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Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald

G >> George MacDonald >> Wilfrid Cumbermede




'I do--from the best authority.'

'His own, you mean, I suppose.'

'I do.'

'But--but--I didn't know you were ever--at all--intimate with my
uncle,' I said.

He laughed knowingly.

'You would say, if you didn't mind speaking the truth, that you thought
your uncle disliked me--disapproved of me. Come, now--did he not try to
make you avoid me? You needn't mind acknowledging the fact, for, when I
have explained the reason of it, you will see that it involves no
discredit to either of us.'

'I have no fear for my uncle.'

'You are honest, if not over-polite,' he rejoined. '--You do not feel
so sure about my share. Well, I don't mind who knows it, for my part. I
roused the repugnance, to the knowledge of which your silence
confesses, merely by acting as any professional man ought to have
acted--and with the best intentions. At the same time, all the blame I
should ever think of casting upon him is that he allowed his
high-strung, saintly, I had almost said superhuman ideas to stand in
the way of his nephew's prosperity.'

'Perhaps he was afraid of that prosperity standing in the way of a
better.'

'Precisely so. You understand him perfectly. He was one of the best and
simplest-minded men in the world.'

'I am glad you do him that justice.'

'At the same time I do not think he intended you to remain in absolute
ignorance of what I am going to tell you. But, you see, he died very
suddenly. Besides, he could hardly expect I should hold my tongue after
he was gone.'

'Perhaps, however, he might expect me not to cultivate your
acquaintance,' I said, laughing to take the sting out of the words.

'You cannot accuse yourself of having taken any trouble in that
direction,' he returned, laughing also.

'I believe, however,' I resumed, 'from what I can recall of things he
said, especially on one occasion, on which he acknowledged the
existence of a secret in which I was interested, he did not intend that
I should always remain in ignorance of everything he thought proper to
conceal from me then.'

'I presume you are right. I think his conduct in this respect arose
chiefly from anxiety that the formation of your character should not be
influenced by the knowledge of certain facts which might unsettle you,
and prevent you from reaping the due advantages of study and
self-dependence in youth. I cannot, however, believe that by being open
with you I shall now be in any danger of thwarting his plans, for you
have already proved yourself a wise, moderate, conscientious man,
diligent and painstaking. Forgive me for appearing to praise you. I had
no such intention. I was only uttering as a fact to be considered in
the question, what upon my honour I thoroughly believe.'

'I should be happy in your good opinion, if I were able to appropriate
it,' I said. 'But a man knows his own faults better than his neighbour
knows his virtues.'

'Spoken like the man I took you for, Mr Cumbermede,' he rejoined
gravely.

'But to return to the matter in hand,' I resumed; 'what can there be so
dangerous in the few facts I have just come to the knowledge of, that
my uncle should have cared to conceal them from me? That a man born in
humble circumstances should come to know that he had distinguished
ancestors, could hardly so fill him with false notions as to endanger
his relation to the laws of his existence.'

'Of course--but you are too hasty. Those facts are of more importance
than you are aware--involve other facts. Moldwarp Hall is _your_
property, and not Sir Giles Brotherton's.'

'Then the apple was my own, after all!' I said to myself exultingly. It
was a strange fantastic birth of conscience and memory--forgotten the
same moment, and followed by an electric flash--not of hope, not of
delight, not of pride, but of pure revenge. My whole frame quivered
with the shock; yet for a moment I seemed to have the strength of a
Hercules. In front of me was a stile through a high hedge: I turned
Lilith's head to the hedge, struck my spurs into her, and over or
through it, I know not which, she bounded. Already, with all the
strength of will I could summon, I struggled to rid myself of the
wicked feeling; and although I cannot pretend to have succeeded for
long after, yet by the time Mr Coningham had popped over the stile, I
was waiting for him, to all appearance, I believe, perfectly calm. He,
on the other hand, from whatever cause, was actually trembling. His
face was pale, and his eye flashing. Was it that he had roused me more
effectually than he had hoped?

'Take care, take care, my boy,' he said, 'or you won't live to enjoy
your own. Permit me the honour of shaking hands with Sir Wilfrid
Cumbermede Daryll.'

