The Unknown Ajax Page 7

  Grooby, kneeling before him, as he sat with his legs stretched out, had already drawn one muddied boot half off, but he paused, and looked up, saying earnestly: ‘Don’t, Master Hugh!’

  ‘Don’t what?’ asked Hugo, ripping off his neckcloth, and tossing it aside.

  ‘Say what they do in Yorkshire, sir. Not if you can avoid it! I’m sure I ask your pardon, but you don’t know his lordship like I do, and you want to be careful, sir – very careful!’

  The blue eyes looked down at him for an inscrutable moment. ‘Ay,’ Hugo drawled. ‘Happen you’re reet!’

  The valet heaved a despairing sigh, and returned to his task. The boots off, he would have helped Hugo to remove his coat, but Hugo kindly but firmly put him out of the room, saying that he could dress himself more speedily if left alone. He shut the door on Grooby’s protests, let his breath go in a long Phew! and began, very speedily indeed, to strip off his coat and breeches. When he presently emerged from his room, he found Grooby hovering in the gallery. Grooby said that he had waited to escort him back to the saloon, in case he should have forgotten his way; but it was evident, from the expert eye he ran over his protégé’s attire, that his real purpose was to assure himself that no sartorial solecism had been committed. It was a pity, but not a solecism, that the Major had not provided himself with knee-smalls, but his long-tailed coat was by Scott, and well-enough; his linen was decently starched; and his shoe-strings ironed. He favoured a more modest style than was fashionable, wearing no jewellery, sporting no inordinately high collar, and arranging his neckcloth neatly, but with none of the exquisite folds that distinguished the tie of a dandy or a Corinthian. Grooby regretted the absence of a quizzing-glass and a fob, but on the whole he was inclined to think that so large a man was right to adopt a plain mode.

  The Major entered the saloon one minute before the stipulated time, thereby winning a measure of approval from his grandfather. Lord Darracott’s brows shot up; he said: ‘Well, at all events you’re not a dawdler! I’ll say that for you. Make your bow to your aunts, and your cousin! Lady Aurelia, Mrs Darracott, you’ll allow me to present Hugh to you; Anthea, you’ll look after your cousin: show him the way about!’

  The Major, receiving a formal bow from a Roman-nosed matron in a turban, and the smallest of stiff curtsies from a tall girl who looked at him with quelling indifference, turned his eyes apprehensively towards the third lady. Mrs Darracott, her heart wrung (as she afterwards explained to her daughter), smiled at him, and gave him her hand. ‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘I am so happy to meet you! So vexed, too, that I wasn’t dressed quite in time to welcome you when you arrived. Not but what that might have made it worse for you – I mean, so many strange new relations! I daresay you must be perfectly bewildered.’

  He did not kiss her hand, but he shook it warmly, and thanked her, smiling down at her so gratefully that she almost wished she had braved my lord’s displeasure, and placed Hugo instead of Matthew beside her at the dinner-table.

  She and Chollacombe had arranged the table, and an arduous labour it had been, necessitating the use of a slate and much chalk. The result was not ideal, but, as Chollacombe very sensibly pointed out, the ideal was not to be achieved with a party of nine persons, all of them related, and too many of them brothers. In this unexceptionable way Chollacombe was able to convey to Mrs Darracott the unwisdom of placing Claud within Vincent’s orbit. She perfectly understood him; and he perfectly understood that when she said that his lordship would certainly wish to have Vincent on his left hand she meant that she was not going to expose the hapless newcomer to the full force of his lordship’s trenchant conversation. In the end, though the table was necessarily uneven, with Lady Aurelia, Richmond, and Claud on one side, and Vincent, Anthea, Hugo, and Matthew on the other, Claud was as far removed as was possible from Vincent, Hugo from Lord Darracott, and Anthea had been placed between Hugo and Vincent, in which position she must willy-nilly shield Hugo from Vincent’s tongue.

  The arrangement was not entirely happy, however, as Mrs Darracott soon perceived; for although Vincent was keeping his grandfather amused, and Richmond was nobly trying to entertain his aunt, Matthew divided his attention equally between herself and his plate; and Anthea, determined to cold-shoulder her intended-suitor at the outset, replied to his tentative attempts to engage her interest with icy civility, and in a manner that did not encourage him to persevere. Mrs Darracott, scandalized by such a display of gaucherie, tried several times to catch her daughter’s eye, but never once succeeded.

