Part 6

"Been playin' golf?" he asked, with a supercilious air when Eleanor had made the introduction. "Not my game. Don't get enough time for it."

Arthur noted that Turner's eyes were those of a man who was making too great demands on his vitality; tired eyes, shadowed with dark lines, and already thinly creased at the outer corners.

"Good, healthy game," he commented, staring rather contemptuously. "Keeps you in the open air."

"Oh! do you play for medical reasons?" Turner replied. "'Fraid I haven't the determination for that." And as he spoke he turned back to Eleanor intimating as plainly as he could that he had no further use for Arthur's company.

Eleanor's tone had a faint note of apology as she said: "Kenyon was asking my advice about something."

Arthur could not resist that chance. "You're rather great on giving advice, aren't you?" he asked, and was surprised to see that she winced as if he had hurt her.

"Am I?" was all she said, and Arthur instantly regretted his rudeness.

"I only meant," he began, "that you.... I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way."

She smiled sadly. "It's an ungrateful task in any case," she said, "and I'm afraid that in this case, too, my advice will not be taken."

Arthur excused himself and went on towards the house, wondering if she were advising young Turner, as she had advised himself, to fly the temptation of Hartling. Why had she done that? He was still unable to find any satisfactory reason for her recommendation of so drastic a course. He could not now believe that she had been jealous of his influence with her grandfather, and the theory that she had conceived so strong an aversion for his personality that she had desired to scare him away, was foolishly improbable. Eleanor was not like that. In some ways he rather admired her. Even Elizabeth always spoke nicely about her.

He was surprised to find an air of disturbance up at the house. Most of the Kenyons were in the drawing-room, but instead of sitting about their familiar occupations, they were gathered together in a group, engaged in what appeared to be a somewhat anxious conference. Their talk ceased abruptly as he came in, and both Mr and Mrs Turner faced round with an expression that was at once expectant and apprehensive. Arthur would have gone out again at once, but Turner hailed him by saying:--

"Hallo! Arthur. Seen my son anywhere?"

"Yes, he's on the middle terrace with Eleanor," Arthur said. "I was just introduced to him, but as they obviously did not want me, I came on up."

Turner looked at his brother-in-law, Kenyon, who shrugged his shoulders, but made no further comment; and they had returned to their discussion with an effect of rather desperate resignation before Arthur was fairly out of the room.

He wondered if there were some sort of affair, perhaps an engagement, between Eleanor and young Turner; and if the family as a whole objected on account of the nearness of the relationship? He decided that if they consulted him, as they generally did on any matter presumed to be within his province as a medical man, he would make it clear that a marriage of first cousins was not necessarily dangerous. Nevertheless, he despised Eleanor for her choice.

The function of dinner was even more formal than usual that night, and old Mr Kenyon had a prolonged lapse of consciousness that kept them all waiting for more than five minutes. These solemn intervals of suspense always produced in Arthur an effect of being present at some religious observance, and to-night he was more aware of it than usual. He remembered how, as a youth, he had been half-awed and half-exasperated when he attended the Sacrament at home by the ceremonial deliberation of his father. He had had an evangelical tendency, but in this service he had favoured quite an elaborate ritual of his own, and his bearing of the chalice and the paten from the ambry to the altar, and the subsequent presentation consecration, and personal acceptance of the elements had been conducted in a low, scarcely audible voice, and with an air of almost exaggerated reverence. Once or twice Arthur had sacrilegiously wondered if his father had found an unusual satisfaction in being the sole human instrument and representative of this mystery of the consecration, and had unduly prolonged the periods of silence involved? And to-night, the same thought crossed his mind with regard to old Kenyon. Was he, perhaps, extending the interval of waiting after he had recovered consciousness, exulting in the exercise of his power?

Instinctively Arthur glanced across the table at Eleanor. She was sitting very still, her hands in her lap, her eyes downcast, but he fancied that her expression conveyed something of impatience and revolt. Did she know? he asked himself. Was she inclined to be critical of her grandfather's whims? Was she, perhaps, desperately ready to marry young Turner in order to escape from Hartling?

As soon as the service was released again, he turned for information to Elizabeth.

