cheated out of his rights, must cling to his pride. But he probably talked it over with his wife, who is a sensible woman, for he appeared at the Parsonage next day in a different frame of mind. He owned that he would be very grateful for the loan from me, and told me of his hopes for a gradual repayment. I know that he will do his best. If he fails, I tell myself that I can well afford the loss.

  I set off at once for the Park and had the good luck to meet Ned upon the way. He greeted me quite cordially, and I told him my errand without any preamble. He made fewer difficulties than I had expected. He seemed to be uneasy himself over Ridding’s case, though he did not understand it very well, and had been misled by Simmons over the terms of the lease. I explained that there would be no need to make out another, a task which he obviously dreaded, in face of the opposition he might expect. A letter, signed by himself, accepting the money and waiving the forfeiture clause, would suffice. He asked me to come with him to the Park and to write the letter ‘in a way no attorney fellow can upset.’ We were in the library, at work upon this, when Madam burst in upon us, demanding to know what we were about.

  Ned, looking more frightened than I could have wished, began to explain. She said angrily that Ridding was not a desirable tenant, a poor farmer who could not pay his way, and that they owed it to themselves to put in a better man.

  I was determined not to interfere, and kept silence while Ned valiantly brought out some of the arguments that I had used with him, – that Harry had never failed with his rent before, that he was honest and industrious, and that his family were old tenants on the Bramfield property.

  ‘My father and his father—’ said he, but he was not allowed to continue further.

  ‘Your father, Mr. Chadwick, did his best to ruin his family. We should be beggars if we continued as he did. Farms are not almshouses, nor parsonages neither!’

  This was a hit at my father, as we both knew. She thinks that it is time he died, so that she may be able to dispose of the living. Ned began to look promisingly obstinate.

  ‘We shall not be the losers in this transaction,’ he began, ‘we are to be paid in full. Miles has—’

  ‘Oh I know that it is all Mr. Lufton’s doing! If he likes to frow his money away he must please himself, but he should not saddle us with a bad tenant.’

  (I used once to be charmed by her inability to say thr.)

  ‘Harry Ridding is an old friend,’ continued Ned doggedly. ‘We used all to play cricket together, when we were boys.’

  ‘A fine reason for allowing him to ruin your land!’

  ‘I say that he does not ruin it.’

  ‘I say that he does.’

  I suppose I should have walked out of the room. It is intolerable to witness bickering of this sort between a husband and wife. But I was unwilling to go until I had got that letter in my pocket, and I feared his resolution if I deserted him just then. I put in a word or two, since I could not stand by in silence.

  I said that Ned and I had learnt a great deal from playing with the village children and tenants’ sons. Ignoring her exclamation of disgust, and her assertion that village children are nasty, dirty creatures with whom her own should never be suffered to associate, I said that in this way gentlemen’s sons may learn how villagers think, how they talk among themselves, how they regard their betters, what are their difficulties, hopes and fears. We had learnt, in that little democracy of childhood, lessons which differences in station might have withheld from us later on, for we should never again be met with such frankness.

  I don’t think that she listened. She stood (we were all standing, since she would not sit) gazing at me contemptuously, not for what I said, but for being what I am. She is a formidable creature, one can’t deny it. There are no two sides to her; she is all of a piece and that is why she always gets what she wants. Nobody could call her a beauty now. She wore a morning wrapper and a strange tall cap, none too fresh; if she had washed herself recently the fact was not apparent. But she is – powerfully female. One cannot talk to her, or look at her, without being aware of it. Repulsive as she is, there is but one thing to be done with her; she knows it and despises those who expect anything else. She thinks me a fool for not having made better use of my opportunities in the avenue that night, long ago. She thinks Ned a fool for marrying her. I daresay she may have some respect for Pinney, if, as I believe, he took her measure, enjoyed her, and got clean off.

  Ned, during my little homily, had been whipping up his courage. When I had done, he said that he was resolved to let Harry Ridding remain at the farm.

  ‘If you do,’ said she, ‘I shall never forgive you. The farm is promised to Mr. Simmons for his son.’

  ‘I made no such promise, and I don’t mean to change my mind. You had better leave us to get on with the business.’

  Huzzah! cried I to myself, pretending to look out of the window. The next sound that I heard was the door slamming and a sigh of relief from Ned. The enemy had retreated.

  We continued with our letter. Ned had signed it and I was just putting it into my pocket when she reappeared, carrying a sheet of paper. My heart sank. I thought that she might previously have got his signature to some other document which could cook our goose.

  ‘You force me to show you this,’ said she, putting it into his hand. ‘I have kept silence, Mr. Chadwick, only because I did not wish to cause ill feeling in your family. I have been accused too often in that way. You must know that Mr. Lufton is not to be trusted. If you knew all, you would have forbidden him the house these many years, for at one time he persecuted me with attempts which he knew to be odious to me, nor would he desist until I freatened to tell you. Will you please to read this?’

  This proved to be my confounded love letter. Ned looked at it, stared, swore, demanded what the devil it meant, and was at last persuaded to let me see it.

  That it was my hand I could not deny. It was undated and the ink was faded. It said that I was off to Brailsford but hoped to return in a couple of days, and that I would then say all that I had been prevented from saying ‘when Ned stumbled upon us, and you ran off.’ There were some sentences of tender apology for my own want of restra
int. I hoped that she was not angry, – I had not been able to help it – I loved her too well. She would forgive me, she must forgive me, for I was all hers and would behave better next time.

  ‘I suppose,’ said I, when I had collected my wits, ‘that I must have written this at a time when I believed myself engaged to – Edmée de Cavignac.’

  ‘I was never engaged to you,’ said she coolly.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Madam! I never said that you were. If you had thought yourself engaged to me you would not have married my cousin. But I made you an offer, and misunderstood you so much that I believed myself accepted.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Ned, who was staring suspiciously at us both.

  ‘Very soon before – before your marriage, Ned.’

  ‘That is a lie,’ stated Edmée. ‘He never made me an offer. He used every art to seduce me, both before and after I married, but he never made me any honourable proposal.’

  The effrontery of this so confounded me that I was speechless. I saw that it was her word against mine. She meant to get rid of me, and my interference on Harry’s behalf, by getting up a quarrel, – any quarrel. I was to give her the lie in Ned’s presence, an insult which no husband can allow. She hoped to provoke a burst of indignation which would betray me into doing this. But, fortunately for us all, I felt none just then. I could only feel very sad, for myself, for Ned, even for her. When I spoke, it was with a mildness which startled both of them.

  ‘Our memories tell us different things,’ I said. ‘It all happened a long time ago. I remember that I loved you once, and told you so, and asked you to be my wife, before I ever dreamed that you would marry Ned. I am very sorry indeed if you did not understand me and believe that you have cause to remember otherwise.’

  I turned to Ned and added:

  ‘You have known me all your life. I cannot be quite sure when I wrote this letter. I can only ask you to consider whether you think me capable—’