  Hugo, with a hostile uncle on his left and a frozen damsel on his right, meekly ate his dinner, and took stock of as many of his relations as came within his view. Of these the most attractive were Mrs Darracott, and Richmond, who was not quite obscured from Hugo’s sight by the epergne in the centre of the table. Hugo thought he seemed a friendly boy: a trifle resty, perhaps; light at hand, like so many high-spirited but spoilt youngsters. He was talking to his aunt: a most alarming female, Hugo thought, eyeing her in awe, and admiring Richmond’s address. Then Richmond chanced to turn his head away from Lady Aurelia, and, seeing that his cousin was looking at him, he smiled shyly. Yes, a nice lad: worth a dozen of the Tulip beside him! Not that Hugo had the least objection to the fops of Society. Being blessed with a vast tolerance he was able to regard Claud with amusement, enjoying the extravagances and the affectations which exasperated Lord Darracott and Matthew. Claud was wearing a coat which represented the highest kick of fashion, and had come (he said) straight from the hands of Nugee. His father told him that it made him look ridiculous, which of course it did, with its wasp-waist, and its shoulders built up into absurd peaks, but there was no need to comb the lad’s hair in public; and certainly no need for that brother of his to have said that he couldn’t help but look ridiculous.

  Hugo ventured to steal a glance at the unyielding profile on his right. Not a beauty, his cousin Anthea, but she was pretty enough, and not just in the common style. Her figure was tall and graceful, and she had remarkably fine eyes, with long, curling lashes; but she looked to be a disagreeable girl, every bit as contemptuous as the appalling old windsucker at the head of the table.

  He was debating within himself how soon he would be able to escape from the home of his ancestors when he found that he was being addressed by his uncle, who told him, rather sharply, that Mrs Darracott was speaking to him.

  She had, in fact, seized the excuse afforded by Lord Darracott’s asking Richmond some question, across Lady Aurelia, to try to draw into conversation the poor young man who was being, she felt, shamefully neglected. She wanted to know if he had found all he needed in his bedchamber, and to tell him, with a motherly smile, that he had only to ask her, or the housekeeper, if there was anything he wished for. He thanked her, but assured her that there was nothing: he would be very comfortable.

  Claud, satisfied that his grandfather’s attention was being engaged by Vincent, shook his head. ‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t be. I don’t know where they’ve put you, but it don’t signify: there ain’t a comfortable room in the house.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Matthew impatiently.

  ‘Why, you said so yourself, sir!’ exclaimed Claud. ‘What’s more, you always say it. The last time you had to come down here you said –’

  ‘Oh, be quiet!’ interrupted his father. ‘It is a very old house, and naturally –’

  ‘Yes, and falling to bits,’ corroborated Claud.

  Matthew, eyeing him almost with dislike, said: ‘That remark, my good boy, is as false as it is foolish!’

  ‘Well, if it ain’t falling to bits you can’t deny it’s being eaten to bits,’ said Claud, quite unabashed. ‘The last time I had to come, here I was kept awake half the night by rats chewing the wainscoting.’

  ‘Oh, not rats, Claud!’ protested Mrs Darracott. ‘Only a mouse! Not but what it’s perfectly true that the house does need repairing, while as for t
he linen, and some of the hangings, I declare I feel positively ashamed! Well, you know what it is, Matthew! Nothing I can say will induce your father– However, we won’t talk of that now! Though I do sometimes feel that if I have to spend another winter here, which, of course, I shall, I shall be crippled with rheumatism! None of the windows fits as it should, and the draught whistles through the house!’

  ‘More like a hurricane,’ said Claud. He nodded at Hugo. ‘You’ll find out, coz. Of course, it’s summer now, so it ain’t so bad, but you wait for the winter! Take my advice, and don’t let ’em light a fire in your room: all the bedroom chimneys smoke, so you’re worse off than before.’

  ‘Not all of them!’ said Mrs Darracott. ‘At least, not very much! Only when the wind is in the wrong quarter. I do hope – for it has begun to get so chilly in the evening now that Mrs Flitwick is having a fire kindled in your room, Hugh! Oh, dear, I wonder if the wind is in the wrong quarter?’

