Part 8

Joe Kenyon paused as if savouring his recollection, taking reflective pride, perhaps, in his power of "seeing," and then continued with a chuckle, "And this chap Payne was all taken aback. He hadn't expected a place like this evidently. Jim hadn't told him anything, I suppose, and Payne probably thought we weren't much better off than Jim. He put it in a bit thick, I remember, about Jim's poverty over there. Nice, decent sort of people. We heard from 'em once or twice afterwards, inquiring after Eleanor, and then they went back to South America and we lost touch with them; though I believe Eleanor still hears from them occasionally. However, what I was going to say was that we didn't know, of course, whether the old man would have Eleanor or not. Esther wouldn't have anything to do with it, so in the end your aunt and I took Eleanor up to show her to the old man, and as luck would have it he took a tremendous fancy to her. She's been his favourite ever since." He hesitated a moment before he added: "But there's never been any question of our being jealous of her, of course. She has told us that if by any chance the old man left her the bulk of his property, she wouldn't keep it. She wouldn't, either. In fact I shouldn't be at all sorry if it was that way. You could trust Eleanor to be absolutely fair--and generous."

Joe Kenyon stopped speaking, but for a time Arthur made no comment on the story he had just heard. His attention seemed to be following two strands at the same moment. One side of his mind was attempting to weigh his uncle's motives in making all these confidences. Had he and his sister been quarrelling? There had been more than one reference to Miss Kenyon that had sounded distinctly bitter, and the emphasis he had laid on his last sentence might have implied that he hoped that if in some moment of aberration his father made an unjust will, he might be at the mercy of Eleanor rather than be dependent on the goodwill of his sister.

The other side of Arthur's mind was engaged in the contemplation of a desolate little fairy standing in the hall of Hartling House solemnly awaiting her fate. Even now, she had sometimes a look of desolation, of loneliness. He wondered if she still remembered her early troubles, if she occasionally grieved for her father and mother?

"I hope I haven't bored you with all this?" his uncle's voice murmured. "It is--to tell you the truth--a relief to let oneself go a little to some one who doesn't know. I dare say you can't understand that?"

"I can. Rather," Arthur said, suddenly appreciating the fact that his uncle's motive was the purely personal one of relief. "I can quite understand now you must get fed up with all this sometimes."

Joe Kenyon sighed, but he did not otherwise comment on this expression of sympathy. "I've been yarning so, we've got rather away from the point," he said. "But you know, Arthur, I don't want you to go into this affair of Hubert's without knowing what you are doing. There it is, my boy. You may be cutting your own throat. I assure you the old man will put you out at an hour's notice if you happen to get on his wrong side."

"Honestly, uncle, I don't care a little hang about that," Arthur affirmed bravely. "I never meant to stay here and I've had a jolly six weeks."

"Of course we shall have to say something to Esther first," his uncle replied.

"Oh, of course," Arthur agreed readily, but for a moment his heart sank. Miss Kenyon's influence was probably very considerable, he reflected. A few minutes earlier he had been eager to come to a clash of wills with her. He was still ready to do that. But it might be that, even if he defeated her in this, she would work against him afterwards, and that he would have to leave Hartling. And when he faced that possibility he was sure that, after all, he did not want to go. The world outside was an uncomfortable, unprotected place, in which there would be no luxuries for him, and he would have to work very hard in uncongenial circumstances in order to make a bare living. Also, he would be sorry to go now that he was just beginning to know these relations of his a little better. Hubert was a good chap, and so was Uncle Joe. He had not properly understood them until to-day. And now that he knew her story, he would like to know something more of Eleanor. There was something fine about her, and the thought of that "dark, solemn little chit" in the hall made him feel oddly tender towards her.

The darkness had fallen, and the clouds had reassembled in tremendous masses that were moving with strange swiftness across the sky. Leaning back and looking upward it was interesting to contrast the windless quiet of the garden in which they were sitting with the evidences of the tumult above.

