Walter Besant
The Fourth Generation
“We may read it after all these years,” Leonard said, shaking the dust of seventy years from it. “There can be nothing in it that she would wish not to be written there.” He read it slowly. It was written in pointed and sloping Italian hand – a pretty hand belonging to the time when women were more separated from men in all their ways. Now we all write alike. “ ‘My dearest…’ I cannot make out the name. The rest is easy. ‘Algernon and Langley have gone off to the study to talk business. It is this affair of the Mill which is still unsettled. I am a little anxious about Algernon: he has been strangely distrait for this last two or three days; perhaps he is anxious about me: there need be no anxiety. I am quite well and strong. This morning he got up very early, and I heard him walking about in his study below. This is not his way at all. However, should a wife repine because her Lord is anxious about her? Algernon is very determined about that Mill; but I fear that Langley will not give way. You know how firm he can be behind that pleasant smile of his.’ That is all, Constance. She wrote no more.”
“It was written, then, the day before – the day before – Keep the letter, Leonard. You have no other letter of hers – perhaps nothing at all belonging to the poor lady. I wonder who Langley was? I had a forefather, too, whose Christian name was Langley. It is not a common name.”
“The Christian name of my unfortunate grandfather who committed suicide was also Langley. It is a coincidence. No doubt he was named after the person mentioned in this letter. Not by any means a common name, as you say. As for this letter, I will keep it. There is nothing in my possession that I can connect with this unfortunate ancestress.”
“Where are her jewels and things?”
“Perhaps where she left them, perhaps sent to the bank. I have never heard of anything belonging to her.”
Constance walked about the room looking at everything; the dust lay thick, but it was not the black dust of the town – a light brown dust that could be blown away or swept away easily. She swept the strings of the harp, which responded with the discords of seventy years’ neglect. She touched the keys of the piano, and started at the harsh and grating response. She looked at the chairs and the tables with their curly legs, and the queer things in china that stood upon the mantel shelf.
“Why,” she said, “the place should be kept just as it is, a museum of George the Fourth fashion in furniture. Here is a guitar. Did that lady play the guitar as well as the harp and the piano? The pictures are all water-colours. The glass has partly preserved them, but some damp has got in; they are all injured. I should like to get them all copied for studies of the time and its taste. They are good pictures, too. This one looks like a water-colour copy of a Constable. Was he living then? And this is a portrait.” She started. “Good heavens! what is this?”
“This? It is evidently a portrait,” said Leonard. “Why, Constance – ”
For she was looking into it with every sign of interest and curiosity.
“How in the world did this picture come here?” Leonard looked at it.
“I cannot tell you,” he said; “it is only my second visit to this room. It is a young man. A pleasing and amiable face; the short hair curled by the barber’s art, I suppose. The face is familiar; I don’t know why – ”
“Leonard, it is the face of my own great-grandfather. How did it come here? I have a copy, or the original, in my own possession. How did it come here? Was he a friend of your people?”
“I know nothing at all about it. By the rolled collar and the curly hair and the little whiskers I should say that the original must have been a contemporary of my ancestor the Recluse. Stop! there is a name on the frame. Can you read it?” He brushed away the dust. “ ‘Langley Holme, 1825,’ Langley Holme! What is it, Constance?”
“Oh, Leonard, Langley Holme – Langley Holme – he was my great-grandfather. And he was murdered; I remember to have heard of it – he was murdered. Then, it was here, and he was that old man’s brother-in-law, and – and – your Tragedy is mine as well.”
“Why, Constance, are you not jumping to a conclusion? How do you know that the murder in Campaigne Park was that of Langley Holme?”
“I don’t know it; I am only certain of it. Besides, that letter. Algernon and Langley were in the study. The letter tells us. Oh, I have no doubt – no doubt at all. This is his portrait; he was here the day before – the day before the terrible Tragedy. It must have been none other – it could have been none other. Leonard, this is very strange. You confide your story to me, you bring me out to see the spot where it happened and the house of the Recluse, and I find that your story is mine. Oh, to light upon it here and with you! It is strange, it is wonderful! Your story is mine as well,” she repeated, looking into his face; “we have a common tragedy.”
“We are not certain yet; there may be another explanation.”
