Read Ebook: The Slanderers by Deeping Warwick

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Ebook has 3056 lines and 91357 words, and 62 pages

"I am," retorted the man, surlily, burying his face behind the pages of finance.

Supper was laid on the heavy mahogany table by the woman Rebecca. Zeus Gildersedge drew his cane-backed chair before the steaming dish of stew. He ate meagrely himself, but watched his daughter's plate with a species of perpetual dissatisfaction. Her healthy appetite irritated his more ascetic instincts. It even grieved him to see the last crust filched from the trencher.

It had grown dusk by the time the table had been cleared, and Rebecca, lighting a single candle, set it on Zeus Gildersedge's table by the window. She was bidden to close the casement lest the draught should waste the wax. The girl Joan was hovering between the bookcase and the door. Her restless vacillation brought a characteristic rebuke from the man by the table.

"Sit down, sit down."

The girl caught up her hat.

"I'm for the garden."

"Get out, then, and don't fuss. What the devil are you going to do out there in the dark?"

Joan Gildersedge was kneeling on the window-seat, peering up through the casement, the candle-light glimmering on the gold in her hair.

"The sky streams stars," she said.

"Damn the stars!"

"They are splendid."

"The sun's a useful fellow; the stars, idle devils, a pack of loafers debauching round the moon. They don't ripen the crops or fruit. Talk common-sense."

"The moon's better than candle-light, father."

"Rot! you can't tote up figures by moonlight."

Joan Gildersedge abandoned the philosopher to his ledger and took refuge amid the yew-trees, sombre under the stars. The trees seemed to whisper to her cheering natural lore, a calm optimism that baffled care. Before her stretched an unkempt, dusky lawn, rank grass running riot to the very curb of a low, red-brick wall. Beyond, the dark swell of a hill leaped southward to the cliffs, and below shone the subastral silver of the sea.

The girl leaned against a great pine whose boughs arabesqued the sky. A quiet breeze came, sighed, and played about her face. She stood there motionless in the half-gloom, her hands hanging listless, her eyes glimmering under the dusky coronal that swept her forehead. The solitude seemed to symbolize the solemn calm of the Universal Spirit, a soundless sympathy that enveloped the world.

The stars, the sea, the night breeze, and a woman's soul! Eternal tones evolving harmony from chaotic discords! Avarice, brutality, unlovely ignorance, and lust! Joan Gildersedge was Joan Gildersedge despite these excrescences of a debased progenitor. They touched her no more than clay can scratch a diamond. Though they enveloped her external being, they could not transform her soul. She lived within herself, conscious, spontaneous, inevitable. Her desires were spreading in prophetic dreams over a more magnanimous horizon. She was a gem hid in a casket, waiting for the lifting of the lid that she might shine.

Behind the casement the candle had completed its limitation of liberty. A hand rattled on the window-frame. Zeus Gildersedge's nightly luxury had flickered to its socket, measured by two inches of wax nicked off neatly with an avaricious thumb-nail. His daughter, obeying the tyranny of greed, went slowly from under the starlight to bed.

THE village of Saltire straggled red-roofed up a green valley that branched northward from the shimmering ringlets of the Mallan. It was a sensuous patch of color, smothered up in woodland, warm and sun-steeped, overrun with roses. On either flank hills ascended, barriering the Saltire homesteads with tiers of trees. Sun and moon climbed over nebulous pines and larches to shine on red roof and flower-enamelled garden. Southward, moorland and meadow stretched towards the port of Rilchester and the sea.

Antiquarians had found in Saltire relics of considerable archaeological interest. The guide-books expatiated sentimentally upon the wonders of St. Winifred's Well, and on the church whose Norman nave had attached unto itself an Early English choir. Saltire was one of the wondrous few churches of repute where Cromwell had not stabled his horses. Sundry fine brasses blazoned the walls. Two crusaders slept cross-kneed in the chancel. Even a poet of distinction had written an ode under the patriarchal yew-tree in the churchyard. As for the cottages huddled under the benediction of the tower, they were as varied in humor as the centuries that had given them birth. Elizabethan, Jacobite, Georgian, a museum of British bourgeois architecture. There were only two new buildings in the village--a bald, blatant, granite-eyed chapel and a tavern, florid and cheerful. At the two village shops you could purchase all manner of merchandise, teething-powders and stationery, boot-polish and bacon.

Though the woodland valley above the Mallan burned a glorious Arcady, worthy of the glimmering armor of Arthurian princes, its inhabitants could hardly boast much kinship with such aesthetic surroundings. The Saltire folk, big-wigs and boors alike, were far from being Utopian either in morality or in creed. An oppressive narrowness took its text from the pulpit. For the Saltire sinners hell flamed with all its puerile and astounding fury. An atmosphere of stolid self-satisfaction pervaded the social ethics of the place. The philosophy of the local potentates smacked of vinegar; the average intelligence recalled the biblical "needle's eye," since nothing bulky could pass through it. There were clerical sermons on a Sunday and clerical arrogances during the week, flavored with an apathetic egotism and sour charity. The ladies of the village indulged largely in sundry Christian philanthropies, and yet were consistently unchristian in every larger sense. The laboring folk toiled, drank, and begot children. Suns came and went, but Saltire endured in pristine narrowness of soul.

