Dance of the Years (32 page)

William gave his mother more consideration than his grandfather had done, but he heard her story with exactly the same sort of mind. When Jinny had finished her confession she did not ask William's forgiveness, an omission which surprised him, although he was quite prepared to give it to her. But instead she took his hand in her heavily veined one and held it fast.

“So never forget,” she said painfully, “you and I, my dear Will, owe so much to James.”

Then she turned away from him and strove to find a cooler part of the pillow for her cheek.

She died very early the next morning when there was nobody with her but poor Debby, who was asleep on her low chair with her dark, crisp Shulie-curls nodding against the soft mountain of the bed.

William was ravished by the story he had heard. He was both despoiled and exalted by it; it made his mind work very fast. In one way he felt closer to Jinny than ever before, but in another he knew himself to be more free and therefore more powerful than ever in his life. Best of all, he felt that at last he was explained; it was not an explanation he could give to anyone else. He did not belong to a class or an age in which bastardy in any circumstances could possibly be considered an asset. But yet he was not regretful. He felt that the facts gave him an excuse for the superior and ruthless attitude he sometimes found himself adopting, not only towards his family, but to the rest of the world.

All through the days before Jinny's funeral, and even when he was in the first carriage with James and Tom, and they all sat close together with their black-gloved hands on their knees, his mind was busy clothing the details he had been given.

Edwin Castor was dead, but he had been a brilliant man. His career was well known, even William had heard of him. He had been, as important people go, considerably important. William did not wish to be associated with him openly, and wild horses would
not have dragged him to seek out his father, but he was very satisfied to have a distinguished grandfather behind him. The matter was private and personal, but remarkably powerful in its effect upon him.

In his own mind he saw the story quite plainly. He had no doubt that James had been an impoverished adventurer who had turned up at the Timsons at precisely the right moment. Clearly old Timson had paid very handsomely for the favour he had required. William assumed that all James's money had come from that source.

To William's inner vision, which was almost as limited as his grandfather's had been, there was absolutely no other explanation which could conceivably cover the facts. He took James's secrecy about his background to be a courtesy to the Timson family's susceptibilities, and he took Jinny's warning that he must be grateful to James as yet another instance of her sweet unworldliness.

He saw himself as James's benefactor; James should be grateful to him. Thinking it over, he realized that James's attitude towards himself had not been that of a man bringing up his wife's illegitimate child, so he thought he probably was very grateful. The notion that James might have refused any consideration from Alfred Timson, and had done what he did do for an entirely different, and to him far more important reason never entered William's magnificent head. As he saw it, it was as obvious as the sun. He was the princeling, and all the others, Tom, Debby and the rest, only existed as a by-product to himself.

At the gathering after the funeral he looked round the crowded parlours and caught sight of himself in a wall mirror. Had he needed any convincing of the truth of the story, that glimpse would have reassured him. He rose high above the others, and his gold hair glowed against their black; whereas their faces were swarthy and rustic and lively, his was grave, aristocratic and even noble.

William looked away. There was no self-depreciation in the fashionable point of view at that time, and he was very much a man of his period. He remembered with a simplicity which to-day seems naïve, that a man with a profession like his own was improved by humility, and so, looking at the family, he felt consciously magnanimous and kindly towards them.

Debby's eyes were puffed with weeping, and Tom looked white and different, with the fires of mischief dead in him. James looked older. He had settled down within himself and his skin had rumpled.

From his superior height William was sorry for them all, but he felt his own grief for Jinny should be an immeasurably higher thing than theirs.

When the funeral was over, James took William up to his own
parlour and sat him down while he unlocked his bureau. Then he told him that Jinny had one hundred and fifty pounds a year settled upon her by her father at the time of her marriage, and that he proposed to turn the securities over to William at once. It was a curious interview. James was not a man who enjoyed parting with money in the ordinary way, but he wanted to get rid of this money. It was all he had permitted Alfred Timson to give his daughter, and all through the years every halfpenny of it had been spent most religiously either on Jinny herself or on William.

James's reasons were elementary. He had not married Jinny for money or love, but for an ideal—a peculiar ideal certainly, mischosen maybe, but an ideal none the less—and he did not want there to be any muddle in his own or the Almighty's mind about that. Once this money was back in its proper place he felt that the incident would be closed. James considered that he had sacrificed and achieved. Now he was a decent, independent, widowed gentleman with a long residence in one respectable place behind him, and a clever aristocratically-bred son to carry on his name.

Because of the circumstances his blood would be perpetuated otherwise; Debby must see to that, or else the two younger boys. His achievement was a patched business, a cracked vase of a structure, but in view of everything it was not too bad. In fact, when he looked at it and considered all the difficulties, he felt it was a damned miraculous performance. Had it not been for Phœbe and for a new, indefinable misgiving, he thought he should feel that he had cause to be very satisfied.

He was thinking this when he got out the documents and handed them to William. Meanwhile, that young man was seeing James for the first time as someone who was not his father. He saw a curious-looking person. James was still powerful, still mighty in the shoulders, but his hips had fallen away and his big head had sunk into his neck, giving him a top-heavy appearance. His black clothes diminished his size still further, and his luxuriant white wig darkened his thick eyebrows and the hollows of his hooded eyes.

William wondered where on earth he had come from originally.

James was slightly embarrassed when he handed over the money; a little anxious to hide his satisfaction. William, who was very used to business interviews, noticed it at once and thought he understood. The old man was cheating him, of course; he assumed he was keeping the greater part for the others and was a little ashamed of it. In his present mood William was inclined to forgive James. Poor old fellow, it was very human.

