Richard blinked at her; the warm candlelight, falling on the curve of her bosom, seemed to reflect a whole world of love and sweetness. Here was one person who would understand, who would not fail to comfort him … He leant forward.
‘It has been a sad day in more ways that you can know.’ He became aware that Miles, his laboured conversation finished, was listening to what he was saying; across the candlelight, between the curved branches of the silver epergne, his sharp eyes were fixed on Richard, with cold concentration. Such overseeing would not halt him; rather the reverse. ‘I have had some bad news,’ said Richard boldly. ‘My brother was kind enough to communicate it to me.’
‘Richard,’ said Miles warningly.
Richard looked at him over the rim of his wineglass, hating him, mocking him. ‘What is it, Sir Miles?’
‘We will not speak of it now.’
‘Do not be shy on my account, Sir Miles. You should be proud of your new estate.’
Miles gave a side-glance at the servants who, having removed the plates of the last course, were handing round the dish of crème caramel. His voice was authoritative, coldly correct. ‘At the proper time,’ he said, ‘you may impart your news, if you wish. This is not the proper time.’
Richard, quickly angered, brought his fist down on the polished table top, so that the glasses jangled. ‘I want no instruction from you,’ he said roughly. ‘If I have something to say, I will say it when I choose!’
Lucinda, perturbed by his violence, intervened quickly. ‘Come, Richard,’ she said, coaxingly. ‘It cannot be of such importance. Tell us later.’
Richard waved away the dish which was offered him; and there was an awkward silence as the servants, their work completed, withdrew from the room. Richard wondered, with an inward flash of contempt, how long it would be before John Keston learned of his outburst. He might be hearing the tale, which would lose nothing in the telling, at this very moment … Miles was still staring at him across the table; the surveillance further angered him, and he responded to his anger with a determination to have his way. He was touchy with damaged pride, ready to see an insult anywhere, in a word or a look; and Miles’s cool insistence that he alone should decide what subjects would, and would not, be talked of at table, was the worst insult of all.
As soon as they were alone: ‘It is of great importance,’ insisted Richard belligerently. In his excitement, he slurred the words, and Miles’s disdainful expression irked him more potently still. He gathered himself, and mastered his tongue. ‘It is my father’s will,’ he said, with careful distinctness, so that they all might hear. ‘I learned of it, for the first time, a few hours ago …’ He waved his hand towards Miles, knocking over his empty wineglass. ‘Behold the new baronet!’ he said loudly. Then his hand fell on his own chest, with a sharp slapping sound. ‘And the new pauper!’
‘You forget yourself, Richard,’ said Miles Marriott, in the astonished silence which followed. His baleful glance, with which he was wont to freeze his junior officers to the quarter-deck, bore down on his brother. ‘There are certain subjects which one does not discuss openly, even’ – his eyes narrowed – ‘even when one is in liquor.’
Richard laughed, a harsh and savage sound. ‘I am in liquor, my dear Miles, to celebrate your good fortune. Surely you are not ashamed of it?’
‘What have I to be ashamed of?’
‘That is between God and your conscience.’ Richard turned to Lucinda Drysdale, his face exhibiting an artificial calm which did not mask his deep feeling. ‘What would you say of an heir who takes, not only his own portion, but his brother’s as well? Would you congratulate him? – or ask him to reveal the secrets of success? Would you say, “Tut, tut! That was a somewhat greedy stroke”? Or would you say, “Well done, thou good and faithful post-Captain”?’
‘You go too far, Richard,’ said Lucinda reprovingly. But there was little or no embarrassment in her expression; rather was it inquisitive, sharper than he had ever seen it before. She looked from one brother to the other, from Miles’s furious face to Richard’s careless scorn. Convention dictated that she should take no part in the quarrel, that she should pass over it and make small talk with her aunt until the squall blew by; but there was something here which overrode convention, a naked conflict which it would be almost as inconceivable to ignore as to notice. She stole a second glance at Miles, and decided to risk her curiosity. ‘In any case, your riddles are too deep for my poor brain. What is this about being a pauper?’
