Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (423 page)

“Well, then, what does it all amount to?” Sir William asked.

“Look here,” Mr. Bunter said sardonically, “I didn’t come here to listen to metaphysical discussions. I want to sell a book. I have discovered that Margaret of Anjou had a bastard daughter—”

“I don’t want to buy books to-day,” Sir William said.

“But you have got to,” Mr. Bunter answered, “or else I’ll take it to Fitters. I tell you it’s gorgeous, I want to get begun on it. This daughter of Margaret Anjou was called Gabrielle de Pise. She had a hundred and twenty lovers. I tell you I am going to make this the book of the world. We sold six thousand of the love affairs of Ninon de l’Enclos. We’ll do twenty of this. I’ll give you the atmosphere of mediaeval love. I will make you see it!”

Sir William said: “You!” as if he were going to be sick. He rose to his feet violently. “Get out of this office,” he said. “You would profane a brothel, a little toad like you. Get out before I kick you.”

Mr. Bunter rose and crossed to the door. He was limping slowly.

“Did Margaret of Anjou happen to be your greatgrandmother?” he said sardonically. “You couldn’t bet safely on who your great-grandfather was. Anyone would think you’ve been looking up your pedigree because you’ve been baronetted.” And he went out of the room happily.

“Look here,” Sir William said, “I’ve done with this show. I can’t stand it. I am going. I shall turn it into a limited company. You can be general manager, McCrackan, and I dare say you can find Lee-Egerton here a job as secretary. I am not fit for work, and this work isn’t fit for me. I am going. Anybody could run this show. If you took a potman or a cabman or a Board School teacher, or anybody who could keep sober, they could run this show or any other show in the City. It isn’t a man’s work, this. It doesn’t need brains, courage, intelligence, or even common honesty. Nothing does here. The place is vulgar, the time is vulgar. The language we speak is vulgar. So are the thoughts we think. Everything is vulgar. Even the air! Come along, Charlie!”

“But, Sir William—” McCrackan said.

“Oh, you can settle it all with Parks and Parks. They’ll do the job of turning it into a limited company. That’s all. I am going.” out of the room. In Henrietta Street he stopped suddenly and looked at young Lee-Egerton.

“You’re Dionissia’s last descendant,” he said; “then you must be my — —”

He passed his hand down his face. “But I am mad,” he said. “It was a dream.”

He felt better when they got to Salisbury and were riding along Fisherton Street and up to the right, so that they came very soon out on to the Plain above Bemerton with its little church. They rode on. It was a very grey day. Sir William was looking for a long shallow valley. He could not find it, or he found too many. At last they came down by the old path to Berwick St. James, and so along the road towards Wishford. But there was no castle. On its place stood a farm-house of stone, with many stone outbuildings and here and there a green mound. So that was all there was left of the great castle of Stapleford. Then they rode along the green valley beside the little stream with its poplars and elms. Here and there a trout rose, and there were still swallows amongst the rushes. Of Tamworth there was less even than of Stapleford. Upon a knoll half a dozen stone cottages huddled very close together, where of old the stables had been.

Then they crossed the stream and went over the great hill beyond the town of Wiley. To young Lee-Egerton Sir William seemed a somewhat alarming figure. His eyes were red so that they seemed upon the point of shedding tears. He muttered to himself now and again in some language that was certainly not English. When they came to the top of the Wiley hill on the shoulder of a great down, he pointed a little way off the road to a circular clump of dark pines.

“There used to be a gallows here,” he said suddenly.

“There used to be a gallows here,” he said suddenly.

“They hung Hugh Fitzgreville on it, and his body could be seen from four counties.”

“You seem to know a lot about this part of the world,” young Lee-Egerton said.

“I ought to,” Sir William answered. “But it is changed. It’s changed. Let us get on.”

