Dwarf's Blood

by Edith Olivier

  Nicholas was silent. Mr. Briscowe watched his face, and it was almost expressionless. With his eyes fixed upon the house, the young man was really looking deep down into himself. This place, he thought, must hold the key to his past. Surely here was the secret of the eternal dissatisfaction of his boyhood—of that incessant sense of thwarting against which he had vainly rebelled. In his blood he must always have felt this ancient dignity, making the Australian air taste bitter in his mouth. He resolved that this must be so.

  There was not a person in sight. No labourers crossed the Park: no gardeners worked around the house: no old woman weeded in the untidy flowerbeds. Only the wild fowl flew away in companies from the lake, their harsh yet lovely voices crying a protest against the interlopers. Nicholas felt as if he were looking down upon the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, but he did not say so to Mr. Briscowe, knowing that grown men do not concern themselves with fairy stories.

  Mr. Briscowe would certainly have been surprised if he could have seen into his companion’s mind, for the old lawyer was considering the place with unmitigated disgust. It was worse than he expected—far worse than it had been five months earlier. It would have distressed him to see any place so fallen into decay, but in this case, the pain he felt was a personal one. Here was the family seat of one of his firm’s oldest clients, and into this condition of ruin it had come. It was true that the lawyer could disclaim any actual responsibility for what he saw. It was years since Sir Henry had consented to see him. He had obstinately rejected all advice. He had shut himself up alone at Brokeyates, as if he hoped that the house would one day fall upon him and bury him in its ruins.

  They drove on, and approached the house. Now Nicholas began to see something of what the lawyer had already seen. Certainly, Australia could never have produced so complete a wreck. He had not imagined that a fine building could become so nearly derelict. The very stones seemed rotting. The spring winds had worked further havoc among the window frames, and now it was not only one room which was laid open to the weather. Several windows gaped hollow and black, the sun finding in them no glass to reflect its rays. Moss was thick upon the steps, and the graceful iron handrail which flanked them was twisted and rusty.

  Mr. Briscowe pulled the bell, and the handle came out in his hand. He knocked. The sound of the old knocker clattered through the empty hall, and then were heard the hasty and tottering steps of someone who must surely be as old as the house itself. Ann Dybbe opened the door. The old woman was bent and feeble; her face was deeply lined, and her hands were deformed by rheumatism. She looked confused and troubled; for, after listening for the motor all through the morning, she had just dropped off to sleep, and the sound of the knocker had given her a fright. She peered rather crossly out, blinking in the sunlight. Once more, Nicholas felt himself thrown back upon the reading of his boyhood. This old hag might have come out of Walter Scott. He felt no dismay at the poverty of his welcome: on the contrary, he was elated.

  Mrs. Dybbe invited the two gentlemen into the hall, but she did not accompany them when they went round the house. She had opened the shutters in all the rooms, but she had made no other preparations for the arrival at Brokeyates of its new master. The dust in the house had long gone beyond her control; and since Sir Henry’s death, she had done nothing but let the air into the rooms on dry days, and look after her invalid husband. She imagined that she was taking care of the house, but she would have made a poor defence against thieves.

  The two men walked through the rooms. Nicholas missed none of the signs of decay. He observed every crumbling plank in the floors, and he was well aware that the dreary smell which pervaded the rooms was caused by dry rot. No ragged scrap of peeling plaster escaped his eye. He saw every shred of torn wallpaper. He counted the places where the ceilings were broken, and the hingeless doors. But none of this dispelled his elation. Instead, it added to the atmosphere of romance which assured him, with every step he took, that he had escaped from the dead level of Australian business efficiency, and was in another world.

  They came at last to the room in which Sir Henry had died. Its windows faced north, towards the copses which hung on the side of the hill, but no glimpse of the view could be obtained from them. The Squire had refused to allow his Virginia creeper to be cut, and its heavy boughs covered the windows, spreading a dismal shadow through the room. When Nicholas and Mr. Briscowe opened the door, they found that they were almost in darkness. In the grate, a few dusty coals sent out a little red gleam, and a sparse wisp of smoke.

