The Leithen Stories (39 page)

Presently, as I lay watching a ridge of distant hills seen through the window and trying to decide what it could be, the sound of singing rose from some room below me. It must be Prayers. The old-fashioned hymn tune reminded me of my childhood and I wondered how many young men of today kept up the fashion of family worship when alone in a country house. And then I suddenly remembered all about the Milburnes, for they had been my mother's friends.

Humphrey Milburne had been a rich Lancashire cotton-spinner, whose father or grandfather – I forget which – had been one of the pioneers of the industry. I don't think he had ever concerned himself greatly with business, for his
métier
had always been that of the devout layman who is more occupied with church affairs than any bishop. He had been a leader of the Evangelical party, a vigorous opponent of ritualist practices, and a noted organizer of religious revivals. Vague memories of him came back to me from my childhood, for my own family had been of the same persuasion. I had a recollection of a tall bearded man who on a visit to us had insisted on seeing the children, and had set me on his knee, and had asked me, a shivering self-conscious mite, embarrassing questions about my soul. I remembered his wife, Lady Augusta, more clearly. She was a thin little woman who never seemed to be separated from a large squashy Bible stuffed with leaflets and secured by many elastic bands. She had had a knack of dropping everything as she moved, and I had acted as page to retrieve her belongings. She had been very kind to me, for to her grief she had then no children … I remembered that a son had at last been born – ‘a child of many prayers', my
mother had called him. And then came a vague recollection of a tragedy. Lady Augusta had died when the boy was an infant and her husband had followed within the year. After that the Milburnes passed out of my life, except that their nurse had come to us when I was at Eton, and had had much to say of young Master Vernon.

My vague remembrance seemed to explain my host. The child of ageing parents and an orphan from his early years – that would account for his lack of youthful spontaneity. I liked the notion of him I was acquiring; there was something quaint and loyal in his keeping up the family ritual – an evangelical athlete with the looks of Apollo. I had fancied something foreign in his air, but that of course was nonsense. He came of the most prosaic British stock, cotton-spinning Milburnes, and for his mother a Douglas-Ernott, whose family was the quintessence of Whig solidity.

I found Vernon waiting for me in the sunny sitting-room, dressed in rough grey homespun and with an air of being ready for a long day in the open. There was a change in him since the night before. His eyes were a little heavy, as if he had slept badly, but the shutters were lifted from them. His manner was no longer constrained, and the slight awkwardness I had felt in his presence was gone. He was now a cheerful communicative undergraduate.

‘Beaton says you had a good night, sir, but you mustn't use that foot of yours. You can't think of London today, you know. I've nothing to do except look after you, so you'd better think of me as Charles with a nephew's privileges. It's going to be a clinking fine day, so what do you say to running up in the car to the moors above Shap and listening to the curlews? In the spring they're the jolliest things alive.'

He was a schoolboy now, looking forward to an outing, and we might have been breakfasting in Oxford rooms before going out with the Bicester. I fell into his holiday mood, and forgot to tell him that I had long ago met his parents. He lent me an ulster and helped me downstairs, where he packed me into the front of a big Daimler and got in beside me. In the clear spring sunshine, with the park a chessboard of green grass and melting snow, and the rooks cawing in the beech tops, Severns looked almost venerable, for its lines were good and the stone was weathering well. He nodded towards the long façades. ‘Ugly old thing, when you think of Levens or Sizergh, but it
was my grandfather's taste and I mean to respect it. If we get a fine sunset you'll see it light up like an enchanted castle. It's something to be able to see the hills from every window, and to get a glimpse of the sea from the top floor. Goodish sport, too, for we've several miles of salmon and sea trout, and we get uncommon high birds in the upper coverts.'