“There can be no other. We will hunt up the contemporary papers; we shall find an account of the murder somewhere. A gentleman is not murdered even so far back as 1826 without a report in the papers. But I am quite – quite certain. This is my great-grandfather, Langley Holme, and his death was the first of all your many troubles.”
“This was the first of the hereditary misfortunes.”
“The more important and the most far-reaching. Perhaps we could trace them all to this one calamity.”
Leonard was looking into the portrait.
“I said it was a familiar face, Constance; it is your own. The resemblance is startling. You have his eyes, the same shape of face, the same mouth. It is at least your ancestor. And as for the rest, since it is certain that he met with an early and a violent end, I would rather believe that it was here and in this Park, because it makes my Tragedy, as you say, your own. We have a common history; it needs no further proof. There could not have been two murders of two gentlemen, both friends of this House, in the same year. You are right: this is the man whose death caused all the trouble.”
They looked at the portrait in silence for awhile. The thought of the sudden end of this gallant youth, rejoicing in the strength and hope of early manhood, awed them.
“We may picture the scene,” said Constance – “the news brought suddenly by some country lad breathless and panting; the old man then young, with all his future before him; a smiling future, a happy life; his wife hearing it; the house made terrible by her shriek; the sudden shock; the heavy blow; bereavement of all the man loved best; the death of his wife for whom he was so anxious; the awful death of the man he loved. Oh, Leonard, can you bear to think of it?”
“Yes; but other young men have received blows as terrible, and have yet survived, and at least gone about their work as before. Is it in nature for a man to grieve for seventy years?”
“I do not think that it was grief, or that it was ever grief, that he felt or still feels. His brain received a violent blow, from which it has never recovered.”
“But he can transact business in his own way – by brief written instructions.”
“We are not physicians, to explain the working of a disordered brain. We can, however, understand that such a shock may have produced all the effect of a blow from a hammer or a club. His brain is not destroyed: but it is benumbed. I believe that he felt no sorrow, but only a dead weight of oppression – the sense of suffering without pain – the consciousness of gloom which never lifts. Is not the story capable of such effects?”
“Perhaps. There is, however, one thing which we have forgotten, Constance. It is that we are cousins. This discovery makes us cousins.”
She took his proffered hand under the eyes of her ancestor, who looked kindly upon them from his dusty and faded frame. “We are cousins – not first or second cousins – but still – cousins – which is something. You have found another relation. I hope, sir, that you will not be ashamed of her, or connect her with your family misfortunes. This tragedy belongs to both of us. Come, Leonard, let us leave this room. It is haunted. I hear again the shrieks of the woman, and I see the white face of the man – the young man in his bereavement. Come.”
She drew him from the room, and closed the door softly.
Leonard led the way up the broad oaken staircase, which no neglect could injure, and no flight of time. On the first floor there were doors leading to various rooms. They opened one: it was a room filled with things belonging to children: there were toys and dolls: there were dresses and boots and hats: there was a children’s carriage, the predecessor of the perambulator and the cart: there were nursery-cots: there were slates and pencils and colour-boxes. It looked like a place which had not been deserted: children had lived in it and had grown out of it: all the old playthings were left in when the children left it.
“After the blow,” said Leonard, “life went on somehow in the House. The Recluse lived by himself in his bedroom and the library: the dining-room and the drawing-room were locked up: his wife’s room – the room where she died – was locked up: the boys went away: the girl ran away with her young man, Mr. Galley; then the whole place was deserted.” He shut the door and unlocked another. “It was her room,” he whispered.