He took the securities gracefully, and James cocked an eye at him. The boy seemed to be taking the cash as if he had a right to it. James
thought it a little surly in him not to protest; a long hidden trace of Shulie's anxiety to try to please when rebuffed stirred in him.

“When I go,” he said, “you'll have to look after your sister and the boys. They're a pack of almighty fools, I'm afraid.”

William looked at James and his blue eyes were very cold.

“You can rely on me to be absolutely just, sir,” he said. He looked so like Edwin Castor when he spoke that he made James feel quite uncomfortable.

One day Willitimson called in at “The Converted World” office, and feeling himself at a disadvantage in the face of so much fashionable Bible knowledge, tried innocently to compete. He startled William by observing that one of the best epitaphs he had ever heard had been placed on the tombstone of an old servant by James Galantry. Willitimson said that carved on the headstone of the grave of a certain Dorothy Holding in the churchyard at Sedgeford were the words: “She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life.”

On the other side of the office Clemmie Johns looked up to say, “Prov. thirty-one, twelve,” but for once William did not notice him. He had heard of Dorothy vaguely, but had never had her explained, for James did not explain his affairs. But now with his new knowledge William thought himself enlightened.

The genuine feeling in the quotation impressed him, as did the account of the tombstone which sounded expensive for the careful James, and he remembered that James had brought several pieces of furniture into the house at Penton Place when the old woman had died. An explanation occurred to him immediately: Dorothy Holding must have been James's mother, of course. He supposed that she had been a well-valued servant somewhere, perhaps too well valued, who had been left something in somebody's will. He would have been astounded had it been put to him that he had an evil mind, he merely adopted the explanation as the probable truth. It was the sort of history which seemed to him to be both reasonable and likely. It was not a matter he wished to examine, and he did not consider the dates, which might have enlightened him. Nor, of course, did he tackle James; it was a point of purely academic interest as far as he was concerned. He was beginning to think of James as a sort of Saint
Joseph in his own story, a useful but not particularly interesting figure.

The personal isolationism of William was quite extraordinary. Some people called it selfishness, but there was a good deal more to it than that. William saw himself as something quite apart, something as exclusive and alone as his own high walled house.

The incident probably explained why he was so surprised when he heard that a relation of James's, introducing himself as Septimus Galantry, had called at Penton Place. James had been confined to his room at the time, and had not seen him, but Debby had. William was unreasonably angry; without a modicum of enquiry or any evidence whatever, he assumed that the man was an imposter come to look for money. He could not interfere but he was against the man, and this was unlike William, who was usually prepared to see absolutely anybody in case they might prove of some use to him.

It was interesting that Debby should have seen Septimus alone when he called first, for it was probably the one stroke of luck she ever had in her life. James and the Dorothy within him were doing their best with Debby in these days, but they had their hands full.

Julia, who was jealous of her, of her school training, of her manners and of her gentleness, told William quite sincerely that she thought the poor girl was simple-minded. She also said that she looked ridiculous in the quilted skirt and pork pie hat which James had bought her at Jay's. This in all fairness to Julia was absolutely true, but most women were looking a little odd that year, and Debby was not alone.

The poor girl did not even notice Julia's resentment. She had a trusting, affable nature, and she put the pork pie plumb on the top of her head, and had to have it rearranged by Boxer, or even the impatient James himself, trying to remember how it had appeared in the shop. Her excuse was that she had been told it was vain to look in the glass, as she had by someone who had underestimated her literal-mindedness. It was a fact that she was the most fearful fool, but the house was a dead fire whenever she was out of it; she would help anybody to do anything, she never minded the most menial or unpleasant work so long as it was for someone, and little Jeff regarded her as a sort of Mother Nature only on his side. Anyone could reward her completely with gratitude, real or feigned; she was not choosy and not acute. Like Jinny, she gave away all she had; and, like James, she never threw anything away.

When one thinks what happened to her later, and how Julia used to patronize her and give her old clothes, and what was in fact a day's charring for her food alone, it is staggering that in the end the two women should have loved each other, and that it should have been
Deborah who tended Julia when she was old and drivelling, and should have soothed her when she shrank from the eternal darkness, and should have closed her eyes.

But this is premature. It is only excusable here to point out that Debby's qualities were real qualities, and were proved so. In Debby, even her faults combined to make her virtues strong; she was as obstinate as James, or as a mule, and she was always getting into such trouble that she clung to being good as a drunken man clings to a railing. Also, she had Jinny's gift—the courage to endure, and she needed that, as it turned out.

From what Debby said afterwards, her interview with Septimus must have had points of interest. When Boxer told her that the master wished her to see the gentleman who was waiting in the drawing-room, the good-natured girl also suggested that she should pin up the curl which was hanging over one of her ears. She also offered to fasten Debby's dress between the shoulder blades where it gaped, and in the end she went up looking more or less tidy.

A tall, fine-boned man of thirty-one or two turned from the window when she went into the drawing-room. He was not a schoolboy, and not the youngster who had blushed when Debby looked at him in church. The mistake was typical of Debby. She had noticed the wrong man, had eyed the pupil and not the master, who sat beside him. Miss Deveraux, who was much more fly, had not been so deceived.

If Septimus was not the fair-skinned, downy adolescent whose innocent stare had attracted Debby, he was by no means unhandsome. He was very much a Galantry. There was the faint air of weariness in his face, the same slenderness, and the same heavy lids and over-wise eyes. He was a self-possessed, disillusioned man, who was augmenting his patrimony by teaching in a fashionable school and was managing to live a comfortable, bachelor life which was yet not altogether satisfying. He wrote a little light verse of a sophisticated type, not then in favour, and hearing from Miss Deveraux that these relatives of his were connected with publishing, he had considered it an excuse to look them up.