"It's beginning to rain," his uncle suddenly exclaimed, breaking a long silence. "We'd better go."

Arthur was prepared for some display of temper on the part of Miss Kenyon when he and his uncle entered the drawing-room, and was disappointed to find that she displayed her habitual air of cold reserve. He was a trifle nervous and apprehensive now, about this projected embassy of his, and would have been glad to have been stiffened by some show of active opposition. Miss Kenyon had, he thought, something of the same awful detachment that her father exhibited towards every-day affairs. All the older members of the party were there. Turner had a novel in his hand, the three women were busy with their usual fancy-work, but to-night they had drawn together in a group by one of the windows, with an effect of being in conference.

Joe Kenyon's action in pulling up a chair and joining the group held a faint suggestion of bravado. He had the uneasy air of a man coming to a confession of his own weakness.

Arthur preferred to stand, leaning against the jamb of the window. It gave him a physical sense of superiority to look down upon his antagonist.

Joe Kenyon plunged at once into what Arthur judged to be relatively a side issue. "Arthur and I have been talking about Hubert's engagement," he said. "Hubert had been telling him all about it this afternoon; and Arthur has suggested that he should say something to my father."

If he had deliberately intended an effect of surprise he had attained his object. They were undoubtedly startled by this announcement, and not less obviously puzzled. It was not, however, Arthur's part in the affair that seemed to perplex them. None of them looked up at him, they were all staring at Joe Kenyon, with an expression that seemed, Arthur thought, to be seeking for a private sign. But so far as he could see, none was given. Joe Kenyon was leaning back in his chair and wiping his forehead. "This rain ought to cool the air a bit," he interjected in an undertone. "Beastly hot in here."

"Very friendly of Arthur," Turner commented, turning slightly towards the young man as he spoke. "No reason, after all, why he should bother himself about our affairs."

"I suppose he understands ..." his wife began, and then stopped abruptly. She was still looking anxiously at her brother as if inviting further confidences.

Joe Kenyon nodded. "Oh, of course, of course," he said. "Hubert told him all about it this afternoon."

"About what, Joe?" Miss Kenyon put in, speaking for the first time. She gave him no indication of perturbation or anxiousness, but she was reading her brother's face as if she sought some evidence of his secret motive.

"Well, about the engagement, and having no money and so on," Joe Kenyon rather desperately explained.

"No money?" his sister returned, with a lift of her eyebrows. "What do you mean, by having no money?"

"Well, Hubert hasn't any, not of his own," her brother replied. "And he was saying, I gather, that he would like--well--a change of air if he were married. About enough of us here, without him, perhaps. That sort of thing. And Arthur very generously offered through me to lend him a couple of hundred pounds if he wanted it."

Whether or not he had intended to create a diversion by this further announcement, he had certainly achieved that object.

Turner gave an exclamation of surprise, but it was Mrs Kenyon who answered.

"Oh, but we couldn't _possibly_ accept that," in an agitated voice; and Arthur, looking down, saw that her hands were trembling. She was, he realised then, by far the most nervous of the five, and he recognised in her at that moment a strong likeness to his own mother. She, too, had been a timid woman, apprehensive not only of danger, but also of change. Miss Kenyon had let her work fall in her lap, and was sitting, plunged, apparently, in a fit of deep abstraction.

"No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon replied. "I have already refused that."

"On what grounds?" Miss Kenyon put in sharply.

"Er--I don't think--I suggested, Esther, that Hubert would be--well, rather lost if he were to find himself in a new country with a wife to support on a capital of £200."

Miss Kenyon gave a short impatient sniff, and turned to Arthur. "A little strange, isn't it," she asked, "for you to offer to finance us?"

"Only Hubert, you know," Arthur explained.

"Hubert has a father and mother alive, to say nothing of uncles and aunts," she returned. "I don't know why he should need help from a comparative stranger."

"He seemed to need it," Arthur said dryly, "or I shouldn't have made the offer."

