Lord Auldearn – whose temper could scarcely have been improved by two solid days of automobilism – turned and glared at these intrusive persons. He might have been feeling that what he had on his hands was at least no more than a family party, although a perplexed one, but that now here was the vulgar world as well. And because he was very old, and for long unpractised in the conduct of minor contretemps, he went, for a moment, rather badly wrong now.
‘Are you’—Lord Auldearn demanded of the new arrivals—’a couple of damned journalists?’
‘Sir!’ Mungo had taken a quick pace forward. He wasn’t going to have his mysterious former patron (who had given him a very decent lunch) abused in this arrogant and mannerless fashion. ‘May I introduce Mr Mackellar, my solicitor, from Edinburgh? And Mr McLeod, who is at present with a firm in Elgin?’
‘How do you do?’ Having no means of knowing that these descriptions represented a more than commonly inopportune embroidering of fact in the interest of fancy, Lord Auldearn surveyed the two legal gentlemen grimly as he growled out this civility. Then he turned to Mungo. ‘At least you lose no time in telling us where we are.’
Mungo was without a reply. He couldn’t very well begin explaining that Mackellar had described him as his client on the occasion of lunching him at his club, and that he, Mungo, had been freakishly reviving the joke. For that matter, perhaps there was some truth in it. Mackellar could only have turned up like this because Roddy had taken a drastic initiative in summoning him – and summoning him for the purpose of looking after Mungo’s interests, whether real or supposed.
However that might be, Mungo’s manner of introducing the two newcomers was having a complicated effect. He was conscious of a harsh hostility in Lord Auldearn’s tone. He was equally conscious of, and a good deal more unnerved by, a spark as of covert approval which had momentarily glinted in Lord Auldearn’s eye. For the aged nobleman – this was the truth of the matter – was suspecting him, Mungo, of engineering a vigorous (and probably unscrupulous) coup de main. And this the aged nobleman in his secret and unregenerate heart admired. And he admired it because it reminded him of Douglas Cardower – the black sheep of the family and his favourite son.
Mungo’s intuition, having carried him so far, now carried him a little farther. In Lord Auldearn no son of Robert Cardower could stir quite the same feeling as a son of Douglas Cardower. Such a son, whether legitimate or not, had only to bob up with some appearance of presentability to put the nose of Ian Cardower quite out of joint with the head of his family. In fact, there was a subtext to this uncomfortable comedy, and in it Mungo had been made suddenly aware that his role was that of the Prodigal Grandson.
Mungo was badly shaken by this glimpse of folly in an old man’s heart. And – for full measure – he suspected that Lord Brightmony was of the same way of feeling as his father. He wondered whether Ian had arrived at any sense of the injustice being done him. He didn’t believe it could have any sequel in the material sphere of property and succession. If Mackellar S.S.C. were to step forward at this moment waving documentary evidences of a marriage between Douglas Cardower and Mungo’s mother, then at once these two old men (for Mungo thought of Lord Brightmony as being much of an age with his father Lord Auldearn) would stifle their secret feelings and fight like mad. All the senior Cardowers would do that – and perhaps Ian too. To a man and woman, they would close their ranks against the Perkin Warbeck, the Lambert Simnel, who had appeared among them. But, Mungo reassured himself, all this was nonsense. Mackellar was not going to step forward with documents. Such things happen only in old plays, or in novels. Yes – Mungo thought – novels.
‘Bestir yourself,’ Sedley was saying briskly. ‘We’re driving up to the house.’ He opened the door on the passenger’s side of his damaged car, and gestured to Mungo to get in. ‘I shall be interested in what Ian has to say for himself.’
‘I’ll be interested in what you have to say for yourself.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Just that.’ Mungo had hardly heard his own staggering words because of the clatter with which the scales had, so to speak, been falling from his eyes. Now he raised his voice. ‘Ian and I,’ he said, ‘are going to walk.’
‘I’m sorry I lied to you.’ Ian said this stiffly, and with his gaze directed straight ahead up the drive. ‘I apologise.’
‘Did you lie to me?’
