The haunted house
amaze, “oo’d ’ave thought it?”
“Yes,” went on her hostess, still pensive, still subdued, and she
sighed again yet more profoundly than before. “Oh, I wish there
was someone to make up our minds for us, as there was when we were
children! What am I to say? What am I to do? I can’t bear to leave the
place, and yet.... And yet.... I think I know where my duty lies. When
I had several offers for it,” she added, lying gently, “I mean, just
after the war, when there were so many people after it, I refused,
as you know.” (It was the first time Mattie had heard of it—and no
wonder!) “But things were different then; my brother-in-law was alive,
and the boy seemed such a child. And now, of course, when it’s quite
a different place in value, with all the changes I’ve made, and the
improvements, they will come offering me more than they did, and I
shall be tempted. I know I shall. But I do promise you this, Mattie. I
won’t even mention figures till I have given you and your husband first
choice. There! I’ve said it now!”
“I knew you would!” answered Mattie impulsively, at the door, and
suddenly kissing her friend. “Oh, you’re strite and loyal, you are!
Pity it is there ain’t more like you. It’s what I was saying to the
Prime Minister only the other day, when he said that about Uggins. He
said, ‘Amathea,’ he said (he calls me Amathea, ’cos I won’t let him
call me Mattie—I don’t think it’s right, nor he wouldn’t neither),
‘Amathea,’ ’e says, ‘that ’usband of yours is one of a thousand. And do
you know why I ses it?’ ses he. ‘Because he’s _strite_,’ ses he. ‘He
runs _strite_,’ ses ’e. ‘I tell you, Amathea,’ he ses, ‘a man that runs
strite is a jule.’ And you run strite too, Ilda, you do. That’s what ’e
said. Them was the identical words!”
So the song ended—as the poet Longfellow somewhere remarks—and the
two ladies strolled into the hall. Amathea, with an agility worthy
of a better cause, rapidly performed the pounding gymnastics which
she called “popping upstairs.” She had certain calculations to make,
certain notes.
As for Hilda, she was turning towards her room, herself also intent on
certain notes, certain calculations, when she heard a firm and regular
step, which she knew. It was Lord Hellup. He had just caught up his
expensive but reasonable grey hat, and his not demonstrative but costly
gold-headed cane, and was about, as befitted the creases in his clothes
and the exactitude of his coat, to adorn the gardens of Rackham. He
had an hour before tea. He was suddenly aware that Hilda stood before
him. I am sorry to say that he impulsively took her hand, as though he
were meeting her for the first time in some days. But he smiled and
she smiled, and he begged her to show him the rosery of which she had
spoken.
So they went out together, he sixty or so, she fifty, and the spring
around them both, and in the rosery they talked of roses.
On the way back Hilda Maple led the way round, still talking in the
manner he found so engrossing, with such refinement, such subtlety,
such charm, as none other but he had noticed in her conversation,
until, turning out of the shrubbery, they found themselves upon the
lawn where so lately Lady Mere de Beaurivage had stood, where Lord
Hellup now was—but with this difference, that Lord Hellup had far too
much respect for womankind to link his arm in Hilda’s; contrariwise,
his hung somewhat awkwardly along his flank.
Hilda Maple gazed at Rackham with a world of affection in her eyes.
Lord Hellup stood by watching, admiring, nearly worshipping that gaze.
It apprehended the gables of Rackham, and the lower part of the sky.
“I can’t bear to think of leaving it,” she said in a subdued voice, and
there was a little catch in it, almost like a sob.
“Why, Mercy!” cried the candid gentleman from overseas, “you’re sure
not thinking of leaving it, Mrs. Maple! Why, we associate you with
Rackham, and Rackham with you, like hand and glove. You’re necessary
to Rackham, Mrs. Maple,” he added, with an emphatic enthusiasm, and he
very nearly continued, “and Rackham’s necessary to you,” when his quick
mind perceived that this would be a blunder. He said, with something
almost like tenderness in his tone, and with a drop of two notes in his
voice, “I could not bear to think of Rackham without you, Mrs. Maple.”
She sighed—that same sigh.
“There was a time when I would not have dreamed of it, Lord Hellup,”
she answered. “You know, these things are very difficult to talk
about——” she delicately put the tips of her fingers upon his arm for
a moment, and at once withdrew them. “But now I have begun perhaps
I ought to say it. When they were making all those offers for the
place—just at the end of the war....”
“Were they _so_?” inquired Lord Hellup with interest, and a most
intelligent look in his eyes.
“Yes, yes,” said Hilda Maple hurriedly. “Well, I wouldn’t hear of it
then. It seemed to me abominable that Rackham should leave the Maple
name. But then, you know, my brother-in-law was alive then, and John
was only a boy. I refused them. Of course, it’s more valuable now: that
was before I had done anything to the place, and I must say,” she went
on prettily, and smiling at him as she said it, “I have made it what it
used to be. I do think I may be proud of it.”
“Why, sure, you can,” answered the magnate emphatically. “It’s the
niftiest little nest I’ve seen this side of the water. The more I see
of it, the more I think so. And so does Bo,” he added hurriedly; to
support his judgment lest by any chance his hostess should disagree
with him. He repeated himself. “The niftiest little nest this side the
water.”
