The Rough Road

Mrs. Trevor, as usual, agreed. So thenceforward, whenever they were abroad, which was for three or four months of each year, Phineas revelled in sheer idleness, nicotine, and the skilful consumption of alcohol, while highly paid professors taught Marmaduke – and, incidentally, himself – French and Italian.

Of the world, however, and of the facts, grim or seductive, of life, Doggie learned little. Whether by force of some streak of honesty, whether through sheer laziness, whether through canny self-interest, Phineas McPhail conspired with Mrs. Trevor to keep Doggie in darkest ignorance. His reading was selected like that of a young girl in a convent: he was taken only to the most innocent of plays: foreign theatres, casinos, and such-like wells of delectable depravity, existed almost beyond his ken. Until he was twenty it never occurred to him to sit up after his mother had gone to bed. Of strange goddesses he knew nothing. His mother saw to that. He had a mild affection for his cousin Peggy, which his mother encouraged. She allowed him to smoke cigarettes, drink fine claret, the remains of the cellar of her father, the bishop, a connoisseur, and crème de menthe. And, until she died, that was all poor Doggie knew of the lustiness of life.

Mrs. Trevor died, and Doggie, as soon as he had recovered from the intensity of his grief, looked out upon a lonely world. Phineas, like Mrs. Micawber, swore he would never desert him. In the perils of Polar exploration or the comforts of Denby Hall, he would find Phineas McPhail ever by his side. The first half-dozen or so of these declarations consoled Doggie tremendously. He dreaded the Church swallowing up his only protector and leaving him defenceless. Conscientiously, however, he said:

“I don’t want your affection for me to stand in your way, sir.”

“‘Sir’?” cried Phineas, “is it not practicable for us to do away with the old relations of master and pupil, and become as brothers? You are now a man, and independent. Let us be Pylades and Orestes. Let us share and share alike. Let us be Marmaduke and Phineas.”

Doggie was touched by such devotion. “But your ambitions to take Holy Orders, which you have sacrificed for my sake?”

“I think it may be argued,” said Phineas, “that the really beautiful life is delight in continued sacrifice. Besides, my dear boy, I am not quite so sure as I was when I was young, that by confining oneself within the narrow limits of a sacerdotal profession, one can retain all one’s wider sympathies both with human infirmity and the gladder things of existence.”

“You’re a true friend, Phineas,” said Doggie.

“I am,” replied Phineas.

It was just after this that Doggie wrote him a cheque for a thousand pounds on account of a vaguely indicated year’s salary.

If Phineas had maintained the wily caution which he had exercised for the past seven years, all might have been well. But there came a time when unneedfully he declared once more that he would never desert Marmaduke, and declaring it, hiccoughed so horribly and stared so glassily, that Doggie feared he might be ill. He had just lurched into Doggie’s own peacock-blue and ivory sitting-room when he was mournfully playing the piano.

“You’re unwell, Phineas. Let me get you something.”

“You’re right, laddie,” Phineas agreed, his legs giving way alarmingly, so that he collapsed on a brocade-covered couch. “It’s a touch of the sun, which I would give you to understand,” he continued with a self-preservatory flash, for it was an overcast day in June, “is often magnified in power when it is behind a cloud. A wee drop of whisky is what I require for a complete recovery.”

Doggie ran into the dining-room and returned with a decanter of whisky, glass and siphon – an adjunct to the sideboard since Mrs. Trevor’s death. Phineas filled half the tumbler with spirit, tossed it off, smiled fantastically, tried to rise, and rolled upon the carpet. Doggie, frightened, rang the bell. Peddle, the old butler, appeared.

“Mr. McPhail is ill. I can’t think what can be the matter with him.”

Peddle looked at the happy Phineas with the eyes of experience.

“If you will allow me to say so, sir,” said he, “the gentleman is dead drunk.”