Constance looked into the room. It was occupied by a great four-poster bed with steps on either side in order that the occupant might ascend to the feather-bed with the dignity due to her position. One cannot imagine a gentlewoman of 1820, or thereabouts, reduced to the indignity of climbing into a high bed. Therefore the steps were placed in position. We have lost this point of difference which once distinguished the “Quality” from the lower sort: the former walked up these steps with dignity into bed: the latter flopped or climbed: everybody now seeks the nightly repose by the latter methods. The room contained a great amount of mahogany: the doors were open, and showed dresses hanging up as they had waited for seventy years to be taken down and worn: fashions had come and gone: they remained waiting. There was a chest of drawers with cunningly-wrought boxes upon it: silver patch-boxes: snuff-boxes in silver and in silver gilt: a small collection of old-world curiosities, which had belonged to the last occupant’s forefather. There was a dressing-table, where all the toilet tools and instruments were lying as they had been left. Constance went into the room on tiptoe, glancing at the great bed, which stood like a funeral hearse of the fourteenth century, with its plumes and heavy carvings, as if she half expected to find a tenant. Beside the looking-glass stood open, just as it had been left, the lady’s jewel-box. Constance took out the contents, and looked at them with admiring eyes. There were rings and charms, necklaces of pearl, diamond brooches, bracelets, sprays, watches – everything that a rich gentlewoman would like to have. She put them all back, but she did not close the box; she left everything as she found it, and crept away. “These things belonged to Langley’s sister,” she whispered; “and she was one of my people – mine.”
They shut the door and descended the stairs. Again they stood together in the great empty hall, where their footsteps echoed up the broad staircase and in the roof above, and their words were repeated by mocking voices, even when they whispered, from wall to answering wall, and from the ceilings of the upper place.
“Tell me all you know about your ancestor,” said Leonard.
“Indeed, it is very little. He is my ancestor on my mother’s side, and again on her mother’s side. He left one child, a daughter, who was my grandmother: and her daughter married my father. There is but a legend – I know no more – except that the young man – the lively young man whose portrait I have – whose portrait is in that room – was found done to death in a wood. That is all I have heard. I do not know who the murderer was, nor what happened, nor anything. It all seemed so long ago – a thing that belonged to the past. But, then, if we could understand, the past belongs to us. There was another woman who suffered as well as the poor lady of this house. Oh, Leonard, what a tragedy! And only the other day we were talking glibly about family scandals!”
“Yes; a good deal of the sunshine has disappeared. My life, you see, was not, as you thought, to be one long succession of fortune’s gifts.”
“It was seventy years ago, however. The thing must not make us unhappy. We, at least, if not that old man, can look upon an event of so long ago with equanimity.”
“Yes, yes. But I must ferret out the whole story. I feel as if I know so little. I am most strangely interested and moved. How was the man killed? Why? Who did it? Where can I look for the details?”
“When you have found what you want, Leonard, you can tell me. For my own part, I may leave the investigation to you. Besides, it was so long ago. Why should we revive the griefs of seventy years ago?”
“I really do not know, except that I am, as I said, strangely attracted by this story. Come, now, I want you to see the man himself who married your ancestor’s sister. Her portrait is somewhere among those in the drawing-room, but it is too far gone to be recognised. Pity – pity! We have lost all our family portraits. Come, we will step lightly, not to wake him.”
He led her across the hall again, and opened very softly the library door. Asleep in an armchair by the fire was the most splendid old man Constance had ever seen. He was of gigantic stature; his long legs were outstretched, his massive head lay back upon the chair – a noble head with fine and abundant white hair and broad shoulders and deep chest. He was sleeping like a child, breathing as softly and as peacefully. In that restful countenance there was no suggestion of madness or a disordered brain.
Constance stepped lightly into the room and bent over him. His lips parted.
He murmured something in his sleep. He woke with a start. He sat up and opened his eyes, and gazed upon her face with a look of terror and amazement.
She stepped aside. The old man closed his eyes again, and his head fell back. Leonard touched her arm, and they left the room. At the door Constance turned to look at him. He was asleep again.
“He murmured something in his sleep. He was disturbed. He looked terrified.”
“It was your presence, Constance, that in some way suggested the memory of his dead friend. Perhaps your face reminded him of his dead friend. Think, however, what a shock it must have been to disturb the balance of such a strong man as that. Why, he was in the full strength of his early manhood. And he never recovered – all these seventy years. He has never spoken all these years, except once in my hearing – it was in his sleep. What did he say? ‘That will end it.’ Strange words.”
The tears were standing in the girl’s eyes.
“The pity of it, Leonard – the pity of it!”
“Come into the gardens. They were formerly, in the last century – when a certain ancestor was a scientific gardener – show gardens.”