After this ceremonial of prophetic investiture, we jogged away quietly,
and he told me a long story about the death of the last proprietor, the
degree in which Sir Giles was related to him, and his undisputed
accession to the property. At that time, he said, my father was in very
bad health, and indeed died within six months of it.

'I knew your father well, Mr Cumbermede,' he went on, '--one of the
best of men, with more spirit, more ambition than your uncle. It was
_his_ wish that his child, if a boy, should be called Wilfrid,--for
though they had been married five or six years, their only child was
born after his death. Your uncle did not like the name, your mother
told me, but made no objection to it. So you were named after your
grandfather, and great-grandfather, and I don't know how many of the
race besides.--When the last of the Darylls died--'

'Then,' I interrupted, 'my father was the heir.'

'No; you mistake: your uncle was the elder--Sir David Cumbermede
Daryll, of Moldwarp Hall and The Moat,' said Mr Coningham, evidently
bent on making the most of my rights.

'He never even told me he was the eldest,' I said. 'I always thought,
from his coming home to manage the farm when my father was ill, that he
was the second of the two sons.'

'On the contrary, he was several years older than your father, but
taking more kindly to reading than farming, was sent by his father to
Oxford to study for the Church, leaving the farm, as was tacitly
understood, to descend to your father at your grandfather's death.
After the idea of the Church was abandoned he took a situation,
refusing altogether to subvert the order of things already established
at the Moat. So you see you are not to suppose that he kept you back
from any of your rights. They were his, not yours, while he lived.'

'I will not ask,' I said, 'why he did not enforce them. That is plain
enough from what I know of his character. The more I think of that, the
loftier and simpler it seems to grow. He could not bring himself to
spend the energies of a soul meant for higher things on the assertion
and recovery of earthly rights.'

'I rather differ from you there; and I do not know,' returned my
companion, whose tone was far more serious than I had ever heard it
before, 'whether the explanation I am going to offer will raise your
uncle as much in your estimation as it does in mine. I confess I do not
rank such self-denial as you attribute to him so highly as you do. On
the contrary I count it a fault. How could the world go on if everybody
was like your uncle?'

'If everybody was like my uncle, he would have been forced to accept
the position,' I said; 'for there would have been no one to take it
from him.'

'Perhaps. But you must not think Sir Giles knew anything of your
uncle's claim. He knows nothing of it now.'

I had not thought of Sir Giles in connection with the matter--only of
Geoffrey; and my heart recoiled from the notion of dispossessing the
old man who, however misled with regard to me at last, had up till then
shown me uniform kindness. In that moment I had almost resolved on
taking no steps till after his death. But Mr Coningham soon made me
forget Sir Giles in a fresh revelation of my uncle.

'Although,' he resumed, 'all you say of your uncle's indifference to
this world and its affairs is indubitably correct, I do not believe,
had there not been a prospect of your making your appearance, that he
would have shirked the duty of occupying the property which was his
both by law and by nature. But he knew it might be an expensive
suit--for no one can tell by what tricks of the law such may be
prolonged--in which case all the money he could command would soon be
spent, and nothing left either to provide for your so-called aunt, for
whom he had a great regard, or to give you that education, which,
whether you were to succeed to the property or not, he counted
indispensable. He cared far more, he said, about your having such a
property in yourself as was at once personal and real, than for your
having any amount of property out of yourself. Expostulation was of no
use. I had previously learned--from the old lady herself--the true
state of the case, and, upon the death of Sir Geoffrey Daryll, had at
once communicated with him--which placed me in a position for urging
him, as I did again and again, considerably to his irritation, to
assert and prosecute his claim to the title and estates. I offered to
take the whole risk upon myself; but he said that would be tantamount
to giving up his personal liberty until the matter was settled, which
might not be in his lifetime. I may just mention, however, that,
besides his religious absorption, I strongly suspect there was another
cause of his indifference to worldly affairs: I have grounds for
thinking that he was disappointed in a more than ordinary attachment to
a lady he met at Oxford--in station considerably above any prospects he
had then. To return: he was resolved that, whatever might be your fate,
you should not have to meet it without such preparation as he could
afford you. As you have divined, he was most anxious that your
character should have acquired some degree of firmness before you knew
anything of the possibility of your inheriting a large property and
historical name; and I may appropriate the credit of a negative share
in the carrying out of his plans, for you will bear me witness how
often I might have upset them by informing you of the facts of the
case.'