Miss Kenyon shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her brother. "Are we to understand, Joe," she said, "that Arthur Woodroffe knows all about us now? Have you told him everything?"

"Damn it, Esther, what do you mean by everything?" Joe Kenyon exploded defensively. "I--it seems to me--Hubert had pretty well told him all that mattered, before I said a word. I told him about Jim, if that's what you mean?"

Miss Kenyon began to drum her fingers on the arm of her chair. "And what good do you expect to do to yourself or anybody else by speaking to my father about Hubert's engagement?" she asked Arthur.

Turner leant back in his chair and crossed his legs. "Precisely, that's the real point," he agreed.

"Well, naturally, I hope to persuade Mr Kenyon to sanction the engagement," Arthur said.

"Why?" snapped Miss Kenyon.

"Friendship for Hubert," Arthur said.

"I wasn't aware that you and he were such great friends," was Miss Kenyon's criticism of that explanation.

"Oh, well, pretty fair," Arthur compromised. "Anyhow, I'll be glad to help him if I can."

"I can't imagine that anything you could say to my father would carry the least weight," Miss Kenyon said dryly.

"Perhaps not," Arthur agreed. "No harm in trying, though, is there?"

"I think that's quite true, you know, Esther," Mrs Kenyon put in, "and it would be rather a relief if--that is, I hope, for Hubert's sake at all events, something can be done to smooth things over."

Miss Kenyon turned from her sister-in-law with a slight suggestion of contempt. "Do you know this girl, Dorothy Martin?" she asked, looking at her brother.

"Slightly," he said. "Met her twice, I think. Seemed a jolly girl, I thought. Full of life."

"Quite a nice girl," his wife put in eagerly.

"Oh! you've met her too, have you?" Miss Kenyon commented coldly.

"At the Club House. Hubert took me up there to tea, the day before yesterday, on purpose to introduce me," Mrs Kenyon explained, with a pathetic air of apology.

Arthur had drawn many false inferences about the affairs at Hartling, but it was quite clear to him now that although there might, as his uncle had said, be some tacit agreement as to the Kenyons' attitude toward the head of the house, Miss Kenyon had certainly not been given any confidences concerning Hubert's engagement.

"She has no money of her own, I suppose?" was the next question.

Joe Kenyon and his wife looked at each other rather helplessly, and it seemed that no further answer was needed, for Miss Kenyon at once continued, "Folly, absurd folly, and you know it. If Arthur Woodroffe likes to make a fool of himself, he can. What he does or does not do is neither here nor there. But I shall have no hand in it, and any influence I have with my father...."

She had risen to her feet as she spoke, and now stood with her hands clenched, an erect and dominating figure. She was over sixty, but she was still a handsome woman, full of vitality and energy; and at that moment Arthur could not but concede her a grudging measure of admiration. He felt as if he had seen her fully awake for the first time. Her rather pale blue eyes were suddenly keen and alert, and there was an air of mastery about her that reminded him of her father. By the side of her, Mrs Turner and her brother with their sandy-gray hair and their tendency to an untidy corpulence, seemed to belong to another race. Esther, if the head of the house was to be taken as the standard, was the only true Kenyon of the second generation, unless Eleanor's father, the errant, independent James, had been of his sister's breed? Had he, perhaps, had his sister's hands also; those white, strong managing hands that were now so threateningly clenched?

She stood there for a moment, dominating them all, while she allowed the threat of her unfinished sentence to take effect; then she turned and left the room with a quiet dignity that was in itself a menace.

Nevertheless, Arthur at least had not been intimidated by her outburst, and her contemptuous reference to himself had provided him with the very stimulant he desired. Moreover, he had now a fierce desire to humiliate his handsome opponent, a desire that arose from a new source. He had seen her as a woman for the first time, and he was aware in himself of a hitherto unrealised impulse to cruelty. He wanted to break and dominate that proud, erect figure. However sneeringly she had challenged him, and in the zest of his unsatisfied youth, he longed to conquer her, although his victory could be but the barren victory of the intellect.

