“‘Barbarians, Philistines, Populace!’”
The young golden-haired man of letters
who was lounging on the grass beside Arthur Meadows
repeated the words to himself in an absent voice,
turning over the pages meanwhile of a book lying before
him, as though in search of a passage he had noticed
and lost. He presently found it again, and turned
laughing towards Meadows, who was trifling with a
French novel.
“Do you remember this passage
in Culture and Anarchy ’I often,
therefore, when I want to distinguish clearly the aristocratic
class from the Philistines proper, or middle class,
name the former, in my own mind, the Barbarians.
And when I go through the country, and see this or
that beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning
the landscape, “There,” I say to myself,
“is a great fortified post of the Barbarians!"’”
The youth pointed smiling to the fine
Scotch house seen sideways on the other side of the
lawn. Its turreted and battlemented front rose
high above the low and spreading buildings which made
the bulk of the house, so that it was a feudal castle by
no means, however, so old as it looked on
a front view, and a large and roomy villa from the
rear. Meadows, looking at it, appreciated the
fitness of the quotation, and laughed in response.
“Ungrateful wretch,” he
said “after that dinner last night!”
“All the same, Matthew Arnold
had that dinner in mind chef and
all! Listen! ’The graver self of the
Barbarian likes honours and consideration; his more
relaxed self, field-sports and pleasures.’
Isn’t it exact? Grouse-driving in the morning bridge,
politics, Cabinet-making, and the best of food in
the evening. And I should put our hostess very
high wouldn’t you? among
the chatelaines of the ’great fortified posts’?”
Meadows assented, but rather languidly.
The day was extremely hot; he was tired, moreover,
by a long walk with the guns the day before, and by
conversation after dinner, led by Lady Dunstable, which
had lasted up to nearly one o’clock in the morning.
The talk had been brilliant, no doubt. Meadows,
however, did not feel that he had come off very well
in it. His hostess had deliberately pitted him
against two of the ablest men in England, and he was
well aware that he had disappointed her. Lady
Dunstable had a way of behaving to her favourite author
or artist of the moment as though she were the fancier
and he the cock. She fought him against the other
people’s cocks with astonishing zeal and passion;
and whenever he failed to kill, or lost too many feathers
in the process, her annoyance was evident.
Meadows was in truth becoming a little
tired of her dictation, although it was only ten days
since he had arrived under her roof. There was
a large amount of lethargy combined with his ability;
and he hated to be obliged to live at any pace but
his own. But Rachel Dunstable was an imperious
friend, never tired herself, apparently, either in
mind or body; and those who could not walk, eat, and
talk to please her were apt to know it. Her opinions
too, both political and literary, were in some directions
extremely violent; and though, in general, argument
and contradiction gave her pleasure, she had her days
and moods, and Meadows had already suffered occasional
sets-down, of a kind to which he was not accustomed.
But if he was just a little out
of love with his new friend, in all other respects
he was enjoying himself enormously. The long days
on the moors, the luxurious life indoors, the changing
and generally agreeable company, all the thousand
easements and pleasures that wealth brings with it,
the skilled service, the motors, the costly cigars,
the wines there was a Sybarite in Meadows
which revelled in them all. He had done without
them; he would do without them again; but there they
were exceedingly good creatures of God, while they
lasted; and only the hypocrites pretended otherwise.
His sympathy, in the old poverty-stricken days, would
have been all with the plaintive American--“There’s
d-----d good times in the world, and I ain’t
in ’em.”
All the same, the fleshpots of Pitlochry
had by no means put his wife out of his mind.
His incurable laziness and procrastination in small
things had led him to let slip post after post; but
that very morning, at any rate, he had really written
her a decent letter. And he was beginning to
be anxious to hear from her about the yachting plan.
If Lady Dunstable had asked him a few days later,
he was not sure he would have accepted so readily.
After all, the voyage might be stormy, and the lady difficult.
Doris must be dull in London, “poor
little cat!”
But then a very natural wrath returned
upon him. Why on earth had she stayed behind?
No doubt Lady Dunstable was formidable, but so was
Doris in her own way. “She’d soon
have held her own. Lady D. would have had to
come to terms!” However, he remembered with some
compunction that Doris did seem to have been a good
deal neglected at Crosby Ledgers, and that he had
not done much to help her.
It was an “off” day for
the shooters, and Lady Dunstable’s guests were
lounging about the garden, writing letters or playing
a little leisurely golf on the lower reaches of the
moor. Some of the ladies, indeed, had not yet
appeared downstairs; a sleepy heat reigned over the
valley with its winding stream, and veiled the distant
hills. Meadows’s companion, Ralph Barrow,
a young novelist of promise, had gone fast asleep on
the grass; Meadows was drowsing over his book; the
dogs slept on the terrace steps; and in the summer
silence the murmur of the river far below stole up
the hill on which the house stood, and its soft song
held the air.
