The haunted house
a better sense of humour than Hilda Maple could hardly have helped
smiling—“when I have made up my mind—I can’t even think of myself as
changing.”
So it was settled. They agreed for a fortnight’s interval in which he
should meet his father’s friends of the neighbourhood, and take some
advice as to where he might get rooms in town—as to what he should look
for then.
John Maple saw and heard and learnt much in that fortnight; and all
he saw and learnt and heard further hardened him in his anger and his
resolve.
For one thing, he discovered the odious word Catchings. It seems
that Rackham had been rebaptised “Rackham Catchings.” Disgusting
black-letter buffoonery!
He had first come across it in the village shop, where the young man
with whom he had played as a boy was all obsequiousness to the heir of
such wealth, and had said, bowing and smirking, over a parcel, “Shall I
send it up to the Catchings?”
“To what?” John had said sharply.
“To the Catchings, sir—Rackham Catchings? Your house, sir; leastways,
Mrs. Maple’s house.”
“Oh,” John had answered. “Yes, Rackham, of course. Where else should
you send it?” And he had turned abruptly out of the familiar door.
After that he noticed the odious thing in the address of letters
arriving. On the first day he had occasion to write a note he found
it on the paper heading. He saw in the _County News_ that some show
or other was to be opened a fortnight hence by Mrs. Maple of Rackham
Catchings. He was beginning to get it on the brain.
And certainly there had been plenty of Catchings added to Rackham. To
his mind, in those few days during which he still lingered, the new
sham timbered front was the Catchings and the beastly sham panelling
and sham beams of the new rooms, and the odious antique furniture, and
the silly Wardour Street pictures deliberately darkened—all these were
the Catchings. He went over them one by one, listing them in his mind,
and grimly delighted in the coming luxury, distant or near, of tearing
them out by the roots like a lot of bad teeth.
It was a state of things that did not make for better relations, though
John was careful to keep off any questions on the novelties, even on
the absurd novel name. He would learn its origin in due time. Meanwhile
upon anything that mattered he was stubbornly silent, and sufficiently
talkative on things that did not.
Aunt Hilda played her part well enough, determined as he was, and
successful as he was, in preventing an open quarrel. On the day when
she bade him good-bye at the door, and made him promise to write and
to return often to visit her, she rejoiced that she had not broken her
word to the dead man. She had done her best. And if anything went wrong
with John, why she was always there to help. But there is no denying
that she was relieved.
As for John, though he had left Rackham silent, he had fallen into a
new mood as the train approached London. Her friends and his father’s
had given him introductions and he had been told of good and reasonable
lodgings; and he had those few hundreds and scores of pounds in his
pocket, which are a fortune on the threshold of one’s twentieth year.
But quite unchanged in his heart as he travelled still stood the image
of the old Rackham, the real Rackham. And those hurried facts which his
father had passed over as though they were too painful for him—sums of
money: the real sum owed—£10,000, or say £12,000, £13,000 at the very
most—yet £20,000 claimed. Well, £20,000 it legally was and £20,000 he
would adhere to.
That £20,000 he would find, make, somehow, somewhere.
At his age £20,000 is like a million, but at his age, also, a million
may be found, made, somehow—somewhere. That £20,000 hardened in his
soul and became the permanent furniture of it.
CHAPTER III
How young people fall on their legs no one knows—least of all
themselves: no more than cats thrown off a roof. Those who have gone
out into the world on their own before they were twenty know that it
happens, and that is all they can say.
It happened to John Maple. He went through the string of those
adventures which all such lads go through, indifferent to the squalor
because he was too young; delighted with the uncertainty, and buoyed
up by the novelty of his life. It happened to him also (as it happens
to all such) that he was never cut off from his equals in real life as
such are cut off in melodrama. There was nothing about not darkening
doors again, or shaking dust off feet. He went down often enough to
Aunt Hilda’s (thinking himself a noble fellow enough for tolerating
Rackham). He made better and better friends with Corton, who always
thought of him as the only true Maple. He met his aunt’s friends. His
father’s old acquaintances looked him up, and asked him out in London.
If you had taken a couple of weeks out of the boy’s life and followed
it hour by hour, you would have found such a mosaic as only an early
experience of that strange kind knows—there are plenty of us alive
to-day who have known it and can remember it. John Maple came to know
them all.
Lodgings chosen for their peculiarity, their isolation; a single bare
room overlooking London from the height of an old building; a basement;
a dusty studio; one changed for another. Odd acquaintances from the
most different sorts of worlds. Broken-down actors, young men trying
to find work, and trying to forget the time when they were soldiers.
Pompous hosts in huge great mausoleums of houses (bad speculations on
the Crown property at Kensington—white elephants). Dull Bohemian nights
in Chelsea. Much more interesting revolutionary nights sandwiched
between foreign and domestic spies in reeking cellars off Houndsditch.
