Privilege : a novel of the transition

Front matter

PRIVILECE

Michael Sadleir i ee ey Me wt

A NOVEL OF THE TRANSITION

CHAPTER I.—TuHE BRADEN HEIRS

Il.—THE CHARM OF WHERN III.—Monica’s CrRowD IV.—A CHRISTMAS PARTY V.—A Famity Row VI.—RETRIBUTION VII.—MicHAEv’s ACCESSION TO WHERN VIII.—A FaAmiILty GATHERING IX.—BEHIND THE CURTAINS X.—A CONSPIRACY XI.—FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS .

XII.—THE TRAGEDY OF MICHAEL XIII.—MAaKING A CHOICE

XIV.—FULFILLED DESIRE

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CHAPTER I THE BRADEN HEIRS I

““MAN that is born of a woman hath but ashort time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.”’

The words hovered one moment in the air and the next, jerked on to the back of the sulky wind, were borne faintly wailing towards the long, wet woods of Whern. The parson, his surplice twitched hither and thither by the gusts of wind, the leaves of his prayer-book fluttering beneath his restraining thumbs, bent his head a fraction lower and continued his monotonous, muted rendering of the burial service.

“ . , totake unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we, therefore, commit /is body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust se With a strange feeling of detachment I focused before my eyes the ironic discomfort of the scene. Through a veil of mist spotted with drops of rain, and as though they were set in the frozen perspective of a stereoscope, I saw my brothers, my sisters, the handful of relatives, and—at a respectful distance—the crowd of villagers. The black clothes cut stencils on the grayness—curious rigid stencils of conventional form so that the figures had little more human significance than the yew trees dotted among the graves. And then the chasm of the grave itself—our grave, our father’s grave, the grave of Black Whern—a foolish pit lined with green and white, scored irrelevantly across the sodden turf. Ironic it was that Black Whern who, when there was not room, forced a way and let the weaker give place, should now at his end encounter a throng even he could not displace—the throng of the dead. He would have his stately tombstone in the church, but his body would rot among those of carters and woodcutters with little to mark the place of its decomposition except, maybe, a headstone a little more ornate, a railing a little more elaborate than those on either hand.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore.”’

The parson closed his book and, his hands clasped before him, bowed his head over the grave in prayer. What prayers was he saying for Black Whern? Did he remember dinners at the Abbey when the old man would insult his cloth, taunt his submissiveness, make mock of his embarrassed silences? Did he remember the great day when the fox took cover behind the chancel screen? Did he see once more hounds streaming up the nave with my father in their midst kicking and swearing— for no huntsman dared gainsay Black Whern however foul his hunting manners—the moment of ugly scrimmage, the shatter of glass as one of the lamp standards caught a brandished crop, the kill in the chancel itself under the very eyes on the one hand of Black Whern terribly alive, swarthy, and exultant, on the other of the pale effigies of his ancestors, couched stiffly tier above tier in the rigid armor of their time? What prayers indeed could be said for Black Whern?

Then in my cynicism I looked at the mourners. Harold—Lord Whern at last—held his silk hat unflinchingly and his too full lips were set into something approaching gravity. He was like the dead man, with all the cruelty gone to sensuality, all the rugged strength to the lax lines of good living. I wondered if he were moved. Likely enough. Men of his type are easily swayed to pompous solemnity. As a child, as a youth, he had gone through alternating fits of sentiment and selfishness. Probably for the moment he felt genuine grief, but even so rare a profundity could not make him dignified. He was handsome and a fine figure of a man, but he was soft—at once soft and reckless, a product of great traditions and too much facility for self-indulgence. Well, well— doubtless there had been Bradens like him before; but some forgotten flicker of family pride scorched my heart one moment with regrets. Michael would have made a worthier heir, thin-lipped, intractable though he was. He was holding himself very straight, and his fine, pale brow and narrow eyes showed neither sign nor pretense of grief. Rather it was contempt that he felt for the whole scene—contempt primarily for the corpse, then for the shivering clergyman, for the crumbling tower, for the humble headstones planted crazily about the grass (like the almonds on Ursula’s ice pudding that July night five years ago—the foolish memory hurt as keenly as though it had been yesterday that her bitter words had driven me into the stifling streets to limp lonely to my rooms).