And he set his spurs into his horse so that it galloped up the hill. And after that there was never such riding as young Lee-Egerton had that day. They went up a hill straight over the tough brown grass, disdaining the white roads that climbed aslant They galloped down the hills as straight, and so up again once more. It was more than the young man’s wind could stand, and his horse was not so good as Sir William’s. Nevertheless, he contrived to keep him in sight, for he was convinced that Sir William was on the verge of madness. He could not ever have been really cured of the effects of his accident. Even Mrs. Lee-Egerton said that he wasn’t the same man. On the top of the last hill home Sir William, well in advance, took a bullfinch, crashing right through the centre of it and going out of sight. The young man could not get his animal to face it in three times, and indeed, he would have funked it himself if it hadn’t been that he was genuinely anxious about his leader. He had to go a quarter of a mile before he could find a gap, and he went it hell for leather, letting his animal have it for all he was worth, and cursing like a madman beneath his breath. When he had scrambled through the gap — and it was a pretty bad take off — he found himself at the top of the long, broad grass valley. A long way away there was the church tower of a little village that he took to be near Fordingbridge — a church and a cluster of buildings with patches of trees around them, peeping over the side of a low hill. And then he caught sight of Sir William sitting perfectly still upon his horse, which was grazing on the roadside, the reins upon its neck. And as the young man cantered slowly towards him, so he continued to sit. He looked round at Lee-Egerton with a face of extraordinary wildness.

“I can’t face it,” he said. “I can’t go there; I can’t go back. Don’t you understand? It’s like being in hell. To love a woman who has been dead four hundred and fifty years. I am done. Used up. It’s all over with me.”

“Oh, come,” the young man said, at his wits’ end, “a man can’t be called used up who can ride as you do; but if you don’t pick up your reins they will be under your horse’s feet. There they go.”

Sir William’s reins had slipped down the horse’s neck and fell upon the short turf before its nose.

“You’ll have your neck broken in a minute,” the young man said between his teeth, and he dismounted to pick up the reins.

“It’s hell,” Sir William repeated dully. There came from just behind them the drilling sound of a bicycle bell. Lee-Egerton pulled his horse off the road on to the turf and made a grab for Sir William’s reins. Then he tried to raise his cap with his encumbered hands. A girl was shooting past them, going very fast. She had a face of a conspicuous fairness, a dress of light blue print, a white linen coif that hid all her hair, and from her shoulders there flew out behind a black cloak.

“My God!” Sir William said suddenly. “Did you see? Who was that? In God’s name who was that?”

“Why?” young Lee-Egerton said. “That was Nurse Morane! The one who nursed you till the first time they trepanned you. She broke down the day before they trepanned you the second time. My mother says she couldn’t stand the excitement, because she was in love with you. My mother’s always got her head full of ideas like that.”

Sir William slowly took the reins and then, irrationally, spurred his horse.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s she doing here?”

The young man tried to shout after him.

“She lives somewhere about here if we are anywhere near Fordingbridge.” But Sir William had galloped off down the road that turned immediately and mounted the hill towards the cluster of old and falling buildings. He turned his horse loose in the stockyard that was surrounded by ancient and crumbling sheds. One half of the house had fallen in years before, but the other, its arched windows filled here and there with lattice and here and there with boards, and with its immensely deep walls, still stood. Wallflowers, house-leeks, rushes, and grass grew out of all the joints in the stones. It was so old that you could hardly recognize it for a house, and so forlorn that you shivered when you passed it, and here and there upon the walls were stuck up placards announcing that this house, together with all the village of Winterburne St. Martin, was to be sold by auction in three days’ time at Salisbury, by order of the War Office.

The living-room into which Sir William went was large, long, and low. It was quite empty; only beneath the windows were a pile of hay, some blankets, and a couple of old green coats. A shepherd had slept there for the last ten nights to watch the farm which had been empty for a fortnight. In the corner of the room was a steep fireplace, and in it the charred white detritus of an old fire.

A door in the party wall which divided this long hall opened gently. There appeared a girl in a blue dress, a black cloak, and a white coif that hid her hair. Her face was of an extraordinary fairness, her eyebrows a dark brown, and her blue eyes were singularly absent in expression. Sir William cried out:

“You!”

