The Sleeping Fury (13 page)

“William?” said Lady Mardale, in pained surprise. “But I always thought William—” She paused.

“So did I, my lady; as honest as could be. I've locked him into the footmen's bedroom and thought I had better keep him there till his lordship returned. He seems very much upset, my lady, and, to tell the truth, so am I.”

“And so am I, Carson. His lordship will be back before six. We had better do nothing till he returns. When he does, I will tell him.”

Charlotte returned to Lady Hadlow, and Carson retreated towards the house.

“Well, Charlotte,” said Lady Hadlow, “and what is the matter?”

“One of the footmen, Mamma, has been stealing silver. Carson has locked him into his bedroom until Alfred returns.”

“Stealing? My dear Charlotte, which footman?”

“William. The smaller of the two.”

“And my favourite. Dear me, what next? Of course, Alfred will ring up the police at once; in fact, Charlotte, hadn't you better tell Carson to do so now?”

“No, Mamma. Alfred may decide otherwise.”

“But how can he?”

“I can't say. I expect he will deal with William himself, without the police.”

“You think so, Charlotte?” Lady Hadlow looked doubtful. Then her face cleared. “Well, my dear, whatever Alfred does will be right; we can rest assured of that.”

But Lady Hadlow's faith in Alfred was tried to the uttermost by what he actually did. For when, on his return to the house, Charlotte went to him in his study and told him of the matter, he rang for Carson and questioned him.

“You're quite sure, Carson, that William did take the silver?”

“Yes, my lord, he has admitted it.”

“Did he give any reason?”

“No, my lord; I didn't question him. I told him I should report it to your lordship and then locked him into his bedroom.”

“Send him to me now, Carson. Don't bring him; just tell him he's to come.”

As Carson was closing the door, Lord Mardale called to him. “Do your best, Carson,” he said, when Carson had returned, “to discourage all talk and discussion of this among the servants.”

“Shall I go or stay, Alfred?” Charlotte asked when they were alone.

“Stay, if you don't mind, my dear. I should like him to realise that you know all about it. It will come from us both, if you agree.”

“You won't hand him over to the police, Alfred?”

“Not I. You didn't expect me to, did you?”

Charlotte shook her head, smiling, as the door opened.

The young footman came in, and, shutting the door behind him, waited. His face was very white. His eyelids were red, as though he had been weeping, and he stood there with his lower jaw thrust out a little, crestfallen, wretched, yet determined, it seemed, not to be browbeaten.

“William, come here and sit in this chair,” said Lord Mardale.

For a moment the young man stared in bewilderment, and did not move.

“Come along,” said Lord Mardale. “I can't talk to you if you stand there, and you can't very easily talk to me.”

William obeyed.

“Now tell me first, William; you did take some silver, did you, as Carson tells me?”

“Yes, my lord. I … I …” His voice failed him as he fumbled for his handkerchief.

“Now listen to me, William. We've known each other now for … how long?”

“Six years, my lord.”

“And liked each other, haven't we?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Yes. Well, now, I'm not going to worry you to tell me any more than you want to tell me. I know you well enough to be sure that you would not have taken the silver unless something very serious had urged you to. Now tell me this; could you get it back?”

The young man hesitated. “I… I don't know, my lord. I sent it away a little at a time to be sold. I was in … in trouble about money, my lord.”

“Well, now, you had better go and see if you can
buy it back. You can start to-morrow. I will give you fifty pounds in notes. If you find you can't recover it, you must go to the silversmiths in London whose address I will give you and replace it. Tell them to engrave it in the usual way and send it when it is ready. Pay for it when you give the order, take your other expenses out of the fifty pounds, and bring the change to me when you return. You need not explain anything to Carson; if you ask him to come up when you go down, I will do that myself. As soon as you get back, come and tell me what you have managed to do. After that, we'll say no more about it.”

