Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  So much so, that when Mrs. Toft came in with the tea she well-nigh dropped the tray in her surprise. As she said afterwards, “The sight of them two as close as chives in a barrel, I declare you might ha’ knocked me down with a straw! God bless ‘em!”

  CHAPTER XL

  “LET US MAKE OTHERS THANKFUL”

  A man can scarcely harbor a more bitter thought than that he has lost by foul play what fair play would have won for him. This for a week was Lord Audley’s mood and position; for masterful as he was he owned the power of Nemesis, he felt the force of tradition, nor, try as he might, could he convince himself that in face of this oft-cited deed his chance of retaining the title and property was anything but desperate. He made the one attempt to see Mary of which we know; and had he seen her he would have done his best to knot again the tie which he had cut. But missing her by a hair’s breadth, and confronted by Toft who knew all, he had found even his courage unequal to a second attempt. The spirit in which Mary had faced the breach had shown his plan to be from the first a counsel of despair, and despairing he let her go. In a dark mood he sat down to wait for the next step on the enemy’s part, firmly resolved that whatever form it might take he would contest the claim to the bitter end.

  And Stubbs was scarcely in happier case. At the time, and face to face with Basset, he had borne up well, but the production of the fateful deed had none the less fallen on him with stunning effect. He appreciated — none better and more clearly now — what the effect of his easiness would have been had Lord Audley not been engaged to his cousin; nor did his negligence appear in a less glaring light because his patron was to escape its worst results. He foresaw that whatever befel he must suffer, and that the agency which his family had so long enjoyed — that, that at any rate was forfeit.

  This was enough to make him a most unhappy, a most miserable man. But it did not stand alone. Everything seemed to him to be going wrong. All good things, public and private, seemed to be verging on their end. The world as he had known it for sixty years was crumbling about his ears. It was time that he was gone.

  Certainly the days of that Protection with which he believed the welfare of the land to be bound up, were numbered. In the House Lord George and Mr. Disraeli — those strangest of bedfellows! — might rage, the old Protectionist party might foam, invective and sarcasm, taunt and sneer might rain upon the traitor as he sat with folded arms and hat drawn down to his eyes, rectors might fume and squires swear; the end was certain, and Stubbs saw that it was. Those rascals in the North, they and their greed and smoke, that stained the face of England, would win and were winning. He had saved Riddsley by nine — but to what end? What was one vote among so many? He thought of the nut-brown ale, the teeming stacks, the wagoner’s home,

  Hard-by, a cottage chimney smokes

  From betwixt two aged oaks.

  He thought of the sweet cow-stalls, the brook where he had bent his first pin, and he sighed. Half the country folk would be ruined, and Shoddy from Halifax and Brass from Bury would buy their lands and walk in gaiters where better men had foundered. The country would be full of new men — Peels!

  Well, it would last his time. But some day there would rise another Buonaparte and they would find Cobden with his calico millennium a poor stay against starvation, his lean and flashy songs a poor substitute for wheat. It was all money now; the kindly feeling, the Christmas dole, the human ties, where father had worked for father and son for son, and the thatch had covered three generations — all these were past and gone. He found one fault, it is true, in the past. He had one regret, as he looked back. The laborers’ wage had been too low; they had been left outside the umbrella of Protection. He saw that now; there was the weak point in the case. “That’s where they hit us,” he said more than once, “the foundation was too narrow.” But the knowledge came too late.

  Naturally he buried his private mishap — and my lord’s — in silence. But his mien was changed. He was an altered, a shaken man. When he passed through the streets, he walked with his chin on his breast, his shoulders bowed. He shunned men’s eyes. Then one day Basset entered his office and for a long time was closeted with him.

  When he left Stubbs left also, and his bearing was so subtly changed as to impress all who met him; while Farthingale, stepping out in his absence, drank his way through three brown brandies in a silence which grew more portentous with every glass. At The Butterflies, whither the lawyer hastened, Audley met him with moody and repellent eyes, and in the first flush of the news which the lawyer brought refused to believe it. It was not only that the tidings seemed too good to be true, the relief from the nightmare which weighed upon him too great to be readily accepted. But the thing that Mary had done was so far out of his ken and so much beyond his understanding that he could not rise to it, or credit it. Even when he at last took in the truth of the story he put upon it the interpretation that was natural to him.

  “It was a forgery!” he cried with an oath. “You may depend upon it, it was a forgery and they discovered it.”

  But Stubbs would not agree to that. Stubbs was very stout about it, and giving details of his conversation with Basset gradually persuaded his patron. In one way, indeed, the news coming through him wrought a benefit which neither Mary nor Basset had foreseen. It once more commended him to Audley, and by and by healed the breach which had threatened to sever the long connection between the lawyer and Beaudelays. If Stubbs’s opinion of my lord could never again be wholly what it had been, if Audley still had hours of soreness when the other’s negligence recurred to his mind, at least they were again at one as to the future. They were once more free to look forward to a time when a marriage with Lady Adela, or her like, would rebuild the fortunes of the Great House. Of Audley, whose punishment if short had been severe, one thing at least may be ventured with safety — and beyond this we need not inquire; that to the end his first, last, greatest thought would be — himself!