"Is anything up?" he asked in an undertone. "Anything out of the ordinary?"

She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes and softly blew her relief. "We got a good dose to-night," she whispered, and continued, "That means there's going to be a fuss."

"About young Turner and Eleanor?" he tried.

"Eleanor? Where does Eleanor come in?" was her surprised response.

"I don't know. I thought possibly...." He hesitated, finding an unexpected difficulty in putting his guess into words.

"Nothing whatever to do with Eleanor," Elizabeth said, without waiting for him to finish his sentence.

"What is it, then?" he insisted.

"About him," she said, indicating Kenyon Turner. "I can't possibly tell you now."

But after dinner he received enlightenment as to the cause of the impending "fuss" from the prime disturber of the peace himself.

"Care to have a game of pills?" he asked, coming over to Arthur as they were leaving the dining-room.

His first instinct was to refuse. The conceit of the fellow annoyed him--he had two lines of braid down his dress trousers--but Arthur was on the top of his form just then, and was spurred by a desire to beat him at what was, no doubt, his own game. He had been so cursedly supercilious about playing golf for "medical reasons."

"Don't mind," he said in the true Hartling manner of one condescending to a casual visitor from the outside.

But although he did, in fact, beat young Turner, he realised that his victory was due to the fact that his opponent was "off his game," and could probably give him twenty in a hundred on ordinary occasions. Young Turner's touch was almost as delicate as his father's.

"I'm no earthly good to-night," he said, putting down his cue at the conclusion of the game. "All this business is such an infernal worry."

As he spoke he looked at Hubert--who had been exercising his predestinate function of marker--rather than at Arthur.

"You're not the only one," Hubert commented morosely.

Arthur, who had been continuing a break that had not been completed when he reached game, straightened his back and faced his cousin. "What is this business?" he asked.

Hubert, who had got into that uneasy-looking pose of his, looked down at his crossed ankles.

"The old man's so infernally difficult," he said.

"So cursedly tight with the money-bags," Turner explained.

"Have you been trying to milk him, then?" Arthur asked.

"Oh, well! the fact is I'm in a hole, on the rocks," Turner admitted. "I've put it off as long as I can, but something has cursedly well _got_ to be done now."

Hubert smiled contemptuously. "_Got_ to be done," he repeated. "Who's going to make him? What it'll end in 'll be your coming to live down here!"

"I'm damned if it will," Turner declared vehemently, but there was a note of fear in his voice as he continued: "It's out of the question. I mean I'm not doing so badly at the office and all that. If only the old man allowed me a decent screw, I should be all right. In an office like ours you simply have to be in everything that's going. Sometimes one of the partners 'll put you in to what he thinks is a good thing, for instance, and you're practically bound to have a fiver on. There's a lot of that sort of thing anyhow you can't keep out of."

"And how much notice d'you think the old man'll take of that?" Hubert asked, without looking up.

Turner almost whimpered. "He's _got_ to put me right," he protested, "absolutely _got_ to."

Hubert rocked silently from foot to foot. "He hasn't," he said quietly, "and you can't make him. You know that well enough. What did Eleanor say?"

"She promised to do all she could," Turner replied unhopefully, and added: "I'd sooner emigrate than come to live down here."

"Got the money for your passage?" Hubert inquired.

"I suppose I could get that somehow," Turner said. "Trouble'd be to dodge my creditors. Besides, some of the money must be paid--fellows in the office and so on. I couldn't let them down."

"You'll be living here before you're a week older," Hubert decided. "Safe as houses."

Turner began to pace up and down the billiard room. There was possibly a touch of the histrionic in his manner of doing it, but he was without question genuinely distressed.

"Oh, I'll be double damned if I do!" he repeated. "It's all very well for you--you seem to like this sort of life--but I'd be a raving lunatic in a month. I simply couldn't stand it. I--oh! God! I'll make the old man pay. Why the devil shouldn't he? He's got more money than he knows what to do with."

Hubert was quite unmoved by his cousin's emotion; indeed he seemed to take a melancholy pleasure in watching him. "When are you going to see him?" he asked.