He took the seat Miss Kenyon had just vacated with a pleasant sense of mastery. He felt that he could do anything he liked with the other four. They were all of them looking, just then, so completely cowed and depressed. Joe Kenyon and his sister were crumpled into their chairs, with an air of rather absurd dejection. Mrs Kenyon had resumed her fancy work and was bending over it in an attitude that suggested the possibility of hidden tears; and Turner, nervously twisting his exquisitely neat little moustache, was staring thoughtfully at his own reflection in the darkened window.

"I don't see why _we_ shouldn't help Hubert, all the same," Arthur tried, by way of making a beginning.

Little Turner withdrew his gaze from the window and regarded the intrepid youth with an expression of half-amused pity.

"You don't _know_," was his only comment.

"Well, I think I do, to a certain extent," Arthur said boldly. "Uncle Joe told me a good many things to-night, one way and another. More than he cared to admit, perhaps, before Miss Kenyon."

He had made a deliberate bid for inclusion into their secret counsels by that last sentence, and he had at least succeeded in stimulating their interest.

"Oh, well, well," his uncle said, sitting up with an effect of reinflation, "perhaps I did. Esther's got a queer temper, now and then. And possibly I told you more than was altogether discreet." He looked at his brother-in-law as he added, "I'll admit to being a bit down in the mouth about the whole affair."

"But do you really think," Mrs Kenyon began unhopefully, "that it would be any _good_ for you to come into the affair at all?"

"Well, I'm perfectly free, you know," Arthur said, and instantly realised that he had said the forbidden thing. They could not bear that admission of bondage in a full company.

"Can't see that that's anything to do with it," Turner replied. "We're all free enough, so far as that goes. Point is, whether your interference is advisable; whether you might not put Mr Kenyon's back up and make things a hundred times worse for Hubert."

Arthur chose to overlook the snub. "Well, I don't see that it could do any harm," he said. He felt pleasantly young and capable among those four old people; he believed that they were too inert to oppose him, that they would accept any leader capable of taking the initiative. "Anything I did," he continued, "would only react on me, and I--don't care. Uncle Joe has warned me that Mr Kenyon may sling me out of the house at an hour's notice, but I'm perfectly willing to take that risk."

No one answered him. For the second time in two minutes he had all too clearly displayed their weakness with his youthful boast of freedom, and this time they had no defence but to ignore him. For a few seconds there was a painful, uneasy silence, and then Turner looked at Mrs Kenyon and said, in a confidential tone,--

"What does Eleanor say about it all? I suppose you've asked her advice?"

"She thinks he'll be against it," Mrs Kenyon said timidly. "But nothing has been said to him as yet. She--she would like Hubert to go away--but I can't see how--even if we accepted...." She glanced at Arthur as she concluded.

"Oh, well," Turner replied, standing up, "we'll have to leave it at that presumably. No good in our interfering, obviously." And he looked at his wife, who began to fumble her work into an untidy bundle, preparatory to getting to her feet.

"With our own trouble hanging over us," she remarked allusively, and added, "What's going to happen to poor Ken, I don't know. He's determined that he won't come to live here."

They were all standing now, saying good-night, but Joe Kenyon lagged behind with Arthur as they trailed across the spaces of the drawing-room.

"I'm afraid it's no good, you know," he murmured, "very generous of you to make the offer, all the same."

When he was alone in his own delightful bedroom, Arthur stood at the open window, listening to the sound of the rain and inhaling the welcome scents of the grateful earth. Already his mood of resentment against these four impotent old people had passed. They had snubbed and checked him, given him to understand that though he might, indeed, know something of the facts of their position, he knew nothing of the spirit. But he could not cherish anger against them, nor even contempt. They had been in shackles too long; he could not reasonably expect them to enter with him into any kind of conspiracy against the old man. They were so helpless, so completely dependent upon his goodwill. Nevertheless, although they had given him no authority, he meant to persist in his endeavour although he risked expulsion from this Paradise of comfort and well-being. He was genuinely anxious to help his uncle, aunt, and cousin, and he thrilled at the thought of crossing swords with Miss Kenyon. If he defeated her, it would, indeed, be a glorious victory.