The adjectives and noun were not those which Hilda Maple would herself
have chosen. Rackham Catchings was not so little, after all, and there
was something impertinent about “nifty,” seeing that the foundations
were pre-monstrous, or whatever the word was. But she had that in her
mind which made verbal niceties unimportant.
“My heart’s been torn, Lord Hellup,” she said, with a rising voice (and
she clasped her hands). “But I think it’s my duty to provide.... You
know what the boy is.”
“He’s some lad,” replied Lord Hellup politely. It was not what Aunt
Hilda wanted.
“Yes, yes,” she said, almost impatiently—English people are sometimes
a little like that with their trans-Atlantic cousins. “Oh, I know his
talents, and he’s a dear boy. But,” shaking her head, “he could never
keep up Rackham!” She sighed again. “It’s the same old story. Like
father, like son. He’s like his father before him. I’m afraid it’s
my duty to see when I’m gone that there shall be solid money behind
him—well tied up. When I am gone ...” she added, putting a bell-like
tone into her voice and receiving, what she had expected, an ardent
protest from her companion.
“Yes, yes,” she sighed, in reply to it, “it may be a long time yet—or
it may not. But I have got to think of the boy.”
Poor woman! She had got to think of the Esthonian as well! Of him who
was to her Mr. Rupert de Vere.
“I don’t know—I don’t know,” she went on, in a carefully distracted
voice, and once more she put her hand on Lord Hellup’s arm, this time
less briefly. “We women need advice. No ... I have made up my mind.
It’s my duty to sell.... I even, sometimes, think I ought to take the
price that was offered me last month by that odious tea broker.”
Lord Hellup had not heard of the tea broker, friend of his hostess
though he was. And why should he—since the tea broker did not exist?
Lord Hellup had passed his life in business. His judgment of prices,
he would often tell himself, might be compared to the glance of an
eagle. He could not help wondering what the odious tea broker man had
suggested for Rackham Catchings. But Hilda was not “talking”—yet.
They were now off the lawn and upon that gravel path going back to the
door, after another such silence as Amathea also had known in that same
place not very long before. Just as they reached the threshold, Hilda
looked up frankly into her friend’s eyes. There was a suspicion of
tears in her own, which moved that friend profoundly.
“When once I’m _certain_ it’s my duty to sell, I shall do it,” she
said. She shook her head again sadly. “But I can’t bear to think of
myself without Rackham.”
“And we,” said Lord Hellup, in a low, deep voice, suitable to the
occasion, and most sincerely moved, “we” (he used the impersonal term)
“could not bear to think of Rackham without you.” He took her hand
again—I am sorry to say that it was his intention to have kissed the
tips of her fingers, but found she had withdrawn them. The peer was
annoyed with the fear that he had perhaps broken some social canon or
other. But Hilda Maple was not cruel, for as she went away, their last
words exchanged, she smiled.
So much for sixty years and fifty years. Now let us come to
calculations.
* * * * *
At the table in her room Lady Mere de Beaurivage did, as she put it to
herself, some figuring. She was an adept at the art, from the days when
she had marked prices in chalk with lightning strokes upon the sides of
the barrow in the Old Kent Road. She had improved in the later days,
when she had cheapened furniture for the new villa of which she had
been so proud in the suburbs, before the Great Change.
But since the Great Change I must admit that Amathea, Baroness Mere de
Beaurivage had begun to let things slide. The money was there in such
heaps that really it didn’t seem to matter what one did. Her passion
for Rackham had got hold of her. She knew enough of buying and selling
to make certain that the place was within her reach if enough were
offered. It was only a question of what enough was. She could usually
manage her lord, but she knew that in one thing the management was not
always easy; and that one thing was money. For like all those whose
genius has led them to accumulate a considerable fortune rapidly, Lord
Mere de Beaurivage was in some terror of losing it. She remembered
what other friends had paid for houses and what other friends had sold
at. Her desire for the place led her further to remember how often
she had heard of the special value of these modest country houses of
ancient memory; what a drug in the market were the great hulking stone
places of the eighteenth century, and what a demand there was for these
Tudor and timbered gems.
Before she had done dreaming of it, the good woman had got as her top
price, at the back of her head—counting all—something like £60,000.
After all, it was not her money. And what is £60,000 in two millions?
Besides which, it was only £3,000 a year anyhow; and what’s three
thousand a year when you were born to an uncertain pound a week? The
great thing is to get what you want. Three thousand a year—but that’s
not the way to look at it—£60,000. Why, there are toffs as ull give
that for a trumpery picture!
And then, there was no one to inherit from them. And she asked herself
sentimentally whether Huggins and she had not the right to enjoy what
was left of their lives. And there could not be anything else like
Rackham. There were not two places like Rackham—not in all England
there weren’t.
In Amathea’s room, therefore, the figure of Sixty Thousand Pounds had
taken root and had sprung.
Through a wall not too thick (for it was in the new or Catchings wing,
and the walls were damnably antique) at another desk, Hilda Maple was
making _her_ calculations also. She drew the figures wearily enough.
£20,000 would clear her. What was desperate, what was immediate was de
Vere of Jermyn Street.
It was to pay the first five hundred, and so get the Esthonian to
renew, all those months ago, just after the Ancestor, that she had
written, on the advice of an acquaintance familiar with antiques, to