I riveted my mind on the present and found that my attention, unsupported by conscious reasoning, had left Michael and passed to Monica. Arrogantly she held herself, beautiful in her black, her golden hair like the flash of a bird in flight under the brim of her small, defiant hat. Rakish, almost, that hat, in view of the occasion, but wonderfully Monica. Cold she looked, cold, proud, magnificent—and again my cynicism smiled inwardly, gloating a little, for I knew Monica for the loose, flashy thing she was, whose extravagances were the delight of keyhole whisperers, whose shipwreck on some shoal of prudery every muck-raker of the servile Press that at present fawned about her little shoes looked for and forward to. Poor Monica! But she had fearlessness and a nobility that in those early days I was too shallow to detect. And, finally, when the crash came she held her head high and smiled that brilliant smile so that I, for one, loved her in her failure as I had never loved her during the vivid years of her success. And then, Anthony. Perhaps it was only his greater youth that gave him transparency and charm. But Harold was gross, Michael pitiless, Monica blatant, in comparison with his graceful reverence. His fair hair and long pale face, the curve of his arm and relaxed right leg blended with the sadness of the day, where the others were hostile blots on the compassionate shroud of autumn. Anthony in normal life was languid and a thing of mannerisms. He collected jade, went to confession, wore black pyjamas with a scarlet belt. And even now, in my softened mood, I seemed to detect a whiff of the scent he used and, as I smelt it, the gulf between me and this my family widened once again and Anthony became as much an interruption as the rest, perhaps the more repulsive for his very elegance.

The group swayed and broke. Harold was moving towards the churchyard gate. One by one the others turned to follow. I stepped back and looked about for Mary. A few moments before I had seen her standing demurely beside Monica, her black coat dowdy (or maybe beautiful with the beauty of a different world) in comparison with the elaborate simplicity of the other’s furtrimmed velvet. Mary was the youngest of us, at that time just eighteen to Anthony’s twenty, to my twenty-seven. Even those of us who were privileged to be children of Black Whern could only guess at the secret of those seven years during which our mother had had no child. Our nurses, perhaps, and old Studland, the butler; the London specialist, a handful of relations . . . they may have known the truth. I gleaned something of it when I came of age because—well, I suppose they thought my withered foot entitled me to a word of explanation. Yet Anthony was sound, though delicate, and Mary frankly healthy. An odd thing, heredity. I was often struck by the difference the four elder of us and the two who formed the postscript of the family. All the harshness of the breed seemed to have ended with me. Anthony had pliability, and Mary gentle persistence, where we others had turbulence or arrogance or reckless levity or self-protective irony. Perhaps because I came last of the first litter (the brutal metaphor was my father’s before it became a commonplace of statesmanship) I was more sympathetic to the younger ones than were my seniors. Certainly I loved Mary as, to the time of which I am speaking, I had loved no one else, and Anthony’s effeminacy called to the banter that was my kindliness more than to my scorn. That the adaptable may become flaccid and the quietly persistent fanatical, after events taught but too thoroughly. Perhaps I should have foreseen them; if so, my obtuseness has been punished.

I looked about for Mary and, as I looked, she crept from behind the shrub at the grave head and, casting a flower into the hole, stood for a moment solitary on the brink, her hands clasped lightly, her face impassive. She was about to hurry away when she saw me watching her.

“‘T should like to walk home, Dick,’’ she said. “Would it bore you too much?”

We explained to the others, waiting impatiently by the short line of motors in the road. Monica shrugged and stepped into the limousine. One by one the ‘“‘mourners’’ found places and with a throb and a screech the cars slid towards Whern. The men touched their hats and one or two old women curtsied, as I limped up the village street by Mary’s side.

The hamlet of Whern St. Nicholas lies to the south of the Abbey grounds in a shallow dip between the still more southerly downland and the gradual slope to the lip of the curious crater in which the home of my ancestors was situated. The road begins to rise directly one leaves the schoolhouse on the left-hand side but does not,

The Braden Heirs II for the ordinary traveler, rise all the way, as it turns half a mile northward of the village and traces a switchback easterly course skirting the crumbling wall that marks the boundary of the Abbey woods. Mary and I entered these woods by a gap in the wall and began to pick our way upwards through the damp leaf drifts and among the lichenous tree trunks.

