“You have only arrived today?
Then your cousin Rachel has not seen you.”
Instinct had warned him also.
But too late.
There is no going back in life.
There is no return.
No second chance.
I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed, sitting here, alive and in my own home, anymore than poor Tom Jenkyn could, swinging in his chains.
It was my godfather Nick Kendall who, in his bluff straightforward fashion, said to me on the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday—a few months ago only, yet God! how long in time—“There are some women, Philip, good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster.
Whatever they touch somehow turns to tragedy.
I don’t know why I say this to you, but I feel I must.”
And then he witnessed my signature on the document that I had put before him.
No, there is no return.
The boy who stood under her window on his birthday eve, the boy who stood within the doorway of her room the evening that she came, he has gone, just as the child has gone who threw a stone at a dead man on a gibbet to give himself false courage.
Tom Jenkyn, battered specimen of humanity, unrecognizable and unlamented, did you, all those years ago, stare after me in pity as I went running down the woods into the future?
Had I looked back at you, over my shoulder, I should not have seen you swinging in your chains, but my own shadow.
2
I had no sense of foreboding, when we sat talking together that last evening, before Ambrose set out on his final journey.
No premonition that we would never be together again.
It was now the third autumn that the doctors had ordered him to winter abroad, and I had become used to his absence and to looking after the estate while he was away.
The first winter that he went I had been up at Oxford still, so his going had made very little difference to me, but the second winter I came down for good and remained the whole time at home, which was what he wanted me to do.
I did not miss the gregarious life at Oxford, in fact I was glad to be quit of it.
I never had any desire to be anywhere but at home.
Apart from my schooldays at Harrow, and afterwards at Oxford, I had never lived in any place but this house, where I had come at the age of eighteen months after my young parents died.
Ambrose, in his queer generous way, was seized with pity for his small orphaned cousin, and so brought me up himself, as he might have done a puppy, or a kitten, or any frail and lonely thing needing protection.
Ours was a strange sort of household from the first.
He sent my nurse packing when I was three years old, because she smacked my bottom with a hairbrush.
I don’t remember the incident, but he told me later.
“It made me so damnably angry,” he said to me, “to see that woman belaboring your small person with her great coarse hands for some trifling misdemeanor that she was too unintelligent to comprehend. After that, I corrected you myself.”
I never had reason to regret it.
There could not be a man more fair, more just, more lovable, more full of understanding.
He taught me my alphabet in the simplest possible way by using the initial letters of every swearword—twenty-six of them took some finding, but he achieved it somehow, and warned me at the same time not to use the words in company.
Although invariably courteous he was shy of women, and mistrustful too, saying they made mischief in a household.
Therefore he would employ only menservants, and the tribe was controlled by old Seecombe, who had been my uncle’s steward.
Eccentric perhaps, unorthodox—the west country has always been known for its odd characters—but despite his idiosyncratic opinions on women, and the upbringing of small boys, Ambrose was no crank.
He was liked and respected by his neighbors, and loved by his tenants.
He shot and hunted in the winter, before rheumatism got a grip on him, fished in the summer from a small sailing boat he kept anchored in the estuary, dined out and entertained when he had the mind to do so, went twice to church on a Sunday even though he did pull a face at me across the family pew when the sermon was too long, and endeavored to induce in me his passion for the planting of rare shrubs.
“It’s a form of creation,” he used to say, “like anything else.
Some men go in for breeding.
I prefer growing things from the soil.
It takes less out of you, and the result is far more satisfying.”
It shocked my godfather, Nick Kendall, and Hubert Pascoe, the vicar, and others of his friends who used to urge him to settle down to domestic bliss and rear a family instead of rhododendrons.
“I’ve reared one cub,” he would make reply, pulling my ears, “and that has taken twenty years off my span of life, or put them on, whichever way I care to look at it.
Philip is a ready-made heir, what’s more, so there is no question of having to do my duty.
He’ll do it for me when the time comes.
And now sit back in your chairs and be comfortable, gentlemen.
As there is no woman in the house we can put our boots on the table and spit on the carpet.”
Naturally we did no such thing.
Ambrose was nothing if not fastidious, but it delighted him to make these remarks before the new vicar, henpecked, poor fellow, with a great tribe of daughters, and round the dining room table would go the port after Sunday dinner, with Ambrose winking at me from his end of the table.
I can see him now, half hunched, half sprawling in his chair—I caught the habit from him—shaking with silent laughter when the vicar made his timid ineffectual remonstrance, and then, fearing he might have hurt the man’s feelings, intuitively changing the tone of the conversation, passing onto matters where the vicar would be at ease, and putting himself to the utmost trouble to make the little fellow feel at home.