‘By implication. By pretending to fall in with the idea of going to the D’Arcy-Drelincourts. I knew I must consult my grandfather, and you perfectly well know why. I may say at once that he doesn’t agree with me. He doesn’t believe you’ve been on the make.’
‘But I have?’
‘On the other hand’—Ian had ignored Mungo’s question—’he says you must be stopped. He distinguishes between the grandson (on whom he dotes, if that’s any satisfaction to you) and what he calls the claimant. So I’m at odds with him there too. It’s going to be for me to say, you know. And you may make your mind easy. Whatever you have the shadow of a title to, my dear cousin, you shall have.’
‘”My dear cousin” – that, and in that tone, is a good start to just what Leonard Sedley had been hoping to hear a lot of.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘I mean, chiefly, that I want you to belt up, Ian Cardower. No, that’s wrong. Listen! You’ve said half a dozen words you’re going to regret. Well there’s not much in half a dozen words. But now – please, Ian, please – keep quiet! Just for the length of this walk to the Castle. Do you promise?’
‘I promise. And I blame you for nothing. For instance, you’ve done quite right to bring in your lawyer.’
‘That gets something wrong for a start. I wrote to Roddy, who is my oldest friend, just because I was in a bit of a puzzle when you’d walked out on me. And Roddy has routed out Mackellar on his own initiative. And Mackellar hasn’t got in his pocket what you and your grandfather fear he has. He may have something – but not the melodramatic twaddle you’ve been led to think. Listen, Ian! For how long has this business of you and me as cousins of a sort been going?’
‘Almost from the start, it seems. I’ve had that from my—from our grandfather. As a suspicion, it began on the night we dined with my parents at the Randolph. It was when you explained to my father that your mother was a Miss Guthrie of Fintry.’
‘All right, Ian. And then, just as a notion, it drifted into your head, and mine too. Later, we tried it out as a kind of joke, and no harm done. We saw that it could be true that I was your uncle’s illegitimate son, and still no harm done. All your people came to see it. Rather notably, they seemed to like me all the better for it. But there was no point in making it explicit. You have delicate feelings, you Cardowers.’
‘We Cardowers.’
‘O.K. And right, so far?’
‘Right.’
‘Next point. How lately did the story get this further turn of the screw: the assertion of there having been a legally valid marriage between your uncle Douglas and my mother?’
‘No time ago, at all. But that’s not the point. You see, it’s absolutely—’ Ian broke off. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘there are things it’s frightfully difficult to say. Because, you know, he was your father.’
‘All right. He was my father. But just go on.’
‘It’s absolutely in Uncle Douglas’s wretched picture. It seems there was one unfortunate girl he married in a perfectly legal way and then persuaded that the ceremony had been a hoax. He’d have been in a regular fix if she hadn’t fortunately died of it all. And he several times used popular misconceptions about the Scottish marriage laws—’
‘Yes, of course. We all know he was the bad Lord Douglas. But what I’m asking is this: who unloaded all this on us – more or less on our cottage doorstep – and when? It was your Uncle David’s precious companion, Leonard Sedley – and no longer ago than the day after you had bitterly humiliated him. That’s my guess. Is it right?’
‘I didn�
�t humiliate him.’
‘Don’t be so thick. Of course you did. Yelping because a licentious hand was teasing your virgin locks.’ Mungo’s spirits were rising. ‘He just couldn’t take it, Ian, however nicely you apologised. And he decided to gain his revenge by running up this professional job.’
‘Mungo, you’re cracked.’
‘It’s Sedley who’s cracked. A bad case of the Iago complex.’
‘For Christ’s sake, let up!’ Ian had come to a halt and was facing Mungo squarely. ‘First uncle-eclipse, and then the Iago complex. Can’t you be serious?’
Mungo found this so funny that he laughed aloud. For he couldn’t, of course, remember ever in his young life having been confronted with a more serious half-hour. Still, the battle was won. Ian would never now say to him, nor would he ever say to Ian, the unforgivable things that had been planned for them.
‘It’s quite simple,’ Mungo said, and began to move forward again. ‘Solvitur ambulando, in fact.’
‘I don’t see you need be so gay.’
