The applause was hearty. The singer’s face became creased with smiles. They cried him encore, and he stood with his eyes on the ceiling, waiting for the din to subside. Some ten yards below the soles of his boots lay the bones of Koor and Hasta and Nigh, untouched since their slaying; and in the veins of every man of this company, of this village, and of this country, ran the blood of Koor. From the great Pitt to the oafish Roger Peakod, they all had this ancestor in common.
‘Let’s have another,’ cried Coachy. ‘Give it rein, my coney.’
‘There be fi’ more varses,’ said Gipsy Noke, half diffident, half triumphant.
‘Let’s have ’em,’ said they all.
The singer opened and shut his mouth without sound, as though to make sure that his jaws were in working order. Then he opened it again: this time to sing:
But at that moment there came a sharp and peremptory tapping on the tavern door, and everybody turned in his seat to stare.
CHAPTER 2
IN WHICH FATHER GANDY BECOMES BROTHER RAPHE
In the dining-room at Maiden Holt, Jack Marden, the young lord of the Fee, sat alone at dessert. In accordance with his fancy, all traces of the evening meal had been cleared from the table, whose dark shining surface was patterned, now, only by silver bowls of fruit, a dish of nuts, coloured decanters, wine glasses, and certain pieces of fragile china acquired in an earlier century by his great-grandfather. A man not yet thirty, he sat surrounded by the small and faded remains of a substantial though never great inheritance. Beyond his private demesne was the Fee itself, comprising a numerous tenantry; commons in which he held certain manorial rights; and farmlands, of which one George Hayward was an arrogant and none too efficient bailey. Within that circle, and the dearer to his heart, was Maiden Holt Park, with its hundred or more head of red deer, its carp pond, its dovecote, its dells and spinneys. And within that again was a circle of tall pines surrounding house and garden. The room he sat in was long and low-ceiled: a room friendly and full of an enduring past. Its windows were close-shuttered and curtained in heavy damask. The fire was lively in its large hearth. The seven candles of the candelabra poured pools of light on the table as upon a dark lake, and set small shadows moving on the walls; and, sometimes, one or another of them would sputter and send a thin curl of smoke rising from a lank wick. The young man sat lost in a trance of thoughtfulness, neither eating nor drinking. His gaze, but not his thought, was held by the circle of candlelight that edged with a ring as of fire the brim of his glass.
In this mood he looks so boyish that we find it hard to believe what in fact we know: that so much as five years earlier, when in his first twenties, he had been accounted a likely source of danger to the state, and so had received, from his father’s old acquaintance, Mr Root, the Glatting magistrate, a demand that all the arms at Maiden Holt should at once be given up. With the official order came a very civil letter, a word in season, to the effect that my Lord Vernon, with two ninety-gun ships, was gone to the Downs. ‘I am sure Mr Marden needs no reminding,’ added Mr Root, being evidently sure of no such thing, ‘that as well his loyalty to King George, as the safety of his own person, requires that he act in these troubled times with all candour and discretion.’ With the Pretender occupying Carlisle, and panic hurrying hotfoot on its devious ways, Mr Root did no more than his duty, and did it, we must allow, with a certain grace. For his pains he became the temporary guardian of three bullet guns, two carabines, four shot guns, and a dozen pairs of plain screw-barrelled pistols: the which he promised to restore to their owner with a thousand times the satisfaction he had had in receiving them. The folk of Marden Fee were more nervous than Mr Root, and in the same degree less polite. Raphe Gandy, the resident priest of Maiden Holt, was hissed down the High Street and arrived home spattered with Protestant mud; and Paul Dewdney, as innocent of Jacobitism as any of them, had his head broken to the glory of King George. But, the danger past, the people repented, and good feeling between themselves and the Maiden Holt household was, by the measure of that repentance, not only restored but increased. The persuasion gained ground that the Jacobites had lost their last throw, and that papists, in consequence, could henceforward be regarded as no worse than queer. If these humble politicians could have read the mind of their young squire they would have found their new trust in him more than justified.
Jack Marden was a Catholic by force of tradition and habit, and he remained so, against his worldly interest, because he was too loyal to old memories, too stubbornly independent, to desert an unpopular cause, or (which is nearer the truth of his case) repudiate an unpopular label, no matter how little it meant to him. He had inherited his religion with the family plate and he was proud of it, as of all his possessions; but he was an Englishman first, a landed squire, with a deep dumb feeling for his home horizons, a sense of immediate duties, and a feudal bond with his servants and tenants, whom he had no wish to leave, and to neglect, in the pursuit of romantic foolishness. And, since a man’s heart will take sides with or without the authority of his considered judgement, he in fact resented Jacobitism and all its works. He was for leaving well alone, in the comfortable expectation of its becoming better—as apparently was its habit, for this new German king stood higher in general favour than ever his predecessor had done. The house of Stuart meant as much to Jack Marden, and as little, as the sentimental songs of one’s boyhood; as a child he had beglamoured it with heroic daydreams, but, so soon as he began to look on the world with a man’s eyes, whatever there was of poetry in him took another turn. The reign of God’s anointed had ended before his birth: it was a remote thing, a fairy tale, which he regarded with a rather perfunctory reverence that concealed from others, but not always from himself, a certain impatience of the political fervour that the royal name still had power to inspire in many breasts. Nor had the pervasive influence of Father Gandy, his priest and tutor and friend, tended to make an active Jacobite of him: rather it may be that it was the priest himself who, against all natural expectation, had guided him insensibly into the path of acquiescence. For Father Gandy, though neither renegade nor heretic, and though prompt in the performance of his priestly duties, cared more, it would seem, for religion than for the church that embodied it. He was lazy, virtuous, and wise; he was comfort-loving, and saintly; and if there are contradictions here, it is life that made the ravel, not we who but observe, that must resolve them.
If Jack Marden, staring at the bright brim of his wine glass, recalled for a brief instant the events and hazards of ’forty-five, it was Paul Dewdney that had prompted the recalclass="underline" his manservant Paul Dewdney, who at this moment lay upstairs a-dying. Thinking of him, Squire Marden felt as he looked—a boy, and forlorn. Forlorn, and none the less so when the anger of feeling himself powerless to help the man made his mouth move and his nostrils dilate. At such times his eyes blazed, and he wanted to do murder upon the phantom that was destroying Paul. There was now but small hope of the fellow’s recovery. The little that human wit could devise had been done: the Glatting apothecary was with him now, and a great man from the remote royal village of Kensington in Middlesex had but recently left the house. Father Gandy, whose wine stood untasted, whose napkin lay in the chair where he had let it fall but five minutes ago, was at the bedside. Death is arrogant and graceless, a disturber of the peace. He affronts our dignity, interrupts us at supper, ignores our arguments, insults us with his peremptory airs. Nor does he disdain to take us at a disadvantage. He is without scruple or discrimination, and therefore is no gentleman. Marden was indignant with such manners and sore at heart; for he was losing something more than a servant and something more than a friend: one who had companioned him in boyhood, and in spite of their different stations had played the elder brother to him, teaching him to ride and fight and fish and shoot, and how to snare and skin a rabbit, and the nice points in cockfighting. That active comradeship was past these many years; but though the relationship had changed outwardly, keeping pace with the years, the old bond of affection had never been broken. Many memories pressed upward for release into his mind, where at present there was room only for anger and anxiety.