Lord Leonard the luckless

Front matter

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.

Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you.

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

Part I

CHAP. PAGE

I. TRANSFORMATION 3

II. MISS JULIET VYSE I3

ni. LIMITED INDEPENDENCE 23

IV. FORTUNE SMILES 33

V. BEL AMI 42

VI. MISS BRADSTREET LENDS A HAND 52

VIL HIS OWN FAMILIAR FRIENDS 6 1

VIIL MISS BRADSTREET'S VISIONS 70

. IX. ICE AND FIRE 80

X. TWO BY TRICKS 89

XL LADY LEONARD IN THE SADDLE 99

XIV. AN ESCAPADE . . 128

XV. CONVENTIONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 38

XVI. LEONARD SHRUGS HIS SHOULDERS . . .147

XVIL THE DISCARDED LILY . 1 56

xvin. MRS. Leonard's hopes 165 iv Contents

Part II

CHAP. PAGE

XIX. THE NEXT GENERATION .175

XX. ARCHIE THE SECOND 1 87

XXI. A HEAVEN-SENT MIRACLE 197

XXII. ATROPOS 207

XXIII. ADIEU, LOVE 217

XXIV. MRS. VANE 226

XXV. STANDING ALONE 236

XXVI. A QUESTION OF CASUISTRY 245

XXVII. VARIOUS THINGS COME TO AN END .... 256

XXVIII. MOTHER AND DAUGHTER 265

XXIX. IN DARK NOVEMBER 274

XXX. RELEASE 284

PART I

CHAPTER I XTtansfotmatton

** A LL my life long," writes the late Lord Leonard, in /\ that copious and strangely candid diary of his, which he must surely have intended, or half intended, for publication, yet which cannot possibly be published, " I have tried to speak the truth, to see it and to face it, feeling assured that nothing else is worth while. But now that the end is at hand, I am less confident. As for speaking the truth, that is, I believe, largely a matter of temperament ; a man is what he has been made by Nature or his Creator, and, for my own part, I have no aptitude for lying. It remains, however, a question with me whether determination to view things exactly as they are is not, upon the whole, misguided energy. Certainly it does not promote happiness; for the truth, which is far more often than not painful, is sometimes downright hideous, and the vast majority, who perform their earthly pilgrimage in an atmosphere of illusion, seem to me to be a good deal better off without it than they could be with it.

" Well, what then ? Has not one of our own poets said, in words so apt as to have become almost proverbial, that

* where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise' ? If I were delivering a homily to the young, and if there were the smallest chance of. their listening to me, I really think I should advise them to close their eyes frequently, and to accept with gratitude such flattering, deluding reflections as their mirrors might find means to bestow upon them. What, after all, does one gain by knowing the lamentable things that I know? "

It is not certain that poor Lord Leonard always discerned the truth, bravely, patiently and pathetically as he strove to do so. Facts, it may be, were too much for him and obscured a vision unskilled to penetrate beyond hard, undeniable facts. But he was ever an honest man, as well as a most sorrowful one. Incapable of deceiving himself, he may yet very naturally and comprehensively have come to wonder, at the end of all, whether the faculty of selfdeception be not amongst the mo^t blessed of God's gifts to dwellers in an intricate, complicated world. His diary — so oddly bequeathed, together with other documents, to the present slightly puzzled compiler, whom he was pleased to constitute his " literary executor "—cannot, as has been said, be printed: what seems manageable is to present him and his story, under the convenient disguise of fiction and with the variations rendered imperative by discretion, to such readers as care to make acquaintance with the same. Thus presented, he will at least be intelligible ; and this he never was to those who knew him in the flesh, unless perchance to one who saw him with the unclouded, unerring eyes of childhood and loved him as indeed he deserved to be loved. It must be owned that, save in the case of that one, his habitual speech and manner afforded little clue to his individuality. With these few words of preface the slightly puzzled compiler begs leave to make his bow and withdraw.

On a sunny afternoon of early summer two young Britannia cadets were seated, side by side, on the grass, looking on at a cricket match in which one of them was too lazy and the other not quite proficient enough to take part. Archie Morant, dowered with an athletic frame and per-

Transformation 5

feet health, in addition to the physical beauty and other charms which were destined at a later period to involve him in endless scrapes, could do pretty nearly ever)rthing that he liked, but only* upon occasion liked to do things which entailed trouble; his companion, dark, sallow, and rather too tall for his age, had different tastes and slender capabilities for gratifying them. Hubert Leonard would have liked to have been batting or fielding, had he been sufficiently good to be included in either team — ^always supposing, that is, that he could have preferred any privilege to that bestowed upon him by the society in which he found himself. But his affection and respect for the boy whose somewhat condescending friendship he enjoyed forbade him to quarrel with any situation of Morant's choosing. He listened deferentially, as he always did, to the latter's desultory talk, and tried, as he often did, to rise to the level of a mental standpoint so loftily exalted above his own. Yet he was intelligent and reflective in a measure beyond his years, whereas Archie Morant never had been, and never could develop into, anything but a fascinating goose. Cultor veritatis from the outset, Hubert Leonard was debarred by his temperament from detecting an unconscious fraud.