They were now entirely ruined by seventy years of neglect. The lawns were covered with coarse rank grass; the walks were hidden; brambles grew over the flower-beds; the neglect was simply mournful. They passed through into the kitchen-garden, over the strawberry-beds and the asparagus-beds, and everywhere spread the brambles with the thistle and the shepherd’s-purse and all the common weeds; in the orchard most of the trees were dead, and under the dead boughs there flourished a rank undergrowth.
“I have never before,” said Constance, “realized what would happen if we suffered a garden to go wild.”
“This would happen – as you see. I believe no one has so much as walked in the garden except ourselves for seventy years. In the eyes of the village, I know, the whole place is supposed to be haunted day and night. Even the chance of apples would not tempt the village children into the garden. Come, Constance, let us go into the village and see the church.”
It was a pretty village, consisting of one long street, with an inn, a small shop, and post-office, a blacksmith’s, and one or two other trades. In the middle of the street a narrow lane led to the churchyard and the church. The latter, much too big for the village, was an early English cruciform structure, with later additions and improvements.
The church was open, for it was Saturday afternoon. The chancel was full of monuments of dead and gone Campaignes. Among them was a tablet, “To the Memory of Langley Holme, born at Great Missenden, June, 1798, found murdered in a wood in this parish, May 18, 1826. Married February 1, 1824, to Eleanor, daughter of the late Marmaduke Flight, of Little Beauchamp, in this county; left one child, Constance, born January 1, 1825.”
“Yes,” said Constance, “one can realise it: the death of wife and friend at once, and in this dreadful manner.”
In the churchyard an old man was occupied with some work among the graves. He looked up and straightened himself slowly, as one with stiffened joints.
“Mornin’, sir,” he said. “Mornin’, miss. I hope I see you well. Beg your pardon, sir, but you be a Campaigne for sure. All the Campaignes are alike – tall men they are, and good to look upon. But you’re not so tall, nor yet so strong built, as the Squire. Been to see the old gentleman, sir? Ay, he do last on, he do. It’s wonderful. Close on ninety-five he is. Everybody in the village knows his birthday. Why, he’s a show. On Sundays, in summer, after church, they go to the garden wall and look over it, to see him marching up and down the terrace. He never sees them, nor wouldn’t if they were to walk beside him.”
“You all know him, then?”
“I mind him seventy years ago. I was a little chap then. You wouldn’t think I was ever a little chap, would you? Seventy years ago I was eight – I’m seventy-eight now. You wouldn’t think I was seventy-eight, would you?” A very garrulous old man, this.
“I gave evidence, I did, at the inquest after the murder. They couldn’t do nohow without me, though I was but eight years old.”
“You? Why, what had you to do with the murder?”
“I was scaring birds on the hillside above the wood. I see the Squire – he was a fine big figure of a man – and the other gentleman crossing the road and coming over the stile into the field. Then they went as far as the wood together. The Squire he turned back, but the other gentleman he went on. They found him afterwards in the wood with his head smashed. Then I see John Dunning go in – same man as they charged with the murder. And he came running out – scared-like with what he’d seen. Oh! I see it all, and I told them so, kissing the Bible on it.”
“I have heard that a man was tried for the crime.”
“He was tried, but he got off. Everybody knows he never done it. But they never found out who done it.”
“That is all you know about it?”
“That is all, sir. Many a hundred times I’ve told that story. Thank you, sir. Mornin’, miss. You’ll have a handsome partner, miss, and he’ll have a proper missus.”
“So,” said Leonard, as they walked away, “the murder is still remembered, and will be, I suppose, so long as anyone lives who can talk about it. It is strange, is it not, that all these discoveries should fall together; that I should learn the truth about my own people, and only a day or two afterwards that you should learn the truth about your own ancestors? We are cousins, Constance, and a common tragedy unites us.”
They mounted their wheels and rode away in silence. But the joy had gone out of the day. The evening fell. The wind in the trees became a dirge; their hearts were full of violence and blood and death; in their ears rang the cries of a bereaved woman, and the groans of a man gone mad with trouble.
CHAPTER IX
MARY ANNE
IT was the Sunday afternoon after these visits to the ancestor and to the group in the Commercial Road. Leonard was slowly returning home after a solitary lunch. He walked with drooping head, touching the lamp-posts as he passed with his umbrella. This, as everybody knows, is a certain sign of preoccupation and dejection.