The year was rotting to its end. Along the carpet of trodden leaves, brown-yellow with an occasional slashing of vivid green, the trees crept like mildewed ghosts, an endless procession of noiseless specters, emerging from one tangled mistiness only to blend instantly with another.

The solitude of this familiar woodland seemed peopled with melancholy sprites. Each raindrop clinging to a twig was a tear for the decay of Whern, each gurgle of the spongy ground a sob for the late autumn of an ancient race. I saw our beloved woods with new and older eyes. The few and brief visits to Whern which I had paid during the last ten years had been visits of duty, and I had found their constraint and antagonism endurable only thanks to a deliberate keeping alive of memories of happier childhood. Indeed more than once I had sought out some corner of the woods— an abandoned pumphouse which had been our brigands’ cave, an overgrown quarry in which we had hunted grizzlies, practiced rock-scrambling, picnicked on golden summer afternoons—to brace myself for an evening in my father’s company. Now, for the first time, I let slip make-believe and left to the past the lure of its own witchery. I saw Whern and its woods and ourselves, its inheritors, sinking, as the old year was sinking, towards an inevitable December. The blaze of autumn is a painted flame, without heat, without core; Black Whern for all his apparent strength was a braggart and a thing of hollow sound. He was dead, and the October leaves were wind-tossed and stained with damp. Where they had flaunted their transient glory were now naked twigs; even the few that clung still in foolish obstinacy to the trees hung limply and askew. In the seat of Black Whern was Harold. And there were tears in my heart because of the great past of Braden and because death is angry sadness to the young.

We had not spoken since entering the woods. Our silence and the gloom of my own thoughts prompted me to that awkward levity which was my treacherous refuge from embarrassment.

“Thank God, that’s over!”

Mary did not answer but bent her head and hurried forward. I cursed myself for a blunderer.

“What is the matter, Mary?”

“Oh Dick—nobody cared. Not one of you cared an atom. Poor, poor father!”

“He was an old man, child, and a lonely one— Don’t grudge him his rest.’

“Grudge it! If you knew how I envied it!”

“Mary! To talk like that!”

She turned on me.

“You haven’t to live on here—with Harold.”

Her bitterness startled me and my uneasiness increased to see her quiet eyes dark with dread.

“But, child—you can come to Monica

‘She would thank you for saying that and so do I!”

‘‘Well then, to me.”

“T may do that, Dick dear, sometime. But you don’t really want me—and, besides, I cannot run away before the battle.”

She was tired and nervous and this intensity was, according to my then superficial judgment, too foreign to Mary to be real. So I merely said:

“That is a promise, then. You can come to me when you wish, and I will try to veil my reluctance to receive you.”

Perhaps the conventional irony did service on that occasion. At any rate Mary brightened and we spoke no more of the funeral nor of its problems.

II

I suppose the others had been in an hour or more when we reached the Abbey. Lunch had draggled off into cheese and crumbled bread, with Anthony like some fastidious bird still picking delicately at its fringe. He explained that the relations had gone. + °,°trains:.0> sonlys tics Mico While waiting for fresh food and too lazy to follow Mary’s lead and go upstairs to change, I wandered towards the billiard room in search of further company. Across the hall through the front door I saw a small mauve car like an enameled snail waiting in the drive. At that moment Monica appeared by the baize doors of the library corridor; they snapped to behind her with their curious sound that suggested an angry dog with no bark. She took no notice of me but going to the foot of the staircase removed the cigarette from her mouth and shouted:

“Fli—im!”’

There was no reply.

“Fli—im! Where the devil have you got to? I’m ready!”

Still no reply.

“Bli—i—i—im!”’

“Better,’”’ I remarked. ‘‘Much better. But remember to trill on the high note and to throw the head well back.”

She turned to see who was speaking.

“Hello, Dick,”’ she said carelessly. ‘‘Got in from your weep-walk? Have you seen Flim anywhere?”’