The colloquy which he found so interesting, and which his friend had well-nigh monopolised, was suddenly interrupted by a summons from the Captain, who had just made his appearance on the cricket field. This middle-aged, rosy-cheeked naval officer, who held an open telegram in his hand, received him with a countenance expressive of mixed emotions.

" My dear boy," he began, " I have bad news for you. This shocking accident to the Scotch mail seems to have been an even worse business than was supposed."

Young Leonard, not having looked at the daily papers, did not know that there had been a railway accident. He ^ said " Yes, sir? " interrogatively.

" Yes ; it turns out that there were several victims whose names were not at first reported, and I am very sorry to say that your uncle and both his sons were amongst them. A most terrible and tragic affair indeed I But it is kinder, perhaps, to speak straight out than to attempt to break these things gently."

The boy's big brown eyes, which were almost black, became somewhat dilated ; but there was no sign of gatihering tears in them as he gravely asked : " Does tfiis mean, then, that I am Lord Leonard, sir? "

The Captain was rather taken aback. "Heartless young beggar I " he thought to himself ; " the idea that that should be the first aspect of the case to occur to him I " He replied aloud :

" Oh, yes ; it means, of course, that you succeed to the title. It also means that you will have to go to your mother at once. She telegraphs that she is starting for Leonard's End, and she wishes you, as I understand, to join her there. You will be able to catch the express to Bristol if you look alive."

Now, it is true that the above-mentioned aspect of the case had been the first to suggest itself to the Captain of the Britannia and that this explained the modified compassion and sympathy so plainly legible upon his honest face; but then he had not been acquainted with the deceased peer, nor had he lost an uncle and a couple of cousins at one blow. " One hasn't, hang it all ! " he reflected, " such a devilish keen eye to one's own interests at the age of sixteen, if one is in any way a decent chap ! "

Poor Hubert was a very decent chap, and at no period of his career could he fairly be accused of an undue devotion to his own interests. What might fairly be said of him, then and always, was that he knew not how to simulate what he did not feel. He had twice seen his uncle, who had sharply snubbed him on both occasions ; of his two cousins he had seen nothing at all. Their dramatic removal from this world affected, him only in so far as it entailed a stupendous change, which he fully realised, in his position and prospects. To be transformed at a moment's notice from the impoverished and ignored son of a younger son into a great and wealthy nobleman is enough, surely, to shake the mental balance of any naval cadet; but it did not turn the sober head which surmounted our young friend's shoulders. Recognising dis-

Transformation 7

tinctly what had happened to him, he was far from rejoicing; for he had no desire to be rich nor any ambition to be eminent. Two things he had looked forward to and longed for — a life on the wide, open sea, whidi he loved, and (with luck) a continuance of Archie Morant's intimate friendship. He was about, as he knew, to lose both, and he could have wept at the thought, had tears ever come readily to his solemn eyes. But he was constructed of that human material which suffers undemonstratively, suffers long and has the air of not suffering at all, save from inexcusable weariness. On his hurried way down to the ship, he paused to take leave of the beloved chum who was to be his chum no more, and this he accomplished in terms of the crudest brevity.

" I say, I've got to be off. My old uncle and both his sons have been killed in a railway smash, and I'm the next heir. This settles my hash. No going to sea for me now that I'm a lord, with a beastly big property; mother wotddn't hear of it, I'm sure."

Young Morant started out of his recumbent attitude and whistled. " By Jove ! " he ejaculated, " you aare a lucky devil ! Any shooting on your place ? " " Oh, I suppose so ; I've never been there." " Well, don't you forget me next autumn, that's all." " I won't forget you," the new Lord Leonard promised. " I must hook it now or I shall miss the train."

The two boys shook hands upon that and parted, Morant afterwards calling out, " Hi I — ^have you got my home address ? "

The other nodded over his shoulder.