Miles Marriott glanced at her with extreme disapproval, and her aunt, who had that uncomfortable capacity of many deaf persons for hearing well enough when it was least convenient, leant across and said: ‘Really, Lucinda – this is not your concern at all!’ But Lucinda’s attention, like her question, was for Richard alone, and her audacity was rewarded when he answered, with the same assumed lightness of tone: ‘I can assure you, my dear Lucinda, that I did not choose the word by accident. It describes my new situation exactly. Since this afternoon I have been living in this house only on sufferance. Marriott, and all that goes with it, now belongs to my brother alone.’
‘Of course Marriott belongs to Miles,’ began Lucinda, puzzled. ‘There was the entail – who else could it belong to? But as for being a pauper–’
‘With Marriott,’ interrupted Richard, ‘goes the whole of my father’s fortune. The whole of it.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You are joking, surely?’
He shook his head; in the silence of the room, the creaking of his chair as he leant forward was very loud. ‘No, I am not joking. I have not the least cause to joke. In my father’s will, I have fared less well than the Cottage Hospital at St Briavels. I have nothing.’
On an impulse, he rose, and crossed to the sideboard, and poured himself a fresh glass of wine; the breach ofetiquette seemed all one with the shock and surprise of what he had said. Lucinda was looking at him with an expression he had never seen in her face before; as if, with the words, ‘I have nothing’, he had become a different sort of man altogether, a stranger she had never met. Miles was staring impassively down at the table; he was choosing to ignore the entire incident – he would not pay it the compliment of disapproval, much less of embarrassment. It was left to Mrs Merriman to bridge the chasm of social dislocation which had been opened up.
She turned to Miles Marriott. ‘I have never understood,’ she said, seizing on the first topic that came to mind, ‘what is meant by the term post-Captain.’
Miles collected himself. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Post-Captain,’ repeated Mrs Merriman. ‘What exactly does it signify?’
‘It means,’ answered Miles, well content to play this game, ‘a captain in a sea-going post – that is, in command of a ship of twenty guns or more.’
Richard, walking unsteadily, slopping his full wineglass, returned to the table and sat down. From there he stared fixedly at Mrs Merriman. ‘You should have asked me,’ he said. ‘I can tell you what a post-Captain is.’
Miles, stung out of his false calm, tried to head him off. ‘Hold your tongue!’ he snapped. ‘You have caused us enough discomfort already.’
‘A post-Captain, my dear Aunt Merriman,’ said Richard, ignoring him entirely, ‘is a baronet with twenty different ways of securing his fortune. He has a brave ship with twenty guns, and every gun is trained on his brother, ready to blow him to perdition.’ He was drunk, and he knew it, and he was past caring; even Lucinda’s eye, bent on him with such inquiring sharpness, could not stop him. ‘A post-Captain, Aunt Merriman, has taken the place of Mustela Nivalis, the common weasel, as the lowest form of animal life. It preys on much larger animals, using cunning instead of strength. It preys on me …’ He was in full flood now, not to be stopped; one of the young footmen, returning to serve the last of the wine, paused open-mouthed in the doorway, until a violent gesture from Miles at the head of the table made him turn in his tracks and bolt from the room. ‘All post-Captains are wealthy men,’ said Richar
d, in an inane sing-song voice. ‘They are their father’s favourites, their mother’s only darlings … Shall I reveal to you the secret of my birth? I was born under Taurus, the stupid patient bull. Post-Captains are born under Sagittarius, the archer who shoots you between the shoulder-blades while you are looking elsewhere …’ He raised his glass, blinking wildly. ‘Ladies, I give you the toast! To post-Captain Sir Miles Marriott, Baronet! The richest baronet in the West Country. The smartest baronet that ever put to sea. And the smallest baronet that ever ruled a great house!’
He swallowed the wine at a gulp; then he raised his hand and hurled the glass with all his strength at the open fireplace. It splintered against the mantel, and the dregs of the wine fell hissing on to the burning embers.