'I am heartily obliged to you,' I said, 'for not interfering with my
uncle's wishes, for I am very glad indeed that I have been kept in
ignorance of my rights until now. The knowledge would at one time have
gone far to render me useless for personal effort in any direction
worthy of it. It would have made me conceited, ambitious, boastful: I
don't know how many bad adjectives would have been necessary to
describe me.'

'It is all very well to be modest, but I venture to think differently.'

'I should like to ask you one question, Mr Coningham,' I said.

'As many as you please.'

'How is it that you have so long delayed giving me the information
which on my uncle's death you no doubt felt at liberty to communicate?'

'I did not know how far you might partake of your uncle's disposition,
and judged that the wider your knowledge of the world, and the juster
your estimate of the value of money and position, the more willing you
would be to listen to the proposals I had to make.'

'Do you remember,' I asked, after a canter, led off by my companion,
'one very stormy night on which you suddenly appeared at the Moat, and
had a long talk with my uncle on the subject?'

'Perfectly,' he answered. 'But how did you come to know? _He_ did not
tell you of my visit!'

'Certainly not. But, listening in my night-gown on the stair, which is
open to the kitchen, I heard enough of your talk to learn the object of
your visit--namely, to carry off my skin to make bagpipes with.'

He laughed so heartily that I told him the whole story of the pendulum.

'On that occasion,' he said, 'I made the offer to your uncle, on
condition of his sanctioning the commencement of legal proceedings, to
pledge myself to meet every expense of those, and of your education as
well, and to claim nothing whatever in return, except in case of
success.'

This quite corresponded with my own childish recollections of the
interview between them. Indeed there was such an air of simple
straightforwardness about his whole communication, while at the same
time it accounted so thoroughly for the warning my uncle had given me
against him, that I felt I might trust him entirely, and so would have
told him all that had taken place at the Hall, but for the share his
daughter had borne in it, and the danger of discovery to Mary.




CHAPTER L.


THE DATES.

I have given, of course, only an epitome of our conversation, and by
the time we had arrived at this point we had also reached the gate of
the churchyard. Again we fastened up our horses; again he took the key
from under the tombstone; and once more we entered the dreary little
church, and drew aside the curtain of the vestry. I took down the
volume of the register. The place was easy to find, seeing, as I have
said, it was at the very end of the volume.

The copy I had taken was correct: the date of the marriage in the
register was January 15, and it was the first under the 1748, written
at the top of the page. I stood for a moment gazing at it; then my eye
turned to the entry before it, the last on the preceding page. It bore
the date December 13--under the general date at the top of the page,
1747. The next entry after it was dated March 29. At the bottom of the
page, or cover rather, was the attestation of the clergyman to the
number of marriages in that year; but there was no such attestation at
the bottom of the preceding page. I turned to Mr Coningham, who had
stood regarding me, and, pointing to the book, said:

'Look here, Mr Coningham. I cannot understand it. Here the date of the
marriage is 1748; and that of all their letters, evidently written
after the marriage, is 1747.'

He looked, and stood looking, but made me no reply. In my turn I looked
at him. His face expressed something not far from consternation; but
the moment he became aware that I was observing him, he pulled out his
handkerchief, and wiping his forehead with an attempt at a laugh, said:

'How hot it is! Yes; there's something awkward there. I hadn't observed
it before. I must inquire into that. I confess I cannot explain it all
at once. It does certainly seem queer. I must look into those dates
when I go home.'

He was evidently much more discomposed than he was willing I should
perceive. He always spoke rather hurriedly, but I had never heard him
stammer before. I was certain that he saw or at least dreaded something
fatal in the discrepancy I had pointed out. As to looking into it when
he got home, that sounded very like nonsense. He pulled out a
note-book, however, and said:

'I may just as well make a note of the blunder--for blunder it must
be--a very awkward one indeed, I am afraid. I should think so--I
cannot--but then--'

He went on uttering disjointed and unfinished expressions, while he
made several notes. His manner was of one who regards the action he is
about as useless, yet would have it supposed the right thing to do.

