The haunted house
really fond of him—and she advised him to yield. Her arguments were
sound. The Prime Minister was asking nothing exorbitant. A dozen new
peers had paid him from twice to ten times as much. Hamilcar was
very rich, and he would not feel it. It was not as if he had run
after them; they had run after him; and really a peerage was a solid
advantage—especially for an American.
“Not Home,” was Hamilcar’s comment; and Lady Pattle had answered
sharply, “No, but you are not living at home.” Whereat Hamilcar had
sighed, for it was true. And in his heart he longed for the wooden
houses and Jake, the playmate of his boyhood, and to see the smoke
rising from his own land, and after that to die.
“It is not,” she said, “as though you had a boy to take it on after
you. That would be a nuisance. But it will certainly help Bo. She’d
like it. She’s been too young so far to know what it means; but
she’d like it now. And it’s great fun, remember. You go and hear the
debates and if you like you can join in. Anybody can. Then, it helps
you abroad: on the Riviera especially, and in Paris too. Still. Even
to-day. It won’t last, but be an English peer while it lasts.”
“Raises prices?” said Hamilcar.
She shook her head.
“Not at the kind of places you go to. They couldn’t raise them.”
What clinched the matter—nothing less would have convinced him—was the
battery she brought up at the end of this memorable conversation.
“If you don’t pay that little bounder off and have done with it, you’ll
be plagued for the rest of your life. He’s worse in opposition than
in office,” she had said. What that meant Hamilcar Hellup hardly
understood; but he understood well enough the wisdom of cutting worry.
And that very week he bought the peerage. One thing, however, he stuck
to; he would not change his name. They tried hard to make him, but
he was adamant. The Hellups had been Hellups too long to change, and
Hellup he remained.
Therefore, when Bo came over from her school, and when Lady Pattle
presented her at Court, and when, with her straightforwardness and
beauty and (to be quite just) her hardness, she had duly impressed
herself upon London, she was the Honourable Isabeau Hellup. Why she was
not Lady Isabeau Hellup was explained to her, and she was reluctant to
accept the explanation. Then did she begin with a great verve a career
of conquest; and her father was prouder of her than of any deal he had
ever made in his life: not excepting the original great Paramount Paper
Merger, in the year ’95.
Bo had armed herself, as must every woman who proposes to conquer, with
a dog—by name Lovey-Lad, by nature swift and terrible, strong to seize
and to tear, strong also to growl, and of the bulldog breed. He became,
in the few hundreds of newspaper pictures which appeared on both sides
of the Atlantic, her cognitive sign, as is the Lion that of St. Jerome,
the Dog that of St. Roch, the Eagle that of Jupiter and St. John,
and an open Bible spread under the left hand that of the late Queen
Victoria at a certain epoch of her reign.
All guessed—some had arranged—whom Bo was to capture. There were
titles in the list—the more knowing ones had particularly good foreign
titles to put forward. There were also great untitled lumps of money,
still knocking about unmarried. There were even a few of the minor
Exalted Personages. Lady Pattle herself, though she was no fool, could
not help, being a hostess and a woman, having fixed plans of her own.
She had settled on and pinned down and labelled young Lord Ockley,
because he had no money, because he was nice, and because she knew him:
three very good reasons.
But these good people reckoned without the Hellup blood, which was
good, tested stuff; they had reckoned without its particular qualities
in Bo; above all had they fatally reckoned without the Bow and Quiver
of the Little God—the Unconquered in Battle—who perpetually scatters
the arrangements of possessing men, and falls like a bolt into the
midst of riches.
It had amused the Little God to bring Bo up against John Maple, and
John Maple up against Bo. It had amused him to shoot at them both;
first from a distance, to try his bow; then good and hard at short
range. They were already quite certain each of the other, before either
of them was quite certain who the other was. They were both married in
heaven—or whatever the process is—I mean, they had both known about
each other from all eternity, while Bo still had no more definite
knowledge of John than that somehow or other he was connected with
“that Mrs. Maple,” and was perhaps vaguely the heir to a Manor House
somewhere or other, with English lawns and oaks, and all the rest of
it: no title—at least, she thought no title. She had not yet thought
much one way or the other about anything connected with him, except
that she knew his soul as she knew her own: and liked it more.
As for John, he knew she was the daughter of one of these American
lords, and he did not honestly try to distinguish between them. But
he had liked her father. He liked the crispness, the exceedingly
well-brushed close short white hair; the equally well-groomed short
white moustache; the humorous, keen eyes and all the rest that goes
with the type. He liked the short sentences, the lively metaphor,
and he liked the man’s certitude in himself. It was as well. For
considering how fiercely John Maple loved that tall infant he might
have hated the rival affection even of her father. And considering how
much Lord Hellup doted on his daughter, he might most furiously have
disliked anyone else claiming her.
That Bo had a great fortune was present in John’s mind, but occupied
no place there. It is often like that. He knew her fortune was there,
as one knows that a big cloud is in the sky. It did not occupy his
thoughts as being anything prominent, still less as having any
effects. For remember, he was still very young. If he had thought of it
at all it would have worried him, I fear. But he did not think of it.