In the heavy silence that followed, Mrs Merriman was, once again, the first to recollect the demands and usages of polite society. She rose to her feet.
‘Come, Lucinda,’ she said brightly. ‘We will leave the gentlemen to their port.’
Miles and Richard both rose; Richard unsteadily, holding on to the table edge, Miles with a controlled impassivity which masked a furious anger. As soon as the ladies had passed silently from the room, Richard sat down again heavily; but Miles remained where he was, standing at the head of his table, staring at his brother with an expression of implacable hatred. Blinking up at him, Richard said: ‘Sit down, brother Miles … We have a full half-hour yet, before we need join them … I have it in mind to drink a bottle of port.’
‘You have drunk enough,’ said Miles icily. ‘More than enough.’
‘Nonsense! We have scarcely begun. A glass of port! It is my last evening.’
‘It is certainly your last evening,’ said Miles, ‘and I am glad of it.’ He walked round the table until he was standing by Richard’s chair, looking down at him. ‘You are a drunken animal,’ he said, very distinctly. ‘You have made avulgar fool of yourself, in the presence of ladies, before the servants, and I would not take wine with you if we were the last two men left on earth …’ And as Richard, startled, sought to rise to his feet: ‘Stay where you are!’ commanded Miles. His face was stern, with the desperate courage of a small man who has been pushed and provoked too far. ‘Stay until the morning, if you choose … I can assure you, the ladies will excuse your withdrawal.’
5
He had vomited, and doused his head in a basin of cold water; later, sobered, but still angry and raw-skinned, he had come downstairs again after an hour of seclusion. He had had some second thoughts during this time of solitude, but not many, and none that could really change his mood. Of course, it had been a mistake to get drunk, whatever the provocation – that was boy’s behaviour, an act of immaturity which Miles, the cold strategist, had been quick to seize on. Richard could even feel a twinge of admiration for Miles, who had turned brave in the face of intolerable insult. Who would have thought that the little post-Captain had such stuff in him? … But the unwilling tribute did not alter the hard facts which beset him; he was still poor, he was dispossessed, he must leave Marriott, like a servant dismissed, within a short time. These were still things which had to he reckoned with, when it came to casting up the accounts. He had insulted Miles because of what Miles had come to mean to him; not simply on this day of defeat, but over the years, the years of being a younger brother … It was only this evening, seeing Miles, the new baronet with the new fortune, lording it at the head of his dining table, that Richard had been brought face to face with the fact of his repulse, and had exploded into fury.
Now, reaching the bottom of the broad staircase, he stood in the great hall, listening. The only sound in all the house was the playing of a piano, gentle, harmonious, in the drawing-room. The jewelled notes, strung like pearls, mocked him with their assurance of a world of civilized delights. Lucinda was playing – but not for him.
On an impulse, Richard crossed to the double doors which led to the garden, and passed out on to the terrace. It was a fine night, starlit, clear; the moon shadow of the great house fell sharply on the stone flags, the smell of the night was of flowers, cooling lawns, rose gardens drenched with their own scent. He walked a few paces, till he came level with the windows of the drawing-room. Through one of them, uncurtained, he could see the lamplit room within.
Lucinda was playing, as he had known she must be. She sat at the rosewood piano, her face studious, her beautiful body bent forward, her arms – as white as ivory – moving gently over the keyboard. Miles was in an armchair beside her, watching her, listening intently to the music. Across the room, Mrs Merriman, at ease on a low-cushioned couch, was intent on her needlework, a fire screen of gros-point which had been her leisuretime engagement for at least three years. To Richard, outside in the darkness of the terrace, the music sounded faintly. But the rest of the scene was as clear and as foreboding as the bell which, this afternoon, had tolled for his father.
He watched Lucinda, as she let her hands drop from the keyboard, and then smiled at Miles Marriott. He watched Miles, a figure of imposing correctness, bow towards her and then bring his hands together in intimate applause. He watched Mrs Merriman, the aunt, the chaperone, so engrossed in her task that she did not feel called upon to raise her head even when the music ceased. The message of their harmony could not have been clearer if the three actors had jointly turned towards him and said: ‘Stay where you are. Keep your distance.’