"To-morrow morning," Turner said. "And, by the Lord, if he refuses I'll give him a piece of my mind."

Hubert smiled sadly. "Not you," he commented.

Arthur had not attempted to interrupt this conversation. Once more he had a sense of some curious mystery behind the commonplace situation. Both Hubert's dismal resignation and young Turner's too violent asseverations hinted at some quality in their grandfather's treatment of them that Arthur found it difficult to associate with the old man himself. It was true, certainly, that he had overlooked or forgotten to offer his medical attendant a salary, but he had none of the signs of the miser. Arthur knew that he gave freely to charities, and spent money without stint on the upkeep of Hartling. And did he not keep his whole family in idleness from one year's end to another?

"Why are you so sure that your grandfather will refuse?" Arthur now broke in, looking at Hubert.

Hubert exchanged a glance with young Turner, and it was the latter who answered.

"He's not sure," he protested. "Anyway, I'm not."

Hubert pursed his mouth and stared thoughtfully at the billiard table.

"Do you think he'll have a down on you for gambling?" Arthur asked.

Turner laughed brusquely. "Well, hardly," he said. "Been a pretty good gambler himself in his day. That was the way he made most of his money. Jolly shady some of his business was too, I've heard. He happened to bring it off, so it was all right. If he hadn't he'd have found himself on the wrong side of the big door."

"You _are_ a pretty damned fool, Ken, to talk like that," Hubert put in softly.

"Oh, well! it makes me so _wild_," Turner protested. "You know the whole amount's under fifteen hundred, and what's that to a man worth over half a million? The pater told me this evening that the old chap's worth _all_ that. Quite likely a heap more."

Hubert solemnly closed his left eye, and continued to stare at the billiard table with the other. "If you come to live down here, he'll put you in the will," he remarked.

Turner snorted impatiently. "It isn't _good_ enough," he said crossly. "Besides, it's a rotten game waiting for dead men's shoes."

"Specially if you can't damned well help yourself," Hubert agreed, without the least sign of being offended.

Arthur's general perplexity was not enlightened by this conversation, although he had now no further doubts as to the reason for Kenyon Turner's visit. There still remained that old suggestion of something taken for granted, something that was hidden from Arthur himself. The two men had apparently spoken quite frankly before him, and Turner, at least, had verged upon the indiscreet until Hubert had pulled him up. But behind all their talk lay the hint of an assumption that violated Arthur's feeling for common sense. This particular refusal of money could be accounted for. Old Mr Kenyon, if he had been a successful gambler himself, might feel a contempt for the failure, or he might, very reasonably, dislike young Turner. But why should he, in either case, want him to come and live at Hartling? Unless that alternative was being held over him as a kind of threat?

Nor did the temporary solution of the immediate problem elucidate the general situation. Kenyon Turner had his interview with his grandfather on Sunday morning, and left for town half an hour later in the Vauxhall.

Arthur, burning with curiosity, made an opportunity to get Hubert alone after lunch.

"Well, what happened this morning?" he asked.

"Given him a month," Hubert replied.

"How do you mean?" Arthur said.

"Month to think it over," Hubert elaborated. "If he'll chuck the city and come to live down here, the old man'll put him straight."

"And if he won't?"

"Then he can jolly well look out for himself."

"But, good Lord, why does Mr Kenyon want him to come and live here?" Arthur broke out.

"Thinks he'll be company for you and me, perhaps?" Hubert suggested.

"Oh! rot! He must have some reason," Arthur protested.

Hubert scratched his eyebrow.

"Don't you know what it is?" Arthur persisted.

Hubert seemed to purse not only his mouth but his whole face. "Can't say I do," he said, paused, and then continued in another voice: "I'm up against it too. You know Miss Martin, don't you? Didn't you meet her up at the club-house? Well--it's a case with her and me. And what the devil I'm going to do about it, I don't know."

VII

Arthur was instantly aware of a change of relationship between himself and Hubert. His cousin's statement constituted a confidence, the first he had received since he had been at Hartling. And it seemed that the mere offer of such a confidence revealed Hubert in a new light. At the moment he was no longer the "plus three" golfer, or the holder of a sinecure waiting for dead men's shoes, but a man with a personal history; he had ceased to be a type and had become an individual.