  ‘Nay, don’t fidget yourself on my account ma’am!’ Hugo said, laughing. ‘I’m not so nesh as my cousin! I’ve been used to sleep in a room that had a fire in the middle of the floor, and not so much as a vent to take off the smoke, so it will need more than a puff or two blown down the chimney to make me uncomfortable.’

  His voice, which was a deep one, had a carrying quality. His words were heard by everyone in the room, and were productive of a sudden, shocked silence. He glanced innocently round the table, and added: ‘A mud floor, of course.’

  ‘How – how horrid for you!’ said Mrs Darracott faintly.

  Chollacombe, with great presence of mind, refilled the Major’s glass at this moment, contriving, as he did so, to give him a warning nudge. The Major, not susceptible to hints, said cheerfully: ‘Oh, it was noan so bad! I was glad to have a roof over my head in those days!’

  Mrs Darracott looked wildly round for help, and received it from an unexpected quarter.

  ‘Don’t look so dismayed, my dear aunt!’ said Vincent. ‘The locality of this dismal dwelling-place was not, as I apprehend, Yorkshire, but Spain.’

  ‘Portugal,’ corrected Hugo, as impervious to insult as to hints.

  ‘Most interesting!’ pronounced Lady Aurelia majestically. ‘No doubt you have seen a great deal of the world during the course of your military service?’

  ‘I have and-all!’ agreed Hugo.

  ‘The billeting arrangements in the Peninsula,’ stated her ladyship, ‘left much to be desired.’

  ‘Ay, sometimes they did, but at others, think on, they were better nor like,’ said Hugo reflectively. ‘After Toulouse I shared quarters with the Smiths in a château, and lived like a prince. That was in France, of course. A château,’ he explained, ‘is what the Frogs call a castle – though it wasn’t a castle, not by any means. You might call it a palace.’

  ‘Our ignorance is now enlightened,’ murmured Vincent.

  ‘We all know what a château is!’ snapped Lord Darracott.

  ‘Ay, you would, of course,’ said Hugo, on a note of apology. ‘Eh, but I thought myself in clover! I’d never been in such a place before – except when I was in prison, but you can’t reetly count that.’

  James, the first footman, let a fork slide from the plate he had just removed from the table, but Charles, deftly nipping away the plate before Lady Aurelia, maintained his equilibrium. James was shocked, but Charles was storing up these revelations with glee. A rare tale to recount to his Dad, so niffy-naffy as he was about the Quality! Properly served out was old Stiff-Rump, with a jail-bird for his grandson!

  ‘What?’ thundered his lordship, glaring at his heir. ‘Do you tell me that you have been in prison?’

  ‘Ay, but it wasn’t for long, sir,’ replied Hugo. ‘Of course, I was nobbut a lad then, and it seemed a terrible thing to me. I had the fever, too, mortal bad!’

  Claud, perceiving that the rest of the company was deprived of speech, made a gallant attempt to respond. ‘Nasty thing, jail-fever,’ he said chattily. ‘Not had it myself, but so they tell me! Very glad you recovered from it, coz!’

  ‘It was being transported set me to reets,’ said Hugo. ‘A rare, tedious voyage we had of it, but –’

  ‘Transported?’ interjected his lordship, gripping the arms of his chair till his knuckles shone. ‘You were transported, sir?’

  ‘We all were,’ said Hugo. ‘The most of us three parts dead with fever, and that ashamed – ! Eh, it doesn’t bear thinking on! Such a voyage as it was, too! Close on five months it was before we landed, for the transport I was on carried away its rudder in a gale, and we ran four hundred miles out of our course before the Swallow towed us into Falmouth, and then we had to sail on to the Downs before they’d let us ashore.’

  A delightful chuckle broke from Richmond. ‘I thought that was it! You are the most complete hand, Cousin Hugo!’

  ‘I collect,’ said Matthew coldly, ‘that when you speak of having been imprisoned, and – er – transported, you mean that you were a prisoner-of-war?’

  ‘Why, what did you think I meant?’ asked Hugo, much astonished.

  ‘You must forgive us!’ said Vincent, leaning forward to speak to him across Anthea. ‘The thought that you had been imprisoned for poaching, perhaps, did, I fancy, occur to some of us.’

  ‘Nay! I’ve always been respectable!’ countered Hugo.

