Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  But that was the final rush. Thewliss wound in his line slowly and steadily. Angela knelt upon the bank with her net in her hand.

  “Oh, he’s a whopper,” she cried enthusiastically; but a much greater whopper was Angela’s remark. He may have weighed half a pound. On the other hand, he may not. But no one was courageous enough to enter upon such dangerous ground as the detail of his weight. He was a whopper. All were agreed upon that. Even Thewliss, who had suffered rather a shock when he saw its insignificance laid out upon the grass, came to the conclusion that as a trout he was a very fine fellow.

  “Bravo!” cried Angela with shining eyes. “Now, Mr. Thewliss, what do you say?”

  And Thewliss, bethinking himself that Saturday night had come, answered:

  “I say that there’s a good deal to be said for a Continental Sunday.”

  X. THE COUNTRY HOUSE

  “AND NOW, ANGELA,” said Derek Crayle that night when dinner was at an end and the coffee cups on the table, “I must beg you to resolve our anxieties. We are poor, weak men, unfitted for the stern business of unravelling riddles. You, too, are unfitted to be a Sphinx. For all Sphinxes have enormous feet. It is the only thing known about them. You could not be one if you would. Explain then why, oh why the heavens would fall and the earth crash in ruin, if Mark Thewliss had not caught a trout to-day!”

  Angela emitted a little gurgle of laughter. She looked at Thewliss and looked away. She was almost embarrassed.

  “I hope that I did not take too much upon myself,” she said with a sedateness which another gurgle belied. “I should hate to be thought a forward girl.”

  “Angela,” said Derek severely, “you have an idea in your head of which you are ashamed.”

  “I have not,” she returned, stung to indignation. “I simply thought that if Mr. Thewliss caught one fish, he would want to catch more.”

  Derek Crayle agreed.

  “And from a very regrettable allusion which he made to our wise Sabbatarian restrictions, I gather that you were right.”

  “Quite right,” said Mark.

  “Proceed, Angela,” said Derek Crayle, and Angela broke out in a bubble of wrath.

  “Oh, go and put your head in a bag. I hate pedants. I shall talk to my father,” and she turned her back on Derek Crayle. “I thought that if Mr. Thewliss once found out that fishing was good fun, he might buy Upper Theign.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then:

  “By Gad!” said Tony Westram. “Well, why not?”

  “The idea, certainly,” Crayle observed, “is more profound than one would associate with the immaturity of Angela’s shoulders.”

  Angela flung round towards her tormentor, battle in her eyes, storm upon her brow. But Mark intervened.

  “Might I inquire what Upper Theign is?” he asked meekly.

  “It’s a house,” Tony explained, “with five hundred acres of land. It marches with Gissens and — this is what Angela’s after — it has half a mile of river next to my water.

  “Yes!” Angela interposed, leaning eagerly across the table. “Don’t you see, Mr. Thewliss, we could fish your water and you could fish ours. The house is for sale and the estate just as it stands, furniture, livestock, farm, tools, everything. If you don’t buy it, it’ll go up for auction, and heaven knows whom we shall get as a neighbour.”

  “You might get a better one than me,” said Mark, and Derek Crayle tittered sardonically.

  “He didn’t want any teaching to fish,” he declared, and Angela, with a gesture of her arm, swept him out of existence.

  “Please pay no attention whatever to that rude little boy, Mr. Thewliss,” she said. “I have been considering you very carefully from every angle. We shall be delighted to have you as a neighbour. I am seldom wrong in my judgments, and I hope you will let me show you the house to-morrow afternoon.”

  So, after all, Mark Thewliss did see the neighbourhood in a wagonette with the ladies. They came to Upper Theign at four in the afternoon, Tony Westram, Derek Crayle, Olivia Stanton, Angela and Mark Thewliss. It was the twin of Gissens, a spacious house of oblong rooms and big windows, wide lawns and old trees, rose gardens and fruit gardens, tennis courts and paddocks and the river running clear and brown between low, green banks. Mark walked from room to room, was shown the great kitchen and the modern bath-rooms. He was conscious of an odd exaltation.