Arthur responded without hesitation.

"Does the old man know?" he asked.

"Not yet; I haven't dared to tell him," Hubert said.

"But you think he'll object?"

"Sure to."

"Why. Doesn't he approve of Miss Martin for some reason?" Arthur asked. He remembered her now--a jolly, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl of twenty or so, who had chaffed him for his devotion to golf. "You're all so dreadfully serious over it," she had said, or words to that effect. Odd that she should fall in love with the melancholy Hubert!

"He has never seen her--or heard of her probably," was Hubert's answer.

"But, good Lord, why are you so sure that he'll object then," Arthur said.

"Well, the truth is that we aren't too keen on staying here--afterwards--after we're married, I mean," Hubert admitted.

"And you don't think the old man could do without you?"

"Oh! it isn't that. I don't do anything, really," Hubert said. "Rankin runs the place. I'm only a figurehead."

Arthur had already suspected this fact, but he was surprised to hear his cousin state the case so frankly.

"I thought you seemed to have plenty of time on your hands," he commented.

"Simply nothing to do," Hubert agreed.

"All the same, you know that your grandfather wants to keep you here?"

"He wants to keep us all here, you included," Hubert said.

Arthur knew now that that was true. But this calm acknowledgment of the old man's peculiarity seemed to imply a comprehension of motive that was as yet quite beyond his own understanding.

They had been walking down through the spinney towards the power-house, and Arthur stopped in the quietness of the wood and laid his hand on his cousin's shoulder.

"I say," he said, "I can see that. He _does_ want to keep us here. But _why_ does he? Do you know? Is there some secret about it?"

"Lord, no--secret? Why should there be?" Hubert returned with perfect candour.

"Seems so damned rum," Arthur said, frowning. "Doesn't it to you?" And then a queer analogy flitted across his mind and he added: "It's like Pharaoh and the Israelites. I never could make out why he wanted to keep them."

"Oh! he's like that, always has been," Hubert replied, ignoring the uncomplimentary parallel. "And he gets worse. He's been frightfully difficult lately." He paused and warming to a closer confidence, went on, "The devil of it is that you never know what he's really after. If he got into a fearful pad, you'd know where you were, more or less. But he's always as cool as a cucumber. Makes you feel such an infernal ass."

"But suppose," Arthur suggested, "that you simply _didn't_ do what he wanted you to? Suppose, for instance, that you stuck it out you were going to marry Miss Martin and be damned to him. What could he do?"

The mere suggestion seemed to make Hubert uneasy. "Couldn't _do_ anything in a way," he grumbled. "But--well--no more could I. Her people aren't well off and I simply haven't got a bean of my own."

"You might get a job somewhere else as an estate agent?" Arthur put in.

Hubert shook his head. "Those jobs are jolly hard to get," he said. "I have thought about it. But I've had no experience really, not to count. And naturally I shouldn't get any testimonial from the old man, if I chucked this. Rankin would have ten times the chance I've got of a job like that, and you should hear him let himself go when he gets cold feet about anything. He's got five kids, you know, and he'd do any mortal thing not to offend the old man. And then, of course, he guesses that he's down for a bit in the will. They all do--all the servants, I mean. They're all hanging on on low wages." He gave a little bark of laughter as he concluded: "Like the rest of us."

"Rotten," Arthur agreed sympathetically. He had begun to like Hubert. It was not his fault that he had no backbone. He had never had a chance to develop one. And this affair with the jolly Miss Martin was quite the worst kind of luck.

They were still standing in the spinney wrapped about by the peace of the Sunday afternoon. It was a dull, windless day, threatening rain; and the very sounds of the wood served to emphasise the repose of humanity. The wheel at the generating station was not working, and except for the distant splash of the overfall and the faint humming of undistinguishable insects, the whole of Hartling seemed to be plunged in sleep.

Hubert took his cousin's arm and they walked on slowly toward the power-house.

"I expect you'll think it perfectly rotten of me to ask," he said in a low confidential voice; "but--you don't think there is any chance of his breaking up, do you?"