In the adventures of John Maple there had been one very simple motive
running through, which was to earn a living: though he put it to
himself not as earning a living, but as earning, making—_getting_,
anyhow—a certain fixed sum of money, to wit, £20,000, wherewith to buy
back Rackham.
Aunt Hilda had, in the interval since John had come up to town to make
his way, gone from bad to worse. It wasn’t enough for her to call the
old place Rackham Catchings; she sometimes used “Catchings” by itself.
And when John protested against _that_ innovation (as he had done
on one of his last visits) she had poured out a torrent of horrible
antiquarian stuff which she had got from an archæological society, and
which boiled down to this: that once, in one of the older title deeds,
the word “Catchings” appeared; it seemed to have been used for some
part or other of the estate. She was proud to add that they had also
found a certain Sir Harry Murtenshaw mentioned in a letter (undated,
but in a handwriting of the sixteenth century), and that in this
same letter there was mention of a Catchings. It was true this last
Catchings was in Norfolk; but that didn’t trouble Aunt Hilda. She had
already established her legend. The true name of Rackham was Rackham
Catchings, or even Catchings alone; and it had descended to the Maples
and so to herself diversely, by heiresses and marriage, from Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, Knight; a courtier of Gloriana’s, a jewel in the crown of
the Virgin Queen, an Elizabethan.
With John’s movements among the rich Aunt Hilda was insufficiently
acquainted. She kept in touch with him, and she was vaguely pleased
to know that whatever tricks he was playing in private to make a
living—and on these she did not yet inquire—he was at any rate, to the
world, her nephew and his father’s son. If he appeared to be living in
London instead of in Sussex, she liked to have it put down to his—or
rather her—opulence. And if he had to refuse many engagements, if he
mysteriously disappeared for days at a time, why, that was again a
proof of his ample leisure and power to choose his own recreations.
She knew, of course, and she half envied, the way in which she heard
him talked about, though it annoyed her more than it pleased her when,
in that world which had been his father’s, they asked her (as they
often did) whether she were not a cousin. For the truth is, that Aunt
Hilda did not know the rich as well as John did. Still, there were few
whom John knew and whom Aunt Hilda had not at least heard of: not many
houses where John was intimate and she had not at least called. She
addressed Lady Pattle by her Christian name, and had more than once
been called Hilda in return. Two warm friendships Mrs. Maple had made
in that world—one with Lord Hellup, who quite frankly admired her;
one with a certain Lord Mere de Beaurivage—or rather, with his wife,
Amathea, whom she had piloted through many straits and narrows. For the
wife of Lord Mere de Beaurivage had to learn the intricacies of high
life rather late, as indeed had her worthy husband. Fortune had come
upon him with horrible rapidity, like a shell, after his fiftieth year.
It was not till the first war Coalition Government that he had appeared
as Sir George Huggins. It was not till the second war administration
that he had come—by the usual cheque—to adorn the House of Lords. His
creation dated some months before Lord Hellup’s. He was senior to Lord
Hellup in the proud hierarchy of our nobility: senior by half a year.
Though Aunt Hilda could not but revere her dear Amathea’s husband
and have a strong attachment for Hamilcar Hellup, neither of these
noblemen, with wife or daughter, had happened to be at Rackham on
the same occasions as her nephew. She had learnt in roundabout ways
that the Hellups knew John and liked him, though she had not a
suspicion of the growing affair with Bo. As for Lord and Lady Mere de
Beaurivage—either they had not come across the young man at all in the
Great World, or if they had, they had forgotten it: he was no apparent
help to climbing folk. To put it in Lady Mere de Beaurivage’s simple
English phrase, when Hilda had cast out a feeler about it, “Your nevvy?
Not as I knows of, Ilda dear. But there, bless you! faces I knows,
but names I disremember.” Or as his lordship had put it with equal
simplicity, “John Miple? Wot? Sime nime as yer own? Not as I can call
to mind. But lor! There’s so many of ’em!” A sound judgment.
Such was the ambiguous situation—John on the fringes of Aunt Hilda’s
push; Aunt Hilda’s wishing that she was really received as John was
received. So John was asked with sincere affection to Rackham, but not
too often. When he came he played up, and he even helped Mrs. Maple
when she came to London in her abhorrent task of adding further and
more heavily to the Catchings—for some purpose of her own which as yet
John could not divine. It intrigued him.
That fixed idea of his that he would be master of Rackham sooner or
later led him to tolerate every grotesque purchase and addition, and to
help her whole-heartedly. It made him know more about the place ... and
he was free to be rid of the whole mass of that rubbish when he should
reign.
He accompanied her when she went to Burton’s studio to inspect the
absurd carved animals that were to appear on the stone pillars of the
new gate. He gravely approved her choice of the new gate itself, when
it was foisted upon her in the Euston Road—a sham Venetian horror in
new iron, and (oh! my God!) not even forged, but cast.