  “All this can be mine,” he said to himself. “Here it is, a house one might invent in a dream. I have only to put my name to a piece of paper and it’s mine.”

  “You do like it, don’t you?” Angela asked earnestly.

  Thewliss was standing at one of the windows of the great drawing-room, looking back over his years to his small beginning. He had foreseen a big house in the country but he had only vaguely visualised it, and he recognised now with shame that so far as it had taken shape and colour in his thoughts it had all the appearance of an enormous red-brick villa with bay windows, a tower and a huddle of tiled roof.

  “What’s wonderful to me,” he said in a voice which betrayed to his friends that he was surprisingly moved, “is that it’s all made all complete and settled and rich with the care and thought of half a dozen generations, and now for good and all made. I don’t suppose that means so much to you. But I have spent my life with things making.”

  Tony Westram glanced at his guest and said with an unusual shrewdness:

  “And yet that has been just your advantage too. You came into notice all made. Nobody had seen you grow. The first we heard of you — there you were established, with a fortune at your back, in the House of Commons, making a speech and a damned good speech too. People had to sit up and ask questions. They became curious. They asked: ‘Why have I never heard of that fellow before?’ To jump at once from the dark, already complete and made! It gives you romance, what?” and he laughed with friendliness, and clapped Thewliss on the shoulder.

  But it was not only the little touch of mystery which had given to Mark this most inappropriate aura of romance. The thirteen years of untiring endeavour, perhaps, too, the delicacy of the experiments he was engaged upon, had given to his aspect something more than authority. They seemed in some subtle way to have refined his features to the point of remodelling them. There had been a look of commonness before; now there was a look of the thoroughbred. The hard thirteen years had done the work of the fairy godmother. They had waved a wand and the herd stood forth freed from his clay, vibrant, sensitive, the artist as he is fondly imagined by such as have never seen one.

  “It wasn’t astonishing that no one of you had ever heard of me,” he replied to Tony. “I lived amongst a set of City people who believe that public affairs are for some vague governing class and should be left to that class. There are many more of them left over from the mid-Victorian days than you would imagine, families living stiffly and ceremoniously in big houses in select suburbs, entertaining each other from time to time with great preparations and formalities, occasionally visiting a theatre, occasionally taking stalls for the Opera, people in buckram...I think I’ll have to buy Upper Theign.”

  Angela clapped her hands.

  “That’s to-day’s good deed.”

  “I said ‘I think.’”

  “I am sure, Mr. Thewliss, you are one of those rare men with whom to think is to do,” said Angela solemnly. “Let us now go and look at your river!”

  She led her father and Derek Crayle out of the room, but Mark’s attention had been seized by the curtain at the window.

  “That’s pretty badly gone,” he said.

  It was a brown curtain of brocaded silk, but the brown had faded and unevenly.

  “These windows get all the afternoon sun,” Olivia explained. “It’s bound to wither and bleach the curtains. You can’t help it.”

  Thewliss frowned and shook his head.

  “We have got to help it,” he answered stubbornly. “That’s one of the problems. But it’s a teaser. Some dyes are faster on wool than on cotton, and o
n both than on silk, so you’ll want three processes. A good many of the azo dyes can be made sunproof with a chrome treatment, but then the shade is changed. The same is true of my own synthetic indigo. It’s quite fast if you steam the stuffs after you have dyed them, but then the bloom becomes just a trifle too violet.”

  Mark seemed to have lost sight of Olivia Stanton except as an audience. He ran his long fingers up and down the curtain, caressing the fabric with a curiously delicate touch.

  “It was a handsome curtain too. A bath of copper sulphate might have preserved the colour more or less. But it’s always more or less, and the method’s always different. That’s what exasperates me.” He dropped the curtain and turned swiftly to Olivia with an eager look upon his face, demanding her sympathy.

  “I have been working out the answer for years. One method for all the dyes, acid, basic, mordant, salt dyes, vat dyes and the rest of them, and for all the dyed materials from cotton to leather and wood. Just one process and fool-proof — perfectly sure and certain! One universal formula! It would be splendid, wouldn’t it?”