Suddenly there was a disturbance.
The dogs sprang up and barked. There was a firm
step on the gravel. Lady Dunstable, stick in hand,
her short leather-bound skirt showing boots and gaiters
of the most business-like description, came quickly
towards the seat on which Meadows sat.
“Mr. Meadows, I summon you for
a walk! Sir Luke and Mr. Frome are coming.
We propose to get to the tarn and back before lunch.”
The tarn was at least two miles away,
a stiff climb over difficult moor. Meadows, startled
from something very near sleep, looked up, and a spirit
of revolt seized upon him, provoked by the masterful
tone and eyes of the lady.
“Very sorry, Lady Dunstable! but
I must write some letters before luncheon.”
“Oh no! put them
off! I have been thinking of what you told me
yesterday of your scheme for your new set of lectures.
I have a great deal to say to you about it.”
“I really shouldn’t be
worth talking to now,” laughed Meadows; “this
heat has made me so sleepy. To-night or
after tea by all means!”
Lady Dunstable looked annoyed.
“I am expecting the Duke’s
party at tea,” she said peremptorily. “This
will be my only chance to-day.”
“Then let’s put it off till
to-morrow!” said Meadows, as he rose, still
smiling. “It is most kind of you, but I
really must write my letters, and my brains are pulp.
But I will escort you through the garden, if I may.”
His hostess turned sharply, and walked
back towards the front of the house where Sir Luke
and Mr. Frome, a young and rising Under-Secretary,
were waiting for her. Meadows accompanied her,
but found her exceedingly ungracious. She did,
however, inform him, as they followed the other two
towards the exit from the garden, that she had come
to the conclusion that the subject he was proposing
for his second series of lectures, to be given at
Dunstable House during the winter, “would never
do.”
“Famous Controversies of the
Nineteenth Century political and religious.”
The very sound of it was enough to keep people away!
“What people expect from you is talk about persons not
ideas. Ideas are not your line!”
Meadows flushed a little. What
his “line” might be, he said, he had not
yet discovered. But he liked his subject, and
meant to stick to it.
Lady Dunstable turned on him a pair of sarcastic eyes.
“That’s so like you clever
people. You would die rather than take advice.”
“Advice! yes. As much as you
like, dear lady. But ”
“But what ” she asked, imperatively,
nettled in her turn.
“Well you must put
it prettily!” said Meadows, smiling. “We
want a great deal of jam with the powder.”
“You want to be flattered?
I never flatter! It is the most despicable of
arts.”
“On the contrary one
of the most skilled. And I have heard you do it
to perfection.”
His daring half irritated, half amused
her. It was her turn to flush. Her thin,
sallow face and dark eyes lit up vindictively.
“One should never remind one’s
friends of their vices,” she said with animation.
“Ah if they are
vices! But flattery is merely a virtue out of
place kindness gone wrong. From the
point of view of the moralist, that is. From
the point of view of the ordinary mortal, it is what
no men and few women can do
without!”
She smiled grimly, enjoying the spar.
They carried it on a little while, Meadows, now fairly
on his mettle, administering a little deft though
veiled castigation here and there, in requital for
various acts of rudeness of which she had been guilty
towards him and others during the preceding days.
She grew restive occasionally, but on the whole she
bore it well. Her arrogance was not of the small-minded
sort; and the best chance with her was to defy her.
At the gate leading on to the moor,
Meadows resolutely came to a stop.
“Your letters are the merest
excuse!” said Lady Dunstable. “I don’t
believe you will write one of them! I notice you
always put off unpleasant duties.”
“Give me credit at least for the intention.”
Smiling, he held the gate open for
her, and she passed through, discomfited, to join
Sir Luke on the other side. Mr. Frome, the Under-Secretary,
a young man of Jewish family and amazing talents, who
had been listening with amusement to the conversation
behind him, turned back to say to Meadows, at a safe
distance “Keep it up! Keep
it up! You avenge us all!”
Presently, as she and her two companions
wound slowly up the moor, Sir Luke Malford, who had
only arrived the night before, inquired gaily of his
hostess:
“So she wouldn’t come? the
little wife?”
“I gave her every chance. She scorned us.”
“You mean ’she
funked us.’ Have you any idea, I wonder,
how alarming you are?”
