The Pit Town Coronet Volume Iii Part 1

The Pit Town Coronet.

Volume III.

by Charles James Wills.

CHAPTER I.

AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS.

Seventeen uneventful years had pa.s.sed and had streaked Georgie Haggard's abundant chestnut locks with grey. A lovely woman still. The innocent, healthful, girlish beauty had developed into the sweet matronly dignity which is so frequently seen among the happy wives and mothers of the English aristocracy. Haggard was still proud of his wife, because even he couldn't fail to see her beauty; and as for the old lord, he idolized her much as old Squire Warrender had idolized her twenty years ago at The Warren. Georgie Haggard was not demonstrative. Always quiet, she was rather timid and subdued in her husband's presence; but with the old lord, though perhaps a little more staid and dignified than of yore, she was still the lovely and affectionate woman of the old happy times. Hers was the beauty of the happy mother, the sweet matronly loveliness which is perhaps the more touching when tinged by the slight dash of sadness which idealises it and saves it from the commonplace. The smile was not ever present, but it was none the less beautiful and touching from its rarity.

Reginald Haggard and his family had been installed at Walls End Castle ever since Lord Hetton's death. They had come originally upon a visit; Mrs. Haggard's health had suddenly broken down, and at the old lord's urgent entreaty the visit had been indefinitely prolonged. Although Haggard was, as we know, a wealthy man, he could not afford to disregard any suggestion of his great-uncle. At first he had looked on the whole thing as a confounded nuisance; he had objected to his wife that they might make themselves ridiculous by a too abject obedience to the whims of the old n.o.bleman.

But after all it was not so very bad for the Haggards. Lord Pit Town took care to make it very apparent to everybody that it was at his special desire that Haggard and his family remained at the Castle.

He let it be very plainly perceived that he considered Reginald Haggard almost as his son, as well as his heir; for the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, at the conclusion of his official duties, had quite enough to occupy his mind with his eternal whist at the club till the small hours of the morning. The odd trick was far more to him than the possession of Walls End Castle and the Pit Town t.i.tle.

But Mr. Lancelot Haggard remained a plain esquire till his death, which occurred seven years after that of the unfortunate Lord Hetton. When his man-servant opened the study door one morning, for he had found the bedroom empty, he saw Lancelot Haggard seated at the whist table, upon which the four hands of an unfinished game were spread. Pole's "Treatise on Whist" lay open at "The Echo of the Call," the candles had burnt out in their sockets, there were tricks turned, and three cards were already played of another one; and Lancelot Haggard sat bolt upright, the fourth card between his fingers, stone dead, but with a peaceful smile upon his lips.

Reginald Haggard, then, was practically in the position of Lord Pit Town's son. Of course he was but plain Mr. Haggard still. He had got rid of his father's place, thus "was.h.i.+ng his hands," as he had threatened, "of the whole bag of tricks;" for though Cunningham, the Scotch steward, had succeeded in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g three per cent. out of the place, yet he had made himself so terribly unpopular in the process that he resigned in despair in order to emigrate to New Zealand, and so become, as he phrased it, his "ain mon again." When the steward resigned Haggard had been very glad indeed of the excuse to send the place to the hammer. A set of rooms in the huge mansion of the old lord in Grosvenor Square had been placed at Haggard's disposal, and though he frequently ran up to town, his _pied-a-terre_ was at the house which would one day be his own, and the Haggards had no regular establishment in London. As for Georgie Haggard herself, she invariably pa.s.sed a portion of the summer with her father at The Warren. She usually made her annual visit accompanied only by the two boys, for Haggard invariably absented himself in the summer either for Norway fis.h.i.+ng, lengthy yacht voyages, or as one of a little party of men of his own kidney, who sought their sport further afield and went lion-hunting in South Africa, shooting the hippopotamus on the White Nile, or chasing the fast-disappearing buffalo upon the American prairies. But as a rule he would get home for the shooting. Year by year the head of game in the Walls End preserves, under Haggard's fostering care, had increased. In the old lord's name Haggard had invited every year a select little party of crack shots; he gave them a couple of days' _battue_ shooting, the other four in the stubble and among the turnips, and at the end of the week they went away to "wipe each others' eyes" over some other man's birds. For some years the bags made at these little annual gatherings had been noted in the daily papers. Haggard himself not infrequently headed the list, for he was an enthusiastic sportsman and a brilliant shot.