Alfred got up from his chair and the footman got clumsily up out of his. He tried to speak, but his lips trembled so violently that at first he could say nothing. He held out his hands in a kind of groping appeal. “My lord,” he stammered at last, “you've … you've been too good to me. I got into trouble, my lord. I was summoned for fifteen pounds and I … didn't know what to do.”

“And you paid the debt with what you got for the silver?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Well, that's the end of it, William. Put it out of your mind, and Lady Mardale and I will put it out of ours, won't we, Charlotte? If you were in trouble you might have come to me.”

William raised his head. “My lord,” he said hoarsely, rubbing his nose with his handkerchief, “I shall never be able to thank you.”

Lord Mardale put his hand on his shoulder. “Don't try, my boy. We understand each other,
and that's all that's necessary, isn't it? Now go and ask Carson to come up.”

• • • • • • • •

It was one of Lady Hadlow's rules to be dressed and down in the drawing-room at least five minutes before dinner was announced. Charlotte, going into the drawing-room an hour later, found her there alone.

“Well, my dear,” the old lady enquired at once, “and what has been done about William?”

Charlotte had intended to say no more about the incident, but the temptation to scotch the Ebernoe in her mother was too great to resist. “Oh,” she replied casually, “Alfred has given him fifty pounds to go and buy some more silver.”

Lady Hadlow stared, incredulous. “Don't be absurd, child.”

“It's the plain truth, Mamma. Alfred has told William to try to buy back the original silver, which, it appears, has already been sold, and if he fails he is to go to Bensons' and buy some more to replace it. He is sending him off to-morrow with fifty pounds in his pocket.”

“But … but, my dear child, what madness! Why on earth send William, of all people? Why not send Carson?”

“Well, the only reason I can give, Mamma, is that Alfred is not only a clergyman, but also a Christian.”

“Oh, of course he is, Charlotte. Who doubts it? But one has to be practical in this world. And he expects to see William and his fifty pounds, or his silver, again?”

“I believe he does, Mamma.”

“And do you, Charlotte?”

“Yes, I do too.”

“Well, my dear, all I can say is, I
don't
.”

“Mamma, I bet you fifty pounds William returns.”

“I'm sorry, my dear, but I can't afford to lose, small though the risk is.”

“Well, if William doesn't return, I'll make you a present of fifty pounds on the spot, Mamma. That's a bargain.”

“But surely William is to be punished, Charlotte.”

“I believe not.”

“Well, my dear, believe me, before long you will have all the servants stealing from you right and left. And who can blame them? You're simply inviting dishonesty.”

“I think, on the contrary, Mamma, that we're inviting honesty.”

“Well, Charlotte, I won't pretend that I sympathise with these new ideas. In my time, right was right and wrong wrong, and those who did wrong were punished for it if we succeeded in catching them.”

Charlotte knew that argument with her mother was useless, and so she did not argue; but before leaving the subject she took care to ensure her mother's silence.

“You haven't mentioned this to Beatrix, have you?” she asked.

“I've told no one,” replied the old lady.

“Then don't, Mamma. Alfred particularly wants the whole matter to be forgotten.”

“Well, Alfred's an angel—I've always said so—
and so I must suppose there's some sense in all this. But I tremble for your fifty pounds, my dear.”

But Charlotte did not lose her fifty pounds. Two days later William came back, having bought back the original silver, and handed Lord Mardale over twenty pounds of change and a detailed account of his expenses.