Possessed by jealous rage, he could not bear to watch further. He felt as if he were a hurt animal, lurking in the shadowy dark, surveying with hatred the warmth and lightness of the habitations of men. Today he had been excluded from Marriott, excluded from his father’s fortune, excluded from the world of lawful wedlock; now he seemed excluded from the world of Lucinda Drysdale, whose smiles, whose glowing presence, were so pointedly offered to another. He moved away from the lighted window, and entered the house again, by another door.
The room in which he found himself was his father’s library, which also gave on to the drawing-room across a small vestibule. It had been terra incognita during the small years; his father was a great reader, as the massive rows of leather-bound volumes testified, and great readers were not to be interrupted, particularly by rumbustious little boys whose pleasures ran to sunshine and trout tickling and wild cross-country pony rides. But latterly, Richard had seen more of it; it contained, besides books in abundance, other things which he had grown absorbed in – ancient maps, old prints of far-off places, sailing ship models with their rigging minutely strung, and the ‘great terrestrial globe’ which was now, incontestably, his own.
Crossing the room past the leather-topped mahogany desk, he put his hand on the curved surface of the globe. His father, a world traveller in his youth, had had it specially made for his entertainment; it was more than four feet in diameter, and it revolved as ponderously upon its axis as if it were the great world itself … In his adolescence Richard had been wont to play a game, turning the globe on its free-running spindle, shutting his eyes, stabbing with his forefinger at the surface of this manikin earth, opening his eyes again to see where fortune would take him, sometime in the distant future. He was destined, he learned, to voyage to Fukien Province in far-off China, to Peru, to the Ivory Coast of Africa, to a spot in mid-Pacific labelled ‘Three Thousand Fathoms Here’ … Now it was almost all he possessed. He could play with it to his heart’s content – his terrestrial globe, and his two pistols.
The music, which had started again, came to its appointed end. Moving a few steps within the library, lit by a single lamp, he could see through the open door into the drawing-room. Lucinda had risen from the piano, and was talking to Miles, smiling at him again; but presently, as Richard watched, Miles bowed slightly, excusing himself, and turned away. It must be some estate matter; or perhaps, as he sometimes did, he was going to visit the stables, to give orders for the morning. Left alone, Lucinda remained standing by the piano, her graceful figure in the black gown outlined against tall gold curtains. From where Richard stood
, Mrs Merriman was out of sight.
He called softly: ‘Lucinda!’
She heard him, and looked, startled, in his direction. But she made no move until he called again: ‘Lucinda – in the library.’ Then, with a side-glance at her aunt, she walked through, and stood in the doorway, staring at him. In the half-light, her face was withdrawn, even cold.
She said: ‘I can scarcely see you, Richard.’ Her tone also was remote and without warmth. ‘Why are you here? – I thought you had retired.’
He took a step towards her. She seemed intensely desirable at that moment; he wanted to take her in his arms, without a word spoken. It would be for the first time, but his discontent and unhappiness were so great that it seemed only her close presence could cure them. He took another step, and reached out his hand. ‘My dearest Lucinda,’ he said.
She drew back as if he had offered her some astonishing insult. ‘You forget yourself,’ she said. There was a freezing tone in her voice which he had never heard before. ‘You have done so all evening … It would be far better if you did retire.’
She turned, making as if to leave him again. Her remoteness was more than he could accept; love and anger warred with each other, and anger overtopped all other emotion. He put his arm across the threshold, barring her way. ‘I am not drunk,’ he said.
She was immobile again, disdaining to touch him. ‘I do not care if you are drunk or not.’ Then she suddenly melted – but she melted into scorn, not into tenderness. ‘Richard, why did you do it? You have behaved disgracefully!’
‘Why did I do what?’
She gestured, impatiently. ‘You know very well what I mean! You insulted Miles – you behaved like a boor – you were not even sober when I arrived!’
‘It has been a hard day, Lucinda.’
The White Rajah (1961) Page 4