“Anything is possible,’ I replied. ‘What is it?”’

Ignoring me completely she began to shout once more, this time with better fortune.

“All right, all right! I’m coming,” said a male voice a little testily, and a small springy man with cheeks shaved black and tight close-cropped black moustache hurried from the far corner of the hall. He was wearing very new herring-bone tweeds of striking cut and a stiff pink-lined turnover collar with a bow tie. Altogether a nasty little man.

“God bless the man!” cried Monica. ‘‘ Where the hell have you been? Here am I waking the dead fe

“T am even surprised you remember there are dead to wake, Monica.”

The sardonic interruption came from one of the small balustraded galleries that on the first floor landing overiook the central octagon of the hall. Michael leant a little forward to see the effect of his remark, and I could see the righteous cruelty of his contemptuous mouth. Monica turned her back angrily, but I noticed that her voice was sensibly lowered when she spoke again:

‘Shall we push off right away?”’

Her friend nodded and muttered inaudibly, glancing round for a servant. One of the men crossed the hall to the dining-room with the preliminaries of lunch for Mary and myself.

“‘Hullo—you there!”’ shouted the little stranger. “Fetch me my coat, and be quick about it!”’

I chuckled. Verily there were rents already in the garment of our inheritance. The footman— he was a junior and nervous—vanished into the dining-room and reappeared immediately in search of the coat. I shrank back in the shadow of a pillar lest the departing, if unbidden, guest should see me—and delay his going. Michael, from his vantage post, observed in silence. ‘Monica had gone through the outer hall to the front door and was standing on the steps gazing sulkily at the tearful sky. With some struggling the stranger settled his coat to his liking, placed a Homburg

The Braden Heirs iy slightly askew upon his head, and swaggered absurdly towards his car.

When the mauve snail had crawled out of sight I crossed the hall to the dining-room and began lunch. Mary came down in a few moments. We ate determinedly.

“Coffee in the billiard room?”

I told the man and followed Mary thither. In front of a huge wood fire Harold sprawled his great bulk on a lounge chair. Whisky stood by his side. The hearthrug seemed solid dog, for, on it, in a fair imitation of their master’s attitude, lay an Irish wolf-hound, three spaniels, and a rough-haired terrier. Over the huge and hideous room brooded the spirit of stupor after gluttony. Harold greeted us without emotion.

“Hullo! Had lunch?”

We advanced to the outworks of the nearest dog.

“Cold . . .” Isaid suggestively. “‘Isn’t it?”

Harold grunted. Then with a crooked grin he hoisted himself to one elbow.

‘Scared of the dogs, eh? Poor little Polly. She shan’t be plagued with nasty dogs. Get away, you brutes!”

His kick cleared a pathway to the fire. Mary slipped to the curb and settled on the fire-seat.

From the edge of the billiard table I swung my legs.

With the coffee came Michael, cool and correct in a short black coat. It was like Michael to have changed his morning coat and nothing more. He walked quietly to the fire, trod on the tail of the fattest spaniel, stepped neatly over the fire-seat and wedged his shoulders against the chimney breast, his feet against the curb. Harold, from the shapeless mass of his old shooting suit, glanced sullenly upwards. He was doubtless painfully aware—for even I had a foreboding—that Michael was about to hold forth.

“Where is Monica?”’

Harold shrugged sleepily.

“Who was that little swine with her in the hall?”

“In the hall,’”’ replied Harold.

“What do you mean—in the hall?” asked Michael crossly.

“Trying to answer your question, old chap,” grumbled Harold. ‘‘You asked where Monica was. I replied, ‘In the hall,’ a reply which, on your own showing, is correct.’

Michael sniffed.

‘‘No—seriously, Harold. You must speak to Monica. It’s rotten bad form to import a little bounder like that on the day of father’s funeral and then go screaming for him all over the house as if it were a railway station. You’re the head of the family.”

Harold grinned.

“What a prig you are, Michael! As if it mattered. He’s not a bad fellow either, is little Grayshott. Damn fine horseman. He told me of ahorse . ‘h

Michael turned to me.

“Dick, for God’s sake, say something!”