  Late in June, the Corn Laws were repealed. On the same day Sir Robert Peel, in the eyes of some the first, in the eyes of others the last of men, was forced to resign. Thwarted by old friends and abandoned by new ones, he fell by a manœuvre which even his enemies could not defend. Whether he was more to be blamed for blindness than he was to be praised for rectitude, are questions on which party spirit has much to say, nor has history as yet pronounced a final decision. But if his hand gave the victory to the class from which he sprang, he was at least free from the selfishness of that class. He had ideals, he was a man,

  He nothing common did nor mean,

  Upon that memorable scene,

  But bowed his comely head,

  Down as upon a bed.

  Nor is it possible, even for those who do not agree with him, to think of his dramatic fall without sympathy.

  In the same week Basset and Mary were married. They spent their honeymoon after a fashion of their own, for they travelled through the north of England, and beginning with the improvements which Lord Francis Egerton was making along the Manchester Canal, they continued their quiet journey along the inland waterways which formed in the ‘forties a link, now forgotten, between the great cities. In this way — somewhat to the disgust of Mary’s new maid, whose name was Joséphine — they visited strange things; the famous land-warping upon the Humber, the Doncaster drainage system in Yorkshire, the Horsfall dairies. They brought back to the old gabled house at Blore some ideas which were new even to old Hayward — though the “Duke” would never have admitted this.

  “Now that we are not protected, we must bestir ourselves,” Basset said on the last evening before their return. “I’ll inquire about a seat, if you like,” he added reluctantly.

  Mary was standing behind him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “You are paying me out, Peter,” she said. “I know now that I don’t know as much as I thought I knew.”

  “Which means?” Basset said, smiling.

  “That once I thought that nothing could be done without an earthquake. I know n
ow that it can be done with a spade.”

  “So that where Mary was content with nothing but a gilt coach, Mrs. Basset is content with a nutshell.”

  “If you are in the nutshell,” Mary answered softly, “only — for what we have received, Peter — let us make other people thankful.”

  “We will try,” he answered.

  THE END

  MADAM CONSTANTIA

  This historical novel was published in 1919 under the pseudonym ‘Jefferson Carter’. Weyman chose to publish pseudonymously as a test of his own popularity after a period of retirement during the First World War. Happily he discovered that his work was just as well-received, even when readers were unaware of his authorship. Although the book is another historical romance, the setting is an unusual one, being set not in Europe but in South Carolina, during the late American Revolution.

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  Frontispiece of the first edition

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  Although the Historical Manuscripts Commission (England) has dealt with several of the Northumberland Collections, the Commission has not thought fit to print among the papers of the Craven family of Osgodby, the narrative of the fifth baronet’s experiences in South Carolina during the War of American Independence. The reason for this decision may be either a belief that the episode is not of value from a historical standpoint; or a suspicion that the facts owe something to the expansion of a man writing many years later. However this may be, the story seemed to the present Editor to possess a certain poignancy, and, notwithstanding some intimate passages, to be worthy of a public wider than that of the County of its birth. He has, therefore, with such skill as he possesses prepared it for publication.

  It will be noticed that Sir Edward Craven nowhere names the regiment in which he served, but it appears from other sources that it was the 33rd Regiment of Foot, now styled the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment.

  The Editor has thought proper to retain the fanciful title prefixed by the writer, but has added some Chapter headings.

  CHAPTER I

  SIR EDWARD’S PREFACE

  So here is this fatal war commenced!

  ‘ The Child that is unborn shall rue

  The hunting of that day!’

  H. WALPOLE.

  Not Lord Chatham, not Alexander the Great, nor Caesar has ever conquered so much territory in the course of all their wars as Lord North has lost in one campaign!

  C. J. FOX.

  Six months ago I went through the old papers in the Strongroom. I noted that neither my father nor my grandfather had added a line, save in the way of leases and the like, to the records which the first and second, baronets left of the Siege of Newcastle, and of the Union troubles. It occurred to me that we owed something to posterity; and that, for lack of more important matter, my fortunes en campagne in America were a part of the family history, and proper to be preserved.

  For an idle man, however, to will and to do are two things; and I might never have proceeded beyond the former if I had not a day or two later taken up the Gentleman’s Magazine and learned that General Washington of the United States of America had passed away at his seat at Mount Vernon on the fourteenth of the preceding month. That gave me the needed fillip. I never knew him; at least I never knew him by that title, since on the few occasions on which I met him, it was beyond my duty as an officer in His Majesty’s service to admit the existence of the States. I believe him, however, to have been a gentleman of good family, kindly and dignified, somewhat of the old school, and of considerable military ability; one, too, whose influence went some way towards checking within his sphere of action the rancour that in the Southern Colonies stained the Continental Cause and did not spare ours. Unfortunately from’80 onwards my duty led me into the Carolinas; and it was to the sad and unusual nature of the war in those provinces that what was singular in my experiences was due.