" Because if you didn't, I'd write and send it to you." Leonard nodded again as he ran down the hill. He had wanted to beg his friend to write, but had been deterred from doing so by that queer, sensitive diffidence which was one of his misfortunes. Morant, he suspected, would never take so much trouble without some prospect of an equivalent. Well, the shooting would evidently be regarded in that light, and he perceived, as he was destined again and again to perceive thereafter, that the precise advantage of being rich and powerful consists in consequent ability to offer equivalents. The disadvantage consists, no doubt, in consequent inability to distinguish gratitude from greed.

Nobody who knew Mrs. Leonard — ^that stem, handsome, upright, uncomplaining and highly capable widow —could have been so unjust as to call her a greedy person ; whether she was of a grateful temperament or not nobody was in a position to determine, her circumstances not having been such as to draw forth manifestations of gratitude. Upon an exiguous income, which her opulent brother-in-law had not dreamed of augmenting, she had contrived heroically to make both ends meet and to give her only boy the education of a gentleman ; too proud to grumble and far too proud to solicit pecuniary aid, she had dwelt since her widowhood in the obscurity of a tiny suburban villa, thus paying the penalty of bygone marital extravagances which she had been powerless to check. Lord Leonard, who had once upon a time defrayed a portion of his late brother's debts, rather particularly disliked her and took little or no notice of her. The remote contingency, which had now actually occurred, of Hubert's succeeding him had probably never for one moment entered into his calculations. Why, indeed, should it, considering that he had two fine, well-grown sons, and that he himself, a hale widower in the prime of life, was by no means disinclined to a second matrimonial venture ? But improbability is no sure safeguard against the caprices of Fate or the decrees of an inscrutable Providence. It was to the latter influence that Mrs. Leonard piously preferred to ascribe a disaster which sent her post-haste, as in duty bound, to Leonard's End and caused her to despatch a telegram at once categorical and concise to the Captain of the Britannia, Like her son, to whom she may have transmitted something of her own character, she accepted changed fortune without outward elation; like him, she did not affect to mourn deaths which were in no sense a personal bereavement to her ; but, unlike him, she was filled with an immense inward, suppressed joy. A gentlewoman by birth, she had been made to suffer horribly, albeit silently, by her enforced exclusion from the

Transformation 9

only society possible to her and the dreary resulting solitude in which her recent life had been spent. Her feeling was that she had been dead and was alive again ; if it had taken a catastrophe of the first magnitude to bring about her resurrection, the utmost that could be asked of her was that she should abstain from thanking God aloud for the method employed.

When Hubert reached Leonard's End, a beautiful old Tudor pile in the midlands, the greater part of which was as ancient as his inherited barony, he found his mother not less composed, grave and gently unapproachable than was her wont. She greeted him with a little dry kiss and read him a little dry homily, suitable to the occasion. It had pleased Heaven, she said, to call him abruptly to a great position, entailing serious responsibilities; it must be his endeavour henceforth to show himself worthy of the one and adequately to discharge the others. We are sent into this world, not to choose our manner of life, not to amuse ourselves or gratify our personal inclinations, but to perform a given task. He must never forget that he bore a title which had been worn by his predecessors for the best part of four centuries without stain or humiliation. The statement may have fallen a trifle short of strict historical accuracy; but it rang out with a certain sonorous appropriateness in the oak-panelled library which was the scene of its enunciation, and the boy was duly impressed. He never failed, indeed, to be impressed by his mother, although his sense of humour was somewhat more developed than hers. To the end of her days, and probably to the end of his, he held firmly to the belief that she was his intellectual and moral superior. So far as a constitutionally fearless being could be afraid of anybody, he was afraid of her, and during his boyhood, at all events, it did not so much as occur to him to question the finality of her decrees. It was, therefore, with only the faintest of faint hopes that he asked :

" Must I cut the Navy, mother? "

" It stands to reason that you must," was Mrs. Leonard's reply.

He had felt sure that she would say so; yet he essayed lo Lord Leonard the Luckless

one feeble, pathetic bid for liberty. " I believe, you know, it's about the only thing I'm fit for, and it's the only thing I want. Mightn't I have just a few years of it? After all, lots of other fellows who have come into property began life as sailors."

"Leonard," returned his mother gravely (from that day forth she never addressed him as " Hubert " again), " you do not understand what you are talking about. If there is a single instance of one in your present position having been brought up as a naval officer, I can only say that I am not aware of it. To have been educated in that way would not be advantageous to you in after life, and it cannot be thought of. I very much regret that it is now too late to send you to one of the great public schools ; but of course, when the time comes, you will go up to Oxford and take your degree. Meanwhile, the best that can be done for you will have to be done. It is a matter for consideration and consultation."