Lady Dunstable exclaimed impatiently:
“People represent me as a kind
of ogre. I am nothing of the kind. I only
expect everybody to play up.”
“Ah, but you make the rules!”
laughed Sir Luke. “I thought that young
woman might have been a decided acquisition.”
“She hadn’t the very beginnings
of a social gift,” declared his companion.
“A stubborn and rather stupid little person.
I am much afraid she will stand in her husband’s
way.”
“But suppose you blow up a happy
home, by encouraging him to come without her?
I bet anything she is feeling jealous and ill-used.
You ought I am sure you ought to
have a guilty conscience; but you look perfectly brazen!”
Sir Luke’s banter was generally
accepted with indifference, but on this occasion it
provoked Lady Dunstable. She protested with vehemence
that she had given Mrs. Meadows every chance, and
that a young woman who was both trivial and conceited
could not expect to get on in society. Sir Luke
gathered from her tone that she and Mrs. Meadows had
somewhat crossed swords, and that the wife might look
out for consequences. He had been a witness of
this kind of thing before in Lady Dunstable’s
circle; and he was conscious of a passing sympathy
with the pleasant-faced little woman he remembered
at Crosby Ledgers. At the same time he had been
Rachel Dunstable’s friend for twenty years; originally,
her suitor. He spent a great part of his life
in her company, and her ways seemed to him part of
the order of things.
Meanwhile Meadows walked back to the
house. He had been a good deal nettled by Lady
Dunstable’s last remark to him. But he had
taken pains not to show it. Doris might say such
things to him but no one else. They
were, of course, horribly true! Well quarrelling
with Lady Dunstable was amusing enough when
there was room to escape her. But how would it
be in the close quarters of a yacht?
On his way through the garden he fell
in with Miss Field Mattie Field, the plump
and smiling cousin of the house, who was apparently
as necessary to the Dunstables in the Highlands, as
in London, or at Crosby Ledgers. Her rôle in
the Dunstable household seemed to Meadows to be that
of “shock absorber.” She took all
the small rubs and jars on her own shoulders, so that
Lady Dunstable might escape them. If the fish
did not arrive from Edinburgh, if the motor broke
down, if a gun failed, or a guest set up influenza,
it was always Miss Field who came to the rescue.
She had devices for every emergency. It was generally
supposed that she had no money, and that the Dunstables
made her residence with them worth while. But
if so, she had none of the ways of the poor relation.
On the contrary, her independence was plain; she had
a very free and merry tongue; and Lady Dunstable,
who snubbed everybody, never snubbed Mattie Field.
Lord Dunstable was clearly devoted to her.
She greeted Meadows rather absently.
“Rachel didn’t carry you
off? Oh, then I wonder if I may ask
you something?”
Meadows assured her she might ask him anything.
“I wonder if you will save yourself
for a walk with Lord Dunstable. Will you ask
him? He’s very low, and you would cheer
him up.”
Meadows looked at her interrogatively.
He too had noticed that Lord Dunstable had seemed
for some days to be out of spirits.
“Why do people have sons!” said Miss Field,
briskly.
Meadows understood the reference.
It was common knowledge among the Dunstables’
friends that their son was anything but a comfort to
them.
“Anything particularly wrong?”
he asked her in a lowered voice, as they neared the
house. At the same time, he could not help wondering
whether, under all circumstances if her
nearest and dearest were made mincemeat in a railway
accident, or crushed by an earth-quake this
fair-haired, rosy-cheeked lady would still keep her
perennial smile. He had never yet seen her without
it.
Miss Field replied in a joking tone
that Lord Dunstable was depressed because the graceless
Herbert had promised his parents a visit a
whole week in August, and had now cried
off on some excuse or other. Meadows inquired
if Lady Dunstable minded as much as her husband.
“Quite!” laughed Miss
Field. “It is not so much that she wants
to see Herbert as that she’s found someone to
marry him to. You’ll see the lady this
afternoon. She comes with the Duke’s party,
to be looked at.”
“But I understand that the young
man is by no means manageable?”
Miss Field’s amusement increased.
“That’s Rachel’s
delusion. She knows very well that she hasn’t
been able to manage him so far; but she’s always
full of fresh schemes for managing him. She thinks,
if she could once marry him to the right wife, she
and the wife between them could get the whip hand of
him.”
“Does she care for him?” said Meadows,
bluntly.
Miss Field considered the question,
and for the first time Meadows perceived a grain of
seriousness in her expression. But she emerged
from her meditations, smiling as usual.
“She’d be hard hit if anything very bad
happened!”
“What could happen?”
“Well, of course they never
know whether he won’t marry to please himself produce
somebody impossible!”