Reginald Haggard at five-and-forty had quieted down. Years and years ago he had taken his name off the books at the Pandemonium; he no longer gambled, and he took a great interest in politics, as became a man who was destined, in the ordinary course of events, and at no very distant date, to become one of our hereditary legislators. Of course Haggard had many friends, or rather acquaintances, all of whom were ready to kootoo and truckle to the man who would be the next Earl of Pit Town; men whom he would invite to dinner, and who would entertain him; generally men of his own age, or club-room bucks with wrinkled cheeks; men whose clothes were always in the fas.h.i.+on, and who as a rule ate and drank rather more than was good for them; men who rode in the park on three hundred guinea hacks, and who might be seen in the Drive in big mail-phaetons with Brobdingnagian lamps, or driving noisy and rather miscellaneous parties on their four-in-hands towards Richmond.

I don't know what Haggard would have done without that invaluable esquire of his body, Mr. Maurice Capt. Capt accompanied him everywhere; he had camped out with him in the Rockies, and his culinary skill there had more than made up for the deficiencies of Bull-headed Bill, the half-bred t.i.tular cook of the expedition. Capt was a silent man, and his fellow servants were never able to extract any gossip from him respecting his master's wanderings. But Haggard was lucky in retaining one real friend; his old _fidus Achates_, Lord Spunyarn, was his friend still; still a bachelor, no longer the unsuccessful amateur athlete of former days, but developed into a full-blown philanthropist, the friend of mankind in general, but of the dest.i.tute East-ender in particular.

Ever since Georgie Haggard, in her just indignation, had banished her cousin from her presence, Miss Lucy Warrender, still a handsome woman, had led a wandering life; the dove had found no rest for the sole of her foot. Homeless and friendless, though her intimates and acquaintances were innumerable, she was as restless and erratic in her movements as the Wandering Jew. Miss Warrender was always in evidence upon the Ascot Lawn; she was to be seen at Brighton during the season, at German watering-places, at Deauville, Biarritz, and Eastbourne or Scarborough in the summer, and occasionally even for a few days at The Warren, where she invariably appeared at Christmas. For Lucy Warrender had eight hundred a year of her own, which she had inherited from the colonel, her father. I am afraid she had become a confirmed old maid; she had flirted and philandered till she was thirty, and there were plenty of the very smartest people who were quite ready to flirt with her now, for Lucy Warrender still retained her good looks, her dreamy blonde beauty, and her eyes still sparkled as of old. We have said Lucy Warrender was homeless and friendless, and she had developed two master vices: to drown her troubles she gambled as only a woman can gamble, and she drugged herself with chloral and other abominations to procure a temporary forgetfulness of a black shadow that incessantly pursued her.

The man Capt knew of the long-buried secret, and he persistently blackmailed the unhappy Lucy Warrender; but Capt was far too wise a man to kill the goose with the golden eggs. He considered that if he drove her to extremity, and the trick which had been played upon Reginald Haggard should ever become a public scandal, that he had nothing to gain but everything to lose. He knew that the English laws against what the French call _chantage_ were severe; he also knew enough of his master to be quite certain that if Haggard's just indignation were once aroused, he would be pursued with relentless ferocity. So he contented himself with plundering Lucy Warrender, and kept her secret; not because he was not perfectly ready to betray it, but because he saw no way of bringing his knowledge to a better market.

