It is possible that Ordham would have delayed paying his respects to his brother from week to week, had not a flattering paragraph in one of the newspapers brought upon him the immediate attentions of his creditors. He ground his teeth, flung their reminders into a drawer of the desk in his bedroom, ordered a telegram sent to Lord Bridgminster and his boxes packed, and started for the north next morning.
Of course he reserved a first-class carriage for the all-day journey. He would have patronized a train de luxe had there been one, or a motor, had the more brilliant extravagance come into being. To spend less to-day that he might have more to-morrow was a principle that only a long period of dire privation could have etched into his creed, and, no doubt, he would have managed to be a luxurious pauper.
During the journey his uneasy apprehensions were varied with remorseful memories of three old servants that had adored and spoilt him since he had come into the world, and to whom he had not given a thought during the past four years. These were the housekeeper, Mrs. Felt, Biscom, the butler, and Cobbs, the coachman. The sure instincts of childhood had driven him to take his little woes, not to his mother’s sterile bosom, but to the warm and pillowed surfaces of the personage who had inherited certain of the honours of Ordham, even as Lord Bridgminster had inherited his. Biscom, sovereign of the pantries, had permitted him to make himself ill as often as he desired, and Cobbs had taught him how to ride and had now his dogs in charge. Then there was Craven, the old gardener—he turned hot and cold at the thought that he had not brought a present to one of them!
Cobbs, in a rusty livery, awaited him at the little moorland station, and Ordham made up in the warmth of his greeting for the lack of a more substantial proof of his affections. There was no footman with the wagonette, and while Hines was attending to his boxes, he asked Cobbs if all the old servants were alive and at the castle. He was not surprised to learn that the immense staff kept during his father’s lifetime had been reduced to ten, including those within and without. But at least he should see the older faces, and the prospect cheered him somewhat as he drove through the purple dusk of the moors. For a wave of homesickness had swamped his spirits, then regret, anger, astonishment. For twenty years this beautiful moorland had practically been his, no doubt would come to him in time; but now, now, in the day of his youth, when he most wanted lands and riches and power (it is, until decay sets in, always the immediate time that seems the one desirable period for the great gifts of life), he came as a suppliant to the brother he detested, a man who was even too mean to live as became his position, and who, no doubt, would barely extend to him a welcome. It was a wonder he had sent the wagonette. Ordham had fully expected to go on to the next town and make the rest of the journey in a fly.
Cobbs volunteered the information that the shooting was uncommonly good this year, but Ordham felt no interest in the subject until it occurred to him that if he wished to accomplish the purpose of his journey he must take pains to propitiate Bridgminster in every way. At this detestable thought his haughty crest went up at least two inches. But he had wise moments, as we have seen, and it was seldom he was not capable of cool rational thought. He reflected presently that, after all, he was very young and that it was not only a close relative to whom he had come to ask a good bit of money, but the head of his house, to whom he stood next in succession. Bridgminster should have been a father to his brood of younger brothers, and it was incredible that he did not accept his obligations. It was time he did, and Ordham felt himself in a temper to bring him to his senses.
But as the carriage approached the high fell upon whose broad table-land the castle stood, he felt more keenly still the freak of fortune which had deprived him of his inheritance. That cold, splendid, formal mass of white and sculptured stone, a palace of the Italian Renaissance rather than an English castle, built by Inigo Jones in 1622-26, and raised above the lofty fell again by a triple terrace, surrounded by Italian gardens, and over-looking thousands of acres of moorland, woods and farms, and a hundred little stone villages, was one of the show places of the north, and it was wasted on a boor whose favourite literature was The Pink ‘Un, and who would not even permit others to enjoy what he could not appreciate. There had not been a house party at Ordham since his father’s death, and, no doubt, the lovely gardens were a wilderness, the superb rooms rat-eaten. To-night there was not a point of light in the vast fa?ade. Ordham lowered his eyelids until they covered the unpleasant glitter of his eyes, and drew his lips against his teeth. Hines, covertly watching him, wondered if he were in pain.