  Both men looked in some surprise at this sign of life. Nicholas walked to the fireplace, and tried to examine, in the uncertain light, what appeared to be a delicately modelled Adams mantelpiece, fouled with the smoke of years. As he did this, he was startled by a groan from the bed. Both he and Mr. Briscowe turned quickly in the direction of the sound, and they saw in the bed what seemed, in the semi-darkness, to be the outline of a very old man. There was on his face so little flesh that he looked no more than a skull. The skin was drawn tightly over the nose, and its bone stood out like a beak, while the old eyes were lost in the deep sockets. A few straggly hairs escaped from beneath an old-fashioned night-cap, and two claw-like hands picked at the sheets.

  Nicholas was not a man to expect the supernatural, but now he had no doubt that he was gazing upon the ghost of Sir Henry Roxerby. He held on to the mantelpiece and felt thankful that Mr. Briscowe was with him.

  ‘Who be’ ee?’ said a voice from the bed.

  Mr. Briscowe set his eyeglasses upon his nose with the firm decision of a man about to read a will. He looked very prim.

  ‘Who is there?’ he asked, enunciating the syllables with extreme precision.

  ‘Get along with ’ ee,’ continued the voice from the bed. ‘ That ’ere chimbly don’t want no sweeping. Or be ’ee the Black come after I?’

  Just then, Nicholas was aware of a movement immediately behind him. He sprang round, and saw Mrs. Dybbe.

  ‘Excuse me, Sir Nicholas,’ said the old woman, in a tone of great concern. ‘I should have mentioned it, and I hope you won’t be hard on me, but I took the liberty to put my husband in here when the old Squire were took. ’Tis the only room upstairs where we’ve’ad the chimbly swept, and ever since my poor old man ’ad ’is seizure, ’e do feel the cold something terrible. I should have told you when you came, but it went out of my mind. I was that upset when I wasn’t in the hall to give you my duty.’

  Nicholas could hardly help laughing. All this was so completely in the picture. It was absurd, and yet, in a way, moving. The old retainer had crept up to die in his master’s bed. He realized again that it was not only oceans and continents which separated him from Australia, and the realization delighted him. Yes; he was completely cut off from his past.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said, and his voice was more genial than Mr. Briscowe had as yet heard it. ‘Very glad that you should keep him warm up here.’

  And he led the way out of the room.

  They went downstairs.

  ‘I fear that all this must be very painful to you,’ said Mr. Briscowe when they found themselves sitting in the library, having taken care to place their chairs in positions in which it seemed the least likely that pieces of the ceiling might fall on their heads.

  ‘Painful?’

  ‘You can hardly have expected, I fear, to find your heritage in so dilapidated a condition.’

  ‘I don’t exactly know what I did expect, but I knew that the place had been neglected for years. You warned me as to that in your first letter.’

  ‘I had not then realized how bad it was, nor how large a sum would be required to make the place even habitable.’

  ‘Ah! About how much?’

  ‘It is impossible to say off-hand. One would have to go over the whole estate. But you could hardly even begin to live, in the house, till you had spent three or four thousand pounds on it. It is barely standing up.’

  Nicholas looked at him with an expression a
lmost of amusement.

  ‘But I am prepared to spend a great deal more than that,’ he said. ‘ I love the place, I love it already. And I like to know that I’ve come into it at its worst, and that it’s up to me to make it again what it once was. Or even to make a better place of it,’ he went on, with an increased zest in his voice. ‘Put me quickly into touch with the right experts. Who do you think is the best architect over here? Find me a model bailiff if you can. I want to begin at once. This is the chance of my life.’