  The blood mounted into Olivia’s face as she looked at him, so earnestly his tense attitude, every fibre of him, asked for the help of her belief that he would succeed. Nevertheless, she was greatly puzzled. It seemed to her not very important in the history of the world that window-curtains should no longer fade in the sunlight. There was wealth, no doubt, and very likely enormous wealth to be plucked from the discovery of the process which would make them fadeless. But she could not count the ambition to make that discovery a great ambition, as Mark did, as undoubtedly Mark did. She could not understand the enthusiasm which shone from him and suddenly made a boy of him.

  Yet he was so clamorous for her approval— “After all, I mean nothing,” she said to herself — that she felt grateful, and was in the mood to make, if she could, a discovery herself. A discovery that somehow, in some way it was a great ambition, worth, for instance, the sacrifice of an Under-Secretaryship of State and the possible collapse of a promising political career.

  “No doubt it would be a wonderful thing,” she said, trying to mean her words. “I am sure, too, that you will make the discovery.”

  “I must! I have got to,” cried Mark, in much the same tense, abrupt tone which he had used when he was playing his half-a-pound weight trout; and for the life of her she could not but think that both achievements were on a par, and the cry of real longing as little justified in the one case as in the other.

  But Mark, though he was quite unconscious of the doubts of him which disquieted her, did now go far to dispel them.

  “You see, colours mean such a tremendous lot to the world, don’t they?” he explained eagerly. “People never reckon up the terrific contribution they make to good order. They look upon them merely as decorations. But they mean hope and good-humour and gaiety. They bring the Spring with them. Put them within the reach of poor people — less drink, less crime, less brooding, less gloom. And not only in this country. All over the world. You see, once I got my universal formula, colour would be ever so much cheaper everywhere “ — and since he could never keep far away from this one aspect of his case— “from the bazaars of Fez and Damascus and Delhi right across the East to the outer edge of Asia. And here’s another thing, Lady Olivia, or rather, it’s all that I have said gathered up into one sentence. Bright colours don’t go with sharp swords. Colour’s a peacemaker. When soldiers go to war, they change their scarlet for khaki! That’s an allegory,” he broke off suddenly. “But I oughtn’t to have bored you with my theories. You must forgive me.”

  “On the other hand, I thank you,” said Olivia Stanton with a smile. She did not tell him that she was glad that her misgivings had been dispersed; nor that she was a little moved by his frank exhibition of how deeply he was moved himself by his as yet unfulfilled ambition. She preferred to end the conversation with a platitude. “A woman is always flattered when a man confides to her his secrets.”

  Mark Thewliss drove away the next morning at half-past nine. Tony Westram waved a hand to him from the door and Angela, standing outside with the sun shining upon her hair, cried:

  “Don’t forget Upper Theign!”

  And Mark did not forget it as he travelled through the lovely country in the freshness of the summer day. He thought of it as a seat of just the right degree of importance; as a place of peace and rest; as a delight to the eye, with its wide green lawns and coloured gardens; but, above all, as a house peopled.

  Peopled by young and joyous persons — a daughter, say, like Angela, and her friends...A wife, too, of course. But, above all, by a daughter, all a-bubble with the beauty of her youth, a pattern of grace, tall, slender.

  “I am forty-five,” he reflected, and the reflection shocked him. He had always meant to have a home. Yes, right back in far off, almost fabulous, days the aspect of a little cabin with its white napery laid daintily for a meal under the soft light of the candles, had set that longing astir in him. But under the stress of the fourteen years between now and then, he had forgotten it. The years had brought their triumphs to be sure, but they seemed somehow smaller than he had thought them...there had been too little grace in his life. Well, he had still the time to repair that omission.

  What should he call that daughter of his to be? Phyllis?...Sylvia?...Angela?...No, that wouldn’t do, since Angela was to be his neighbour. Besides, his wife, yes of course there would be his wife...She would want a word in that momentous decision. Sylvia, perhaps...

