The Unknown Ajax

by Джорджетт Хейер

  “I should have thought of that before,” said Hugo. He turned his head, the hint of his disarming grin on his countenance. “You were in the right of it: dull, brainless Ajax fairly hits me off! Happen you’re the only one amongst us with the power to bring that lad to his senses. Did he tell you all that passed between us last night?”

  “He didn’t withhold the cream of the jest from me, if that’s what you mean,” replied Vincent, with his glinting smile.

  “Remember I’m blockish!” said Hugo. “What was the cream of it, by your reckoning?”

  “Do you know, dear cousin, there have been moments when I have wondered whether I was a trifle out in my first judgment of you? How comforting it is to meet with reassurance on this head! The cream of the jest was the conclusion you jumped to, in your somewhat ingenuous fashion—if I may be permitted so to describe it!”

  Quite unmoved by the studied offensiveness of this answer, Hugo asked straitly: “Has it never occurred to you that there’s something devilish smoky about that halfling’s docility? He doesn’t want for spirit: he’s full of spunk, and as meedless as be-damned besides!”

  “I am afraid I have never given the matter a thought,” said Vincent, smothering a yawn.

  “Give it one now, then! You may be too well-accustomed to the state of affairs here to be struck by what must fairly stagger anyone coming, as I did, as a stranger amongst you. I told you once that I’ve had more experience of lads than you, and I’ll tell you now that I hadn’t been here above a sennight before I hadn’t a doubt but that our Richmond was playing some kind of double game, though what it might be I hadn’t a notion, until I got into conversation with that Riding-officer. I’d have had to be twice as blockish as I am not to have realized that there was more behind his hostility to Richmond than resentment at the treatment he’d met with at his lordship’s hands; I’m bound to own that the suspicion that gave me seemed too cock-brained to be entertained—until I’d added one thing to another, and, in particular, the sort of loose talk the lad had listened to all his life: not one of you, seemingly, having enough sense to see the daft risk you were running! The blame’s to be laid chiefly at his lordship’s door, but you’re no floss-head, and you’ve known the lad from his cradle! Nay then, Vincent! Did it never occur to you he was touchwood, needing no more than a spark to set him ablaze?”

  “No,” said. Vincent, very gently. “But do, pray, continue! You mustn’t think I’m not enjoying it. I am, in fact, much rapt in this, and—er—apprehend immediately The unknown Ajax. The passage, which I’ve mauled a little, continues: Heavens, what a man is there!—But perhaps it would be uncivil to complete the line, and for me to be uncivil to the future head of my family would not do at all.”

  The Major regarded him with tolerant amusement, remarking placidly: “For one who doesn’t want for sense you waste a mort of time milking the pigeon! You’ll pick no quarrel with me, so you may as well stop trying to make me nab the rust, and attend to what’s of much more moment. Richmond wasn’t playing ghost last night for my benefit: he wanted to scare Ottershaw away from the Dower House, if he could do it. He knows now he can’t, and I believe him when he says he won’t cut the caper again. If I didn’t, I’d have no choice but to lay the whole matter before his lordship, which is the last thing I want to do. Ottershaw had his pistol in his hand when I halted him. Whether he’d have used it is another pair of shoes: I think not, but it won’t do to run the risk of it”

  “If it comforts you, you may know that I have already told Richmond that, however amusing the repercussion of his exploit may have been, such pranks are really quite unworthy of him,” said Vincent languidly.

  “It would comfort me much more if I felt I could leave the matter in your hands. Richmond won’t confide in me: it’s not to be expected he should.”

  “But he has—unless I have misinformed—given you his assurance that he is not engaged in any such nefarious occupation as smuggling,” interpolated Vincent, in a voice of silk.

  “Ay, he’s done that,” admitted Hugo. He was silent for a moment, gazing meditatively ahead, between his horse’s ears. A rather rueful smile crept into his eyes. “I’ve no reason to doubt his word, and the Lord knows it goes against the pluck with me to do so, but I think he lied to me.”