  Previously, to be brief, I had served for three years in the north, I had suffered the humiliation of surrendering with that gallant and loyal gentleman, General Burgoyne, I had been exchanged. But my experiences in Canada and on the Hudson were those of a hundred others and I pass over them, proposing to begin my relation at the point at which the fortunes of war cast me adrift, and flung me on my own resources.

  From where I write, looking out on the barren, frost-bound hills of the Border, it is a far cry to the rice-fields and tropical lands of the Tide-water of Carolina; and a farther cry to the rolling country of pleasant vale and forest that sweeps upwards to the foothills, and so to the misty distances of the Blue Ridge. In those days it was often a three months’ passage, on salt meat and stale water; a passage of which many a poor fellow never saw the end. To-day I cross in a moment. But before I do so, let me add a word of preface, that all who read this may view the matter from our standpoint in’80, midway in the fighting, rather than from the point at which we stand to-day, with the end behind us and an American Minister at St. James’s.

  I say nothing about the Tea Duty or the claim to tax the Colonies. I believe that we had a right to have money from them; our fleet covered their trade. But whether we should not have left it to them to tax themselves is another matter, and seems more English. What is certain is, that we had through the war the most worthless government that ever held power in England; and so my father said a hundred times — and voted for them steadily till the day they fell!

  In the City and at Brooks’s the war was never popular. There were many in both who asked with Mr. Walpole what we should gain by triumph itself; would America, laid waste, replace America flourishing, rich and free? And here and there an officer declined to serve against his kinsmen and was allowed to stand aside. But for the most part we ran to it, younger sons and eldest too, from my neighbor Lord Percy downward, as to an adventure. All who could beg or buy a commission mounted the cockade. The thing was fashionable —— with two results that I came to think unhappy.

  The first was that too many of our people — those in particular who had the least right to do so —— looked down on the Colonials from a social height as on a set of farmers and clodhoppers; forgetting that many of them were our own cousins once or twice removed, and that some had been bred up beside us at Westminster and Oxford. The second was that those of us who had seen service under the great Frederick, or had learned our drill at Finchley or Hounslow, sneered at the rebel officers as tailors, called them Mohairs — God knows why! — and made light not only of their skill but their courage, treating even the Loyalists who joined us as of a lower grade.

  For these two prejudices we were to pay very dearly. They not only brought into the struggle a bitterness which was needless and to be deplored, but, as things turned out, they reacted very unpleasantly on ourselves. It was bad enough to be worsted by those whom the meaner and more foolish among us regarded as of lower clay; it was still more mortifying for old soldiers, who had learned their drill in the barrack-yard, to find that it went for little in face of the immensities of that unknown continent; and that among the forests of the Hudson or in the marshes of the Savannah our military art was of far less value than the power to shoot straight, or to lay an ambush after the Indian fashion.

  Owing to these two prejudices the lessons we had to learn in the war were the more painful. Not that our poor fellows did not fight. Believe me, they fought with the most dogged courage — sometimes when the only powder they had was the powder on their queues, and the steel or the clubbed musket was their only weapon. But the others fought too and stubbornly — what else could we expect? They were of our blood and bone;
they, too, were Britons. And they were in their own forests, on their own rivers, — which seemed to be seas to us — they were fighting for their homes and barns and orchards. Whereas we were twelve weeks from home, ill-fed, ill-found, and ill-supported, scattered over hundreds of leagues, and lost in pathless wilds that grew more hostile as outrage on the one side or the other embittered our relations.

  The first half of the war was fought in the northern colonies. It ended sadly, as all remember, in our surrender at Saratoga, and in the retreat of General Clinton from Philadelphia to the sea-coast. After that, the fighting was transferred to the south, to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. We took Charles Town, we defeated the Continental Army at Camden, we had South Carolina in our hands, we looked hopefully towards the north. And then, in the late summer of’80, when the south seemed to be in our hands, the country on all sides rose against us as by magic and the war took on a new and more savage character. But enough has been said by way of general preface.

  For myself. On the fifth of October of that year’80, I was sent from Charlotte — whither my Lord Cornwallis had advanced on his way into North Carolina — with important orders to Colonel Ferguson, who at the time was covering the left flank with a strong body of royalists. On the sixth, accompanied by Simms, my orderly, and after a perilous ride, I reached Ferguson’s camp on King’s Mountain. He knew that the enemy were in strength in the neighbourhood, and, after falling back some distance, he had taken up a strong position on a ridge, which rose above the forest — a more active and able officer was not in the service. But this time he had either under-valued his opponents, sturdy hunters and settlers from the Backwaters, or he had over-estimated the strength of his position; and the lamentable issue of the fight on the following day is well known. After a fierce struggle Ferguson’s men were out-flanked and surrounded, and he himself fell, striving bravely to the last, while the greater part of his force was captured or cut to pieces. Of the few who had the good fortune to break through the ring I was one. Nor was I only fortunate for myself, for I carried off poor Simms on my crupper. From this point my relation starts.