The local celebrities were well differentiated and quaintly characteristic. There was the Reverend Jacob Mince, the vicar, lean, complacent, uxorious, and parsonic, a man who intoned through his nose, patronized creation, and was very wise concerning cabbages. Mrs. Mince, the vicaress, big, pallid, with a melancholy air of dilapidated Protestantism, contrasted with Mrs. Marjoy, the doctor's wife, whose red face tilted its spectacles in the defence of virtue. Then there were the three Misses Snodley, maiden ladies of irreproachable morals, who drove a donkey chaise, delighted in scandal, and indulged in missionary work at a discreet distance. Lastly stood Mrs. Jumble, the intellectual light of the village, a most precise and pompous person, who read Shakespeare and delivered decretals on the conduct of life generally. In truth, there were numberless folk whose virtues it would be wearisome to chronicle and whose vices were inevitable and commonplace. Saltire was an orthodox and Christian village. It knew not Spinoza and would have martyred Kant.

Saltire Hall stood on a bluff, oak-girdled hill-side that sloped southward towards the water-meadows of the Mallan. Elizabethan in mood and feature, its tall chimney-stacks towered above the trees, its casements glimmered silver through the green. A rose-flecked terrace, archaic gardens, fish-ponds, and a wild fragment of park-land maintained a sympathetic setting to the house, over whose eaves a quaint melancholy brooded, as though the old manor found the Victorian present incompatible with the past.

There was a considerable gradation between bewigged and dark-featured Jacobites and the person of John Strong, Esq., a brazen bullionist, plump with the prosperity of a successful mercantile career. Saltire Hall--armor, ancestors, memories included--had fallen into the callous hands of a nineteenth-century tea merchant. John Strong, Esq., in the plenitude of years had gotten unto himself a picturesque and peaceful habitation. He had embarked his family upon the duck-pond of county society. He had become a power in Christendom, a ponderous autocrat heading the notabilities of an English village. He was a great man so long as he remained within two leagues of the village pump.

John Strong lived a British patriarch in his own household. His philosophy bulwarked itself upon solid state principles. He was orthodox to the backbone, a discreet and conventional Christian, an upholder of the monarchy, and a most punctilious church-warden. He possessed the arrogance of conviction begotten of long success. He could forgive a debt, but could not pardon any impropriety that based its being upon original intuition. His prejudices were like caltrops strewn before the advance of any unfamiliar philosophy. Question his convictions and he would vote you a fool or a prig, according to your age. He was as incapable of stomaching argument as a Jew of breakfasting off bacon.

John Strong numbered among his household chattels a daughter and a son. Twenty years had elapsed since their mother had been clamped down under a marble slab in a suburban cemetery. Judith, the daughter, mistressed the house Martha-like under her father's supervision. Gabriel, the son, basked in the sunshine of parental favor and accepted with indolent resignation the somewhat enervating ease of fatherly patronage.

Gabriel Strong had emerged from a university circle when a certain sensuous aestheticism had claimed many disciples from the ripening generation. He had imbibed certain fine sentimentalities, some affectations, much psychical color, and not a little genuine idealism. A contemplative and somewhat lazy youth, he was a member of the romantic school, a man tinged with a tender Celtic melancholy, something of a fatalist regarding the materialisms of life, and not very fervent over any particular creed. His father, who believed in culture without comprehending its significance, simultaneously admired and patronized his son. John Strong had received his education at a third-rate boarding-school, and yet appreciated in an obtuse and mercenary manner the social advantages of Eton and Oxford. He had considered culture as a creditable investment in the person of his heir. He intended him to be a gentleman of independence, singularity, and distinction. Strangely enough, he had no desire to make a mercantile Stylites of him on an office-stool.

Now Gabriel Strong had eccentricities; and he was something of a poet. Not that a poetic inclination can be considered as an eccentricity in these days when the knack is too universal to be genuine. Gabriel had much of the Maurice de Gu?rin about him. He would trudge miles to see the sea on a moonlight night, or tumble up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the woods. He was mobile, impressionable, sensitive as dew swinging on the gossamer of a spider's web. This very sensitiveness tempted to make him weak and pusillanimous in the minor affairs of life. Living largely in his own mental atmosphere, he approached actual existence with a listless apathy born of contempt. The past with its golden pageantry of splendor and romance alone inspired in him the desire of being.