He was becoming, in fact, conscious of a strange obsession of his soul. The Family History sat upon him like a nightmare: it left him not either by day or by night. He was beginning to realise that he could not shake it off, and that it was come to stay.
When a man is born to a Family History, and has to grow up with it, in full consciousness of it, he generally gets the better of it, and either disregards it or treats it with philosophy, or laughs at it, or even boasts of it. The illustrious Mr. Bounderby was one of the many who boast of it. But, then, he had grown up with it, and it had become part of him, and he was able to present his own version of it.
Very different is the case when a man has a Family History suddenly and quite unexpectedly sprung upon him. What could have been more desirable than the position of this young man for a whole quarter of a century? Sufficiently wealthy, connected for generations with gentlefolk, successful, with nothing whatever to hamper him in his career, with the certainty of succeeding to a large property – could mortal man desire more?
And then, suddenly, a Family History of the darkest and most gloomy kind – murder, sudden death, suicide, early death, the shattering of a strong mind, bankruptcy, poverty, cousins whom no kindliness could call presentable – all this fell upon him at one blow. Can one be surprised that he touched the lamp-posts as he went along?
Is it wonderful that he could not get rid of the dreadful story? It occupied his whole brain; it turned everything else out – the great economical article for the Nineteenth Century, all his books, all his occupations. If he read in the printed page, his eyes ran across the lines and up and down the lines, but nothing reached his brain. The Family History was a wall which excluded everything else; or it was a jealous tenant who drove every intruder out as with a broom. If he tried to write, his pen presently dropped from his fingers, for the things that lay on his brain were not allowed by that new tenant to escape. And all night long, and all day long, pictures rose up and floated before his eyes; terrible pictures – pictures of things that belonged to the History; pictures that followed each other like animated photographs, irrepressible, not to be concealed, or denied, or refused admission.
This obsession was only just beginning: it intended to become deeper and stronger: it was going to hold him with grip and claw, never to let him go by night or day until – But the end he could not understand.
You know how, at the first symptoms of a long illness, there falls upon the soul a premonitory sadness: the nurses and the doctors utter words of cheerfulness and hope: there is a loophole, there always is a loophole, until the climax and the turning-point. The patient hears, and tries to receive solace. But he knows better. He knows without being told that he stands on the threshold of the torture chamber: the door opens, he steps in, because he must: he will lie there and suffer – O Lord! how long?
With such boding and gloom of soul – boding without words, gloom inarticulate – Leonard walked slowly homewards.
It was about three in the afternoon that he mounted his stairs. In his mood, brooding over the new-found tragedies, it seemed quite natural, and a thing to be expected, that his cousin Mary Anne should be sitting on the stairs opposite his closed door. She rose timidly.
“The man said he could not tell when you would come home, so I waited,” she explained.
“He ought to have asked you to wait inside. Did you tell him who you were?”
“No. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to disturb your Sabbath calm.”
“My – Oh yes! Pray come in.”
She obeyed, and sat down by the fire, glancing round the room curiously. In her lap lay a brown-paper parcel.
“I thought you would come home to dinner after chapel,” she began, “so I got here about one.”
She observed that his face showed some trouble, and she hesitated to go on.
“Have you come to tell me of more family misfortunes?” he asked abruptly.
“Oh,” she said, “I wish I hadn’t come. I told her you didn’t want it and you wouldn’t like it. Besides, what’s the use? It all happened so long ago. But granny would have it. I’ve brought you a book. She says you must read it. If you’d rather not have it, I will take it back again. Granny ought to know that you don’t want to be worried about these old things.”
He pulled himself together, and assumed a mask of cheerfulness.
“Nonsense!” he said. “Why should I not read about these old things which are to me so new? They belong to me as much as to you.”
He observed the girl more narrowly while he spoke. Her words and her hesitation showed perception and feeling at least. As for her appearance, she was short and sturdy; her features were cast in one of the more common moulds. She wore a black cloth jacket and a skirt of dark green serge, a modest hat with black plumes nodding over her head in the hearse-like fashion of the day before yesterday, and her gloves were doubtful.