  He was pacing to and fro in the room, his face lit with a new animation; and Mr. Briscowe, as he watched him, saw that he was transformed. He had been struck from the first by the young man’s appearance, but he had not seen this in him. He had observed the fine physique, the great length of limb, and the heavy shoulders with their air of immense strength. Nicholas held himself haughtily, his great head rather immobile on the big shoulders. His dark blue eyes were shadowed by overhanging brows: his jaw was hard and vigorous. One was aware of every bone in his face, and they were fine bones, firm and good in outline. Yet, as they drove down that morning, Mr. Briscowe had felt that all this force was in some way dormant. Nicholas had seemed surly, reserved, suspicious. He appeared to be keeping himself in hand, resolved not to show too much interest. And now all this had suddenly changed. The young man had come to life, and what had been almost repellent in him, was all at once, attractive and youthful.

  As Nicholas said his last words, he came to a standstill, and he now faced Mr. Briscowe, standing, with his head thrown back, and with, on the wall behind him, a portrait in a murky frame. It was not a very good picture, but it must have been a good likeness, for it seemed to have come to life again in the member of the family who stood beneath it.

  ‘He’s a chip off the old block,’ said Mr. Briscowe to himself.

  He was drawn to the young man. He had disliked Sir Henry. No other sentiment was possible in face of that bitter dejected old failure. But Mr. Briscowe had always wanted to be able to feel affection for the owner of Brokeyates. The relationship was traditional in his firm. But then, in the old days, the Roxerbys had been men of pride and breeding, for whom it had been a pride to work. Now it seemed that the heir was a man of the true breed. He must indeed be so, for he had been stirred to enthusiasm by the very sight of Brokeyates, even though he saw it for the first time, in this woeful condition of ruin.

  Mr. Briscowe got up from his chair, and took Nicholas by the hand.

  ‘It’s going to be a tough job,’ he said. ‘But I believe you are the man to do it. And you are not too late, though you would have been so in another year or two. You see it isn’t only this house which is falling down. It’s the same with every farm and cottage on the estate. They are disgraceful from first to last. You don’t know the worst yet. This is only the beginning.’

  Nicholas smiled.

  ‘It sounds alarming,’ he said. ‘ But I’m not frightened. We will make, not this house alone, but every house on the place, something worth coming miles to see. I don’t look upon it only as a matter of sentiment. Mark that. It’s a business proposition. I mean to shovel capital into this land of mine, and to show you people over here, that with modern methods it’s possible to make a success of farming in the old country.’

  He spoke in the manner of those who believe that they know something which they can teach their grandmothers; but Mr. Briscowe thought that possibly such a disposition was not a bad one under the circumstances.

  Chapter Three

  NICHOLAS ROXERBY might have been an artist, if he had not grown up entirely among hard-headed business men and women; but as things were, such an idea had never crossed his mind. Inarticulately, he had always desired the beauty which he Could not find in his mother’s world, and the name of Brokeyates had meant for him that unpossessed and remote ideal. He so bitterly disliked the business atmosphere in which he lived, that he could not see that the men who worked in it were after all doing something in their own day. They were, in a manner, artists too, creating great concerns, manipulating men’s lives, and harnessing the forces of nature for what they considered to be the benefit of the human race. Such aspects of commerce had never kindled Nicholas’s imagination as he worked resentfully in his mother’s office.

  Now he found himself at Brokeyates, and here was indeed waiting for him the beauty, the romance, and the poetry which had always been out of his reach; but he found that all this loveliness was on the very point of perishing for lack of the money and business capacity which he had taught himself to despise. After all, it was going to be what he had learnt in that hated office which would be of value to him now. The realization did not make him hate that office the less, but he did admit that he had gained something from his business apprenticeship. He would hardly have understood if he had been told that the recreation of Brokeyates was to be the one work of art of his life, although the technique he was to use would consist mainly of skill in business; yet this was none the less true. It was too late for Nicholas to begin to think in terms of art; but he had imagination, and it was all set on Brokeyates.

