A Difficult Young Man (9 page)

‘No, stay here,' said Diana. ‘In case he returns.' They now only referred to Dominic as ‘he,' with the unconscious superstitition that if they spoke his name it would link him with the disaster they feared for him. Leaving Wolfie, the other three, carrying halters and wisps of hay, went down to the paddock, which was on the hill from which the house took its name, and tried to catch the horses. It was often hard enough to catch them in the day-time, but in the dim light from the stars, with the horses either frightened or resentful at being approached at this time of night, it was almost impossible. They galloped from one corner to the other of the sloping twenty-acre paddock, and when Sarah, Diana and Tom
panted up the hill after them, they turned and pounded in a body down to the bottom again. After half-an-hour or more they gave it up, and returned to the house.

Before entering they stood at the door, listening in the diminishing hope of hearing Dominic return, but there was no sound save the tinkle of a Chopin prelude from the drawing-room, where Wolfie had been unable any longer to resist the itching of his fingers. Diana said kindly:

‘Well, good night, Tom. Thank you very much. There's nothing more we can do. He may even have ridden down to Beaumanoir. Why isn't there a telephone here?'

‘It would mean a five-mile private line to Berwick,' said Sarah.

They entered the drawing-room. Wolfie went on playing and rolled his eyes at Diana, with a reproachful forgiving expression, but she only said:

‘Well, you'd better go to bed now, Wolfie.'

He followed her advice, and as he passed the sofa he stroked her hair with a gesture of tenderness and patronage, understanding her woman's weakness. Actually he had done them a greater service than any of them knew, as when Wolfie was present it was almost impossible to become hysterical.

Diana and Sarah sat on, and did not notice the light growing dim, until suddenly the lamp, empty of oil, spluttered and went out. Wolfie had allowed the
fire, lighted against the chill of the evening air, to die down while they were out after the horses, and for a minute or so the room was in complete darkness, until Sarah had groped along the mantelpiece for some matches, and lighted the two candles on the writing table. They only illuminated the Teba portrait which Dominic so much resembled, which hung over the table. The rest of the long room was in shadow. The darkness and then the looming of this evil face, evil in her mind rather than in its actual appearance, startled Diana, and she gave a faint gasp of dismay. When she told me of this night, many years later, she emphasized with all the dramatic intensity of which she was capable, the feeling she had of the influence of this ancestor upon Dominic. Just after Sarah had lighted the candles they heard a horse cantering, and then the sound suddenly stopped.

‘It must have been one of the horses in the paddock,' said Sarah, ‘frightened by a snake.' But a minute or two later they heard footsteps on the gravel of the drive.

‘It's someone come to break the news,' cried Diana, convinced, or pretending to herself that she was convinced, as exhausted in the small hours her common sense was evaporating, that the dramatic emergence of the duque's face had been an omen of Dominic's death. They hurried to the front door, where they found Dominic himself.

‘Where have you been?' said Diana, exasperated and cross, now that she imagined the miasma of tragedy
was dispelled and that the anxieties of the past hours had been without foundation. He did not answer, but followed them into the drawing-room, where Diana repeated her question.

‘Riding,' he said.

If ever he looked like a damned soul it was now. Diana, with Victorian romanticism, may have over-dramatized the effect of the Teba portrait in this scene, and over-emphasized the instincts that the duque had passed down to Dominic, but there is no doubt that part of his temperament was derived from that source, as well as his appearance. His resemblance to the portrait was often noticed with surprise by visitors who had not before been to the house. Both Diana and Sarah told me that he looked as if the curse had come upon him. Of course it was very late and Diana was overwrought, but this may have made her more sensitive, not more obtuse to the spiritual condition of another person. The writing table was near the door, and the two candles shone clearly on only two things, the face in the portrait and the face of Dominic standing beneath it. His eyes were large dark hollows, and he had a look of utter defeat, as if he accepted his fate or his nature, or whatever landed him in these situations. Sometimes people who have been through great suffering have an evil look, as there is no light of hope in their faces. Dominic now had that look, which made so striking his affinity with his ancestor, and it may have been then
that Sarah, seeing the likeness between her favourite and the monster, decided to destroy the portrait.