As for the two young men, for they had already ceased to be adolescents, they were certainty physically decidedly above the average. Lucius, the elder, was, as we know, Lucy Warrender's child. His whole soul was wrapped up in the fact that a few short years would see him the possessor of the courtesy t.i.tle and heir to his supposed father's ample means and old Lord Pit Town's incalculable wealth. The young fellow had even developed a taste for art, simply because he felt it was his bounden duty to be able to appreciate the innumerable treasures which must inevitably soon be his very own. Young Lucius Haggard had been petted and spoiled from his earliest infancy, he had had his way in everything; his nurses, his schoolmasters and his tutors had bowed down to him; good-looking young fellow that he became in after years, a fact of which he was perfectly aware; he was flattered and toadied to by the golden youth of both s.e.xes, and by most of his elders, who ought to have known better, to an extent sufficient to have turned the head of any ordinary young man of well-regulated mind. But Lucius Haggard's was not a well-regulated mind. He was of his father's religion, but he carried the religion further. Reginald Haggard was a self-wors.h.i.+pper, a man determined to get the greatest amount of pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt out of this world, regardless of consequences to others, a man for whom trumps were continually turning up, a man who felt he was a brazen pot among the earthen ones floating down the stream, and to whom the annihilation of the weaker vessels was a matter of utter indifference. Like Napoleon, he believed in his star, and he had been right in doing so, for when at two-and-twenty he had been turned out to take his chance, he had rapidly become the possessor of wealth far beyond his needs; a little later, after a short period of enjoyment of the free wild life in America, he had returned to draw the prize in the matrimonial lottery, which somehow inevitably falls to the lot of such as he. The good lives which stood between him and the Pit Town peerage had all dropped, and nothing now remained between him and what he considered his rights but one frail old man. But the young Lucius had never for an instant been submitted to the healthy influence of even temporary poverty, his existence had never even been troubled by so much as a crumpled rose leaf; the consequence was that his selfishness was utter and unaffected, that he did not even wear it as a garment, but that it was absolutely a part of himself. A tall handsome young fellow enough, fairly clever, who did not conceal that he thought himself rather superior to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world took pretty good care to coincide in the young fellow's opinion.

As for George Haggard, he was the anti-type of Lucius. Equally good-looking, he was the picture of old Squire Warrender in his youth; his fair chestnut hair curled in profusion over his broad square forehead. He was a muscular youth who shone at school and at the university, in the cricket field and upon the river alike. But he was no mere athlete, for he had a taste for reading, and he never forgot the fact, which his father was continually pressing upon his mind, that he, as a younger son, would have to get his own living. And George Haggard was ambitious; he meant if possible to force his way into the arena of political life, and had already determined to make a struggle for name and fame at the Bar. But though George Haggard was ambitious, his was an affectionate disposition; he idolized his mother, and he truckled to no one, not even to his father or the old earl. George Haggard knew well enough that he would be a comparatively poor man--a pauper, as his brother pleasantly put it, but only a pauper from the point of view of Lucius Haggard, the probable future possessor of immense wealth, for The Warren acres would a.s.suredly be his, and had George Haggard so willed it, nothing would have been easier for him than to sit and twiddle his thumbs and wait for old Squire Warrender's death; but as we have said, George Haggard was ambitious.

The great new gallery at Walls End Castle, the Grecian temple which Dr.

Wolff had designed over twenty years before, was now less offensive to the eye externally. It was a Grecian temple still, but its spick-and-spanness had pa.s.sed away. Two old gentlemen arm-in-arm slowly walked down the princ.i.p.al saloon, the one a big grey-haired man whose face was disfigured with many scars; as he walked he gesticulated, and he spoke with a strong German accent in a loud voice. By his side ambled his friend and companion of many years, a very old man this, who stooped considerably and leant frequently upon a crutch-handle stick; the two men were John, Earl of Pit Town, and Dr. Wolff.

"I never thought, Wolff, that I should be spared to fill the last s.p.a.ce on these walls. I certainly never expected to see the termination of my labours. In art one cannot be too exacting. We made up our minds years ago that there should be nothing doubtful here, and here is the only remaining s.p.a.ce filled at last, and filled, as it should be, by a masterpiece. Yes," said the old n.o.bleman, as he rubbed his hands, "thank heaven there is nothing doubtful here. Nothing remains for me now, Wolff, but to leave the treasures that it has been the labour of my life to acc.u.mulate; my sight isn't what it was."