And then she seemed to see him.

“You are Sir William Sorrell,” she said. “I am Dionissia Morane.”

He asked huskily:

“What are you doing here?”

And she answered:

“I was born in this room. We have farmed this place time out of mind — for centuries. Now it is going to be sold, and I wanted to see it again.”

“What does it all mean?” he asked.

“I can’t tell,” she answered. “Do you know after they trepanned you for the first time you said suddenly ‘Es tu là?’ and reached out your hand to me, and I took your hand because no one was allowed to speak then? And I kept on saying to myself, ‘It is very well with me,’ which is what the country people about here say when they are glad. I was very glad because I thought you were recovering. But then you went back, and it was almost too much for me. So I came to this village, where I have a room, because it is my native place. And then I heard that you had recovered. But they would not take me back at the hospital because they said I was too weak. However, I am going back to-morrow, and that is why I have come here to-day.” Sir William said:

“No! No, you are not going back.” And his voice came hotly. “You are never going back.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“Then you must never go back either,” she said at last.

CHAPTER III.

It struck Mrs. Lee-Egerton as a most extraordinary affair when Sir William told her that very evening that he was going to buy the village of Winterburne St. Martin, restore the old farmhouse until it resembled the little castle it had once been, and there, in company with Dionissia Morane, pass the remainder of his days. He was going to take up hawking as a pursuit.

Mrs. Lee-Egerton was not exactly unsympathetic, but she said that that would be putting his future into the hands of a girl who could not be more than twenty-two, and she wanted to know if that was exactly wise on his part when he had not known her, at the moment when she was speaking, for more than seven hours at the most, though she acknowledged that Dionissia’s nursing had probably saved his life.

Mrs. Lee-Egerton had taken one of the large furnished villas outside Salisbury, when, shortly after the railway accident, she had learned that Sir William might probably be in bed for a long spell. Thus she had three months of a tenancy to run, and as she was herself still too shaken to think of returning to town, she was getting all the benefit of the country air that she could. Her husband even had returned from the Rockies. — A large, silent, but not at all disagreeable man, he accepted quite readily the fact that he, as well as his wife and his son, owed a debt of gratitude to Sir William Sorrell, and almost cordially begged him to live with them as long as it suited him. Mr. Lee-Egerton passed all his days fishing in the river Wiley beyond Wishford.

To Mrs. Lee-Egerton’s mild remonstrances, Sir William replied that he was perfectly sure that he was doing the wisest thing he had ever done in his life. He was going to marry Dionissia Morane, and she was the wisest person he had ever met. He had proved this several times.

“But you couldn’t have,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said—”not in seven hours, when you were on a horse and she was on a bicycle.”

Sir William, in fact, had told not a single soul of his experiences whilst he lay in bed. He hadn’t told anybody, because he felt that he would not ever be able to make anybody understand that his experiences had just been real. So that when he replied to Mrs. Lee-Egerton:

“I tell you I have proved it several times. Whatever Dionissia recommended always proved the best course,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton could only think that his accident was still affecting him. She thought that he was really a little mad. But it was after all none of her business. With the exception of Sir William’s very old aunt, Lady Wells, he did not seem to have any relatives to trouble about or to argue with him. So that, almost immediately Mrs. Lee-Egerton perceived that her business in the matter was simply that of “leaving the young people alone together” as much as possible. And in a very short time Mrs. Lee-Egerton had arrived at the conclusion that Dionissia Morane was a thoroughly nice girl. Within a month she had concluded that Dionissia was a thoroughly wise one.

