The haunted house
therefore I owed her, after her husband died, more than I could pay;
more than there was anywhere. There was a German investment of your
grandfather’s—did you know that?”
“No, Papa.”
“Well, it’s gone, of course. I lost it by your uncle’s advice; he said
it was as safe as gold; but after all, he could not tell. No one could
tell.”
“Papa,” said John Maple, asking a question of this sort for the first
time in his life, prompted by he knew not what odd premonition of the
future, “what was the sum owed? How much was the money claimed? How
much would be needed to...?”
His father looked at him with a long look.
“You’re thinking of getting Rackham back?”
“Oh, no, Papa,” he said, startled. He had no conception of such
powers. He could not even imagine himself earning. “I only wondered.”
“Well, well,” said Henry Maple, falling back into his vagueness, “your
aunt will do the right thing. When I am gone, John, go straight back to
her.... You want to know ... what the sum was?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said John. But something fierce in his voice
belied the words.
“My dear boy, it is easily told. The first sum, you know, the actual
sum, I don’t mean the interest—was £10,000. One bit after another ...
it began during those bad years ... I saw corn sold at Lewes market
for 10s. a sack.... Anyhow, your uncle was really generous. He was,
indeed. He never pressed and the interest ran, without his ever saying
a word about it.... And then, at the end, when what with that, and some
expenses or other ...” he hesitated, as though his memory was working
ill ... “oh, yes, on the church, you know. Well, it wasn’t £20,000....
But your uncle was generous, boy, do believe it. He gave me the balance
making it up to £20,000. That is what we have had over and above some
of the rentals since we have been here.... There will be £300 or £400
for you to take in the bank when....” He would not say the words.
“It was £20,000 altogether?” said John.
“Yes,” said his father. “But, you know, when your aunt came she had all
the papers in order, and there’s no denying she had a right to a lot
more than that.”
The son was silent: he was growing older with every moment of this.
“_She_ was just, too, John, believe me. They kept the place very well.
It looked twice what it had been, though a little strange ... when I
went back there.... Anyhow, it’s hers now.”
“Hers?” said John. “Oh, don’t bother, Papa. Don’t trouble. I ought not
to have asked you.”
“Yes, dear boy, it had to be. Strictly, she could have made me sell.
But in her odd way she’s generous too, I think. Though I can’t pretend
that I ever....” He would not complete the sentence. But from that
moment the boy had an unpleasing image of the woman in his heart.
“It was her right, John, and she’ll do the right thing by you. She has
no children, and it’s bound to come to you. And, you know, you are to
go to Oriel? She’ll see to that. I make no doubt she’ll see to that.
Settle it with her. And your allowance, my dear boy ... and....”
He ceased, under a sudden spasm of extreme fatigue.
“I must stop now, boy.”
His son kissed him upon the forehead, and thought it oddly cold.
“It’s late,” the father added, almost in a whisper. “Tell Marie to come
up. I’ll get to bed.”
And next morning young John Maple, waking late, alarmed that his father
had not rung, went to his door, and knocked, and heard no answer. That
father was dead.
* * * * *
The English friends in the place told the lonely boy what he should
do, but he was already almost competent to act. Cut off though he
had been from the life of his kind, he had a singularly mature power
of decision, and it was nerved now by a strange, tenacious feeling
in which, as in a composite picture, were inextricably entwined the
beloved memory of the face which he would never see again for ever
(every detail of the funeral remained vivid all his life)—a profound
sense of wrong done him, and a vague, quite formless, but astonishingly
strong intention of _action_—what action he knew not, nor how it should
be performed, nor where. Even in one so young, sudden and overwhelming
grief adds to the vividness of life intolerably. By so much as he
dwelt—more than in real experience itself—upon his father’s voice,
gesture, everything—by so much was he acutely, violently sensitive to
harsh alien things.
His aunt had not come out for the funeral. She seemed to show an
intolerable indifference. Bad as the immediate post-war conditions
were, it was inexcusable. The letter he had received from her struck
him like ice; though that woman had never written unkindly in her life,
yet also she had never written kindly. The journey home in those
strange, interrupted days of the spring of ’19, with the delays and
the broken glass in the carriages and the sleepless nights, felt like
an approach to some doom. What would it be like? What would Rackham
be like? What would it have become? He had a fairly clear memory
of the place, though he had not seen it since he was a child—for
five-and-a-half years. His father had told him very vaguely and in a
few sentences that it “looked twice what it had been”; but he evidently
did not like to dwell on any description. He had pictured to himself
one or two consolations—meeting again with Corton, the old butler, and
the rest of them—he supposed they were all still there—the familiar odd
disjointed front of the house, half brick, half timber; the rank grass,
the neglected field beyond the rusty iron palings, the ill-kept lawn
which were for him not decay, but Home.
His first shock was at the station.