"No man is what he was, my good friend and master, but it is not well to be sad. You set yourself a great task years ago, an almost superhuman task. He is aggomblished."

"No, not accomplished yet, Wolff. I have only got through a part of it.

I have caught my white elephant, but what am I to do with him? I know too well that my natural heir looks upon the contents of these galleries but as so many hundred thousand pounds' worth of hard cash. He is an honest man, and makes no secret of it."

"But his son, my lord, the young Mr. Lucius?"

"Ah! he is a mystery, Wolff, that I have failed to fathom. We have known him, my friend, since he was a little child. I can't tell why, Wolff, I have never trusted him. Perhaps the aged are over-suspicious. I confess to you that if I thought he loved art for art's sake, he should have my pictures, as he will ultimately have my t.i.tle and what goes with it."

"You can tie them up, my lord."

"Yes, I know I can tie them up, but then the pictures I've loved would suffer. Who will care for them, Wolff, when you and I are gone?"

"You have sometimes talked, my lord, of giving them _en bloc_ to the nation."

"Yes, Wolff, I did once think of that; but since that time I have seen that real Chamber of Horrors, the National Portrait Gallery. I should not like to send her there," he said, as he pointed to the portrait of wicked Bab Chudleigh, who simpered and smiled at him from the wall. "No, Wolff, I shouldn't like my pictures to be hawked about as loans to one East End or provincial exhibition after another, to be sneered at by crowds of unappreciating yokels. It's a very heavy responsibility, Wolff."

At this moment Reginald Haggard entered the gallery.

"I hear, my lord," he said, as he shook hands with the old n.o.bleman, "that you have hung the last long-sought treasure this morning. Is it really so?"

The old lord nodded.

"I suppose you will begin the weeding process now?" continued Haggard.

The old man drew himself up a little stiffly. "If you can indicate to me anything that is unworthy, you will confer an obligation; but I think you'll find it difficult. In my opinion, Haggard," he continued, "and in the opinion of others far better able to judge than I am, there is nothing here requiring weeding out."

Haggard slightly flushed.

"I can only plead my ignorance," he said; "it is what most connoisseurs do."

"Yes, there you're quite right; but most men begin collecting as the amus.e.m.e.nt of their old age. I began it sixty years ago, and I'm afraid my long life's labour is over, and that, useless old man that I am, I've lived too long already."

"You look upon things in a melancholy light, my lord."

"No man is pleased when he finds his occupation gone; and perhaps it's a little sad to me to find that you care for none of these things."

"I know you wouldn't wish me to affect an interest I do not feel," said Haggard with an ingenuous smile.

"No, there you're right. For we should find him out, shouldn't we, Wolff?"

The doctor of philosophy laughed. "It is our business to detect shams,"

he said. "Yes, I think we should have found you out."

"Then, Dr. Wolff, you'd better try your skill on Lucius; he poses as a man of taste, I don't."

At that moment the two young men entered the gallery.

"Here he is to answer for himself," said Haggard; "and I'll leave him to your tender mercies. If he be a sham Priest of Art, unfrock him by all means, Dr. Wolff," said Haggard with a laugh, as he sauntered away.

The two young men greeted their aged relative with respect, and nodded familiarly to Dr. Wolff.

"I verily believe, my lord, that this younger brother of mine has no soul," said young Lucius Haggard; "he actually tells me that the contemplation of pictures produces in him naught but headache."

"And a pain in the neck, Lucius; don't forget the pain in the neck,"

said his brother.

"Yes, his pain in his neck was his other symptom. He declares he sees more beauty in a sunlit rustic hedge than in a landscape by Claude Lorraine."

"And I added to my criminality, I fear, Dr. Wolff, by declaring that I only liked a picture when it gave pleasure to my eyes, as does the wicked wanton on the wall yonder," he added, kissing the tips of his fingers to Mistress Barbara Chudleigh.

"Ach, my young friend, do not glory in being a _Philister_," sighed Dr.

Wolff.