She was extraordinarily silent at times, and you never could tell what she was driving at. Indeed, it took Mrs. Lee-Egerton at least a month to see that she was driving at anything at all. During this month Dionissia was still working in the hospital, so that she only got her evenings off. She had had in decency to give the hospital so much notice. —

For Sir William, however, this month became one of furious activity. He had purchased the estate of Winterburne St. Martin within three days, and had had down from London a young architect sanctioned by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings even before he had bought the property. Within a week he had a gang of labourers at work upon the old farmhouse, and he rode over every day from Salisbury to look at them at work. The great heat of the day would not stop him, no rain would stop him; they began pulling every vestige of modern work out of the old building. And, as plaster fell away and floors came down, and little by little the oldest stonework of all came into sight, he felt the keenest satisfaction. His hair would be full of lime when he returned to Salisbury, but he would take a bath, and pass the evening sitting with Dionissia on the verandah. The nights were very fine and the Lee-Egertons’ villa stood very high, so that all before them there was an immensity of space, a great stretch of territory unseen in the dark distances from which, from time to time, there sounded the cry of a heron coming back from the river.

Mrs. Lee-Egerton saw Dionissia most frequently, however, over the architect’s plans, whilst that young man and Sir William and the girl discussed the details of the new work that was to be put in. And Mrs. Lee-Egerton made out, gradually, that what Sir William was trying to do was to get an exact reproduction of a fourteenth-century castle. At the outset, he even objected furiously to the idea that there should be sinks, draining-boards, or drains, in the kitchen. He said that what they really did in those days was to throw all the refuse into the courtyard. And, when Mrs. Lee-Egerton and the architect pointed out that you could hardly do that nowadays, Sir William became quite unnecessarily angry. He said that what had been good enough for those people was going to be good enough for him. He was going to have everything exactly as it had been. And he thumped his large fist on the table and repeated “Exactly!” in a loud and even a threatening voice. Dionissia had said nothing at all on that occasion. It had been the first on which they had discussed the plans. Dionissia had said nothing, but Mrs. Lee-Egerton had observed that she looked at Sir William with a glance of a curious nature. In it Mrs. Lee-Egerton imagined that she observed at once tenderness and compassion, as if Dionissia considered that she had in hand a great invalid who must be humoured.

But upon Mrs. Lee-Egerton’s first visit to the little castle, which took place some three weeks later, she observed certain trenches, going deep down into the very chalk of what had formerly been the stackyard and, still earlier, the courtyard itself. And when the architect told her that these trenches were being made for the drains, Mrs. Lee-Egerton began to consider deeply. The castle itself had become a mere shell of very old stones. Within and without you perceived the outlines of windows that had been filled in for centuries, and here and there the blackened stones of fireplaces that for centuries had been bricked up. But in the outlines the old castle could be discerned plainly enough. There was a central arch, the halls on either side, the holes in the walls into which formerly there had fitted the great beams supporting the upper rooms and the long roof chamber. Most of the outer wall remained in a state of decay, and many of the rooms that had surrounded the courtyard. Even the moat could quite clearly be traced. And, from what Mrs. Lee-Egerton understood, they were going to turn the small castle
 
into an exceedingly comfortable dwelling-house. There would be at least twenty bedrooms, a garage, and stabling for no less than fifteen horses. The rather odd predilection that Sir William had at first shown for everything mediaeval had very sensibly diminished. Indeed, when Mrs. Lee-Egerton had pointed out to her a corner of the courtyard in which there was to be erected an engine-room, from which the castle was to be supplied with power for the electric light, she could not help saying to Sir William:

“You seem to have dropped your idea of living like a knight of old altogether.”

Sir William looked at her humorously. The riding backwards and forwards from Salisbury to the little castle seemed to have made a different man of him. His flesh was firmer, and there was much less of it; his eyes were keen and satisfied, his mouth much less threatening. He was standing in the sunlight of the courtyard without a hat. It was a Sunday, and all the workmen were away. The architect had taken Dionissia round the outer wall in order to show her a curiously carved gargoyle that they had discovered in the earthed-up moat the day before.

“Well, you see,” Sir William said to Mrs. Lee-Egerton, “Dionissia has made it plain to me. The first thing I wanted when I came back to my senses was Dionissia.”

“Well, you got her very soon,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said. “But I didn’t know then,” Sir William continued, “that she was in the world. I thought she was back in the fourteenth century. So, of course, I thought the fourteenth century was the only bearable time in the history of the world.”