The carriage drove through the unlighted tunnel into the courtyard. The old butler, the gardener, and a footman stood at the foot of the grand staircase, and as Ordham, banishing his gloomy thoughts, descended and shook hands with them, asking intimate personal questions of each, the mask of dignified servitude fell from their faces, and they gazed, smiling and tearful, upon the young man who had lorded it over and bewitched them for twenty years. Ordham almost laughed outright as he realized how they yearned to say, “My lord.” He wished to God they could. There was no affected philosophy about Ordham. He longed as ardently to be a peer of the realm as he did for the income of the estates. But after he had convinced them that they had barely left his thoughts during the years of his exile, he added wistfully that he was glad to see the old place again and wished that death might have spared his father. Ordham was always adored by servants. With neither familiarity nor condescension, always kind (save to Hines, who sometimes got the benefit of his tempers), with a smile of peculiar sweetness and an impenetrable reserve, a careless acceptance of devotion, yet with a tacit admission of a minion’s claim to call himself a man, generous, yet never so lavish as to suggest that perhaps his was not the divine right to be waited on hand and foot,—he fulfilled the ideal of the great lord to the most exacting class of mortals in the world. And these old men had all the retainer’s pride in his uncommonly fine manners, in which there was still nothing old-fashioned, in his aristocratic if not strictly handsome face, in the languid but dignified carriage of his well-knit figure.
He followed the footman up the wide marble staircase to his old suite, immense rooms, with lofty frescoed ceilings, and still sparsely furnished with the mahogany pieces he had carved when a boy. He felt a thousand years old and sick at heart. When he saw Felt standing there to greet him, he nearly fell into her great bosom, but contented himself with taking her hand in both his own and shaking it for a full minute. She told him (tearfully) that he had grown and improved, and he bade her invite him for tea in her sitting room on the following day, adding bitterly that he should feel at home nowhere else.
“I suppose there is no company in the house?” he asked, with intention.
“Oh, no, sir. His lordship never entertains. Come four years now we have never had a visitor save her ladyship, and she found it so dull she could never stay long. The first year there was a hunt breakfast, but it was stiff and sad, Mr. Biscom said, and now the county gentlemen don’t even call at the castle. It’s not like the old days, Mr. John.”
“What on earth does he do with himself?” He could surrender something of his reserve to this old woman who had given him many a shaking, and he was anxious to know more of the brother of whom he had seen so little.
Mrs. Felt shook her head. “He mopes terrible, sir. You wouldn’t think it of a man who loves a gun and a horse as he does—but those long evenings all alone! He don’t seem one to read—not like you, Mr. John. He’s changed a good bit, even since he come—and the last six months or so, before the shooting began—” She paused significantly.
“Does he drink?” No one can be as blunt as a diplomatist.
“There’d be no hiding it from you, sir. You’d see it in a minute for yourself. We’ve known he was getting more comfort out of drink these two years past, and, as I said, these last few months—well, you can’t burn bottles, and his man, for all his solemn pretending that his lordship is perfection, don’t take the trouble to bury them, neither. We all have our suspicions that Mr. Flint drinks with his lordship.”
“What?”
“No wonder it turns your stomach, sir. It do ours. The Ordhams, begging your pardon, have never been like that. There’s been wild ones, and most of them could drink themselves under the table, I’ve heard from my father and grandfather; but never one that lived familiar with his man and had naught to do with gentlemen. If his mother hadn’t been such a young thing when she died, and straight from the schoolroom, we’d have our suspicions.”
Ordham laughed shortly. “The King of Bavaria, whose royal blood is a thousand years old, consorts wholly with his lackeys. He has a rotten spot in his brain, and so, no doubt, has my brother. What else can be expected of a recluse that never opens a book? He can’t shoot and hunt the year round.”