“And Lady Dunstable would suffer?”
Miss Field chuckled.
“I really believe you think
her a kind of griffin a stony creature with
a hole where her heart ought to be. Most of her
friends do. Rachel, of course, goes through life
assuming that none of the disagreeable things that
happen to other people will ever happen to her.
But if they ever did happen ”
“The very stones would cry out?
But hasn’t she lost all influence with the youth?”
“She won’t believe it.
She’s always scheming for him. And when
he’s not here she feels so affectionate and
so good! And directly he comes ”
“I see! A tragedy and
a common one! Well, in half an hour I shall be
ready for his lordship. Will you arrange it?
I must write a letter first.”
Miss Field nodded and departed.
Meadows honestly meant to follow her into the house
and write some pressing business letters. But
the sunshine was so delightful, the sight of the empty
bench and the abandoned novel on the other side of
the lawn so beguiling, that after all he turned his
lazy steps thither-ward, half ashamed, half amused
to think how well Lady Dunstable had read his character.
The guests had all disappeared.
Meadows had the garden to himself, and all its summer
prospect of moor and stream. It was close on noon a
hot and heavenly day! And again he thought of
Doris cooped up in London. Perhaps, after all,
he would get out of that cruise!
Ah! there was the morning train the
midnight express from King’s Cross just arriving
in the busy little town lying in the valley at his
feet. He watched it gliding along the valley,
and heard the noise of the brakes. Were any new
guests expected by it? he wondered. Hardly!
The Lodge seemed quite full.
Twenty minutes later he threw away
the novel impatiently. Midway, the story had
gone to pieces. He rose from his feet, intending
this time to tackle his neglected duties in earnest.
As he did so, he heard a motor climbing the steep
drive, and in front of it a lady, walking.
He stood arrested in a stupor of astonishment.
Doris! by all the gods! Doris!
It was indeed Doris. She came
wearily, looking from side to side, like one uncertain
of her way. Then she too perceived Meadows, and
stopped.
Meadows was conscious of two mixed
feelings first, a very lively pleasure
at the sight of her, and then annoyance. What
on earth had she come for? To recover him? to
protest against his not writing? to make
a scene, in short? His guilty imagination in a
flash showed her to him throwing herself into his
arms weeping on this wide lawn for
all the world to see.
But she did nothing of the kind.
She directed the motor, which was really a taxi from
the station, to stop without approaching the front
door, and then she herself walked quickly towards her
husband.
“Arthur! you got
my letter? I could only write yesterday.”
She had reached him, and they had
joined hands mechanically.
“Letter? I got no
letter! If you posted one, it has probably arrived
by your train. What on earth, Doris, is the meaning
of this? Is there anything wrong?”
His expression was half angry, half
concerned, for he saw plainly that she was tired and
jaded. Of course! Long journeys always knocked
her up. She meanwhile stood looking at him as
though trying to read the impression produced on him
by her escapade. Something evidently in his manner
hurt her, for she withdrew her hand, and her face stiffened.
“There is nothing wrong with
me, thank you! Of course I did not come without
good reason.”
“But, my dear, are you come
to stay?” cried Meadows, looking helplessly
at the taxi. “And you never wrote to Lady
Dunstable?”
For he could only imagine that Doris
had reconsidered her refusal of the invitation which
had originally included them both, and either
tired of being left alone, or angry with him for not
writing had devised this coup de main,
this violent shake to the kaleidoscope. But what
an extraordinary step! It could only cover them
both with ridicule. His cheeks were already burning.
Doris surveyed him very quietly.
“No I didn’t
write to Lady Dunstable I wrote to you and
sent her a message. I suppose I shall
have to stay the night.”
“But what on earth are we to
say to her?” cried Meadows in desperation.
“They’re out walking now but
she’ll be back directly. There isn’t
a corner in the house! I’ve got a little
bachelor room in the attics. Really, Doris, if
you were going to do this, you should have given both
her and me notice! There is a crowd of people
here!”
Frown and voice were Jovian indeed.
Doris, however, showed no tremors.
“Lady Dunstable will find somewhere
to put me up,” she said, half scornfully.
“Is there a telegram for me?”
“A telegram? Why should
there be a telegram? What is the meaning of all
this? For heaven’s sake, explain!”
Doris, however, did not attempt to
explain. Her mood had been very soft on the journey.
But Arthur’s reception of her had suddenly stirred
the root of bitterness again; and it was shooting
fast and high. Whatever she had done or left
undone, he ought not to have been able to conceal
that he was glad to see her he ought not
to have been able to think of Lady Dunstable first!
