Lord Mullion's Secret (22 page)

They were now in the drawing-room. When Mr Pring was busy Swithin had sometimes been allowed to carry flowers into it for Lady Mullion, and it was much the grandest apartment he had ever seen. Lady Mullion was there already, and she gave him much the same friendly glance as she would have done had he been seen arriving with a mass of daffodils and tulips. But he wasn't fool enough, he told himself, to believe that she would at all approve of his marrying her daughter. Boosie was there too, and Boosie had recently been rather fond of him. But Boosie was a generous sister, and it was his immediate perception that he had better, at the moment, give her a wide berth, since she would certainly be minded to rush up and kiss him in a demonstrative and politically motivated way. He was relieved when Cyprian shoved him into a chair and he found himself sitting beside the local doctor.

‘Good afternoon,' Dr Hinkstone said, and eyed him curiously. ‘I feel I hardly know you, Mr Gore.'

‘No. I suppose it's because I seem to keep pretty well.' Swithin wasn't sure that this was a very gracious speech. ‘I hope you do,' he added.

‘As well as my years permit, my dear young man. We did hold a certain acquaintance at one time, I may add. But you are unlikely to remember it.' Dr Hinkstone chuckled softly. ‘Except under deep hypnosis, perhaps.'

Swithin was about to say ‘I beg your pardon?' but thought better of it. He felt he'd got the idea, and it disconcerted him. So he contented himself with a survey of the other persons present. In addition to the immediate family there was only the vicar and Mr Honeybath and Mr Sylvanus Wyndowe. He had a vague notion that Mr Wyndowe, in addition to a wife, owned something like a dozen daughters. But none of these ladies was of the company. Swithin suddenly felt very out of place indeed. The feeling wasn't even much alleviated when Patty, with perfect composure, came up and handed him an alarmingly fragile looking cup and saucer. He took a nervous gulp from this at once. It wasn't at all old Charlie Dew's kind of brew.

‘A party in a parlour, all silent and all damned,' Dr Hinkstone murmured to him perplexingly. ‘But not for long. I understand that the vicar proposes to address us. Take my word for it, Gore, that I have got hold of the right expression. Do you often hear him preach?'

‘I haven't ever. I don't go to church.' This bald reply was a further indication of Swithin's unease.

‘So you haven't heard of the grand principle of subordination?'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘But there is also the grand principle of legitimacy.'

‘Legitimacy?' Swithin echoed defensively.

‘Using the term in its broadest sense,' Dr Hinkstone said a shade hastily. ‘Nobody must be cheated or excluded, you know, simply on the score of expediency or inconvenience to others. Whether it be a sound doctrine I am not prepared to say. And I shall not myself be taking part in anything that could be called debate. Facts are another matter. I may offer a fact or two, if the need occurs.'

‘Well, I could do with a fact or two myself,' Swithin said with a sudden effect of urgency, ‘and perhaps you can oblige with them. If you brought me into the world – which is what you appeared to be saying in a roundabout way – you might feel you owe it to me to put me wise if you can. I don't pretend I'm not interested in the Wyndowes. I've a very particular reason for being, as a matter of fact.'

‘Lord Mullion confided something of the sort to me, Mr Gore, as we walked back from the church. He is very much upset.'

‘
I'm
upset. Cyprian says – I mean Lord Wyndowe says – that this Dr Atlay is going to produce something frightful about Miss Camilla Wyndowe.'

‘It probably isn't all that frightful at all. Dr Atlay tends to think along what may be called clerical lines.'

‘I don't much care whether it's frightful or not. But I had nothing to do with the old lady except groom her mangy old donkey. So perhaps you'll tell me just why I'm here at all.'

‘That, my dear young man, is what I understand our good vicar intends to do. He will tell you that you are mistaken in supposing your connection with the late Miss Wyndowe to have been confined to caring for her quadruped. He will explain to the company – and I am sure that it will be with the greatest lucidity – that Miss Wyndowe was in fact your grandmother.'

 

 

Charles Honeybath, sipping his tea on a sofa shared with his hostess, was feeling (and with more justification than Swithin) decidedly an intruder upon this mysterious family gathering. It was true that circumstances had gained him several confidences, and had even set him inquiring around. And this had provided him with a certain amount of information of a not widely disseminated sort. For example, his lately projected conversation with Dr Atlay, actually achieved only after Miss Wyndowe's death, had brought him the conviction, if not the positive certainty, that the Vicar of Mullion had long cherished, and masked, something like a romantic devotion to the deceased gentlewoman. It was possible that the grand principle of subordination had as much to do with this as did any vestiges of a long-past amatory attachment.

