“Consider it done — if it is possible.”
“I want you to hire a yacht for me — just a nice roomy sailing yacht, with plenty of room in it for me and my maid, and her crochet,” she added with a smile.
“Your maid Garland. I hope she is satisfactory.”
“She is everything that she ought to be. She has only one defect. She hates everything rustic, and she loves lamp-posts and pavements and shops and people. But she puts up with the country for my sake, and she solaces herself with crochet.”
Austin dined with her, and after dinner she told him her ideas about the weekly allowance to her old women, the coals and the clothes and other indulgences. And she submitted the financial arrangement to him.
“It must be done by an endowment,” he told her, “and you will have to sink a considerable sum for that.”
This rather scared her.
“But have I enough money?”
“Yes, you have plenty. You are richer than you think.”
“I have never thought about it. But I want to do something that will make people happier — people I know, and these are my only friends. There must be a substantial endowment for the maintenance of the Orphanage — a generous allowance for the chaplain, and a liberal recompense for doctor and matron and subordinates. I want it to be a happy home,” Mary said.
She harped upon that idea of creating happiness. It seemed to her the only joy that wealth could bring.
The matron had been chosen and engaged — a person of unimpeachable character, and the chaplain Mary had found in the church at Port Jacob, where he had been curate for six years, doing most of the work on a stipend that made marriage impossible, and he had been engaged for all those years to a young lady who had waited for him with unwavering constancy, heedless of better chances.
“I had plenty of enthusiasm from Mr. Stainforth and his fiancée,” Mary said, “which ought to make up for the cold water I got from some of my old women.”
Austin was going back to London by the first through train next day. He had only come to see her work, now that it was nearly finished, and to hear her plans.
“My life is fuller than when I was a barnacle,” he told her. “I have more work and more responsibilities now I have my share in the Yard. I am beginning to feel the rich man’s burden.”
“But I hope Mr. Bertram helps you?”
“Not much. He takes his responsibilities very lightly, and he is much keener about his work at the Bar than about the biggest contract our firm ever captured. He doesn’t care much for money. He will be in Parliament before long, and I hope he won’t feel out of it there.”
Austin came from Tintagel early on the following day and met Mr. Brownlow and had another and more deliberate survey of the Almshouses, with that gentleman at his elbow, ready to explain what he had done, and to hear Mr. Sedgwick’s suggestions. This interview over, Austin proposed going back to London by an afternoon train. He had seen the Almshouses, and he had put Mary in the right way as to all business details, and it seemed to him that there was nothing else for him to do, except drive to Camelford Road Station in good time for the train. His kit-bag and dressing-case were in the dogcart in which he had driven from the hotel at Tintagel. He was a rich man now, but still travelled without a servant. He had liked the company of mountain guides, even put up in out-of-the-way places with a courier who could cheat in four languages, but he had not yet resigned himself to the idea of his own man, always at his elbow, and always officious.
When he talked of going back to London that night, Mary surprised him by asking him to stay.
“The three-thirty is a slow train,” she said. “You would not get to London till too late for anything worth thinking of in the East or the West End. Stay and dine with me at six o’clock, and give me an evening for talk. You will have a full moon for your drive back to the “King Arthur,” and it is not a difficult road. There is so much that I have to say to you. I want your counsel and your help. You were my only friend when I was poor, and you are my only friend now I am rich.”
Austin flushed as a woman flushes when she is deeply moved, and then paled as a woman pales before he answered her.
“Why, you have troops of friends,” he said with a laugh. “My mother and my Aunt Bertram are panting to be of service to you and they will bring a troop with them. Their chief idea of kindness will be to bring nice people about you — the nicest they know, with handles to their names. That is their idea of friendship, especially my mother’s, who has never known quite as many nice people as she wants to know, and who annotates her “Debrett” every time she scrapes acquaintance with a peeress, or even a spinster with a courtesy title. But she is a good woman all the same, and I hope you will overlook her little failings, and come to like her in the progress of time.”
“I shall like her because she is your mother, even if there were no other reason,” Mary said gently.
She could not pretend to be cordial about a lady who had never shown her the slightest civility while she was a salaried reader.
Austin and Mary began their long talk at dinner, just such a short and simple meal as the “Ship” could produce with distinction.
They talked all through dinner chiefly of the Almshouses, of the chaplain and his wife, and the old women who were to live there, and they went on talking when the decanters and the untouched dessert dishes had been removed, and the “Ship’s” attempt at black coffee had been served.
“I’m afraid you must think me very childish,” Mary said, “but this is my first use of money, the first thing I have done worth doing since I have been alone — with no one to help or advise me, as he would have done. I never knew how charitable he was till after he was gone. Then Frominger told me the stream of bounty that had flowed from Warburton House, and how those who could prove themselves worthy of being helped had never been denied. And now I want you to teach me the best use I can make of the fortune that fell into my lap almost as a terrible surprise. It was too much — and I am always asking myself what I ought to do with it; whether I ought not to live very quietly at Madingley, and give all the rest of my income to the people you have told me about in the East End — where the sufferings of a multitude in abject poverty is an evil that cries aloud for cure.”