She began to take a pleasure in mystifying him.
“I expected a telegram.
I daresay it will come soon. You see I’ve
asked someone else to come this afternoon and
she’ll have to be put up too.”
“Asked someone else! to
Lady Dunstable’s house!” Meadows stood
bewildered. “Really, Doris, have you taken
leave of your senses?”
She stood with shining eyes, apparently
enjoying his astonishment. Then she suddenly
bethought herself.
“I must go and pay the taxi.”
Turning round, she coolly surveyed the “fortified
post.” “It looks big enough to take
me in. Arthur! I think you may pay
the man. Just take out my bag, and tell the footman
to put it in your room. That will do for the
present. I shall sit down here and wait for Lady
Dunstable. I’m pretty tired.”
The thought of what the magnificent
gentleman presiding over Lady Dunstable’s hall
would say to the unexpected irruption of Mrs. Meadows,
and Mrs. Meadows’s bag, upon the “fortified
post” he controlled, was simply beyond expressing.
Meadows tried to face his wife with dignity.
“I think we’d better keep
the taxi, Doris. Then you and I can go back to
the hotel together. We can’t force ourselves
upon Lady Dunstable like this, my dear. I’d
better go and tell someone to pack my things.
But we must, of course, wait and see Lady Dunstable though
how you will explain your coming, and get yourself and
me out of this absurd predicament, I cannot
even pretend to imagine!”
Doris sat down wearily.
“Don’t keep the taxi,
Arthur. I assure you Lady Dunstable will be very
glad to keep both me and my bag. Or
if she won’t Lord Dunstable will.”
Meadows came nearer bent down to study
her tired face.
“There’s some mystery,
of course, Doris, in all this! Aren’t you
going to tell me what it means?”
His wife’s pale cheeks flushed.
“I would have told you if
you’d been the least bit glad to see me!
But if you don’t pay the taxi, Arthur,
it will run up like anything!”
She pointed peremptorily to the ticking
vehicle and the impatient driver. Meadows went
mechanically, paid the driver, shouldered the bag,
and carried it into the hall of the Lodge. He
then perceived that two grinning and evidently inquisitive
footmen, waiting in the hall for anything that might
turn up for them to do, had been watching the whole
scene the arrival of the taxi, and the meeting
between the unknown lady and himself, through a side
window.
Burning to box someone’s ears,
Meadows loftily gave the bag to one of them with instructions
that it should be taken to his room, and then turned
to rejoin his wife.
As he crossed the gravel in front
of the house, his mind ran through all possible hypotheses.
But he was entirely without a clue except
the clue of jealousy. He could not hide from
himself that Doris had been jealous of Lady Dunstable,
and had perhaps been hurt by his rather too numerous
incursions into the great world without her, his apparent
readiness to desert her for cleverer women. “Little
goose! as if I ever cared twopence for
any of them!” he thought angrily.
“And now she makes us both laughing-stocks!”
And yet, Doris being Doris a
proud, self-contained, well-bred little person, particularly
sensitive to ridicule the whole proceeding
became the more incredible the more he faced it.
One o’clock! striking
from the church tower in the valley! He hurried
towards the slight figure on the distant seat.
Lady Dunstable might return at any moment. He
foresaw the encounter the great lady’s
insolence Doris’s humiliation and
his own. Well, at least let him agree with Doris
on a common story, before his hostess arrived.
He sped across the grass, very conscious,
as he approached the seat, of Doris’s drooping
look and attitude. Travelling all those hours! and
no doubt without any proper breakfast! However
Lady Dunstable might behave, he would carry Doris
into the Lodge directly, and have her properly looked
after. Miss Field and he would see to that.
Suddenly a sound of talk
and laughter, from the shrubbery which divided the
flower garden from the woods and the moor. Lady
Dunstable emerged, with her two companions on either
hand. Her vivid, masculine face was flushed with
exercise and discussion. She seemed to be attacking
the Under-Secretary, who, however, was clearly enjoying
himself; while Sir Luke, walking a little apart, threw
in an occasional gibe.
“I tell you your land policy
here in Scotland will gain you nothing; and in England
it will lose you everything. Hullo!”
Lady Dunstable’s exclamation,
as she came to a stop and put up a tortoise-shell
eyeglass, was clearly audible.
“Doris!” cried Meadows
excitedly in his wife’s ear “Look
here! what are you going to say! what
am I to say! that you got tired of London, and wanted
some Scotch air? that we intend to go off
together? For goodness’ sake, what
is it to be?”
Doris rose, her lips breaking irrepressibly into smiles.
“Never mind, Arthur; I’ll get through
somehow.”