Arthur sincerely wished at the moment that he could give an encouraging reply, but he could find none.

"Don't see any signs of it," he said almost apologetically. "He's tremendously sound, lungs and heart and so on."

"But what about those fits of his?" Hubert asked.

"Well, I'm not sure," Arthur said. "They're a bit hard to diagnose. But I'm pretty sure they're not a sign of impending death."

"And he might go on like he is--perhaps for years."

Arthur hesitated. Desire was urging his thought, but he believed that he was giving a carefully weighed opinion when he replied: "Well, it wouldn't surprise me, as a matter of fact, if he went to pieces all at once. Physically, I can't find anything the matter with him, but I've never made a thorough examination. And, in a case like his, there's much more than the actual physical condition of the principal organs to be considered. I've wondered if he isn't held up, in a way, by his will-power. He keeps himself so aloof--if you know what I mean? Never lets himself get excited about any mortal thing; hardly seems interested, really...."

"Well, but is there any reason why he shouldn't go on holding himself up?" Hubert inquired, as Arthur paused.

"It might break him down if he were badly crossed," Arthur said.

They walked on in silence for a few yards, pondering the significance of that last pronouncement before Hubert said,----

"Couldn't do that, though, not on purpose. Be pretty much like murder, wouldn't it?"

"Pretty much," Arthur agreed. "And anyway, it's pure speculation on my part."

"I can't afford to cross him," Hubert went on, as though he had finally dismissed the thought of his cousin's speculations in pathology. "I expect you'll think I'm jolly soft, but I couldn't face being chucked out of here without a penny and no prospect of getting a job."

"But surely Uncle Joe would help you," Arthur put in.

"The pater! Good Lord! what could _he_ do?" Hubert said. "He hasn't got a red cent of his own. I don't suppose he could lay his hands on a fiver to save his life."

Once or twice in the course of the last few weeks Arthur had had a faint suspicion that ready money was rather scarce among the Kenyons, but he was shocked by this plain statement.

"Doesn't the old man allow them anything?" he asked.

"Not a bean--in cash," Hubert said. "Of course we can get anything we want in reason, but the old man pays all the bills. He isn't a bit mean that way. Never grumbles. Draws the line at jewellery, though, as you've probably noticed."

Arthur had not noticed that omission, but he instantly remembered it, and he saw now that the absence of jewellery gave some air of distinction to the Kenyon women. He approved the old man's taste in this particular. He hated to see women smothered in diamonds.

"Why's that?" he asked, passing by the admission of his failure to observe the phenomenon.

"Hates jewellery; always has," Hubert explained. "One of his fads. Says he'd as soon see women wear a ring in their nose as in their ears."

Arthur nodded. He had no inclination to enter into any discussion of the æsthetic value of jewellery as an aid to the enhancing of woman's beauty. And he was intrigued for the moment by the new aspect of Hartling that Hubert's confidences had unexpectedly revealed to him. The Kenyons seemed to be living a sort of communistic life, he reflected. They had goods, everything they wanted in reason, but no money. Well, it was an easy life--for the elderly and middle-aged. They had no responsibilities, no anxieties. He could understand now why they had all got into such slack habits. After all, why shouldn't they? They had no incentive to do anything but what they were doing. Indeed, it seemed that they had no power to alter their way of life. They were the slaves of a benevolent autocrat who demanded no service from them except respect. Hartling was a Utopia, a Thelema in which there was no necessity for work; and one soon forgot that it was also a prison.

He realised at the same time that he might have drawn these inferences for himself, and was slightly annoyed with his own obtuseness. He was, he thought, too much inclined to take things for granted. He had come down to Hartling with ready-made opinions and formal judgments. He had certainly been far too willing to judge the Kenyons, without knowing any of the facts of the case. But he condemned them no longer. It is true that they were not, as Eleanor might say, doing any good in the world, but they were no worse in that respect than the majority of rich people, and the Kenyons had the valid excuse that they could not help themselves.

Abruptly his thoughts returned to Hubert's troubles.

"I'll admit it's rotten luck about Miss Martin," he said, as if he were continuing their conversation. "But you do get a good time down here."