Dr Atlay, certainly, had been concerned to protect Miss Wyndowe's reputation, which was another way of saying to conceal the truth about her. But this care seemed not to extend to her memory. Or rather (and to be fair to the man) once Miss Wyndowe had departed, and certain fictions with her, it was due to various other people that truths should be revealed. And this was particularly imperative upon Dr Atlay (Honeybath had come dimly to discern) in matters concerning hereditary privileges and ancient rights.

And here Swithin Gore had first edged himself into the picture and then come to command it. And ‘picture' was a little more than metaphorical. Dr Atlay, it seemed, had not very long ago become aware that if this gardener's boy had a certain haunting if elusive likeness to several Wyndowes living now, he was by a strange freak of heredity the split image of one commemorated by Nicholas Hilliard some centuries ago. And the arrival of a celebrated portrait-painter had confronted Dr Atlay with a crisis here. Wouldn't such a person, were Swithin to come within his view, spot this extraordinary circumstance at once, and conceivably draw undesirable attention to it? Faced with this possibility, Dr Atlay had acted promptly – taking an illustrated treatise on English miniaturists from his own shelves and performing his deft substitution with considerable skill. When Honeybath departed the particular menace he represented would depart with him, and the authentic Hilliard could be restored to its place. It had not escaped Honeybath, when he had penetrated to the vicar's responsibility for this bizarre action, that the deception might be held to have been in aid of something very like a criminal act. The facts here, however, must depend upon matters still to be revealed. And here Honeybath was as much in the dark as anybody. Except, indeed, that he was clear about this: in the quite immediate past – in fact only some hours before Miss Wyndowe's death – Atlay had discovered something quite new. And his discovery had discomposed him in an extreme degree. It was clearly the reason why, hard upon the funeral, he had felt he must conduct the curious inquest now about to transact itself.

It was when he had recapitulated these matters to his own satisfaction that Honeybath glanced across the drawing-room and wondered why on earth Swithin Gore, sitting beside the family doctor, had turned as pale as a ghost. It might have been expected that this obscure youth, suddenly promoted to a position of mysterious consequence among his betters, would be in at least an incipiently euphoric state of mind. There must, to put it crudely, be something in this for him. And as he was already indulging himself in the hope of a wildly unsuitable niche within his employer's family, he ought surely to be feeling that something like a providential leg-up had suddenly presented itself in this enterprise.

But such a line of thought, Honeybath had to acknowledge to himself at once, did injustice to Swithin Gore. The young man was very much concerned to stand on his own feet. That he could now in any sense be thought of as coming at the Wyndowes with menaces would be a notion very far from grateful to him. He wasn't feather-headed, but he did own the self-confidence of his years, and probably underestimated his own disastrous ineligibility as a suitor for the hand of Lord Mullion's daughter. Or it might be said that he was confident of Patty herself, and judged this to be enough. Honeybath wasn't entirely disposed to be judged that he was wrong.

Dr Atlay had cleared his throat. It was in what Honeybath felt to be an uncharacteristically hesitant way. Dr Atlay, in fact, had envisaged some such scene as this – and perhaps over a considerable period of time. But now he was conscious that it couldn't be played in quite the fashion he had anticipated; that he was committed to bat, in fact, on a distinctly sticky wicket. Honeybath had just arrived at this thought when Sylvanus Wyndowe took advantage of the moment's silence to address himself to Lady Mullion, on whose other hand he sat. He did so in what he probably believed to be a confidential murmur, but which turned out to be his customary roar or bellow.

‘Mary, who the devil is that young fellow over there beside old Hinkstone? Haven't I seen him trundling muck around the place?'

‘His name is Swithin Gore, Sylvanus. I think I heard you say the other day that you knew the family.'

‘The deuce it is! He doesn't look like a Gore to me. Ugly clod-hoppers, all of them. And I like the cut of that young man.'

‘No doubt, Sylvanus.' Lady Mullion was facing up to this embarrassing moment well. ‘But Dr Atlay has something to say to us. So please be quiet and listen to him.'