And, possibly, Eleanor would be on his side? He had an amazingly clear picture of her in his mind, a forlorn, independent child, in the midst of the splendours of the Hartling hall. He could see her standing by the side of the colossal elephant's pad; an amazing contrast between the slender and the gross.

What was it his uncle had called her? "A lovely, solemn little chit?" Yes, she was lovely. He had hardly realised it until now. Perhaps she would change her opinion of him after to-morrow.

VIII

Arthur's usual hour for his morning interview with old Mr Kenyon was 11 o'clock, but two or three times a week he received a message either at breakfast or immediately after, releasing him from attendance. He had been prepared for such a reprieve this morning, imagining that the old man might be a trifle exhausted by his passage of arms with Kenyon Turner the day before, but as no message arrived he went into the library to read the morning papers for an hour and a half before going upstairs.

All the important journals were taken at Hartling, most of them in duplicate; and Arthur was probably the only member of the household who had ever considered the expense involved. He had calculated once that, including magazines and other periodicals, more than a hundred pounds a year were spent under this head alone. But the expenditure of the place was all on the same magnificent scale. Arthur remembered his uncle's whimsical comment that cigars were not provided in the workhouse, and smiled grimly at the thought that the inmates of Hartling were the most pampered paupers in the world.

The library was empty that morning. Arthur generally found Hubert there at that time, but he had presumably had breakfast even earlier than usual and gone out. Nor did Mr Turner, who came in half an hour later, settle himself down there to his customary study of the _Times_. Instead he nodded a curt good-morning to Arthur, selected half a dozen papers, and immediately retired with them to some other room.

After that Arthur was left severely alone. The inference was clear enough: the Kenyons did not wish to appear in the cause he was going to plead. They might approve his intention but they preferred not to influence it. If he failed, they would deny any kind of responsibility for what he had said. Their attitude had been foreshadowed in the course of their conversation the previous night. "No good _our_ interfering," Turner had said. They were afraid of being dismissed from their luxurious almshouse.

Arthur put down his paper, walked across to the window, and stood there looking out into the gardens. It had rained heavily in the night and there was more rain coming. Low wisps of ashen gray cloud were travelling intently across the dark purples of the heavy background, and the horizon was hidden by the mist of an approaching downpour. It was not a day, he reflected, remembering many such days, to spend in going from house to house through fountains of London mud; nor in receiving poor patients at the surgery. How their wet clothes reeked! They brought all the worst of the weather in with them, the mud and the wet invaded the consulting room; one was never dry or clean on such days as these.

Instinctively he rubbed his hands together, and then looked down at them. They were better kept than when he had first come to Hartling; it had been impossible to keep his hands like that in Peckham. He liked the brown of their tan, deeper on the back than at the finger tips, and his nails were rather good. It was worth while now to spend a little time on them.

Were the Kenyons to be pitied? They were not free, of course, but no one was free. They were certainly more free living their life here than he would be if he went back to Peckham. It was a dog's life that, even Somers couldn't deny it.

The tall trees in the garden were bent by a rush of wind, and the rain suddenly spattered furiously against the plate glass of the window. How protected one was here! Hartling windows did not rattle in the gale, nor let in the wet. A day such as this gave a zest to the comfort of it all. And although one could not go out there was plenty to do, any amount of books to read, billiards with Turner, and probably they would play bridge in the afternoon--his uncle, Turner, and Elizabeth all played quite a good game....

If the old man turned him out for interfering in a matter in which he was not concerned, he would have to go back to Somers for a night or two. If he was not very careful with the little money still left to him, he would have to give up the idea of Canada altogether. Living in a place like this for five weeks changed one's scale of values. He did not look forward to "roughing it" so much as he had before he came away from Peckham.