‘But I am gay. Even as a bird out of the fowler’s snare escapes away, so is my soul set free. But you don’t deign to sing the metrical psalms in your whistle-kirks.’
‘What on earth is a whistle-kirk?’ That Ian’s chin was coming clear of the water was attested by this irrelevant curiosity.
‘It’s a kirk with an organ in it – and therefore only fit for Episcopalians.’ Mungo now stretched his arms above his head as he walked, and looked contentedly about him. ‘That post-and-rail fence along the drive,’ he said, ‘could you hurdle it?’
‘I could vault it.’
‘But I can hurdle it.’
Mungo hurdled it, ran on, turned, and hurdled it again.
On this repeat performance he unfortunately misjudged the dip of a shallow ditch, and came down with a breath-expelling wallop. He stood up, very dusty, to the accompaniment of Ian’s comradely laughter. ‘And now I’ll go on,’ he said soberly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘You have made a somewhat leisured matter of joining us,’ Lord Auldearn was saying some twenty minutes later. Lord Auldearn had seated himself at the head of the long refectory table in the dining-room of Mallachie, and was plainly proposing to preside over quasi-judicial proceedings. He looked hard at Mungo. ‘Young man,’ he demanded, ‘have you been fighting?’
‘Not fighting – hurdling,’ Mungo said blithely, and glanced round the room. Lord Brightmony was present, but not Father Balietti. Mackellar and Roddy were sitting at a far end of the table. With Ian and himself, that was the lot. There was no sign of Leonard Sedley. ‘It was a fence, you see,’ Mungo amplified. ‘Ian thought he could only vault it, but I said I could treat it as a hurdle. And so I did. But I mucked it, the other way on. Are you waiting for Mr Sedley?’
‘It is certainly desirable that he should be present.’ Lord Auldearn looked a little puzzled. ‘I understood that he was following us. He will no doubt be here in a moment.’
‘I don’t think so. It’s my guess that from this time forth he never will speak word.’
‘Mungo, this is no occasion for talking nonsense. We have a very serious matter to consider. To consider and, if possible, to compose.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. But it isn’t quite nonsense, as I’ll explain. May Ian and I sit down?’
‘My dear boy, don’t play at formalities. This is a family matter, as you very well know. Sit down, both of you.’ Lord Auldearn made a gesture which seemed more weary than his voice. ‘And, Mungo, if you think it useful that you should begin our discussion, please do.’
‘Then that’s fine.’ Mungo sat down, and offered everybody present a cheerful smile. He had resolved that it was his line to keep the temperature low. ‘I’m sorry Mr Sedley isn’t here, because it would be better if I said what I have to say in his presence. But it can’t be helped. I think you’ll find that he really has asked for his cards.’
‘Has what?’ Lord Brightmony demanded.
‘I’m sorry. Has handed in his checks. Decided to go away. You see, he knows that I know. It came to me in a moment – and I saw that its having come to me came to him the moment after. These are frightfully spontaneous things.’
‘This talk is idle,’ Lord Brightmony said severely. ‘And it appears to asperse Leonard, who is indeed not here to defend himself. It will be more proper that Mungo be silent for a time, and that we go about the matter another way.’
‘I think not.’ Lord Auldearn said this gently and with decision. ‘Mungo, you were quoting the last words spoken by Iago, and apparently with some serious intention. Please explain yourself.’
‘Well, it’s just that I’ve been explaining it all to Ian in terms of what I called an Iago complex. And that was only because we have a game – Ian and I – of sometimes talking a sort of outmoded psychological jargon. So I won’t use it to you, sir, because I’m afraid you really would think it frivolous.’
‘I wonder.’ Lord Auldearn was now looking at Mungo, thus all disarmedness, very searchingly indeed. ‘I think that, on the whole, I should like to be favoured with it too.’
‘Very well. Iago is the type of the failed artist. I think he wrote no end of plays and things – with perhaps a bit of a success now and then – before he gave it up and joined the army. The root cause of his failure as an artist was that he had no impulse himself to enter into the lives of other enjoying and suffering human beings. He just wanted to get a sensation of power out of manoeuvring his characters – puppets, really – into various rather horrid destinies. He took that instinct – Iago did – into actual life after he’d failed as a writer, and started in with his funny business on flesh and blood people. That’s the whole truth about him – except, of course, that he was jealous of, or hated, relationships he couldn’t understand. I suppose this is a quite old-fashioned and boring view of Iago, but it seems to me the true one.’