And that was the beginning of the end of Phineas. He lost grip of himself. He became the scarlet scandal of Durdlebury and the terror of Doggie’s life. The Dean came to the rescue of a grateful nephew. A swift attack of delirium tremens crowned and ended Phineas McPhail’s Durdlebury career.

“My boy,” said the Dean on the day of Phineas’s expulsion, “I don’t want to rub it in unduly, but I’ve warned your poor mother for years, and you for months, against this bone-idle, worthless fellow. Neither of you would listen to me. But you see that I was right. Perhaps now you may be more inclined to take my advice.”

“Yes, Uncle,” replied Doggie submissively.

The Dean, a comfortable florid man in the early sixties, took up his parable and expounded it for three-quarters of an hour. If ever young man heard that which was earnestly meant for his welfare, Doggie heard it from his Very Reverend Uncle’s lips.

“And now, my dear boy,” said the Dean by way of peroration, “you cannot but understand that it is your bounden duty to apply yourself to some serious purpose in life.”

“I do,” said Doggie. “I’ve been thinking over it for a long time. I’m going to gather material for a history of wall-papers.”

CHAPTER II

Thenceforward Doggie, like the late Mr. Matthew Arnold’s fellow-millions, lived alone. He did not complain. There was little to complain about. He owned a pleasant old house set in fifteen acres of grounds. He had an income of three thousand pounds a year. Old Peddle, the butler, and his wife, the housekeeper, saved him from domestic cares. Rising late and retiring early, like the good King of Yvetot, he cheated the hours that might have proved weary. His meals, his toilet, his music, his wall-papers, his drawing and embroidering – specimens of the last he exhibited with great success at various shows held by Arts and Crafts Guilds, and such-like high and artistic fellowships – his sweet-peas, his chrysanthemums, his postage stamps, his dilettante reading and his mild social engagements, filled most satisfyingly the hours not claimed by slumber. Now and then appointments with his tailor summoned him to London. He stayed at the same mildewed old family hotel in the neighbourhood of Bond Street at which his mother and his grandfather, the bishop, had stayed for uncountable years. There he would lunch and dine stodgily in musty state. In the evenings he would go to the plays discussed in the less giddy of Durdlebury ecclesiastical circles. The play over, it never occurred to him to do otherwise than drive decorously back to Sturrocks’s Hotel. Suppers at the Carlton or the Savoy were outside his sphere of thought or opportunity. His only acquaintance in London were vague elderly female friends of his mother, who invited him to chilly semi-suburban teas and entertained him with tepid reminiscence and criticism of their divers places of worship. The days in London thus passed drearily, and Doggie was always glad to get home again.

In Durdlebury he began to feel himself appreciated. The sleepy society of the place accepted him as a young man of unquestionable birth and irreproachable morals. He could play the piano, the harp, the viola, the flute, and the clarinet, and sing a very true mild tenor. As secretary of the Durdlebury Musical Association, he filled an important position in the town. Dr. Flint – Joshua Flint, Mus. Doc. – organist of the cathedral, scattered broadcast golden opinions of Doggie. There was once a concert of old English music, which the dramatic critics of the great newspapers attended – and one of them mentioned Doggie – “Mr. Marmaduke Trevor, who played the viol da gamba as to the manner born.” Doggie cut out the notice, framed it, and stuck it up in his peacock and ivory sitting-room.

Besides music, Doggie had other social accomplishments. He could dance. He could escort young ladies home of nights. Not a dragon in Durdlebury would not have trusted Doggie with untold daughters. With women, old and young, he had no shynesses. He had been bred among them, understood their purely feminine interests, and instinctively took their point of view. On his visits to London, he could be entrusted with commissions. He could choose the exact shade of silk for a drawing-room sofa cushion, and had an unerring taste in the selection of wedding presents. Young men, other than budding ecclesiastical dignitaries, were rare in Durdlebury, and Doggie had little to fear from the competition of coarser masculine natures. In a word, Doggie was popular.