“An evil that never can be cured, Mary, except in the socialists’ arid world, where there is to be neither the beautiful life of the rich, nor the comfortable life of the prosperous middle-classes, only uninteresting food and a roof to keep out the rain.”
“But your people in the East End?”
“My people and two or three dozen parish priests people are looked after in a way, and a good deal is done for their souls and bodies. Those are not the helots. But there is a lower depth, a black abyss of misery so vast that an army of priests and mission sisters could only reach one in twenty of the myriads who live without joy and die despairing.”
“But can’t we help them, Austin? You and I, who are both so rich.”
“No, Mary. If you and I both flung our fortunes into the cauldron, there would only be a bubble on the surface, an infinitesimal bubble, and the daily toll of human lives would not be lessened. Don’t try to solve the insolvable problem, Mary. Only do the things that please you — the happy things — like your almshouses, and enjoy your life and the beautiful things my uncle gave you. You are to lead a pleasant life, to let the world see you while you are young enough to enjoy society — not my aunt’s nice people with coronets on their carriage doors, but the writers, and painters, and inventors, men and women who are moulding the age they live in.”
“Yes, one would always love to know such as those.”
“When are you coming to Warburton House?”
“Not for a long time.”
“And you talk of a yacht, and a summer sailing about the coast of Brittany, and stopping at quaint old cities, and looking at dolmens and cromlechs. Rather dull work, I should think.”
“No, no, I have always hankered for Bri
ttany.”
“You will satisfy your hankering in a month, and after that where are you to spend your autumn and winter?”
“At quiet little places on the Mediterranean — Porto Fino — Alassio.”
“A thousand miles away from everybody who loves you.”
“There’s nobody to love me now your uncle’s gone. I shall have enough to interest me in the yacht, and my sailors, if they could only be some of my Cornish men.”
“They might be half of them Cornish men, if you will come to Scotland. Spend your autumn among the islands. I will find you a sailing master who will navigate your yacht, and keep your Scotsmen and Cornishmen in order. Just dawdle among the islands till the cold weather begins, and then come to Dunoon for the winter.”
“What sort of a place is Dunoon?”
“Almost as pretty as anything you would find on the Mediterranean, and you would be near the Yard. Wouldn’t you like to see the source of your wealth — the great workshop in which my uncle never lost his interest?”
“I should love to see it and to see the men who work there.”
“That is settled. I will find the yacht for you, and you can choose, say, half a dozen of your old friends, the fishermen, to join the Scottish crew.”
Mary accepted this total change of plan without a moment’s hesitation. It seemed so pleasant to have someone who would take the trouble to think for her.
She was dashed by this new idea of human misery that lay beyond the pale. But she told herself that there were so many people who could be helped — so many with whom a little money will go such a long way — that she had no need to despair because there was a darker world that her little candle could never light. Austin had told her that it was better to take the work near one’s hand, than to torture one’s brain by brooding upon impossible schemes.
There were the poor ladies, the patient ones who never stretched out the beggar’s hand, and yet were sometimes worse off than the crossing sweeper with his pocket full of pence to carry home to his garret when the day’s work was done: the patient ones who could maintain their self-respect in an attic and go to bed early on winter nights to save coal and candle. She could cheer and comfort a multitude of these with a tithe of her income; and she meant to give away much more than a tithe. She meant to make a great many people happy. That was always in her mind — to make them happy, those for whom comfort, which is often a synonym for happiness, could be so cheaply bought. From the five-shilling attic to the fifteen-shilling bed-sitting-room! From the hundredweight of coals to the ton!
Mary stayed at Port Jacob just long enough to finish her business, and bid her old people good-bye. She forgot nobody in those final arrangements, least of all the old purblind retriever, who had been happy with her, and who was to be taken care of at the “Ship” till the chaplain’s house was ready, when the chaplain’s wife was to receive the old dog, who had grown a good deal younger under Mary’s fostering care, and to care for her to the end of her days. There was to be no more talk of doing away with Dinah.
By the time this was all settled Mary’s hired yacht had come. It was all that the most exacting spinster, and the still more exacting spinster’s maid, could desire. She was not a liner in little, not a thousand-ton steam yacht like those that gladden the eye of the lounger on the pier at Cannes, when the morning sun is shining on the islands. She was not the yacht of a duke or a millionaire, but was large enough and handsome enough to startle the fishermen in the little harbour at Port Jacob, and Mary was pleased with her and pleased with her Scottish skipper, who had left vacancies in his crew for some of her Cornish friends, notably the captain of the Mayflower and his mate.
It had been a long way to come from the Clyde to Port Jacob, but Captain Macpherson had done the voyage short-handed and without one difficult hour; and he expressed himself agreeably surprised by the North Cornwall coast, not having anticipated finding such picturesque scenery out of Scotland.