  He set to work to restore the house, arresting its decay, and giving back to it that solid dignity which had been its peculiar possession. But he was determined that this should be done without giving it a renovated appearance, or banishing the spirit of romance which had hung about it, striking him in the heart like an arrow, at that moment when he had first looked down upon it from the top of the hill.

  Weathered stones repaired the damages to the fabric of the house, renewed the crumbling steps, and rebuilt the tumble-down walls which had surrounded the garden. The Park was cleared of undergrowth and weeds, and the fine old trees stood out in their splendour. In the rooms, the restoration of plaster and woodwork was carried out with an almost slavish loyalty to the original fragments which remained; and although the house was ‘modernized’, the modernizing was hidden out of sight. And it was not only the house, the whole estate was taken in hand. Cottages became tidy and comfortable as if by miracle, and the farm buildings were made strong and efficient once more. Nicholas spared no money, but what he would not spare was time. He was in a desperate hurry, and he wanted everything to be done at once. He was prepared to pay any number of workmen, and to pay them any wages they asked, so long as the work went forward with the swiftness he desired.

  He lived in the house from the first. Comfort, in itself, meant little to him, though his pride insisted that Brokeyates, when finished, should be furnished with every modern comfort. But, meanwhile he himself was perfectly content to live in two uncomfortable rooms in the servants’ quarters, waited upon by Ann Dybbe and a young housemaid. The plainest food satisfied him, and he did not observe whether it was well or badly cooked. His one desire was to be on the spot to keep the workmen up to the mark. The incessant noise of hammers, saws, and chisels, disturbed him not at all. He was quite indifferent to the fact that the chairs and tables which he used, and indeed the very clothes which he wore, were thick with white dust. He was in the house to see his purpose carried out, and he had no other thought.

  The men liked him, although there was no friendliness in his manner of dealing with them. He seemed hardly to know that they were human beings. They existed for him only in the work they did, and he gave credit for every well-placed stroke of the hammer. He missed nothing, seeming to know just how much labour had been employed in every finished detail. He was quick to see the difference between good work and bad, appreciating the one and never failing to point out the other. Though he was not sufficiently interested in the men themselves ever to learn to know their faces, he knew them by their work, and could nearly always be counted on to recognize by the craftsmanship, which man had carried out any particular job.

  In the evenings, when the men had gone home, Nicholas moved—a lonely, dusty figure—among the ladders, the scaffolding, and the planks. Nightfall released the workers from their tools, to refresh themselves with a change of interest, but Nicholas wanted no c
hange for his mind. Brokeyates was his obsession, and he enjoyed the hours when the men were away, and he could go over the house, reckoning the progress made each day. To him it seemed unbearably slow, though the architect found that his designs were actualized as if by magic. It was a new thing to be allowed to employ men by hundreds instead of by tens.

  Nicholas had no visitors, for he knew no one in the neighbourhood, and indeed there was not a room in the house in which any tidy person could sit down. But Colonel Bracton insisted upon making friends. His house was barely a mile away, and, in spite of his eighty-five years, he often walked over to Brokeyates, and stood about with Nicholas for hours at a time, watching the men at work. Nicholas liked him, for he found that the old man was as interested as he was himself in what was going on. The two would stand side by side, often saying not one word for ten minutes or more, while they watched a piece of work being carried out. When they did speak, it was only to refer to some technical point, and Nicholas soon found that, like most old-time landowners, the Colonel was a thoroughly practical man. No surveyor could know more about repairs than he did, no gardener more about gardens; and no elderly relation could have been more helpful when it was a question of how things had been in the old days. The Colonel realized, without any words being spoken, that what Nicholas wanted was to preserve the old traditions of the place; and that he was sensitive because he had no idea what those traditions had been. When the Colonel remembered something, he spoke as if Nicholas remembered it too. Each of the men would have repudiated the idea of sentiment, although it was nothing but a shared sentiment which held them together, outwardly absorbed in the processes of digging, sawing, mortar-mixing, or painting. They spoke of nothing but the practical work in hand.