Although of no mean or revengeful nature, he was human enough to feel a little malicious satisfaction when it was proved to Durdlebury that Oliver had gone to the devil. His Aunt Sarah, Mrs. Manningtree, had died midway in the Phineas McPhail period; Mr. Manningtree a year or so later had accepted a living in the North of England, and died when Doggie was about four-and-twenty. Meanwhile Oliver, who had been withdrawn young from Rugby, where he had been a thorn in the side of the authorities, and had been pinned like a cockchafer to a desk in a family counting-house in Lothbury, E.C., had broken loose, quarrelled with his father, gone off with paternal malediction and a maternal heritage of a thousand pounds to California, and was lost to the family ken. When a man does not write to his family, what explanation can there be save that he is ashamed to do so? Oliver was ashamed of himself. He had taken to desperate courses. He was an outlaw. He had gone to the devil. His name was rarely mentioned in Durdlebury – to Marmaduke Trevor’s very great and catlike satisfaction. Only to the Dean’s ripe and kindly wisdom was his name not utterly anathema.

“My dear,” said he once to his wife, who was deploring her nephew’s character and fate – “I have hopes of Oliver even yet. A man must have something of the devil in him if he wants to drive the devil out.”

Mrs. Conover was shocked. “My dear Edward!” she cried.

“My dear Sophia,” said he, with a twinkle in his mild blue eyes that had puzzled her from the day when he first put a decorous arm round her waist. “My dear Sophia, if you knew what a ding-dong scrap of fiends went on inside me before I could bring myself to vow to be a virtuous milk-and-water parson, your hair, which is as long and beautiful as ever, would stand up straight on end.”

Mrs. Conover sighed.

“I give you up.”

“It’s too late,” said the Dean.

The Manningtrees, father and mother and son, were gone. Doggie bore the triple loss with equanimity. Then Peggy Conover, hitherto under the eclipse of boarding-schools, finishing schools and foreign travel, swam, at the age of twenty, within his orbit. When first they met, after a year’s absence, she very gracefully withered the symptoms of the cousinly kiss, to which they had been accustomed all their lives, by stretching out a long, frank, and defensive arm. Perhaps if she had allowed the salute, there would have been an end of the matter. But there came the phenomenon which, unless she was a minx of craft and subtlety, she did not anticipate; for the first time in his life he was possessed of a crazy desire to kiss her. Doggie fell in love. It was not a wild consuming passion. He slept well, he ate well, and he played the flute without a sigh causing him to blow discordantly into the holes of the instrument. Peggy vowing that she would not marry a parson, he had no rivals. He knew not even the pinpricks of jealousy. Peggy liked him. At first she delighted in him as in a new and animated toy. She could pull strings and the figure worked amazingly and amusingly. He proved himself to be a useful toy, too. He was at her beck all day long. He ran on errands, he fetched and carried. Peggy realized blissfully that she owned him. He haunted the Deanery.

One evening after dinner the Dean said:

“I am going to play the heavy father. How are things between you and Peggy?”

Marmaduke, taken unawares, reddened violently. He murmured that he didn’t know.

“You ought to,” said the Dean. “When a young man converts himself into a girl’s shadow, even although he is her cousin and has been brought up with her from childhood, people begin to gossip. They gossip even within the august precincts of a stately cathedral.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Marmaduke. “I’ve had the very best intentions.”

The Dean smiled.

“What were they?”

“To make her like me a little,” replied Marmaduke. Then, feeling that the Dean was kindly disposed, he blurted out awkwardly: “I hoped that one day I might ask her to marry me.”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” said the Dean.

“You haven’t done it yet?”

“No,” said Marmaduke.

“Why don’t you?”

“It seems taking such a liberty,” replied Marmaduke.

The Dean laughed. “Well, I’m not going to do it for you. My chief desire is to regularize the present situation. I can’t have you two running about together all day and every day. If you like to ask Peggy, you have my permission and her mother’s.”

“Thank you, Uncle Edward,” said Marmaduke.