It was not the old brougham that met him, the old horse that he
remembered; it was a car, too smart for such a place; and the driver,
of all things in the world, a Frenchman, demobilised and (by some
strange snobbery of his aunt’s) smuggled in: imported by the favour of
some Parliamentarian friend of hers.
The drive was too short. The old ramshackle lodge was gone, and there
was, in its place, a Queen Anne cottage of the worst type. The drive
was twice as broad as in the old days. The gravel of it clean and new.
Then, at a turn, in a moment—the evening still light—he saw Rackham.
But was it Rackham? The front was all timber now. And no one could say
whether it was all new or all old. It seemed new, made falsely old. The
windows were old-new, anyhow, for they were criss-cross lattice. It
made him think of the few times he had seen stage scenery, when he had
gone with his father into Berne to the play.
Corton was there when the door opened. And for the first time in
so many days he rejoiced a moment in the warmth of the old man’s
greeting—but in what surroundings!
The old hall had gone; the next room had been knocked into it. He could
have believed it the lounge of an hotel for its garishness. There were
strange beams, artificially rough and artificially darkened. There were
pictures on the wall which he had never known. All looked new, most
abominably aping age.
He was in an ill mood by the time his aunt received him. But that first
evening things went quietly enough. She did her best—it was a poor
best, but she could do no better. She was precise, she was worldly, she
could not bear things to be casual and unfixed; and she was (wrongly)
convinced that the boy before her was but a repetition of his father—of
whose goodness she had felt nothing, for whose vagueness and slackness
she had had all the contempt of her kind.
I say, it was a poor best; and for a week—she thought it well to allow
a little time before any business should be talked—the tension grew.
The breaking-point came one evening after dinner in the
drawing-room—furnished after some antique fashion which John could not
understand and hated—when Hilda Maple, in a tone which seemed to him
rather like the commands of an official than converse with one’s kind,
began to give him her plans for his future. He was to have so much—not
an insufficient allowance—paid thus and thus; he must account for it.
She had seen the authorities at Oriel and the rooms he would have. She
approved of the rooms. Perhaps she would have preferred Christ Church,
but it was his poor, dear father’s wish (she said that as though his
father’s wish was necessarily less worthy than her own—after all, poor
Henry had been at Oriel, hadn’t he?).
John made no answer. He listened with increasing anger in his heart.
“They wanted you to read history,” she said, “but I said you would
rather read law. You would, I know. Your uncle would have said that. He
always said that he wished he had read law himself at the University.
He said that it would have saved him three years. And you know, John,
you will have to have a profession.”
John sat up in his chair and leaned forward slowly towards the April
fire.
“I shall not go to Oxford. I shall find some trade,” he said, in a
slow, determined voice.
“What do you mean?” answered his aunt sharply.
“What I say,” answered her nephew.
It was not a courteous beginning in her ears, for she felt she was
being enormously kind. After all, she owed him nothing; it was the
other way round; she had lost by him and his.
“What you say?” she cried, almost angrily. “What you say? I don’t
understand you!”
“I have got £352 left, Aunt Hilda,” he said, still refusing to meet her
eyes and looking straight into the fire.
“Well?” said she.
“It’s enough to turn round on,” he continued.
“Good heavens, boy! Do you understand that you’re not yet nineteen?
D’you think you are of age? What can one do with three ... really, I
don’t understand what you mean!”
But in that young mind a very firm determination was growing up. He
knew nothing whatever of the world. But he was prepared to learn it,
and to learn it alone, as soon as might be. He said no more. She
questioned, she spoke so strongly that with a woman less careful of
herself there would have been a storm. But she got no more out of him.
There followed two days in which neither said much. Hilda Maple did not
reproach herself, but she was a little anxious. She thought herself
capable of any situation: but this was new. On the third day John told
her of his determination.
He was going to London. He would give her his address the moment he had
one; he begged her to let him be. He was sure of himself.
There passed rapidly through his aunt’s mind the alternatives before
her, and before him. She saw them clearly, as was her talent, and she
made the decision, which was perhaps the only one she could have made.
He might go. She would not oppose his going. She was still determined
to do her duty in so far as he would meet her—she had a strong sense
of that—there was nothing petulant about the woman, nor any danger
of sudden moods; she had the virtues of the worldly, and their kind
of strength. It was a simple issue—either to use the law—which would
be odious, and would mean a permanent breach in little more than two
years’ time (for she rightly guessed the obstinacy of that deep-voiced,
clear-cut, sturdy figure) or simply to let him run the length of his
tether. She prophesied no disaster; she had the judgment to think that
upon the whole there would be none; though there was a hidden sneer in
her mind as she thought of what occupations this pig-headedness might
drive him to. She told him there would always be a home there when he
needed it; at heart she felt relieved of a burden.
John, on his side, felt a weight lifted too. And young as he was, he
moderated.
“I certainly don’t want to quarrel, Aunt Hilda,” he said. “And I cannot
help telling you that I am grateful to you. You see, when I have made
up my mind——” he talked like one ten years older, and anyone with