She was not in the least likely to consult anybody, unless legally compelled to do so; nor, assuredly, would the slightest consideration be given to the boy's individual views. He yielded, with a smothered sigh and without further words. He was fond of his mother, as she, after her peculiar fashion, was undoubtedly fond of him ; but they had never been upon terms of confidential friendship. His secrets remained his own; his longings and joys and sorrows and disappointments were for internal consumption only. It was in truth, for him, saying a good deal to say, as he presently did :

" I don't a bit like being Lord Leonard ; I think it's an awful bore I "

He was rebuked for talking in that way, which was stigmatised as " very silly and childish." It was pointed out to him that to be Lord Leonard was at least to be " somebody " (one must perhaps be somebody in order to appreciate at its full value the inestimable privilege of being nobody), and that it likewise entailed the putting away of childish things. What it apparently did not at all imply was any relaxation of discipline or any diminution of the obedience due to elders and betters. Mrs.

Transformation 1 1

Leonard had thought the whole thing out in the course of a few hours' railway journey ; she more or less saw her way, and to her way her son must necessarily conform. She was a very able, self-possessed, quietly insistent lady.

Collaterals, lawyers, agents, stewards — ^a whole host of bewildered functionaries and hangers-cm — were destined to find her so and to bow, not unwillingly, to her behests. There was really nobody else who, in a totally unforeseen situation and in the absence of precise instructions relating hitherto, was qualified or entitled to take the lead, nor did she encounter any opposition. The arrangements for the triple obsequies which had to be solemnised in a vast crowd were undertaken by her and efficiently carried through; the reading of the late Lord Leonard's will, which proved by force of circumstances to be a practically inoperative document, left her in legal command; Leonard's End, with everybody and everything involved in the possession of that property, accepted her regency from the outset. Easily and at once she became a personage in the county and remained for many years a highly influential personage, respected, admired and, in a modified sense, beloved. After the funeral rites, the new Lord Leonard, who had figured in the same and had produced a fairly favourable impression as a somewhat forlorn little chief mourner, addressed a modest request to her.

" Mother, would you mind my asking Morant to come and shoot in September? "

"You are too young," Mrs. Leonard answered, "to issue invitations in your own name. Besides, I do not know who Morant is."

" He is a pal of mine and an awfully good fellow."

" I suppose you mean that he is a friend and a schoolfellow of yours ; ' pal ' is a vul^r term which I would rather not hear you use. Well, if he is one of the Dorsetshire Morants, if he can be trusted with a gun and if he will not interfere with your studies, I see no objection to his being asked."

"I promised," pleaded the boy, adding presently,

" And September is a holiday month for everybody, you know."

" Promises," observed his mother, " ought always to be kept, although they should not be lightly given. I will make inquiries about your young friend. Bear in mind, however, that great landowners, even while they are in their minority, cannot consistently with duty, take long or frequent holidays."

They very habitually do; but it may he said of this rather exceptional landowner that up to his dying day he availed himself but little of privileges which he might have claimed. During the adolescent period, at all events, he was — ^wisely or unwisely — ^inured to hard work and denied all luxuries, save such as inevitably belonged to the stately ordering of his daily existence. To the end he never ceased to regret the sea, nor to yearn mutely and vainly for his forfeited insignificance.

MRS. LEONARD had ideas upon the subject of education. It is a subject upon which most people have ideas; but these are, as a rule, quite harmless, inasmuch as most people are effectually restrained by the almost irresistible trammels of use and wont from putting them into practice. Young England, in the upper-class sense of that term, goes through the mill which has turned out so many generations of its forefathers and emerges after the fashion that we see — ^not learned, perhaps not even adequately instructed, yet with the acquisition of certain qualities and characteristics which have their very definite value. What may have been a little unfortunate for the new Lord Leonard was that his mother was in the unusual position of having a practically free hand with regard to him. Duly constituted colleagues in his guardianship were appointed for her; but hers was always the determining voice, and all they ever did in discharge of their functions was to say ditto to her. What could she do? — what could anybody have done in her place? It was, as she had said, too late to send him to Eton or Harrow, and rather than expose him to the hazardous possibilities of private tuition away from home, she resolved to conduct the training process under her own eye and with the aid of the best pedagogues obtainable for money. Such a process could not in the nature of things be wholly satisfactory ; she rendered it less so than it need have been by the stringency of the methods which she prescribed. The ideal landowner is, no doubt, easily definable; but possibly it may be said of him, as of a poet, nascitur, non fit. It is, at any rate, hardly by snatching a would-be sailor out of his predestined groove and dinning the nature of his terrestrial duties perpetually into his ears that the ideal is likely to be evolved.

