The haunted house
that he would go to pretty well any house where he would meet rich
people. She thought, quite rightly, that both the others would like to
meet a brother peer with a few generations behind him.
She dipped her tongue in honey (if you will excuse the coarseness of
the phrase), and said sweetly to her nephew at dessert:
“Tell me, John, I think you know Lord Hambourne, don’t you? Or about
him, anyhow? You see, I know him _well_. Only I was told that he was
interested in old furniture and understood it, and I wanted him to
help me a little in that.” (It was true; but it was also true that
she wanted him to help her in impressing his wealthier peers with the
fact that the furniture was old and that the Beam was old and that
the Ancestor was old, and that in general the Catchings were old and
vouched for by that venerable glory the Hambourne peerage.)
“Oh,” said John, “I’ve met him. And I’ve got friends, as I said, who
have known him at Oxford. And there’s one man in his fourth year whom I
know rather well and he did Psychology with him. Rather likes him. You
know that he does journalism?”
“Who?” said Aunt Hilda.
“Hambourne.”
“No, I didn’t. What do you mean by journalism?”
“Why, this stuff they call Personal Journalism. He talks about people
whom he’s really met, and also about people whom he pretends to meet.
But he won’t sign. Perhaps it’s a point in his favour, for they’d
pay him double if he did. But the rag he’s on is really so base that
perhaps it pays him one way and another not to sign. You see, his
column’s called ‘Behind the Scenes.’ It’s in _The Howl_.”
“Oh!” said Aunt Hilda. Her heart had risen slightly at the idea that he
might be useful to advertise her and hers. It sank a little at hearing
under what headline she and hers would appear.
“He’s not scurrilous, is he?” she said, after a pause.
“I’m told,” said John Maple, critically and carefully separating his
words, “that he would like to be, and can’t. You see, though he was
very poor he had a good mother and was an only son and (as he was very
poor) he did not go to a Public School. It’s very difficult for that
kind to shake off all their early refinement.”
Aunt Hilda again restrained herself.
“Is it true he is an atheist?”
“Oh, good Lord, _yes_!” protested John Maple. “Why, my dear Aunt Hilda,
what did you expect? He’s a don, Aunt Hilda—and more than that, he
belongs to the old-fashioned lot. After all, he was elected to Burford
nearly thirty years ago.”
Aunt Hilda pursed her lips firmly. She had not got quite used to the
moral revolution. As for the reaction that is now beginning, she had no
idea of it.
“But he won’t be blatant, Aunt Hilda,” John went on. “Besides, I know
Lord Hellup wouldn’t mind.”
“I think,” said Aunt Hilda acidly, “I should know as well as anyone
what Lord Hellup would or would not mind....” Then she stopped
abruptly, for she was getting on dangerous ground. She did not want to
discuss her other two guests and raise a breeze.
John was less discreet.
“As for the other one, old Bruvvish,” he began.... But Aunt Hilda cut
him short.
“We won’t discuss Lord Mere de Beaurivage, if you please, John, though
his wife _is_ a friend of mine. A straightforward, plain, English
gentleman—I think that’s enough said. He never pretends to be what he
is not, and that is one of the hundred reasons why everybody respects
him.”
It is immensely to John Maple’s credit that he did not here add
the other reasons; but he remained silent. The wine he had drunk,
the influence of the evening, which gave the darkening room a real
antiquity (for Night is an aged thing), the fact that he had his
back to the Ancestor and was facing the oak table—which after all
_was_ old—all this soothed John. In his mind he was already the owner
of Rackham, planning innumerable things, and among these plans he
reprieved some part of the Catchings. Yes, he would keep the oak table;
he might even keep the panelling. But the Ancestor would have to go.
Corrupted by too early an experience of competition, his mind wandered
off (after his aunt had left him to his wine) to what he might make on
the Ancestor. Should it go by auction or how? Then the thought of money
brought him back to the raising of that £20,000. And _that_ brought him
back to Bo. And in contemplation of Bo’s image he pleasantly remained.
He went to bed early, too sleepy to pursue the thoughts of banks,
solicitors, options and the rest, which that excellent young daughter
of commerce had put into his head. Opportunity would come with the
morrow.
And it did; as it always does to the young.
CHAPTER VIII
The three parcels of her week-end party were to be separately delivered
to Mrs. Maple in three batches. She was just as well pleased. It was
easier to mix them that way.
Of the three batches Lord Hambourne would be the first.
The title of Hambourne is an ancient one. The first Lord Hambourne,
son of a rich King’s Lynn merchant under Edward IV., married into the
Cavells. His son died without issue.
The title was revived by Henry VIII. towards the end of his reign, for
the ennobling of John Heysham, who had carried out a great part of
the confiscations in the north, and kept a sufficient proportion for
himself. He had no heir, but his only daughter married a younger son of
the Parkers of Luttbury, for whom the title was revived by Elizabeth.
He was a great deal at the Court attracting the attention of the
Queen, after the early death of his wife—some say by poison, others by
disease. He died at the early age of forty-three. He left no heir.