  “I cannot supply you with any reason for doubting him, but I can, and will, supply you with one—possibly incomprehensible to you, but nevertheless to be relied on—for accepting his word,” said Vincent, his eyes hard and contemptuous. “Richmond, my dear coz, was born into, and reared in, an order of society whose members do not commonly give lying assurances, or engage in criminal pursuits. However much you may have been misled by what you term the loose talk so reprehensibly indulged in by my grandfather, it is as inconceivable that Richmond should confuse sympathy with participation as that he, a Darracott, would entertain for one instant the thought that he might join a gang of such vulgar persons as freetraders. I trust I have made myself plain?”

  “You’ve done that, right enough,” Hugo replied. “I don’t know if you believe what you say, or if you say it because you dislike me too much to think of aught else; and any road it doesn’t make a ha’porth of odds: you don’t mean to lift a finger to save a lad who thinks the world and-all of you from bringing himself to ruin! You’ve made me a fine, top-lofty speech about Richmond’s birth and rearing: his birth’s well-enough, but his rearing was as bad as it could be! Sithee, Vincent, you know that! I know it too. When you were at Eton, I was at Harrow, and what hadn’t been clouted into me by my granddad I learned there.” He paused, and the twinkle came back into his eyes. “And there wasn’t so very much to learn either!” he added. “Reet vulgar he was, my granddad, but worth a score of any Darracott I’ve yet laid eyes on!”

  “Harrow—!” murmured Vincent, in the grip of cold fury. “To be sure, our opinion of Harrow was never very high, but—ah, well!”

  Hugo chuckled. “Nor ours of Eton, think on! Ee, if you haven’t got me talking as you do yourself! Sneck up, and ask yourself how much you’d have learnt if you’d been reared as Richmond was!”

  They had ridden into the stable yard by this time, and as their grooms had already come out to take charge of the horses Vincent’s sense of ton prevented him from making any reply which he considered to be worthy of the occasion. He was silent therefore, but his groom, catching a glimpse of his face, would have given a month’s pay to have been privileged to know what the Major had said to put him in the devil’s own passion, He strode out of the yard without vouchsafing a word either to his cousin or to his servant; and after exchanging a few observations with John Joseph, and, to that severe critic’s disapproval and the grinning delight of several stableboys, admonishing Rufus in the broadest dialect for his want of manners in demanding with every sign of equine impatience the sugar he knew very well would be bestowed upon him, the Major followed him, in his leisurely way, to the house.

  The post had been brought up from the receiving-office during his absence, and a thick letter, addressed to himself, and stamped Post Paid, lay on the table by the door. He had just broken the wafer that sealed it, and spread open three closely written sheets, when Chollacombe came into the hall to tell him that my lord desired to see him in the library as soon as might be convenient to him. The Major, already perusing the lengthy communication sent him by one who subscribed himself as his attached friend and obedient servant, Jonas Henry Poulton, acknowledged this message with an abstracted grunt, neither looking up from the letter in his hand, nor evincing the smallest disposition to make all speed to his grandfather’s presence. Any one of his cousins would have recognized the civil form in which the message was phrased as the cloak spread by Chollacombe over a peremptory (and possibly explosive) command; but nothing would ever avail, thought Chollacombe despairingly, to teach Mr. Hugh the wisdom of obeying such summonses with all possible dispatch. He coughed deprecatingly, and said: “His lordship, sir, is anxious to see you, I fancy.”

 
The Major nodded. “Yes, very well! I heard you. I’ll go to him as soon as I’ve changed my clothes. Send Ferring up to my room, will you, Chollacombe?”

  Chollacombe sighed, but attempted no remonstrance. For his own part, the Major’s invariable custom of putting off his riding-habit as soon as he came in from the stables met with his fullest approval, but my lord, he knew well, had no particular objection to the aroma inseparable from the horses, and every objection to being kept waiting for as long as five minutes. He went away, knowing from experience how useless it would be to remind the Major of this circumstance, or to hint to him that my lord was sadly out of temper.

  The Major discovered this for himself when he walked into the library some twenty minutes later. When last seen by him my lord had been unusually amiable; his brow was now thunderous, and he showed, by the nervous twitch of his fingers, and the throb of the pulse beside his grim, thin-lipped mouth, that something had happened to cast him into the worst of ill-humours. He was standing with his back to the fireplace, and he greeted his huge grandson with a fierce scowl and a barked demand to know where the devil he had been.