The poor lad had a severe, cheerless, solitary youth, of which he did not complain, yet which left its indelible mark upon him through life. He was taught many things, and was taught them as well as could be managed by a succession of able instructors ; he developed a certain studious, literary aptitude and (for Mrs. Leonard was too shrewd a woman to ignore the indispensable demands of sport) became a fair horseman and shot: what he missed — and what happened to be essential in the case of one of his temperament — was companionship. Archie Morant (was proved, on inquiry, to be one of the Dorsetshire Morants and therefore eligible) was indeed permitted to spend a month with him and to walk up partridges in his company, escorted by a watchful keeper; but Archie passed out midshipman from the Britannia, was despatched forthwith to the North American station and came to Leonard's End no more. He answered one or two of his faithful chum's letters and then fell silent. He had no successor, nor in truth could he have had any ; for such young fellows as were domiciled in the neighbourhood did not take much to the solemn, shy boy who had but few holidays in the course of the year and who was sensitively reluctant to thrust himself upon them. In short, the Lord Leonard who eventually matriculated and took up his residence at Christ Church was not all that his painstaking mother could have wished him to be. She had moulded him only too well ; she had indued him with a very strong sense of the duties and responsibilities attaching to his station; he was not, she felt comfortably sure, in any danger of bringing sorrow upon her by breaking out into extravagance or debauchery ; yet — ^he was, somehow, not a success. She realised that, and was secretly provoked with him; he also realised it, and was saddened. They both, it may be, longed for the unattainable; they both felt that so young, wealthy and distinguished a personage as Lord Leonard ought to be easily popular; and popular, poor fellow, he never was. His mother was of

Miss Juliet Vyse 15

opinion that he had incurably bad manners; he himself only knew (and could at times have wept with the miserable consciousness of it) that he was unsympathetic.

Oxford, of course, did something for him. He made sundry acquaintances — friends they could scarcely be called — who accepted the hospitality which he was allowed to extend to them ; his horizon became widened, and, being in some respects malleable, he assimilated that prevailing tone of his day which it would have been too absurd of him to fail in catching ; but, in spite of all, he remained a lone figure. From start to finish the real man was oddly detached from his actual life ; from first to last his heart was at sea, far away on the broad ocean which had acquired for him the glamour of passionately desired, forbidden things. Somewhere in his diary he says — half-dejectedly, half-humorously, as usual — " I can't imagine what Providence was thinking about when my soul was allotted to my body ; I seem so very much like the outcome of an oversight. And yet, God knows, I have tried hard enough to accommodate myself to difficult circumstances ! Perhaps, when all is over, the reason of my tragi-comic failure may be revealed to me, although it will then have only an academic interest."

It was soon after his twentieth birthday that hfe suddenly assumed for him the species of interest which is known by experience to every mortal of that age or upwards. He was at home for Christmas, acting as host to a houseful of people invited by his mother ; some of his mother's guests had accompanied him out hunting, but at the close of the short winter day he had lost sight of them and, which was more to be regretted, had, owing to a series of mishaps, likewise lost the hounds. He had just made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to make for the nearest road and jog back when he became aware that somebody on the farther side of a ragged fence a couple of hundred yards or so away was waving forlorn signals to him with a hunting-crop, and at the same time there reached his ear, through the moist, misty air, inarticulate sounds as of a female voice imploring help. He cantered across an intervening stretch of plough, put his horse at a gap in the hedge, and, receiving too late a hasty cry of warning, narrowly escaped the disaster which had overtaken his predecessor.

" Oh ! " she exclaimed, drawing a long breath, " I was afraid you were going to come to grief as I did. I didn't think you would try to jump it, although of course you were as little prepared as I was to find this hideous ditch on the other side."

She was a tall, fair-haired girl whom he remembered to have seen at the meet — ^the daughter, somebody had told him, of a certain General Vyse who had recently succeeded to a property in the neighbourhood. Little susceptible though he was to feminine charms (for women, as a rule, frightened him and he had already made the dismaying discovery that a large proportion of them were quite undisguisedly desirous of marrying him), he had been struck at the moment by Miss Vyse's remarkable beauty, and this impression was renewed, despite the unbecoming aspect under which he now beheld her, with a broken hat, a torn habit and mud-plastered cheeks. Stiff and stark at her feet lay the little bay horse whom she had managed with noticeable grace and dexterity earlier in the day and whom she now apprehensively indicated with an outstretched finger.