On a certain April morning the master of Saltire Hall stood watching several workmen who were laying the foundations of a new cow-house at the home farm attached to the estate. The local bailiff had been listening with discreet reverence to the tea merchant's views on certain agricultural technicalities. John Strong delighted in Arcadian hobbies and devoured much scientific literature on the subject. He had his own beasts, pigs, and poultry; his own crops; his own dairy; his own drainage system, septic tank included. Possibly he lost some hundreds a year in his farming, but that was a detail in his expenditure that gave him no qualms of conscience.

Having meditated sufficiently over the new cow-house walls, Squire Strong, as he loved to be called, plodded back alone over the meadows towards the oak-trees dewing the park. John Strong was in an ambitious mood. His cogitations rose from the contemplation of liquid manure to the consideration of matrimony as a social investment. John Strong had many choice schemes--agricultural, matrimonial, ethical: he had promised a new vestry to the Reverend Jacob Mince. He had purchased sundry prize bullocks for the improvement of his stock. Moreover, he had cast an eye upon the luxurious comeliness of the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, and was inclined to purchase her as a mate for Gabriel, his son.

John Strong, threading the rose-garden and passing betwixt high hedges of yew, climbed the western stairway that led to the terrace fronting the house. The morning rejoiced in mild heat, and John Strong was corpulent and somewhat asthmatic. As he stood wiping his forehead with a red silk handkerchief his son Gabriel emerged from the French window of the library, the pockets of his Norfolk jacket padded with a sketch-book, a paint-box, matches and tobacco, and a volume of Swinburne's poems. Tall and slim as a cypress, with a finely chiselled face, a sallow yet bronzed complexion, Gabriel Strong won admiration even from the dispassionate glance of a father. A red scarf was knotted under the collar of his flannel shirt. There was a certain Dantesque air about him. He reminded one of some slim and romantic figure taken from a pre-Raphaelite wood-cut.

"Off sketching, eh?"

"To Cambron Head."

"A ten-mile walk. Young blood runs brisk. I suppose the Saltire bounds are too narrow for the new generation. You young folk are too damned expansive, too sentimental. No man ever earned good dollars by sentiment. You'll be back to dinner?"

"Perhaps."

The elder gentleman, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, had established himself against the balustrading of the southern stairway of the terrace. Sentiment did not express itself vividly upon his countenance. He had a big, clean-shaven jaw, a thick, protuberant lower lip, a somewhat Semitic nose, and gray, lustreless eyes. A rough tweed suit, a soft felt hat, and buck-skin gaiters constituted an attire that John Strong deemed in keeping with his rustic habits. He was a short man, thick-set, with a certain solid arrogance of demeanor. His keen northern nature took life prosaically upon business principles.

"Stent's getting on fast with the cow-house," he remarked. "I'm having twenty stalls, each to hold a couple of beasts. The drinking-troughs are to be on the self-replenishing system. Stent advises a 'Stafford-brick' floor. I think they're going to overstep the estimate. Still, I sha'n't worry about fifty pounds or so. Work well done is worth cash."

Gabriel Strong received the news with an air of languid and exotic enthusiasm. His father's farming ventures did not interest him vastly; even the excellences of artificial manure awoke no joy in him. Father and son were always colliding dismally on such topics. Gabriel found it a perpetual trial of filial respect to escape from appearing bored by his father's hobbies.

"Those heifers are to come from Heatherstoke at the end of the week," the elder man continued. "I shall drive into Rilchester and take you with me. I want to see Murchison about that fencing. And, by-the-way, I heard from the major by the morning's post. He sent me Mold & Company's price-list; I have been looking it over; their prices are ten per cent. more reasonable than those of that London firm. These Americans bust our manufacturers. Be back to dinner, now."

Thirty years of tyranny over his commercial minions had developed in John Strong a certain abrupt and peremptory method of address. He often spoke to his son with something of the air he would unconsciously have adopted to his office-boy. It was unintentional, but it often irritated.

"I may be late," quoth Gabriel, looking out over wood, hill, and meadow towards the sea.

"The Gussets and Colonel Delaware are dining with us at seven. Don't forget it."

"I had, as a matter of fact."

"What a memory you have for actualities. I believe you'd let this place go to rack and ruin in six months."

"Bad farming produces artistic effects. I should as a matter of principle let my thorn hedges grow as they liked, and I should welcome red poppies into my fields of wheat."

"And grow beans for the scent, I suppose. Reserve your eccentricities for dinner-time; Ophelia Gusset will expect to be entertained."

John Strong scrutinized his son's face for any confession of color or confusion.

"I have a great admiration for Ophelia," he suggested. "Really fine women are rare in the country--women of style and spirit. A smart girl is a relief after giggling children bred in parsonages and flouncing hoydens fit only for milk-pans."

Gabriel retorted monosyllabically. He rarely indulged in filial confidences.

"Ophelia Gusset won't be a spinster long," resumed the pandar. "If I were a youngster, by George! I'd make a bid for the girl. Don't fag yourself or you'll be sleepy to-night. You must talk, you know; girls don't like a dull dog, and the Gussets are up to date."

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