We sped up by winding hill-roads to the moors, and there were the curlews crying over the snow-patched bent with that note which is at once eerie and wistful and joyful. There were grouse, too, busy about their nesting, and an occasional stone-chat, and dippers flashing their white waistcoats in every beck. It was like being on the roof of the world, with the high Lake hills a little foreshortened, like ships coming over the horizon at sea. Lunch we had with us and ate on a dry bank of heather, and we had tea in a whitewashed moorland farm. I have never taken to anyone so fast as I took to that boy. He was in the highest spirits, as if he had finished some difficult task, and in the rebound he became extraordinarily companionable. I think he took to me also, for he showed a shy but intense interest in my doings, the eagerness with which an undergraduate prospects the channels of the world's life which he is soon to navigate. I had been prepared to find a touch of innocent priggishness, but there was nothing of the kind. He seemed to have no dogmas of his own, only inquiries.

‘I suppose a lawyer's training fits a man to examine all kinds of problems – not only legal ones,' he asked casually at luncheon. ‘I mean he understands the value of any sort of evidence, for the principles of logical proof are always the same?'

‘I suppose so,' I replied, ‘though it's only legal conundrums that come my way. I was once asked my opinion on a scientific proof – in the higher mathematics – but I didn't make much of it – couldn't quite catch on to the data or understand the language.'

‘Yes, that might be a difficulty,' he admitted. ‘But a thing like a ghost story for instance – you'd be all right at that, I suppose?'

The boy had clearly something in his head, and I wondered if the raw magnificence of Serverns harboured any spooks. Could that be the reason of his diffidence on the previous evening?

When we got home we sat smoking by the library fire, and
while I skimmed
The Times
Vernon dozed. He must have been short of his sleep and was now making up for it in the way of a healthy young man. As I watched his even breathing I decided that here there could be no abnormality of body or mind. It was like watching a tired spaniel on the rug, too tired even to hunt in his dreams.

As I lifted my eyes from the paper I saw that he was awake and was looking at me intently, as if he were hesitating about asking me some question.

‘I've been asleep,' he apologized. ‘I can drop off anywhere after a day on the hills.'

‘You were rather sleepless as a child, weren't you?' I asked.

His eyes opened. ‘I wonder how you know that?'

‘From your old nurse. I ought to have told you that in my boyhood I knew your parents a little. They stayed with us more than once. And Mrs Ganthony came to my mother from you. I was at Eton at the time, and I remember how she used to entertain us with stories about Severns. You must have been an infant when she left.'

‘I was four. What sort of things did she tell you?'

‘About your bad nights and your pluck. I fancy it was by way of censure of our declamatory habits. Why, after all these years I remember some of her phrases. How did the thing go? “What fidgeted me was the way his lordship 'eld his tongue. For usual he'd shout as lusty as a whelp, but on these mornings I'd find him with his eyes like moons and his skin white and shiny, and never a cheep the whole blessed night, with me lying next door, and a light sleeper at all times, Mrs Wace, ma'am.” Was Mrs Wace a sort of Mrs Harris?'

He laughed merrily. ‘To think that you should have heard that! No, she was our housekeeper, and Ganthony, who babbled like Sairey Gamp, made a litany of her name. That's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard.'

‘You've outgrown that childish ailment anyhow,' I said.

‘Yes, I have outgrown it.' My practice with witnesses made me detect just a shade of hesitation.

At dinner he returned to the subject which seemed to interest him, the exact nature of the legal training. I told him that I was an advocate, not a judge, and so had no need to cultivate a judicial mind.

‘But you can't do without it,' he protested. ‘You have to advise your client and pronounce on his case before you argue
it. The bulk of your work must be the weighing of evidence. I should have thought that that talent could be applied to any subject in the world if the facts were sufficiently explained. In the long run the most abstruse business will boil down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data. Your profession enables you to select the relevant data.'

‘That may be true in theory but I wouldn't myself rate legal talent so high. A lawyer is apt to lack imagination, you know.' Then I stopped, for I had suddenly the impression that Vernon wanted advice, help of some kind – that behind all his ease he was profoundly anxious, and that a plea, almost a cry, was trembling on his lips. I detest confidences and labour to avoid them, but I could no more refuse this boy than stop my ears against a sick child. So I added, ‘Of course lawyers make good confidants. They're mostly decent fellows, and they're accustomed to keeping their mouths shut.'

