His wife, Aunt May, would have described herself with appropriate modesty as a religious woman, for the doings of the parish and the services at St. Ysfael’s were her chief concern. Helping the poor, so far as the waning fortunes of the Cornishes would allow, and a repressive hand on any clergyman who showed a tendency to be High, were her great cares. What she believed, nobody knew, for she was firm in her reticence on all matters relating to the inner life. In church she was seen to pray, but to What, and what she said to It, and how It worked in her daily life, nobody knew. The chances were strong that she prayed for her son Reginald, who was with his regiment in India, and her son Hubert, who was in the Navy and hoped for a command soon, and her daughter Prudence, who had married Roderick Glasson, another oppressed neighbouring squire. Unquestionably she prayed for her tribe of grandchildren, but how efficacious such prayers were was a matter of speculation, for they were a wild lot and gave Francis a good deal of trouble.
He never, during his month at Chegwidden, got them properly sorted into families, for they came and went inexplicably, roaring in and out of the house with cricket bats and bicycles, and small guns, if they were boys. As for the girls, they were doing their uttermost, it seemed to the quiet Canadian, to get themselves killed, riding ponies in a horrible parody of polo, which they played in a meadow full of rabbit holes, so that the ponies were always stumbling, and the girls were always pitching over their heads into the path of other charging ponies. They all regarded him as a huge joke, even when he tried to impress them with his skill (learned at an expensive boys’ camp) in making a fire without matches. Because of this they called him the Last of the Mohicans, and treated his enthusiasm for King Arthur as a form of American madness. He never could be sure whose were Reginald’s, and whose Hubert’s, though he knew that two of the girls must be Prudence’s, because they assured him daily that if their older sister, Ismay Glasson, could only meet him, she would soon put him to rights. They were very proud of Ismay because she was a Terror, even among the Chegwidden lunatics. But Ismay was abroad, staying with a French family to improve her accent, and doubtless terrorizing the French.
At the family table, over bad food in restricted quantities, Francis had tried to introduce some topic that would reveal whether or not the Chegwidden Cornishes knew what a great man his father was, and how intimate he was with the Chaps Who Knew, up in London. But he discovered that Sir Francis was merely a younger brother, so far as Uncle Arthur was concerned, and that in Aunt May’s mind it was a pity that if there had to be a Lady Cornish at all, that Lady Cornish should be an American—for the Cornishes were pig-headedly determined that the pretence of Canadians not to be Americans was sheer affectation, to be rebuked whenever possible. As for the fortune that the Wooden Soldier had acquired by his marriage and his value as a trust company figurehead, it was plainly a sore touch at Chegwidden; to be a younger son, and to have money, when the elder son was struggling to keep his head above water, was intolerable cheek. So Francis was made to feel that he was not only the Last of the Mohicans, but a Rich American. He was sure the Chegwidden Cornishes did not mean it unkindly; it was simply that their excellent manners were not strong enough to keep their jealousy in complete abeyance.
From the family table Francis sometimes lifted his eyes above his plate of congealing mutton stew to look at the family portraits that hung above the wainscot. They were, he had to admit, ghastly. They were worse, because older and more blackened and scabby, than the portraits in the Prayer Hall at school. But out of them all, though the form varied, stared the family face, a long, horsy face with gooseberry eyes in which, in some portraits, a distinction, an air of intelligence and command, showed itself. As he looked around the table, at Uncle Arthur and at the grandchildren (for of course Aunt May did not count, being a mere breeding machine in the great complex of Cornishes), that face, disappointed and severe in Uncle Arthur, and peering through puppy-fat, or schoolboy awkwardness, or under ill-braided pigtails, was repeated in a variety of styles, but always, in form and mannerism, the same. And, when he went to bed in his chilly room, he could see, in the whorled mirror, that even under the black hair he had from the McRorys, it was his own face, and that his black hair and his gooseberry eyes gave him a look which would some day be startling.
Chegwidden: a disappointment, really. After all he had suffered because of that difficult name, which was not only queer in itself but a nuisance in pronunciation, he had at least expected an impressive dwelling and, as the name suggested, a white building. But no: Chegwidden was a large, low, grubby-looking mansion of brownish-grey stone, with a lowering, unfriendly front door, pinched little windows, and a slate roof on which moss grew in patches. Old it unquestionably was; such inconvenience could not have been achieved in anything less than four centuries. Smelly it was, too, for a much-tinkered Victorian system of plumbing had never really come to terms with what was demanded of it. As it seemed to be a family habit never to throw anything away, it was cluttered with furniture and ornaments, pride of place being given to things that various Cornishes had brought home from military or naval service abroad. But the total effect was faded, down-at-heel, uncomfortable, and valetudinarian. School had habituated Francis to shabbiness and discomfort and stinks, but his notion of a family dwelling was the rich, velvety ugliness of St. Kilda, or his mother’s uncompromisingly fashionable house in Toronto. How did the Cornishes put up with a house where every chair, in the midst of summer, embraced the sitter like a cold sitz-bath, and every bed was dank from the sea mists?
Yet Father had assured him that at least half his root was here.
Try as he might, he could not evoke King Arthur, even in the ruins of Tintagel. He bicycled back through Camelford to Chegwidden, glad that tomorrow he would return to London, and after a few days take ship for Canada.
“Did you enjoy your visit to Cornwall?”
“Thank you, sir. It was very interesting.”
“But not enjoyable?”
“Oh, very enjoyable. But I thought people living there would have been more aware of the history of the place.”
“The Cornishes are the history of the place. I suppose they think of history as something that happens elsewhere. A bit provincial, was it?”
“I wouldn’t like to say that.”
“You’re a cautious fellow, aren’t you, Francis?”
“I don’t like to make hasty judgements. This is my first time in England, you see.”
“But it certainly won’t be your last, your father tells me. Going up to Oxford eventually?”
“That’s the plan.”
“By that time you might be quite a useful chap. Your father tells me you might end up in the profession.”
So that was what it was! That was why Colonel Copplestone had asked him to lunch in the Athenaeum, an impressive club in the West End, though certainly not much ahead of Chegwidden in the matter of food. Francis had been expecting something like this, Colonel Copplestone must be one of the Chaps Who Knew.
“Father spoke about it.”
“And you liked the idea?”
“I was flattered.”
“Well—no promises, of course. Just follow your nose. But we’re always on the lookout for promising young men, and if they’re promising enough, we might make a few promises later on.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Are you a letter-writer?”
“Sir?”
“Write interesting letters, do you? If you’re really interested, I want you to write letters to me.”
“What about?”
“About what you’re doing—and seeing—and thinking. I’d like a letter from you not less than once a fortnight. Write to me at this address; it’s my country place. And in the letters you address me as Uncle Jack, because I’m an old friend of your father’s, and that’s appropriate. I’m your godfather.”