‘Riding!' exclaimed Diana incredulously. ‘For half the night! Well, thank God you're alive anyhow.' But she did not say this in the same heartfelt tones that Laura had used on the road on Mount Wellington.

Sarah was looking intently at Dominic. ‘Where's Tamburlaine?' she asked.

‘He's dead,' said Dominic.

‘Dead! Where?' asked Diana.

‘In the drive. He fell dead, just now.'

Nobody spoke for a moment, then Diana said quietly:

‘D'you mean to say you rode him to death?'

He did not reply and they knew that was what had happened.

‘You're sure he's dead?'

‘Yes.'

‘Nothing can be done till the morning. You'd better go to bed. Get him some hot milk, Sarah.'

‘I don't want it,' said Dominic. He now felt utterly cut off from them. His pride would not let him accept anything. He turned and went off to his room.

‘This is terrible,' said Diana. ‘What will everyone say? D'you think he's really wicked?'

‘He wouldn't be wicked if he was left alone,' Sarah burst out viciously. ‘What did you come up here for? If you hadn't come it wouldn't have happened. I suppose
Baba sent you. She's the wicked one. She hates Dominic because he's good. Whenever she's about something happens to him.'

‘That's nonsense,' said Diana, calm and sensible now that Sarah was excited. Sarah flustered out of the room, again like an angry hen, and one whose chicken had been injured. Diana took up a candle and examined the Teba portrait. Apparently the duke had killed the thing he loved, and now Dominic had done it. She did not know quite what Wilde meant, but she supposed that it was that the evil in our nature was afraid of the good, and tried to kill it. Diana sat for about five minutes at the writing table, looking up at the portrait, and thinking uneasily of the family repercussions. If only it has been any other horse than Tamburlaine, it would not have been so shocking, though to be cruel to any animal, especially a horse, was the maximum crime in our family. With Tamburlaine, the nice kind horse we all loved, who put his head over the fence when we had tea in the garden, it was like a murder. Nobody would forgive it.

‘Dominic will have to be sent away somewhere,' she murmured to herself, and she went off to her room, where Wolfie was lying on his back snoring.

Sarah went out to the kitchen and heated some milk on a kerosene stove, and took it to Dominic's room. When she knocked he did not answer, but she opened
the door. The room was in darkness and she lighted a candle on the chest of drawers. She saw his dark hollow eyes staring at her from the bed.

‘I've brought you some milk,' she said.

Sarah, being an outcast like himself, was probably the only person from whom he would have accepted it, and with a shaking hand he took the cup from her. It may have been the taste of the milk, more than Sarah's kindness, that broke down his restraint. Warm milk is the drink of childhood and of comfort. At the touch of the milk on his lips, his body was shaken by a tremor, and some of the milk spilled on the sheet. Sarah took back the cup, and for the third and last time that I shall record, he was convulsed by those loud and racking sobs.

The fact that Dominic wept may be thought a proof of his weakness of character. On the contrary it merely showed that he had not atrophied his sympathies in accord with the nineteenth-century middle-class tradition. The great heroes of antiquity, the saints and the noblest men of history, wept plentifully.

There are few people more tiresome than those who express their sympathy with the imprisoned thug and ignore the wounds of his victim, but there are two comments which may be made on Dominic's ill treatment of Tamburlaine. The family at the time could see no mitigating circumstance, and put it down, probably owing to Diana's talk about his resemblance to the
Teba portrait, to inherited sadism. Actually Dominic was not thinking at all about Tamburlaine. He was not intentionally cruel. His beautiful horse of whom he was immensely proud, owing to the torment and fury of his own heart, was no more than a bicycle he might have been riding. This is bad enough of course. There was another thing. He had grown, and did not realize that he was now a much heavier weight for the horse to bear (Tamburlaine was about the size of a polo pony) than when he was first given to him. Here is another possibility—his sobbing may have occurred when he realized that, more blind than other people, he could not foresee the results of any action until these overwhelmed him at its conclusion. Even so, to understand the cause of his behaviour does not make it any more attractive.