  “Over into Sussex, sir,” replied the Major, shutting the door. “Was there something you wanted me to do? I’m sorry.”

  Lord Darracott seemed to be exerting himself to curb his temper. He did not answer the Major, but said abruptly: “I sent for you because I’ve had a letter from your uncle Matthew. I don’t know what maggot’s in his head, or where he came by the information he has sent me. He’s a damned fool, and always was! Anyone could gull him!”

  The Major, though of the opinion that Matthew had rather more common-sense than any other member of the family, allowed this unflattering estimate to pass without comment, and waited with patience and equanimity for my lord to reach the kernel of whatever piece of information had raised his ire.

  Lord Darracott, hungry for legitimate prey, glared more menacingly than before; and, failing to unnerve his grandson into committing the imprudence of answering him, snapped, with bitter loathing: “Dummy!” The gambit eliciting no more than a twinkle in the Major’s guileless blue eyes, he expressed, not for the first time, his burning desire to be told why Fate had seen fit to afflict him with a gapeseed for his heir; and came, at last, to the meat of the matter. “My son writes to inform me that that fellow—your maternal grandfather!—was the head of some curst firm or other—I don’t know anything about such things!—that goes by the name of Bray & Poulton. Is that so?”

  The Major nodded. “Ay, that’s so. He was its founder. Uncle Jonas Henry is the head of it now, but at the first-end, when he was a little lad, he was just one of the pieceners—they’re the children that keep the frames filled, or join the cardlings for the slubbers—”

  “Uncle?”interrupted his lordship. “You told me you had none!”

  “Nay, he’s no kith of mine,” replied Hugo soothingly. “It was what I used to call him when I was a lad myself, and he the best weaver in the Valley. He was a prime favourite with my granddad, but it wasn’t until near the back-end of his life that Granddad took him into partnership—having no one but me to succeed him, who hadn’t been bred to the wool trade.”

  “Are you telling me, sir, that your maternal grandfather was a mill owner?”thundered my lord.

  “Why, yes!” replied Hugo, smiling. “That’s what he rose to be, though he started as a weaver, like his father before him. He was as shrewd as he could hold together, my granddad—a reet knowing one!”

  Stunned by this disclosure, it was several moments before his lordship was able to command his voice enough to utter: “A man of substance?”

  “Ay, he was well to pass,” replied the Major. “You might say that he addled a mort of brass in his day, tewing and toiling—which he did to the end, think on! It wasn’t often you wouldn’t have found him at the mill, wearing his brat, even when he’d got to be one of the stiffest men in the whole of the West Riding. His brass wasn’t come by easily, either,” he added. “It was make and scrape with him before he’d addled enough to get agate—not that he was what we call sneck-drawn, in the north. It was just that he knew how to hold household, like any good Yorkshireman.” He paused, perceiving that my lord was staring at him in mingled incredulity and wrath, and added, in a tone of kindly explanation: “That wasn’t the way he made his fortune, of course: it was only the start of it. He was flue-full of mother-wit: the longest-headed man I ever knew, and with a longsight to match it, what’s more! Fly shuttles were invented before he was born, of course, but it wasn’t until he was five years old that the first of the power-looms was put into use—and precious few liking it overly much! He saw it when he was a piecener himself: he told me once that that was the start of his life. Seemingly, he had never any other notion in his head from that time on but what was tied up with machines. He was one of the first to buy Cartwright’s loom—not the one they use now: that didn’t come till a matter of a dozen years later; but a queer old machine you’d think even-down antiquated today. All that was long before I was born or thought of: by the time I was out of short coats such things weren’t considered newfangled any more, and the mill, which the better part of Huddersfield said Granddad had run mad to build, was doing fine!” He smiled, and said apologetically: “Nay, I might as well talk Spanish to you, sir, mightn’t I?” His smile broadened to a grin. “And if any wool-man could hear me explaining the trade to you he’d laugh himself into stitches, think on! You could floor me with any one of a dozen questions, for all I know is little more than I picked up, running about the mill when my grandfather’s back was turned. The thing was that in the old days there was no such thing as a mill, where the packs went in at one door, as you might say, and came out of another as cloths—serges, kerseymeres, friezes, and the like. Cartwright set up a factory in Doncaster, where weaving and spinning both were done; but Granddad went one better nor that—levelling at the moon, they used to say—until they saw that old, ramshackle mill growing and growing! Today, the name of Bray is known to the trade the world over.”