“It must have been a horrid sort of epoch,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said. “Were not they very dirty?”

“Well, they were and they weren’t,” Sir William said meditatively. “And it was and it wasn’t — a horrid epoch,” he continued, gazing at the points of his riding-boots for a considerable time. “I can tell you this,” he said at last. “When I came back — when I came back to consciousness, the modern world seemed to me a horribly mean and dirty sort of place — worthless, useless, disgusting.”

“But when you found Miss Morane.... Mrs. Lee-Egerton said.

“Ah, when I found Dionissia,” Sir William smiled brilliantly, “it became a different proposition.”

“Well, you’re certainly a different man,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton replied, “and it’s certainly very satisfactory. I don’t mind saying that I wouldn’t have objected to marry you myself if I’d been free to do it, but since I wasn’t, obviously the next best thing is that I have been able to regard Dionissia really as a daughter — or let us say as a niece. And so we keep you in the family.”

“Why, so you do,” Sir William said. “Did you hear Dionissia’s latest discovery about the Egerton family?”

“I did hear it,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said, “but I couldn’t exactly understand it.”

“Well, try to understand it now,” Sir William said. “The Lady Dionissia de Morant de Ecclesford, who was the real founder of the family of Egerton, she had a son called Sir William de Egerton de Tamworth. And that Sir William had two sons.”

“If it’s going to branch out any more,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said, “I shan’t be able to follow.”

It isn’t,” Sir William said, “it can stop with the two sons. The eldest of these was Sir Edward de Egerton de Tamworth, and he was the ancestor of your husband.

The younger son inherited this place and took the name of William de Morant de Winterburne St. Martin. He was the ancestor of Dionissia.”

“Well, I said I regarded her as a sort of niece,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton put in. “I suppose the Egertons sold Tamworth and made what money they did make somewhere else. And the Morants stuck to this place and didn’t make any money at all. That’s the usual story of great families.”

“That’s about it,” Sir William said; “they went on living in the place until at last they were only tenants where they had been owners, and now there is only Dionissia. Her father was rather a good farmer, and when he died two years ago he was able to leave her a few hundreds. She has been to Girton, you know, that’s why she is so extraordinarily well educated. She knows more about history than any man I ever met, and I met a good few when I was having encyclopaedias compiled.”

“She’s certainly an extraordinary young woman,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton conceded amiably; “she doesn’t even dress really badly.”

“I should think she didn’t” Sir William ejaculated. “Oh, well,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said, “you can’t expect one woman to say more than that of another.” She remained for a moment in a slight reverie. “About the way you said the ‘world appeared to you when you came to your senses,’” she continued, “I suppose what it comes to is that when you dreamed that Dionissia was in the fourteenth century you wanted to be back there; but when you came to find that she was here, you thought that, as they say in New York, ‘Little old New York is good enough for me.’”

“Of course,” Sir William said, “I have put it to Dionissia that any century that produced her was justified of its existence, but Dionissia put it in another way.”

“What sort of a way?” Mrs. Lee-Egerton asked.

“Well, the simple result of Dionissia’s reasoning is that we are going to have the electric light in the castle, and I am going to go on looking after my publishing.”

“I really can’t follow
that,”
Mrs. Lee - Egerton said.

“What it comes to,” Sir William answered, “is that Dionissia thinks — that Dionissia is convinced, that one century is just as good as another. And just as bad. We aren’t so adventurous as we used to be, but we don’t go in for so many, lawsuits. We aren’t so romantically dressed, but we have got electric light and better baths. So that, take it all round, Dionissia says, what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts. And she says that it is ones business to make a good job of what one’s got in hand. Romance, according to Dionissia, is the flavour of any life at any time. It’s the reckoning up of success or failure at the end of things.”

“I don’t know what all that means,” Mrs. Lee-Egerton said; “no doubt Dionissia does. But when it comes to success, you seem to do yourself pretty well. I understand that your building here is going to cost you £50,000.”