“You’ll see something better, ma’am, when you’ve passed the Solway,” he told Mary, “but these red cliffs are worth looking at.”
So instead of sailing over the sunken portions of America to the coast of Brittany, Mary had sailed gaily with her face to the north.
Cruising about from Dunoon and Rothesay, where she dawdled through the summer, and spent the most part of it on shore, Mary’s time of mourning went by very peacefully between land and sea. Her placid thoughtful hours passed where the beauty of the world around her was enough for delight, and where even the books she loved best, heaped up in the basket at her side, seemed hardly to matter. Blue sky, blue water, and picturesque scenery! What could any mortal want more for bliss?
And then there was the Yard, of which Conway Field had talked in those twilight hours when he had let himself go, and had not been afraid to talk of the time in which he had been a free son of the earth, free to come and go, free to do what he liked with his life — not a broken machine which had to be moved gingerly by the hands of hirelings, with much aid from expensive mechanism.
He had told Mary about the Yard, that wonderful growth of a father and son’s industry, the father a peasant lad, educated at a village school, the son a First Smith’s Prizeman at Cambridge. These two had made the Yard, beginning when steam power on the sea had been in its experimental stage, through the long slow years in which the cargo ship and the passenger ship were gradually changing their nature, their shape, their size, their weight, and every ounce of material from keel to topmast: the long years in which there was always something new, something to make the world wonder.
To the man who had laboured with adze and plane, and whose hammer and rivets had rung merry music round the hull of many a stout teak clipper, the changes that the Smith’s Prizeman loved were not always welcome. Indeed, when in the last year of his long life he saw the paddle-wheels of an American packet-boat churning up the waters of the Clyde, he uttered words that were not only uncomplimentary but profane.
XXIV
IT was a year alter the building of the almshouses when Mary Tremayne came back to Warburton House, to take her place there as sole mistress of all that it held of beauty and splendour.
Mrs. Sedgwick and Mrs. Bertram, who had both insisted upon interesting themselves in all her plans, told her that she could not live in that house alone without provoking scandal. Somebody in the way of chaperon she must have, however independent and self-contained she might be by nature.
“If you live alone you will be a mark for slander,” Mrs. Bertram told her. “Some people will say you are eccentric or mad, and others will say you are improper, and will invent horrid stories about you.”
“And you are not going to keep this splendid house shut up like a prison as poor Conway did,” pursued Mrs. Sedgwick. “You will be expected to entertain, to give young people a chance. My girls, for instance, who hardly had a cup of tea in their uncle’s house from year’s end to year’s end, expect to see a wonderful change now you are reigning here. ‘Miss Tremayne is as young as I am, and she must enjoy society, after having been cooped up reading dry books to my uncle,’ Julia said. ‘She will be giving nice parties and waking up the big stupid rooms! ‘ You see the idea of a house that doesn’t entertain is impossible to girls in society. People nowadays are expected to do their part in making others happy.”
“By giving balls and dinner parties?” said Mary, smiling.
“I have been thinking about making people happy; but not quite in that way.”
“You have been listening to Austin, who thinks there is nothing wanted for anybody at the West End. We are to spend all our money on Poplar and Bethnal Green. Poor dear Austin is a saint, but he might remember that he has sisters of his own who ought to count before the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
And then the two matrons came round again to the question of a chaperon. However quietly Mary might resolve to live, whether she did or did not “entertain,” she must have a well-bred woman of mature years to keep her in countenance. Ma
ry protested that she could not support life with a hired companion.
“If my friend the vicar’s wife at Port Jacob had lived I might have asked her and her husband to share my home,” she said, and then she told her new friends about the old vicar and his young wife, and how the young had been taken and the old and feeble left.
“Well, it is a question to be thought out at leisure,” she said, anxious to put an end to the debate. “I will consult Mr. Sedgwick the next time I see him. He is my adviser about most things.”
“You really mustn’t call him Mr. Sedgwick. You must call him Austin.”
“I will when he asks me,” Mary said simply.
And then Mrs. Bertram struck in with what she considered a brilliant idea.
“There is Elaine — the very person! She is distinctly simpatica — she need never bore you. She must have been very lonely since Walter Halling’s death, and though she only lives for her garden, and never comes to London except for a day or two just to see the horticultural shows and buy new rock plants, she must often feel sick of her solitude. If she would entertain the idea she would be just the right person, and it would stop the mouths of malicious gossips if they found one of Conway’s sisters at your elbow.”
“I am not afraid of malicious people,” Mary answered, with a chilling look. “I have nothing to apologize for; and the society you consider so carefully is of no account to me. Whatever purpose I have in life lies quite apart from your world, Mrs. Bertram. But if I cannot live in this house without a chaperon I need scarcely say that I would rather have one of Mr. Field’s sisters than anyone else.”
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