I was apt to shirk on these occasions and for the moment, although I was with him on this particular point, Michael’s tactlessness made me hate him.

‘Railway station’ is very good,’’ I said reflectively. ‘‘I have long wanted to know what Whern reminded me of. Of course—a railway station. Perhaps Monica thought it was St. Pancras and wanted a porter.”

Harold guffawed.

““Monica’s quite capable of wanting half a dozen porters if they were good-looking,” he said.

Mary shifted in her place and glanced appealingly towards me. Michael darted a furious look at Harold, shook himself free of the chimney-piece, and walked quickly from the room. Clearly the subject required changing. “Well, Harold, what’s the next move? Are you going to make a coronation speech to the tenants?” “God!” replied Harold, ‘‘I see myself.” Anthony lounged into the room.

“Exquisite!’” he exclaimed mincingly. ‘‘The purple, browns, and greys . . . And the sad menace of the down. . .. Harold, the old brandy is finished. I was constrained to finish my lunch sans liqueur.” |

I condoned. Harold sniffed loudly.

“You smell like a girl,’”’ he growled.

Anthony smiled gently.

“Parfum d@’amour—what is more delicate? The frail white flesh——”’

Mary got up and hurried to the door. On the threshold she turned passionately.

“Father is dead,’ she cried, “‘and you are his sons . zs

Her voice broke and she vanished from sight.

Harold sniggered.

“Dramatic,” he said. ‘‘She gets on my nerves, that girl. Too damn pernickety.”

“Only Victorian,” drawled Anthony. ‘Were she not one’s sister one would say bourgeoise. But there is infinite freshness in virtue. Indeed, maidenhood is getting fashionable again.”

“It’s never been very cheap,” sneered Harold. ‘“‘Gross—gross,’’ murmured Anthony.

And once more I chuckled.

Chapter II The Charm Of Whern I

Ir I write something now of the Whern I knew and loved, it is perhaps as much to convince myself of what I won when I lost it and to brush away from the memory of the crowded years that followed my father’s death the cobwebs of wistful sentiment, as to provide a proper setting for my narrative. The ‘Dream Palace” that one reads of in the letters of its creator, the fantastic erection—adorable in its very absurdity—in which I was born and in which I spent my childhood, has vanished now even more completely than has Beckford’s Abbey of Fonthill, its inspiration and its prototype. What strange misfortune pursues things, animate and inanimate, that defy the custom of their time? Has conformity a divine sanction after all? While they remained decorous children of their age the Bradens, in their unob- 22 trusive way, prospered. One erratic, decadent genius, twenty short years of feverish eccentricity —and the centuries of steady if stupid growth counted for but a fraction of their lasting. Lancelot Braden died loathsomely under soaring vault of his mighty house not three months after the last touch of gilding had dried on the weather vane of the northern tower. Geoffrey, his nephew and successor and my grandfather, was killed in the Crimea. My father, an ironical exception, lived out his passionate life to its forlorn and solitary end. Subsequent events—the fun grew fast and furious—are my story. Many a time have I felt the grim justice of my melancholy on that wet woodland walk with Mary, of my sense of strange and desolate happenings brooding over Whern and over Braden. .

In a great cup of the Wiltshire hills, under the lee of the western slope and on the bank of a shallow lake made by a stream that traversed the arena from north to south, there were erected in the eleventh century a Cistercian Abbey and cloister which took their name from the hamlet of Whern lying in the adjoining valley. The foundation was not a rich one, as the place was at once remote and too near Sarum to flourish more than modestly. Its obscurity did not, however, save it at the Reformation, and its lands and buildings were bestowed by the Crown on Sir Richard Braden, whose father had joined Henry Tudor on his march to Bosworth Field taking in his train young Richard and a company of yokels from his home in the Welsh marches. The lad by his skilful parade of shrewd economy at the expense of other people won the approval of the new king and, with the coming of Henry VIII., was knighted with a place at court. The bestowal of Whern paid the loyal debt of gratitude for a variety of services, rendered staunchly and with tact, and began the transfer of the Braden home from Shropshire to Wiltshire, which by the end of the sixteenth century was finally accomplished. It seems that a succession of unambitious and none too durable houses sheltered those ancestors of mine that held Whern from the accession of James I. to the time of the French Revolution. Perhaps every second generation pulled down and began afresh. Certainly, at stated intervals, the ruins of the old Abbey were pillaged for material and the original and noblest Whern of all faded into a tattered fragment of ghost-gray loneliness, while across the green basin of the wooded hollow house after transient house blossomed and died.