One or two really interesting parties in the houses of such people, for
instance, as Charles Baker, who had been his father’s friend for years
before the exile, and who was still in Parliament and still ridiculing
it, but whose real point was that he could paint; or tea with another
friend of his father’s of very many years’ standing, Lady Pattle,
the widow of the Admiralty Judge. There he met everybody—and there,
incidentally, he met Bo.
Lady Pattle liked pretty well everything, but if she liked one thing
more than another it was people who could talk crisply and dress
crisply. She liked them best when they were least English, and she
liked them best of all when they were American.
Now God in His providence had at this very moment provided for Lady
Pattle, and for England, precisely what was most needed in this line.
Hamilcar Hellup had not begun life upon a few copper coins, still less
had he walked as a barefoot child into New York, because he could not
afford to ride. He had been born of a very good family—that is to say,
of a family that had plenty of lineage (ten generations of it since
the first settlers); moderate in fortune; once Puritan, now atheist,
in religion. He had been brought up with the other lads of the village
under that fine tradition of social equality which for so long was,
and still is, in unspoiled places, the tradition of the United States.
He had made a large fortune without selling any material objects that
anyone had ever seen, dealing shrewdly in paper. He had never cheated
anyone, to his knowledge. What is far more remarkable, very few people
had cheated him; or, at any rate, very few with impunity.
His delight was to escape from New York and return at too brief
intervals to the place of his birth: and there his confidant was a
playmate who had remained poor and cunning on the soil, one Hiram Jake.
Hiram Jake remained in Hamilcar Hellup’s vision the symbol of his own
people, and years later, when he stole back home on brief escapes from
England, to talk of Mayfair to Hiram Jake over the broken fence of
that citizen’s lot was cold water in the desert to the millionaire.
When he was a little over fifty he became a widower, and was left with
an only child, a girl called Isabeau, then twelve years old, and to
enjoy, at eighteen, yet another fortune from her mother. His whole life
changed. He gave up the accumulation of further wealth—and therein was
wise, for he had an enormous lump of it. He came over to Europe with
his daughter. First he travelled with her to many places he himself had
seen in his former journeys; then he put her back into a school in his
own country; his wife would have wished it.
While Isabeau was thus growing up American, her father, fully
realising, what he had known at the back of his mind since first he had
seen the country, that England was the place where rich men should come
to die, made his arrangements to settle here.
Nearly seven years had passed since then, and Isabeau, whose name had
very naturally contracted into Bo, was on the point of coming back to
England, when Hamilcar Hellup (he had been Hamilcar J., but he had
dropped the J.—wherein again he was wise) was first pestered by our
hungry politicians to pay them money for a peerage.
Now Hamilcar, being an American, knew all about such things. The Press
of his native country had told him far more about English politics than
our own Press ever tells Balham or Tooting. He knew all about the
politicians, with their tongues hanging out for money—and he preferred
to keep his money to himself. Therefore had Hamilcar been standing on
guard, like a wicket keeper with the gloves on, for now some years:
ready to catch each attack on his purse and throw it back. Hitherto he
had succeeded. Of the last begging interviews, two had been attempted
by a tout of the Prime Minister of the day, very clumsily done, without
a proper introduction; the fellow simply rang the bell and sent in a
card. He was shown out; or, as Hamilcar put it, thrown into the street.
But appetite in politicians is over-mastering, and Hamilcar’s wealth
was notorious, illustrious, quite unconcealed.
The next attack was delivered in his club. It was delivered by an old
gentleman who had bothered him about a lot of other things. This cadger
was (to change the metaphor) deftly cut through the slips. But the
third attack came, only two days later, in the shape of a florid young
man in the Government, with whom he got on like a house on fire. It was
quite late in the evening during a party in Merton Street, when his
under-secretary suddenly asked him whether he would meet yet another
politician at lunch next day. Hellup very foolishly consented; and
there suffered a most brutal hammering, a torture of direct insistence
that he should pay. But there was plenty of hard wood in Hamilcar
Hellup, and he stood firm. There was nothing doing.
What did the trick was Lady Pattle. Lady Pattle had got to know him
just after he had landed. She was a dab at that sort of thing, and she
had managed it sideways, getting him kidnapped to tea in her house
under the guard of her niece and a Lord Chancellor in a large motor.
She had him by the Christian name within a year. She was not for
hurrying things. He was taking her advice during all the second year,
and still more during all the third year; and he had rarely found it
wrong. Lady Pattle it was who told him quite solemnly, after now six
years of acquaintance, that he ought to buy. Lady Pattle it was who
broke down that iron resolve and made Hamilcar Hellup a peer. No other:
Peggy, Lady Pattle.
Let me cast no suspicion on that honoured name. She took no commission.
She had been specially urged by no one. It was principally from
Hamilcar himself that she had learnt how he had set his teeth, and was
becoming obstinately proud as well as amused in turning the politicians
down. She desired to do only what might be good for him, for she was