The Freelands

Not rousing even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, he answered:

“It’ll all come soon enough, my pretty!”

To think that she must come to an end like the rest, having found out almost nothing, having discovered just herself, and the particle of God that was within her! But he could not, of course, say this.

“I want to FEEL. Can’t I begin?”

How many millions of young creatures all the world over were sending up that white prayer to climb and twine toward the stars, and – fall to earth again! And nothing to be answered, but:

“Time enough, Nedda!”

“But, Dad, there are such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and reasons, and – and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times, it seems to me, that one finds out anything.”

“As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What’s to be done for us?”

She slid her hand through his arm again.

“Don’t laugh at me!”

“Heaven forbid! I meant it. You’re finding out much quicker than I. It’s all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired stuff. The variations my mind spins – wouldn’t I just swap them for the tunes your mind is making?”

“I don’t seem making tunes at all. I don’t seem to have anything to make them of. Take me down to see ‘the Tods,’ Dad!”

Why not? And yet – ! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much, so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: “If you wish it, by all means. You’ll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can’t say, but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it seems.”

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.

CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland’s country house, Becket, was almost a show place. It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons, his mother’s family – that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War. The site – certain vagaries in the ground – Mrs. Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms – arrows and crescent moons in proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too – that bird ‘parlant,’ from the old Moreton crest – were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley – owner of this native Moreton soil – least of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast of mind and body. That was why he made so much more money than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of Clara’s undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of Worcestershire. Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve – for he was both kindly and prudent – at his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such Moretons as were left were ‘dry enough sticks, clean out of it.’ They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished without issue – marrying from generation to generation exactly their own equals; living simple, pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never making money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility more punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally paternal and maternal to their dependents, constitutionally so convinced that those dependents and all indeed who were not ‘gentry,’ were of different clay, that they were entirely simple and entirely without arrogance, carrying with them even now a sort of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made cordials, lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent use of the word ‘nice,’ a peculiar regularity of feature, and a complexion that was rather parchmenty. High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer inbred conviction that nothing else was nice; but withal very considerate of others, really plucky in bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.

Of Becket, as it now was, they would not have approved at all. By what chance Edmund Moreton (Stanley’s mother’s grandfather), in the middle of the eighteenth century, had suddenly diverged from family feeling and ideals, and taken that ‘not quite nice’ resolution to make ploughs and money, would never now be known. The fact remained, together with the plough works. A man apparently of curious energy and character, considering his origin, he had dropped the E from his name, and – though he continued the family tradition so far as to marry a Fleeming of Worcestershire, to be paternal to his workmen, to be known as Squire, and to bring his children up in the older Moreton ‘niceness’ – he had yet managed to make his ploughs quite celebrated, to found a little town, and die still handsome and clean-shaved at the age of sixty-six. Of his four sons, only two could be found sufficiently without the E to go on making ploughs. Stanley’s grandfather, Stuart Morton, indeed, had tried hard, but in the end had reverted to the congenital instinct for being just a Moreton. An extremely amiable man, he took to wandering with his family, and died in France, leaving one daughter – Frances, Stanley’s mother – and three sons, one of whom, absorbed in horses, wandered to Australia and was killed by falling from them; one of whom, a soldier, wandered to India, and the embraces of a snake; and one of whom wandered into the embraces of the Holy Roman Church.

The Morton Plough Works were dry and dwindling when Stanley’s father, seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted it. For Clara, his wife, had that energy of aspiration which before now has raised women to positions of importance in the counties which are not their own, and caused, incidentally, many acres to go out of cultivation. Not one plough was used on the whole of Becket, not even a Morton plough – these indeed were unsuitable to English soil and were all sent abroad. It was the corner-stone of his success that Stanley had completely seen through the talked-of revival of English agriculture, and sedulously cultivated the foreign market. This was why the Becket dining-room could contain without straining itself large quantities of local magnates and celebrities from London, all deploring the condition of ‘the Land,’ and discussing without end the regrettable position of the agricultural laborer. Except for literary men and painters, present in small quantities to leaven the lump, Becket was, in fact, a rallying point for the advanced spirits of Land Reform – one of those places where they were sure of being well done at week-ends, and of congenial and even stimulating talk about the undoubted need for doing something, and the designs which were being entertained upon ‘the Land’ by either party. This very heart of English country that the old Moretons in their paternal way had so religiously farmed, making out of its lush grass and waving corn a simple and by no means selfish or ungenerous subsistence, was now entirely lawns, park, coverts, and private golf course, together with enough grass to support the kine which yielded that continual stream of milk necessary to Clara’s entertainments and children, all female, save little Francis, and still of tender years. Of gardeners, keepers, cow-men, chauffeurs, footmen, stablemen – full twenty were supported on those fifteen hundred acres that formed the little Becket demesne. Of agricultural laborers proper – that vexed individual so much in the air, so reluctant to stay on ‘the Land,’ and so difficult to house when he was there, there were fortunately none, so that it was possible for Stanley, whose wife meant him to ‘put up’ for the Division, and his guests, who were frequently in Parliament, to hold entirely unbiassed and impersonal views upon the whole question so long as they were at Becket.