The first impression was of complete insignificance; the second impression was of a girl who might interest one. Her eyes were good – they were the eyes of her grandmother; her hands were small and delicate – they were the hands of her grandmother; her voice was clear and soft, with a distinct utterance quite unlike the thick and husky people among whom she lived. In all these points she resembled her grandmother. Leonard observed these things – it was a distraction to think of the cousin apart from the Family History – and became interested in the girl.
“My cousin,” he said unexpectedly, “you are very much like your grandmother.”
“Like granny?” She coloured with pleasure. As she was not a girl who kept company with anyone, she had never before received a compliment. “Why, she is beautiful still, and I – Oh!”
She laughed.
“You have her voice and her eyes. She seems to be a very sweet and gentle lady.”
“She is the sweetest old lady in the world and the gentlest, and, oh! she’s had an awful time.”
“I am sorry to think so.”
“She cried with pleasure and pride when you went away. For fifty years not a single member of her family has been to see her. I never saw her take on so, and you so kind and friendly. Sam said you had as much pride as a duke.”
“Your brother should not judge by first appearances.”
“And you were not proud a bit. Well, granny said: ‘Nobody ever told him of the family misfortunes, and it’s shameful. I’ve told him some, but not all, and now I’ll send him my Scrap-book with the trial in it – the trial, you know, of John Dunning for the wilful murder of Langley Holme.’ And I’ve brought it; here it is.” She handed him the parcel in her lap. “That’s why I came.”
“Thank you,” said Leonard, laying it carelessly on the table: “I will read it or look at it some time. But I own I am not greatly interested in the trial; it took place too long ago.”
“Once she had another copy, but she gave it to your grandfather a few days before he killed himself.”
Leonard remembered these words afterwards. For the moment they had no meaning for him.
“Granny says we’ve got hereditary misfortunes.”
“So she told me. Hereditary? Why?” His brow contracted. “I don’t know why. Hereditary misfortunes are supposed to imply ancestral crimes.”
“She puts it like this. If it hadn’t been hereditary misfortune she wouldn’t have married grandfather; he wouldn’t have been bankrupt; father wouldn’t have been only a small clerk; Sam would have been something in a large way; and I should be a lady instead of a Board School teacher.”
“You can be both, my cousin. Now look at the other side. Your grandfather was ruined, I take it, by his own incompetence; his poverty was his own doing. Your father never rose in the world, I suppose, because he had no power of fight. Your brother has got into a respectable profession; what right has he to complain?”
“That’s what I say sometimes. Granny won’t have it. She’s all for hereditary ill-luck, as if we are to suffer for what was done a hundred years ago. I don’t believe it, for my part. Do you?”
He thought of his talk with Constance in the country road.
“It is a dreadful question; do not let it trouble us. Let us go on with our work and not think about it.”
“It’s all very well to say ‘Don’t think about it,’ when she talks about nothing else, especially when she looks at Sam and thinks of you. There was something else I wanted to say.” She dropped her head, and began nervously to twitch with her fingertips. “I’m almost ashamed to say it. Sam would never forgive me, but I think of granny first and of all she has endured, and I must warn you.” She looked round; there was nobody else present. “It’s about Sam, my brother. I must warn you – I must, because he may make mischief between you and granny.”
“He will find that difficult. Well, go on.”
“He goes to your village in the country. He sits and talks with the people. He pretends that he goes to see how the old man is getting on. But it is really to find out all he can about the property.”
“What has he to do with the property?”
“He wants to find out what is to become of all the money.”
“Does he think that the rustics can tell him?”
“I don’t know. You see, his head is filled with the hope of getting some of the money. He wants to get it divided among the heirs. It’s what he calls the ‘accumulations.’ ”
“Accumulations!” Leonard repeated impatiently. “They are all in a tale. I know nothing about these accumulations, or what will be done with them.”
“Sam is full of suspicions. He thinks there is a conspiracy to keep him out.”
“Oh, does he? Well, tell him that my great-grandfather’s solicitor receives the rents and deals with them as he is instructed. I, for one, am not consulted.”
“I said you knew nothing about it. Granny was so angry. You see, Sam can think of nothing else. He’s been unlucky lately, and he comforts himself with calculating what the money comes to. He’s made me do sums – oh! scores of sums – in compound interest for him: Sam never got so far himself. If you’ve never worked it out – ”