He nodded, as if I had settled some private scruple, and we fell to talking about spring salmon in the Tay.

‘Take the port into the library,' he told Beaton. ‘Sir Edward doesn't want coffee. Oh, and see that the fire is good. We shan't need you again tonight. I'll put Sir Edward to bed.'

There was an odd air of purpose about him, as he gave me his arm to the library and settled me with a cigar in a long chair. Then he disappeared for a minute or two and returned with a shabby little clasped leather book. He locked the door and put the key on the mantelpiece, and when he caught me smiling he smiled too, a little nervously.

‘Please don't think me an ass,' he said. ‘I'm going to ask a tremendous favour. I want you to listen to me while I tell you a story, something I have never told to anyone in my life before … I don't think you'll laugh at me, and I've a notion you may be able to help me. It's a confounded liberty, I know, but may I go on?'

‘Most certainly,' I said. ‘I can't imagine myself laughing at anything you had to tell me; and if there's anything in me that can help you it's yours for the asking.'

He drew a long breath. ‘You spoke of my bad nights as a child and I said I had outgrown them. Well, it isn't true.'

When Vernon was a very little boy he was the sleepiest and healthiest of mortals, but every spring he had a spell of bad
dreams. He slept at that time in the big new night-nursery at the top of the west wing, which his parents had built not long before their death. It had three windows looking out to the moorish flats which run up to the fells, and from one window, by craning your neck, you could catch a glimpse of the sea. It was all hung, too, with a Chinese paper whereon pink and green parrots squatted in wonderful blue trees, and there seemed generally to be a wood fire burning. He described the place in detail, not as it is today, but as he remembered it.

Vernon's recollection of his childish nightmares was hazy. They varied, I gathered, but narrowed down in the end to one type. He used to find himself in a room different from the nursery and bigger, but with the same smell of wood smoke. People came and went, such as his nurse, the butler, Simon the head keeper, Uncle Appleby his guardian, Cousin Jennifer, the old woman who sold oranges in Axby, and a host of others. Nobody hindered them from going away, and they seemed to be pleading with him to come too. There was danger in the place; something was going to happen in the big room, and if by that time he was not gone there would be mischief … But it was quite clear to him that he could not go. He must stop there, with the wood smoke in his nostrils, and await the advent of the something. But he was never quite sure of the nature of the compulsion. He had a notion that if he made a rush for the door at Uncle Appleby's heels he would be allowed to escape, but that somehow he would be behaving badly. Anyhow, the place put him into a sweat of fright, and Mrs Ganthony looked darkly at him in the morning.

Those troubled springs continued – odd interludes in a life of nearly unbroken health. Mrs Ganthony left because she could not control her tongue and increased the boy's terrors, and Vernon was nine – he thought – before the dream began to take a really definite shape. The stage was emptying. There was nobody in the room now but himself, and he saw its details a little more clearly. It was not any apartment in Severns. Rather it seemed like one of the big old panelled chambers which he remembered from visits to the Midland country houses of his mother's family, when he had arrived after dark and had been put to sleep in a great bed in a place lit with dancing firelight. In the morning it had looked only an ordinary big room, but at that hour of the evening it had seemed an enchanted cave. The dream-room was not unlike
these, for there was the scent of a wood fire and there were dancing shadows, but he could not see clearly the walls or the ceiling, and there was no bed. In one corner was a door which led to the outer world, and through this he knew that he might on no account pass. Another door faced him, and he knew that he had only to turn the handle for it to open.

But he did not want to, for he understood quite clearly what was beyond. There was a second room just like the first one; he knew nothing about it except that opposite the entrance another door led out of it. Beyond was a third chamber, and so on interminably. There seemed to the boy to be no end to this fantastic suite. He thought of it as a great snake of masonry, winding up hill and down dale away to the fells or the sea … Yes, but there
was
an end. Somewhere far away in one of the rooms was a terror waiting on him, or, as he feared, coming towards him. Even now it might be flitting from room to room, every minute bringing its soft tread nearer to the chamber of the wood fire.