  The car was entering Reading. Mark stopped it at a newsagent’s shop and bought a copy of the day’s Times. A study of the business columns of that journal would be a more decorous occupation for a Member of Parliament and the active partner of Mardyke and Campion than blowing bubbles out of day-dreams, even on a morning of young June. Yet he never read a word of the columns.

  “Forty-five...Forty-five...Forty-five...If he married to-morrow he would still be sixty-three before the daughter-to-be reached Angela’s age...Forty-five...Forty-five...And he couldn’t marry to-morrow. There were preliminaries to marriage, such as selection and a certain amount of courtship...Forty-five...Forty-five.

  “There was a funny story about belated attempts to marry...What were the words. ‘Every year you become more particular and less desirable.’ Yet not such a very funny story after all. There was a sharper tang to it than Mark Thewliss cared for...And then fear smote him. Suppose that no woman wanted him now!...

  “But that’s ridiculous,” he declared. “Besides—”

  Yes, there had been a moment on Saturday, at the luncheon table — an encouraging moment. He had been looking at Olivia Stanton. She had understood his refusal of office, was with him in that refusal, had nodded to him her sympathy. And he had suddenly glanced at Angela who was at her side, had embraced them both, the girl and the young woman in the one look. “Just such a wife! Just such a daughter,” he had said to himself, and he had seen the colour rise into Olivia’s face and her eyes fall from his.

  “She understood,” he reflected, “and she wasn’t angry. In the afternoon of the next day, at Upper Theign, she was interested, sympathetic. Perhaps...in a little time...why not?” he asked himself.

  True, there was the lover killed in the Boer War. But he was forty-five. Though the hot raptures of youth were for neither of them, there was much each could give to the other.

  “She is poor. She would be mistress of her own home, freed from all the embarrassments which attend upon a meagre income, safe. And I? I want my daughter.”

  The second of the two rules which guided his life wrote itself out in front of him. “Want what you want.” And he had never, so far as he could remember, wanted anything so desperately as the fulfilment of the need which his visit had awakened in him. A house noisy with young laughter, a house with a daughter — and a wife too — yes, of course, a wife too!

  After all, such things were the corollary of his ambition. Power, the sensation of power, could never be q
uite complete to the solitary man. He must see the evidences of it about him. Assuring himself thus that this unaccustomed yearning was all according to plan, he yielded to the luxury of it. He dreamed of some starry-eyed, splendid girl with delightful peremptory ways, a sort of protective regard for her unfortunate elders, and a joyous tenderness, whose name might be Phyllis or Sylvia or whatever you liked, so long as she was there, making a house into a home such as he had never had. And once again the little cabin of the Sea Flower, with its candles shining through their globes and its table spread with a fine white cloth set in the loneliness of the sea, passed before his eyes.

  The motor-car came to a halt in the traffic. Looking out of the window Mark realised that he was already in High Holborn. Upon an impulse he took the speaking-tube from its rest and spoke to his chauffeur.

  “I want to go to my solicitors.”

  He added the address and the car in a little while turned into Ely Place.

  XI. MARK VISITS HIS LAWYER

  TWO STEPS LED from the pavement into a narrow panelled hall. Doors upon either side only shut to open. A staircase in front was a Jacob’s ladder encumbered with the angels of the law. It was the rush-hour in the great legal factory of Messrs. Hawker, Hawker & Lyndhurst.

  A clerk recognised Mark Thewliss.

  “Is Sir William expecting you, sir?”

  Mark shook his head.

  “I have hardly given myself five minutes’ warning of my visit.”

  Mark, however, was a client of value, and within a quarter of an hour found himself in the comfortable room occupied by the head of the firm.

  Sir William, a spare, middle-aged man with a pair of very sharp eyes twinkling behind spectacles, pulled forward an arm-chair.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Two things. First I want to buy Upper Theign. It’s a house and an estate in Berkshire, for sale just as it stands. Will you please negotiate for it?”

  Sir William took down upon a block such particulars as Mark could give him.