  This intelligence did not appear to afford Lord Darracott the smallest gratification. He said, in the voice of one goaded to exasperation: “I know nothing about mills, and care less! Answer me this, sir! Is it true, what your uncle writes me—that you inherited afortune from Bray?”

  “Well,” replied the Major cautiously, “I don’t know just what you’d call a fortune, sir. I’d say myself I was pretty well-inlaid.”

  “Don’t come any niffy-naffy, shabby-genteel airs over me!” barked his lordship. “Tell me without any damned roundaboutation how much you’re worth!”

  The Major rubbed his nose. “Nay, that’s what I can’t do!” he confessed.

  “You can’t, eh? I guessed as much! Trust Matthew to exaggerate out of all recognition! Why can’t you?”

  “I don’t know myself, sir,” said Hugo, making a clean breast of it.

  “What the devil do you mean by that, idiot?” demanded his lordship. “Presumably you know what your grandfather left you!”

  “Oh, I know what his private fortune was, reet enough!” said Hugo. “It’s invested mostly in the Funds, and brings in between fifteen and sixteen thousand pounds a year; but that’s not the whole of it. I’ve a sizeable share in the mill over and above that. I can’t tell you what they may be worth to me. Times have been bad lately, what with Luddite riots, and the depression that followed close on the Peace. The harvests were bad last year, too: my uncle Jonas Henry wrote me that in Yorkshire wheat rose to above a guinea the bushel. However, things seem to be on the mend now, so—”

  “Are you telling me that Bray cut up to the tune of half a million?”said my lord, in a strange voice.

  “It would be about that figure—apart from the mill,” Hugo agreed.

  Lord Darracott was shaken by a sudden gust of rage: “How dared you, sir, deceive me?” he exclaimed.

  “Nay then! I never did so,” Hugo reminded him. “It was in this very room that I told you I’d
plenty of brass.”

  “I remember! I supposed you to be referring to prize-money—as you knew!”

  Hugo smiled down at him. “And I told you that my other grandfather had left his brass to me. You said I might do what I pleased with my granddad’s savings, but that you wanted to hear no more of them or him. So I didn’t tell you any more, for, to own the truth, sir, I was better suited, at that time, to keep my tongue between my teeth until I’d had time to look about me. What’s more,” he added reminiscently, “I wasn’t ettling to remain here above a sennight—particularly when you told me you had it all settled I was to wed my cousin Anthea. Eh, it was a wonder I didn’t take to my heels there and then!”

  Lord Darracott stared at him, his lips tightly gripped together, and his eyes smouldering. He did not speak, but after a moment went to the wing-chair on one side of the fireplace, and sat down, his hands grasping its arms. The Major sat down too, saying: “Happen it’s as well my uncle wrote to you, for it’s time we reached an understanding. It chances that I’d a letter myself by today’s post, from Uncle Jonas Henry.” He chuckled. “Seemingly he’s as throng as he can be, and a trifle hackled with me for loitering here. I shall have to post off to Huddersfield next week, sir—and a bear-garden jaw I’ll get when I arrive there, if I know Jonas Henry!”

  Lord Darracott said, with an effort: “Have the goodness to tell me whether you mean to return, or to stay there!”

  “Nay, that’s for you to say, sir.”

  The fierce old eyes flashed. “It appears I have no hold over you!”

  The Major considered him, not unsympathetically. “Well, that’s true enough, of course, but don’t fatch yourself over it, sir! If you’re thinking of the brass, I’ll tell you to your head it makes no difference: you’d have had no hold over me any road. But all the brass in the world wouldn’t help me to cross this threshold if you didn’t choose to let me.”

  His lordship gave a contemptuous snort of unmirthful laughter, but said in a milder tone: “Well, what do you mean to do?”