Then came the reign of great-uncle Lancelot, the birth of the Braden peerage, the meteor splendor of golden Whern and—the zenith passed—the tilt on to the final downward slope to decadence.

I have spoken of Fonthill as the inspiration and the prototype of Whern. It was more than that. It was its material as well as its spiritual forbear, some part of Whern being actually fashioned of the marble, stone, and glass of the notorious Non- Such wonderland of an hundred years ago. This makes it all the more surprising that in an age of rapid tourism so few would-be visitors stopped their cars for an hour or two at the high crossroads on the down or forced the slumbrous peace of Whern Royal to stay a night at the really admirable inn and catch a glimpse of a house which was, with all its faults of beauty, undoubtedly unique.

Deliberately I concentrate on Whern and not on its creator, for this is the story of my brothers and sisters and myself and not of our ancestors. But, freely, the tale of Lancelot Braden, first Viscount Whern (‘‘Great-Uncle Lance” we always called him, the familiarity mirroring’ the admiring repulsion in which, by tradition, we held his memory), would make finer and more sensational reading than that of our more discreet shortcomings. Some other time, perhaps . . . Enough, here, to state that Lancelot Braden, vastly rich, physically beautiful, saw in the pioneer gestures of the great William Beckford a hint for his own supereccentricity ; that he became first an admirer, then a protégé, finally an adoring intimate of the Sultan of Lansdowne Tower; that, whereas London knew him only as a figure of sinister and remote licentiousness, to Bath he was a frequenter of the treasure house in Lansdowne Terrace, a companion of old Beckford on his rides along the down, an enthusiast for sale catalogues, rare manuscripts, pictures of foreign schools. Concerning the strange friendship rumors went about; in explanation of the bestowal by George IV. on Lancelot of a peerage the coffee houses knew something more substantial and less savory than even the basest rumour. . . But all this, again, is irrelevant. Let us get back to Whern.

It is history that in 1823 Beckford, mainly for reasons of economy but partly also from disgust at realizing the frauds practiced on him by his architect, sold the entire Fonthill estate, including the famous Abbey, to a Mr. Farquhar. It is also history that, not long after completing his purchase, the new owner saw the great tower fall down (for the second time in its brief period of life), and decided to cut his losses and sell the mansion for building material. At this point, where history turns to things of greater moment, Braden family pride takes up the tale. Under other names, and unknown either to Farquhar or to Beckford, Lancelot Braden, then twenty-five years old, bought a large part of the more decorative elements and caused them to be transferred, circuitously and unobtrusively, over the hills to Whern, which was not many miles away. He was no fool and made a good bargain. He argued that Wyatt, however dishonest in his furnishing of the hidden essentials of good building, was not likely in those externals visible and of greatest interest to the owner to use anything but the best quality of material; further, that the second collapse of the structure would so rudely have shocked the facile admiration of the crowd for Beckford and his works that prices might be expected to rule low. On the whole he argued soundly and became possessed of a quantity of fine carving, rare marbles, and unusual architectural miscellanea at a reasonable figure. The way was then open for the building of yet another Whern.

And what a Whern! An extravagant facade, three soaring towers, a nightmare chapter house, cloisters, and flying buttresses... . On the hills above Oban on the west coast of Scotland stands a foolish parody of a Roman coliseum— but built of rosy stone some two feet thick. From below, the idiot edifice seems to be cut from cardboard. And so it was, in less degree, with Lancelot Braden’s Gothic abbey. One felt that every artifice had been used to extend that ribbon of crisped and crocheted exoticism as far as possible along the northeastern slopeofthewoodedbasin. Atthesame time the house had no depth; it was flush with the drooping margin of the woods; a demented vision of the medieval age, slung like a painted cloth along the ancient Wiltshire hill.