'There!' he said, shutting up his note-book with a slam; and turning
away he strode out of the place--much, it seemed to me, as if his
business there was over for ever. I gave one more glance at the volume,
and replaced it on the shelf. When I rejoined him, he was already
mounted and turning to move off.

'Wait a moment, Mr Coningham,' I said. 'I don't exactly know where to
put the key.'

'Fling it under the gravestone, and come along,' he said, muttering
something more, in which, perhaps, I only fancied I heard certain
well-known maledictions.

By this time my spirits had sunk as much below their natural level as,
a little before, they had risen above it. But I felt that I must be
myself, and that no evil any more than good fortune ought for a moment
to perturb the tenor of my being. Therefore, having locked the door
deliberately and carefully, I felt about along the underside of the
gravestone until I found the ledge where the key had lain. I then made
what haste I could to mount and follow Mr Coningham, but Lilith delayed
the operation by her eagerness. I gave her the rein, and it was well no
one happened to be coming in the opposite direction through that narrow
and tortuous passage, for she flew round the corners--'turning close to
the ground, like a cat when scratchingly she wheels about after a
mouse,' as my old favourite, Sir Philip Sidney, says. Notwithstanding
her speed, however, when I reached the mouth of the lane, there was Mr
Coningham half across the first field, with his coat-tails flying out
behind him. I would not allow myself to be left in such a discourteous
fashion, and gave chase. Before he had measured the other half of the
field, I was up with him.

'That mare of yours is a clever one,' he said, as I ranged alongside of
him. 'I thought I would give her a breather. She hasn't enough to do.'

'She's not breathing so _very_ fast,' I returned. 'Her wind is as good
as her legs.'

'Let's get along then, for I've lost a great deal of time this morning.
I ought to have been at Squire Strode's an hour ago. How hot the sun
is, to be sure, for this time of the year!'

As he spoke, he urged his horse, but I took and kept the lead, feeling,
I confess, a little angry, for I could not help suspecting he had
really wanted to run away from me. I did what I could, however, to
behave as if nothing had happened. But he was very silent, and his
manner towards me was quite altered. Neither could I help thinking it
scarcely worthy of a man of the world, not to say a lawyer, to show
himself so much chagrined. For my part, having simply concluded that
the new-blown bubble hope had burst, I found myself just where I was
before-with a bend sinister on my scutcheon, it might be, but with a
good conscience, a tolerably clear brain, and the dream of my
Athanasia.

The moment we reached the road, Mr Coningham announced that his way was
in the opposite direction to mine, said his good morning, shook hands
with me, and jogged slowly away. I knew that was not the nearest way to
Squire Strode's.

I could not help laughing--he had so much the look of a dog with his
tail between his legs, or a beast of prey that had made his spring and
missed his game. I watched him for some time, for Lilith being pulled
both ways--towards home, and after her late companion--was tolerably
quiescent, but he never cast a glance behind him. When at length a
curve in the road hid him from my sight, I turned and went quietly
home, thinking what the significance of the unwelcome discovery might
be. If the entry of the marriage under that date could not be proved a
mere blunder, of which I could see no hope, then certainly my
grandfather must be regarded as born out of wedlock, a supposition
which, if correct, would account for the dropping of the _Daryll_.

On the way home I jumped no hedges.

Having taken my farewell of Lilith, I packed my 'bag of needments,'
locked the door of my uncle's room, which I would have no one enter in
my absence, and set out to meet the night mail.




CHAPTER LI.


CHARLEY AND CLARA.

On my arrival in London, I found Charley waiting for me, as I had
expected, and with his help soon succeeded in finding, in one of the
streets leading from the Strand to the river, the accommodation I
wanted. There I settled and resumed the labour so long and thanklessly
interrupted.

When I recounted the circumstances of my last interview with Mr
Coningham, Charley did not seem so much surprised at the prospect which
had opened before me as disappointed at its sudden close, and would not
admit that the matter could be allowed to rest where it was.

'Do you think the change of style could possibly have anything to do
with it?' he asked, after a meditative silence.

'I don't know,' I replied. 'Which change of style do you mean?'

'I mean the change of the beginning of the year from March to January,'
he answered.