  At this point, Anthea, who had been surprised into turning her head to stare at him, lowered her eyes rather swiftly to her plate again, and took her underlip between her teeth. Matthew, far more conscious than his parent of the presence of the servants, said, with a tolerable assumption of amusement: ‘You are, as Richmond says, a complete hand. From the length of time your voyage lasted I am led to suppose that you took part in our ill-fated expedition to South America?’

  ‘That’s reet,’ nodded Hugo. ‘I joined as soon as I left – as soon as I was seventeen. I was gazetted to the 1st Battalion just in time to set sail with Whitelock. A rare piece of good fortune I thought it, but all I got out of it was a fever that mighty near carried me off, and a horse. I paid three dollars for him, I remember. Eh, but I was a Johnny Raw! I could have had him for two.’

  ‘Did you take part in the assault on Buenos Ayres?’ asked Richmond.

  ‘I wouldn’t, myself, call it an assault,’ replied Hugo.

  ‘A disgracefully mismanaged affair!’ said Matthew.

  ‘Ay, we suffered a bad back-cast. Our people wrote up that General Whitelock was a coward, or a traitor, or maybe both, on all the street-corners in Montevideo, but, myself, I think he was no more than a sackless hodgobbin.’ He drank off his wine, and grinned. ‘The men used to drink success to grey-beards but bad luck to white locks,’ he disclosed.

  ‘And then?’ Richmond prompted.

  Hugo smiled at him. ‘Oh, then I was packed off home, on sick furlough, for there was nothing of me left but skin and bone!’

  ‘Poor boy!’ said Mrs Darracott, her motherly instincts stirred. ‘How shocked your mama must have been! But I am persuaded she soon nursed you back to health.’

  ‘Nay, my mother died a year before I joined,’ he answered.

  ‘Oh, poor boy!’ she exclaimed, braving her father-in-law’s displeasure. ‘But perhaps you have other relatives?’

  ‘I’d my grandfather,’ he said. ‘Mother was all the children he had. Happen it was Yorkshire air and good Yorkshire food that plucked me up.’

  ‘Were you at Corunna?’ asked Richmond.

  Hugo nodded; but before Richmond could beg for further information Lord Darracott intervened, saying harshly that he desired to hear no talk about the war at his dinner-table. Hugo, accepting this snub with what appeared to be unshakeable placidity, then retired from the conversation, to discuss with an excellent appetite a large helping of apple pie.

  The rest of the meal passed without incident. For perhaps the first time in all the years she had
lived at Darracott Place it was with reluctance that Mrs Darracott gave the signal for the departure of the ladies from the board. Her compassion had been roused, and it went to her heart to leave her enormous but hapless nephew to the mercy of his hostile male relations.

  In the event, it was not Hugo but Claud who drew my lord’s fire. When the cloth had been removed, it was the custom of the house that not only decanters of port and madeira should be set before his lordship, but that three jars of snuff should also be placed on the table. My lord was a connoisseur; he mixed his own sort, but provided for his guests Old Bureau, King’s Martinique, and Hardman’s ’37. He invited no one but Vincent to help himself from his gold box, and was amused rather than offended when that elegant young man, declining the honour, drew out a box of his own, and snapped it open with a flick of his thumb, saying: ‘Try some of mine, sir! I shall value your opinion.’

  ‘Mixed it yourself, did you?’ said his lordship. He helped himself to a pinch, and inhaled it critically. ‘Too much Brazil!’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you come to me for a recipe? All the same, you young –’ He broke off suddenly, his gaze fixed in wrath and stupefaction on Claud, who had produced a small silver shovel and a haresfoot from his pocket, and was preparing, in happy unconsciousness of the baleful stare bent upon him, to scoop some snuff out of the jar in front of him. ‘What the devil – ?’ demanded his lordship, in such stridulous accents that Claud, startled, looked up, and promptly dropped his little shovel. ‘Well?’ said his lordship. ‘Well, popinjay?’

  ‘Put that thing away, you young fool!’ said Matthew, in a vexed undervoice. ‘Making a figure of yourself – !’

  ‘I ain’t making a figure of myself!’ returned Claud indignantly. ‘Assure you, sir! Quite the go! You take the snuff in the shovel, to save dabbling your fingers, and if you spill any on your coat you brush it off in a trice with the haresfoot, like –’