The title was revived by Charles II. as a reward for the loyalty of Sir
William Malling, a Rutlandshire squire, who had devoted his fortune
to Charles I.’s cause. His son, the second Lord Hambourne of the
third creation, was true to the family tradition and accompanied James
II. into exile. After years of struggling with poverty in the Rue de
Fouare, in Paris, he died, it is to be feared of malnutrition, leaving
no heir.
The title was revived in the early days of George III. by the managers
for that monarch, who, having a pressing need for support in the House
of Commons, thought it only their duty to close the long and honourable
career of Henry Porter, a large shipmaster turned squire, five times
member for King’s Lynn—of whose burgesses he could always purchase a
considerable majority. He had doggedly voted in the Court interest
until he was thus raised to the peerage.
When the question of choosing his title arose, a local gentleman of
antiquity and _vertu_ pointed out to him the original connection
between King’s Lynn and the Hambourne name; on which account it is now
generally—and erroneously—believed that the peer of Edward IV. was the
ancestor of our Hambournes of to-day.
From that day to this, for four whole generations, the title has never
failed. The family fortune was dissipated by the second Lord Hambourne
(of the fifth creation) partly in entertaining the Regent, partly by
losing money at cards to the Regent’s more intelligent friends. The
title passed, just before the accession of Queen Victoria, to a cousin,
possessed of an annuity of some £800 a year and a pleasant house with
an orchard in Kent.
_His_ eldest son, after a life of honest toil in the Civil Service,
died childless—and of course impecunious. The title passed, just before
the Boer War, to a then young man his nephew, who had just been elected
to a classical Fellowship at Burford College. The lad was not without
initiative; straitened circumstances had perhaps sharpened his wits;
but anyhow, while he was making it his business to talk psychology, to
buy books on psychology, to speak in debates on psychology, and even
to attend the foreign congresses on psychology, certain of his friends
were persuading The Turtle Eaters Company that Oxford was perishing
for the lack of a Chair in Psychology; so when that Chair must be
filled, what claim more obvious than Lord Hambourne’s? The envious who
pointed out how little he knew even of a subject on which there is so
little to be known were silenced by the very true retort that the other
candidates knew nothing.
With the Great War came his opportunity. It was admitted on all
sides that he had procured for his country the great advantage of
the only telepathic system among the Allies which could compare with
the splendid organisation of the Germans. And while Ragensdorp in
Leipsig was reading, with the success that has rendered him famous,
the deep strategic thoughts of one British Minister after another
during those four and a half years, Lord Hambourne with far greater
success was reading the strategic thoughts of Hindenburg, Ludendorf
and Falkenhayn and communicating them daily to the Cabinet. On the
Continent his powers were less appreciated, and it is to be feared that
the prolongation of the struggle was largely due to the failure of the
Italians and French to do credit to a science with which they were as
yet unfamiliar.
The Coalition Government rewarded such great services to the country
with a grant of £20,000. It was paid over at once, and the honoured
recipient was on the point of retiring from his arduous academic
duties, when the unexpected fall of the mark destroyed his prospects.
For though Lord Hambourne had accurately read the thoughts of those who
had determined to preserve the German currency, he had never thought
of tapping one master mind in New York, whence alone he would have
received more accurate information on the future of his securities.
As his very just estimate of the German character had led him to put
the whole of a grateful nation’s offering into the German domestic
loans, he found himself, long before the date of Hilda Maple’s party
at Rackham, possessed of Bonds to Bearer Series 2 Nos. 555201–598237
of the first German internal 5 per cent. guaranteed reimbursable Peace
Loan, worth anything between 5¾d. and 6d. the lot.
But though thus denuded of material goods, he had acquired all the
special qualifications of his profession, and even a first-rate
academic manner with a strong stammer, a habit of saying, “Quate!
Quate!” at the ends of most of his sentences, a nickname among the
undergraduates, and a sheaf of stories about him, the subtle humour of
which missed fire outside the University.
* * * * *
Lord Hambourne, then, was coming to Rackham on the Saturday early; he
was coming in time for lunch and (being poor) by train.
He was a very sensible man. He kept very careful accounts. He
calculated that the free lunch at Rackham almost exactly paid for the
return ticket from Oxford (a week-end third)—though, of course, it did
not cover the ticket from London down to Sussex. He took a single for
_that_ journey, on the chance that one of the guests would motor him
back to town on the Monday. In his letter he had told his hostess how
eager he was to be in her county again, and what a pleasure it was to
get off from Oxford and the associations of so much hard work. For Lord
Hambourne had to lecture on psychology for one hour on two days a week
by statute, and very often added a third lecture freely and of his
own accord for a reasonable fee. And, like all dons, he only had six
months’ holiday in the year. To such men in our strenuous University
life the free air and repose of a week-end make all the difference.
He was to be excused, then, for taking that morning train. And as it
trundled him up to Paddington, and he further trundled on from Victoria
(there was an hour between the two, and that saved him the expense of a
cab) he was thinking how many paragraphs Rackham would account for in
his social column. He decided that a house of that calibre was not good