‘It is at least an odd preface to our affair.’ Lord Auldearn looked with a sudden glint of malice down the table and at Mr Mackellar. ‘I even feel that your legal adviser judges it irrelevant and injudicious. But please go on. Are you dignifying our absent friend with the stature of an Iago?’
‘Oh, no! It’s just that he has exhibited rather the same pattern of behaviour. In a way, he interests me rather more than Iago does.’
‘Does he, indeed? He would be flattered.’
‘It’s because he has an aesthetic – quite a specific aesthetic – which has lent a pattern to his fatuous attempts to muck us all up. I’m afraid this sounds fearfully pretentious.’
‘You are afraid of nothing of the sort. Don’t waste our time.’
‘No, sir. Well, it’s an aesthetic of illusion. The artist creates precisely what is not, and the measure of his achievement lies in the completeness or intensity which his illusion achieves. It may be only for a moment that the illusion holds. But if for that moment it is absolute, then he has succeeded in his aim.’
‘It seems not a very elevated view of the artist.’
‘Oh, no – of course it isn’t. I’m just trying to explain why Mr Sedley has acted so freakishly. He’s been a baffled sort of person for a long time, chiefly because he’s lost the ability to create people and understand them – love them, even.’
‘That may be true,’ Lord Brightmony said. ‘But is it relevant?’
‘Just let me go on, please. Mr Sedley hasn’t liked me at all, particularly as Ian’s friend. And – only quite recently – he’s come very much not to like Ian either. So what he’s been doing is trying to bring off a malicious joke. He was going to exploit a bit of—well, of family history to bring us to a shameful and embarrassing public quarrel. Ian and I were going to say things to each other about each other’s motives and feelings that would make it impossible for us ever to be friends again. That was to be the joke.’
There was a silence, during which Lord Auldearn glanced at his son as if inviting comment on these extraordinary statements. Lord Brightmony, however, appe
ared to have withdrawn upon silent prayer. So Lord Auldearn turned to Ian instead.
‘Ian, would you describe yourself as suddenly converted to Mungo’s view of the matter?’
‘Yes, I would. It’s bewildering, but there it is. I was to suspect Mungo of making his way among us in order to poke around in the family history to his own advantage. And Mungo was to see me as believing I had to take every means to outwit him. Mungo says the whole business of Uncle Douglas’s supposed secret marriage to mother will turn out to be a sudden invention of Seldley’s. Seldly felt I had humiliated him and his imagination got to work.’
‘Humiliated him, Ian?’
‘Yes – because one evening I made a silly scene. We’d been—’
‘That, certainly, we need not pursue.’ Lord Brightmony had emerged abruptly from his devotions.
‘All right, then, I won’t.’ Ian turned again to his grandfather. ‘But for a time, you see, the secret marriage was to be colourable – I think that’s the word – because Uncle Douglas is known to have played some odd tricks with the marriage laws. I ought to say Mungo and I think Sedley must be a bit cracked, as well as astoundingly malicious. He imagined he had far more grip on his plot, so to speak, than was actually the case. It’s true that Mungo and I were beginning to be uneasy with each other—’
‘Even to suspect each other,’ Mungo interpolated calmly.
‘Yes – even that. But his big scene, with the two of us chucking low accusations at one another before the entire assembled cast: that, I just don’t believe he could conceivably have brought off.’
‘That is a belief,’ Lord Auldearn said drily, ‘that it will be salutary to maintain.’
‘You do see that we’re right, don’t you?’ Mungo demanded.
‘I think I may say I do. As for Leonard’s being – like all the rest of us – a little mad, I see no difficulty in that at all. Do you think, by the way, that he supposed he was going to remain undetected in this ramshackle piece of wickedness?’
‘Oh, I think that!’ Mungo broke in with this. ‘You see, there’s the convention of the Calumniator Believed, and there’s the convention of the Invisibility of the Villain—’
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