• • • • • • • •

That night, as she lay in bed, Charlotte's thoughts returned to her talk with Beatrix. Yes, she admitted now, Beatrix was right. Life was a disillusionment. And yet she herself had not hoped for anything better. She had longed for something almost unimaginably rapturous, something of which she had had brief, shy glimpses in those strange fancies about the dark-haired young man, Christopher, whom she had invented; but she had never dared to hope for it, to expect it. And yet, in some deep, secret corner of her heart, she must have hoped for it, or why should she nowadays feel that life was so sad, that year by year she was more and more irrevocably losing something unutterably precious to her, of which she had known no more than the shadow? Yet she had everything, or everything else, to make her happy. She and Alfred, as she had foreseen, were ideal friends. She respected and admired him even more to-day than when she had written accepting his offer of marriage. Her thoughts returned to the way in which, that very evening, he had dealt with the case of the footman, and she felt, as she had often felt before, that she had never fully appreciated Alfred's real goodness. And yet there was still that something which she hungered for
more, much more, than goodness. If only she could have loved Alfred as he loved her, she would have found it with him. And she had hoped, and tried, and prayed to find it with him. Now, apart from the fact that she was married, her youth was past; she would soon be thirty; it was too late, now, for her dream to become reality. How strange that, without regard, it seemed, for goodness or wickedness, it was granted to some people to achieve that supreme crown of life, and to others not. To her it had not been granted, and the years passed more and more rapidly, the summers and the yearly visits of Beatrix and Lady Hadlow came and went, and nothing, nothing happened to her.

The Hadlow visit to Haughton had never been interrupted except in the year of old Lord Mardale's death, and, in the case of Beatrix, in the previous year also, just after her elopement. After Charlotte's marriage, Lady Hadlow and Beatrix had come punctually every summer, and Lady Mardale also until her death; and there was the usual round of callers—old friends who drove over to see the visitors, and the annual garden-parties, including the Penningtons' and their own at Haughton. Beatrix never came to Haughton except for the summer visit, but Lady Hadlow and Lady Mardale each came at other times during the year. It was years before Charlotte had grown accustomed to the change produced in this summer reunion by her marriage to Alfred. That she should be hostess and Lady Mardale a guest seemed to her always a sacrilege. It was strange, too, that she should be mistress at Haughton and her mother a guest; but this was
not a sacrilege; it was simply a satisfactory readjustment. Beatrix's husband never came to Haughton. The Mardales had invited him, but the reply had always been that he could not leave his work. During Beatrix's visit this year Charlotte had tried again to arrange with her to bring him.

“Does he never have a holiday, Beatrix? Choose your time and come, both of you, whenever it suits you.”

Beatrix slid her arm through her sister's—they were strolling together in the garden. “Dear Charlotte,” she said, “it's awfully nice of you, but … well, let us leave my skeleton in his cupboard. I should hate to bring him here. There's far too much of the snob in me not to feel thoroughly ashamed of showing him to my friends here. I'm just like Mamma, and there's no good pretending I'm not. Besides, he wouldn't fit in here. There's nothing for him to do. He must have something to do on a holiday. ‘Let's go somewhere,' he always says to me, ‘where there's something to do.' How I loathe a place, Charlotte, where there's something to do.”

“Then I'm afraid you've had rather a tiresome time here during the last fortnight. We've been to—how many?—one … two … three … the Penningtons', four … garden-parties.”

“Oh, garden-parties aren't something to do. They're glorified idleness. ‘Something to do' is sight-seeing, golf, tennis, and bathing at some horrible seaside place like Scarborough”

It was in the autumn, two years later, that the Mardales were invited to dine and stay the night at the Penningtons'. Invitations to dinner between the Mardales and the Penningtons always included the invitation to stay the night; it was a survival from the days when the journey was done by carriage and the distance was too great to return the same night, though nowadays, in a motor, the drive took only about an hour.

A visit to the Penningtons' was always a pleasant change. It was not merely that the Penningtons themselves were old friends, nor that the country was different from the Haughton country, but also that the two houses presented a perfect contrast. The old timbered Manor House, with its warm autumnal brick, its huddled gables, the long, sprawling garden front that seemed rather a natural growth than an architectural design, the long, low rooms with heavily timbered ceilings, the grey oak of the panelling and staircases, the dark corners and dim passages, were a world apart from the Haughton world of lofty, many-windowed rooms, the wide, simple spaces of airy corridors and halls, and the calm, classic artistry of its beautiful stone façades. The Manor House was full of ghostly mystery; Haughton was the very flower of sanity and sweet reason.