Sylvanus Wyndowe would probably not have claimed to he a particularly tactful man. Even so, having become aware of an unknown young man now ensconced within the Wyndowe family circle, he might have been expected to refrain from immediately and loudly associating him with a harrow. Swithin's own discomposure did not appear to have been increased. Dr Atlay, however, was glancing at Sylvanus with disfavour and even horror, as if any reflection upon young Mr Gore and his dunghill pursuits evinced the most unspeakable impropriety. And now Mr Atlay spoke.

‘Mullion,' he said augustly, ‘have I your permission to begin?'

‘Yes, Martin, by all means. If you want to, that's to say.' Lord Mullion's intellectual faculties seemed to be increasingly in abeyance. ‘We are always delighted to hear you talk. Dashed good sermon only a couple of Sundays ago, if I may say so.'

‘By Jove, yes! You gave it to them hot and strong, sir.' Cyprian, as he produced this untimely mockery, glanced around for any approval he could pick up.

‘Cyprian, dear,' Lady Mullion said.

‘Sorry, mama.' Cyprian looked decently abashed. ‘Drive on, sir.'

‘Camilla's death,' Dr Atlay began, ‘is, it need hardly be said, a sorrow to us all. And on me it imposes a duty which I am loath to fulfil. To Camilla herself, however, I long ago gave a promise that it would be so. Everything that I have to tell you came to me, fully and freely, from her; and on the understanding that it would be transmitted to her kinsfolk in due season. Or
nearly
everything.' Here Dr Atlay paused weightily. ‘One circumstance, and that a transforming one, has come to me only recently, and from a different source. What dear Camilla would have thought of it, how she would have judged it to affect the propriety of what was determined and acted upon many years ago, I scarcely dare to conjecture.'

This exordium, being sufficiently portentous, may be said to have held the vicar's auditory spellbound at once. The most gripping sermon that Lord Mullion and his heir had ever heard from him could scarcely have been of greater effect.

‘Camilla,' Dr Atlay pursued, ‘when a young woman – indeed, a very young woman – travelled somewhat adventuresomely abroad. This, as we all know, was because she was given to artistic pursuits. She was accompanied – and here was a most regrettable circumstance – only by her personal maid, herself quite a young person, of the name of Pipton. On the continent, and all unknown to her people at home, she formed an attachment to her cousin, Rupert Wyndowe, at that time the heir to the earldom. Nobody knew or heard about Rupert; he lived much on the continent; he was a man, I am sorry to say, of loose morals.'

‘Good God!' Lord Mullion interrupted. ‘Then Mary and Charles were right. Rupert it was! I knew there was something pretty specific, you see. But I always felt I'd better make a secret of it. Go on, my dear Martin.'

‘Most reluctantly, Mullion, I will go on. Rupert's seduction of his young kinswoman – for it came to that – was accomplished only with the aid of a most atrocious subterfuge – one such as is happily confined, for the most part, within the covers of cheap romances. It was with tears in her eyes that Camilla told me the story. Rupert, she said, arranged for, and carried through, a clandestine marriage with her, explaining that various matters of inheritance and the like within the family made it inexpedient that the bond should be made public at that immediate time. Being an artless, as well as an ardent, girl, she agreed to this. Very shortly after this, she became pregnant. And at that point Rupert revealed himself in his true colours. Tired of his amour, he told her that he was in fact already a married man, that their own marriage ceremony had therefore been invalid and worthless, and that he was clearing out. That, Camilla said, was his crude expression. And clear out he did. Camilla never heard from him again during the remaining eight or ten years of his life.'

‘Great heavens, Martin!' The Earl of Mullion was aghast. ‘How did you react to all this?'

‘I was, of course, deeply affected, my dear Mullion – very deeply affected, indeed. But the strangest part of the story that Camilla so movingly confided to me has yet to come. A son was born to her, almost immediately before it was designed that she should return to England. This unhappy and illegitimate infant might well have been left in Italy. But Camilla, with the help, Mullion, of your father, who alone knew the truth, in fact brought her child back to England and Mullion. It was represented as being Pipton's child, and irregularly conceived here in the village to which Pipton had been briefly returned from abroad on the death of a parent. The father was declared to be one Abel Gore, and Abel Gore was persuaded to marry Pipton at once.'