It was beautiful there, too, with the bright open fields hedged with great elms, and that ever-rich serenity of its grass and trees. The white house, timbered with dark beams in true Worcestershire fashion, and added-to from time to time, had preserved, thanks to a fine architect, an old-fashioned air of spacious presidency above its gardens and lawns. On the long artificial lake, with innumerable rushy nooks and water-lilies and coverture of leaves floating flat and bright in the sun, the half-tame wild duck and shy water-hens had remote little worlds, and flew and splashed when all Becket was abed, quite as if the human spirit, with its monkey-tricks and its little divine flame, had not yet been born.

Under the shade of a copper-beech, just where the drive cut through into its circle before the house, an old lady was sitting that afternoon on a campstool. She was dressed in gray alpaca, light and cool, and had on her iron-gray hair a piece of black lace. A number of Hearth and Home and a little pair of scissors, suspended by an inexpensive chain from her waist, rested on her knee, for she had been meaning to cut out for dear Felix a certain recipe for keeping the head cool; but, as a fact, she sat without doing so, very still, save that, now and then, she compressed her pale fine lips, and continually moved her pale fine hands. She was evidently waiting for something that promised excitement, even pleasure, for a little rose-leaf flush had quavered up into a face that was colored like parchment; and her gray eyes under regular and still-dark brows, very far apart, between which there was no semblance of a wrinkle, seemed noting little definite things about her, almost unwillingly, as an Arab’s or a Red Indian’s eyes will continue to note things in the present, however their minds may be set on the future. So sat Frances Fleeming Freeland (nee Morton) waiting for the arrival of her son Felix and her grandchildren Alan and Nedda.

She marked presently an old man limping slowly on a stick toward where the drive debouched, and thought at once: “He oughtn’t to be coming this way. I expect he doesn’t know the way round to the back. Poor man, he’s very lame. He looks respectable, too.” She got up and went toward him, remarking that his face with nice gray moustaches was wonderfully regular, almost like a gentleman’s, and that he touched his dusty hat with quite old-fashioned courtesy. And smiling – her smile was sweet but critical – she said: “You’ll find the best way is to go back to that little path, and past the greenhouses. Have you hurt your leg?”

“My leg’s been like that, m’m, fifteen year come Michaelmas.”

“How did it happen?”

“Ploughin’. The bone was injured; an’ now they say the muscle’s dried up in a manner of speakin’.”

“What do you do for it? The very best thing is this.”

From the recesses of a deep pocket, placed where no one else wore such a thing, she brought out a little pot.

“You must let me give it you. Put it on when you go to bed, and rub it well in; you’ll find it act splendidly.”

The old man took the little pot with dubious reverence.

“Yes, m’m,” he said; “thank you, m’m.”

“What is your name?”

“Gaunt.”

“And where do you live?”

“Over to Joyfields, m’m.”

“Joyfields – another of my sons lives there – Mr. Morton Freeland. But it’s seven miles.”

“I got a lift half-way.”

“And have you business at the house?” The old man was silent; the downcast, rather cynical look of his lined face deepened. And Frances Freeland thought: ‘He’s overtired. They must give him some tea and an egg. What can he want, coming all this way? He’s evidently not a beggar.’

The old man who was not a beggar spoke suddenly:

“I know the Mr. Freeland at Joyfields. He’s a good gentleman, too.”

“Yes, he is. I wonder I don’t know you.”

“I’m not much about, owin’ to my leg. It’s my grand-daughter in service here, I come to see.”

“Oh, yes! What is her name?”

“Gaunt her name is.”

“I shouldn’t know her by her surname.”

“Alice.”

“Ah! in the kitchen; a nice, pretty girl. I hope you’re not in trouble.”

Again the old man was silent, and again spoke suddenly:

“That’s as you look at it, m’m,” he said. “I’ve got a matter of a few words to have with her about the family. Her father he couldn’t come, so I come instead.”

“And how are you going to get back?”

“I’ll have to walk, I expect, without I can pick up with a cart.”