Hines entered and Mrs. Felt departed. When Ordham had finished dressing, half an hour later, the footman knocked, and informing him that all the rooms on this floor, with the exception of his own and his lordship’s suites, the dining room, and a small room adjoining, were closed, escorted him down the long familiar corridors to the sanctum of his brother. It was a square room, whose old frescoes had been whitewashed, and furnished with several leather chairs, a couch, a desk, and a table, the last littered with racing calendars and sporting magazines. It was empty and Ordham sniffed in disgust; it was the sort of room he hated—utterly, baldly, savagely masculine. He had supposed that at least he could console himself in the beautiful rooms devoted to entertaining, and now felt that even the old boudoir of his paternal grandmother, done up in “tapestries” worked with her own hands, and replete with Victorian horrors, would have made him gratefully sentimental. Again his spirits took a downward plunge. He felt nauseated. And through what avenue could he approach the man? He was even more demoralized than he had counted upon.
There was a shuffling step on the hard floor of the passage that led in from the corridor, and Lord Bridgminster entered. He was a big man who, once strong and athletic, was now merely heavy. His face was large and red, his eyes small and dull. He wore a full beard and mustache, which made him look older than he was and hid but little of the scar that disfigured the right side of his face. Nor did it lend him any of the dignity of his younger brother, and he carried his shoulders loosely and moved his hands incessantly. In his youth he had been handsome, with well-cut features and the fresh colouring of his race, but not a vestige of either youth or beauty remained.
“How d’y do?” he said politely enough, extending a limp hand. “I’m a bit off my feed, but you look fit—why shouldn’t you? Wish I were twenty-four.”
They walked into the dining room together, and Ordham, whose languid eyes missed little, noted a flicker pass between Biscom and Thomas. It said as plainly as speech, “O lud, what a contrast!” Involuntarily he drew himself up, and at the same time resented that any brother of his should be scorned by the very servants as unworthy of the great position to which he had been born. It was almost as if a changeling had been slipped into the family cradle, and yet he knew that there were many like him, for the race is always reverting to its primitive types.
The dinner, served at a small table by an open window, consisted of the heavy joints and vegetables that Ordham detested; but it surprised him that his brother, whom he remembered as a man of mighty appetite, barely picked at it. Nor would he talk. The amenities—as he understood them—over, he responded with but an occasional grunt to the guest’s attempts at conversation, and finally the silence became so oppressive that Ordham lost what little appetite the sight and odours of the repast had left him. When the pudding appeared, hopeful of starting a congenial topic, he asked Bridgminster why he did not go up to London and consult a doctor.
“There are doctors in every town in Yorkshire,” growled his lordship. “Why should I go to London? Haven’t seen it for eighteen years. Should lose my way.”
“There are cabs,” suggested his brother, delicately. “Or I should be happy to guide you. If you have lost your appetite, there must be something serious the matter.”
“Not at all!” Bridgminster raised his voice shrilly. “There’s nothing the matter worth mentioning. Can’t a man be a bit off his feed without taking a day’s journey to pay two guineas to some damned swindler?”
“One can be seriously upset without being threatened with extinction; and when doctors were invented to keep one fit, why be uncomfortable?”
“I thought you wanted a week’s shooting. Wasn’t that what you said in that letter you honoured me with after you passed those examinations?”
Ordham blushed at this sarcastic reference to the only excuse he had been able to think of when inviting himself to the castle of his fathers. But it must be made to serve. He answered suavely: “One gets so little of that sort of thing on the Continent. Do you go out every day?”
“Certainly. Am I really to have the pleasure of your company on the moors from morning till night?”
“Well—a good part of the day. Remember that I am a bit out of practice, and not as hard as you are.”
“I’m no longer hard, but I go out and potter about. It is a damned sight better than sitting in the house. And I loved it once! God! how I loved it.”
Ordham glanced at him with a fleeting pity. The creature was mournfully without resour............