When his sobbing had subsided he went to sleep and fortunately slept through until noon next day. Sarah had set her alarm for six o'clock, and with her ruthless energy, made Tom and the farm hands remove Tamburlaine from the drive by breakfast time, and he was buried in the orchard, beyond the stables, an hour before Dominic was awake.

Wolfie and Diana were taking Daisy back to Melbourne after luncheon. Dominic said he would go with them. They took a cab from Malvern, and leaving Wolfie and Daisy at their house Diana drove on with Dominic to Beaumanoir, partly to justify their own part in the affair, but also to give a softened explanation
of Dominic's. Where a kindness was advantageous to herself, Diana never hesitated to perform it, but she did not, like Baba, perform it solely for that reason.

When they arrived at Beaumanoir, Laura was on the terrace, resting from some dusty job of sorting out lumber. She looked at them with consternation, as the unexpected return of Dominic was seldom accompanied by good news.

‘Where's Steven?' asked Diana.

‘He's in the library doing the books.' This meant that he was sorting out Austin's collection of legal, sporting and genealogical books to see which were worth keeping, and which could be sold or given away.

‘Why have you come back, dear?' asked Laura.

‘It's Tamburlaine,' said Dominic.

‘What about him?'

‘He's dead.'

I have said that I would not record Dominic's sobbing again, and the tears which now suffused his eyes, but did not fall, were very different from the storm that shook him the night before. They were of pure grief for another being, and not of despair at his own nature.

‘Oh, my dear, I'm sorry,' said Laura. ‘How did it happen?'

‘I rode him too long, and he fell—dead.'

‘You can't mean it,' said Laura, her face suddenly stern. After a moment she asked:

‘Why did you do it?'

‘Aunt Diana will tell you.'

Laura went into the house and Dominic followed her, but not into the library. He sat on a chair in the hall, like someone waiting to be called to hear the verdict of a jury.

In the library Diana had been softening the blow to such an extent that Steven had not yet grasped what she was talking about. Laura intervened.

‘Tamburlaine is dead,' she said.

At last Diana gave them a straightforward account of what had happened. ‘I suppose he was over-ridden and his heart failed,' she ended, with the air of dissociating herself from the information she was giving. Steven, holding a book, stood motionless while Diana told her story. When she had finished he put down the book and looked at Laura. They were in many ways opposed in temperament, yet on any serious issue they found themselves in complete agreement. They had reached such an agreement in their exchanged glance.

‘Don't be too hard on him,' said Diana.

‘How can I be hard on him?' said Steven irritably. ‘I can't beat him. He's too big, and he'd probably murder me if I tried. I can't deprive him of money, as he never seems to want any. I could talk to him but what can I say? Only the extr emes of violent language will meet the case. He's done a devilish thing. The only thing I can say is that he's fit for a criminal lunatic asylum,
but I'm not going to send him to one. So there'd be a squalid scene with no result, as he'd forget all about it tomorrow. And to give a tepid rebuke for killing a horse is worse than nothing.'

‘He realizes what he has done,' said Diana.

‘It would be pretty hopeless if he didn't,' said Steven.

For awhile they discussed it and how the news would be taken by the family. Diana wanted it kept quiet because of Wolfie's part in it, and Steven and Laura knew that if it were known that Dominic had ridden Tamburlaine to death, it would exclude him even further from social contacts and make it more difficult for themselves to place him in any occupation. They came to the sensible but not very admirable decision to hush it up, and simply say that Tamburlaine had died from an accident. Diana said she would tell Wolfie to hold his tongue. Sarah would probably do so from her regard for Dominic, and the farm-hands at Westhill had no communication with our friends in Melbourne. They had been so occupied with this plan that they forgot the question of Dominic's treatment. He became impatient at last, and entered the library. Steven gave him a nod, recognizing his existence, but not with any pleasure.

‘You are not to say a word about this,' he said in the tone of a judge delivering sentence. ‘It will be very difficult for you and all of us if it gets about.'