'When did that take place?' I asked.

'Some time about the middle of the last century,' he replied; 'but I
will find out exactly.'

The next night he brought me the information that the January which,
according to the old style, would have been that of 1752 was promoted
to be the first month of the year 1753.

My dates then were, by several years, antecedent to the change, and it
was an indisputable anachronism that the January between the December
of 1747 and the March of 1748, should be entered as belonging to the
latter year. This seemed to throw a little dubious light upon the
perplexity; the January thus entered belonging clearly to 1747, and,
therefore, was the same January with that of my ancestor's letters.
Plainly, however, the entry could not stand in evidence, its
interpolation at least appeared indubitable, for how otherwise could it
stand at the beginning of the new year instead of towards the end of
the old, five, years before the change of style? Also, now I clearly
remember that it did look a little crushed between the heading of the
year and the next entry. It must be a forgery--and a stupid one as
well, seeing the bottom of the preceding page, where there was a small
blank, would have been the proper place to choose for it--that is,
under the heading 1747. Could the 1748 have been inserted afterwards?
That did not appear likely, seeing it belonged to all the rest of the
entries on the page, there being none between the date in question and
March 29, on the 25th of which month the new year began. The conclusion
lying at the door was that some one had inserted the marriage so long
after the change of style that he knew nothing of the trap there lying
for his forgery. It seemed probable that, blindly following the
letters, he had sought to place it in the beginning of the previous
year, but, getting bewildered in the apparent eccentricities of the
arrangement of month and year, had at last drawn his bow at a venture.
Neither this nor any other theory I could fashion did I, however, find
in the least satisfactory. All I could be sure of was that here was no
evidence of the marriage--on the contrary, a strong presumption against
it.

For my part, the dream in which I had indulged had been so short that I
very soon recovered from the disappointment of the waking therefrom.
Neither did the blot with which the birth of my grandfather was menaced
affect me much. My chief annoyance in regard of that aspect of the
affair was in being _so_ related to Geoffrey Brotherton.

I cannot say how it came about, but I could not help observing that, by
degrees, a manifest softening appeared in Charley's mode of speaking of
his father, although I knew that there was not the least approach to a
more cordial intercourse between them. I attributed the change to the
letters of his sister, which he always gave me to read. From them I
have since classed her with a few others I have since known, chiefly
women, the best of their kind, so good and so large-minded that they
seem ever on the point of casting aside the unworthy opinions they have
been taught, and showing themselves the true followers of Him who cared
only for the truth, and yet holding by the doctrines of men, and
believing them to be the mind of God.

In one or two of Charley's letters to her I ventured to insert a
question or two, and her reference to these in her replies to Charley
gave me an opportunity of venturing to write to her more immediately,
in part defending what I thought the truth, in part expressing all the
sympathy I honestly could with her opinions. She replied very kindly,
very earnestly, and with a dignity of expression as well as of thought
which harmonized entirely with my vision of her deeper and grander
nature.

The chief bent of my energies was now to vindicate for myself a worthy
position in the world of letters; but my cherished hope lay in the
growth of such an intimacy with Mary Osborne as might afford ground for
the cultivation of far higher and more precious ambitions.

It was not, however, with the design of furthering these that I was now
guilty of what will seem to most men a Quixotic action enough.

'Your sister is fond of riding--is she not?' I asked Charley one day,
as we sauntered with our cigars on the terrace of the Adelphi.

'As fond as one can possibly be who has had so little opportunity,' he
said.

'I was hoping to have a ride with her and Clara the very evening when
that miserable affair occurred. The loss of that ride was at least as
great a disappointment to me as the loss of the sword.'

'You seem to like my sister, Wilfrid,' he said.

'At least I care more for her good opinion than I do for any
woman's--or man's either, Charley.'

'I am so glad!' he responded. 'You like her better than Clara, then?'

'Ever so much,' I said.

He looked more pleased than annoyed, I thought--certainly neither the
one nor the other entirely. His eyes sparkled, but there was a flicker
of darkness about his forehead.

'I am very glad,' he said again, after a moment's pause. 'I thought--I
was afraid--I had fancied sometimes--you were still a little in love
with Clara.'

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

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Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

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