BELCHAMBER

BY HOWARD OVERING STURGIS AUTHOR OF ‘TIM,’ ‘ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE’ Westminster ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, LTD. 1904 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty TO WILLIAM HAYNES SMITH

CHAPTER I

Belchamber is one of the most beautiful places in England. The name, if not the house, dates from days when Norman-French was the polite language of our kings; the reigning monarch, some early Henry or Edward, alighting for the night, as was the habit of reigning monarchs, at the house of his vassal, and having been especially pleased with something about the apartment prepared for his use, is said to have remarked in high good humour, ‘Pardie! tu as là une belle chambre.’ Something of old-world scandal hung about the legend (which in its authorised form is just a little bare and dull for the nucleus round which gathered the fortunes of a noble family), tales of frail beauty not insensible to a royal lover, of feudal complaisance, not to be more overtly acknowledged than by this gracious allusion to the belle chambre, from which the domain was to take its name.

The house, as the humblest tourist may see for himself on certain days of the week, is an exquisite Jacobean structure borrowing largely from the Renaissance palaces of Italy, yet with a certain solid British homeliness about it, that specially fits it for its surroundings, the green undulations of an English park. The view from the front is sufficiently extended, and behind it, the various Dutch and Italian gardens are interspersed with water-works and statues like a miniature Versailles. Great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts stand in the park, and four large avenues of elms draw their straight lines across it to the four points of the compass. The little river, which in the woods and meadows is a natural shallow trout-stream with loosestrife and ragged robin fringing {1} {2}its banks, is pressed in the gardens into many curious uses—fountains and cascades, and oblong rectangular fish-ponds, where old carp and goldfish circle in and out among the stalks of foreign water-lilies sunk in hampers. The huge lawn behind the house is

shaded by cedars of Lebanon, that are such a characteristic feature of Restoration places, and there is one that disputes with the famous tree at Addington, and I dare say with half a dozen others, the doubtful glory of being the oldest cedar in England.

Of the thousands of acres of which the property consists, the farms and manorial rights, the livings in the gift of the owner, it is not necessary that I should give a catalogue; it is not the business of the novelist to value for probate, but if possible to convey a vague but imposing impression of wealth and position. Suffice it that the Lord of Belchamber is ground-landlord of the greater part of three large parishes, and that in the county of his residence alone no less than three beneficed clergymen sit in their comfortable rectories by the grace of a sickly young man of no very definite religious beliefs, without counting his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who ministers to the spiritual needs of a small army of in-and out-door servants and their families in the little tame church that is, so to speak, tethered on the lawn.

Belchamber has suffered but little at the hands of restorers; the family have always taken a sort of lazy pride in the beautiful house, which luckily seldom rose to the point of desiring to improve it. The third marquis, to be sure, had some formidable projects for remodelling the building, of which the plans remain in a great Italian cabinet in the hall; but his two favourite pursuits combined to save his home, for he lost so much money at cards that even he drew back before the large expense involved, and while he still hesitated, a bad fall out hunting cut short his building projects with his life. That was more than a hundred years ago, when gambling and unpaid debts were indispensable parts of the ideal of a gentleman.

If Charles James, third Marquis and eighth Earl of Belchamber, lost large sums at the club gaming-tables when he{3} came up to the House of Lords, and died as he had lived, in the hunting-field, his successor, George Frederick Augustus, the fourth marquis, in no way fell short of his respected parent’s example. He played as high, drank as deep, and rode as hard as his father, while he imported into his excesses just that flavour of vulgarity which the bucks of the Regency copied so successfully from their master and pattern. He kept two packs of hounds, and several establishments in addition to his acknowledged and legitimate residence; and if he did not break his own neck, he at least broke his wife’s heart, not to mention such unconsidered trifles as his word, and a large quantity of beautiful old china, when in liquor. Belchamber saw him but little; he preferred London and Brighton, and one of his smaller places which was in a better hunting-country; and here once more the very vices of its owners seemed to conduce to the

preservation of the beautiful house and its treasures. The books, the celebrated Vandykes, and the painted ceilings suffered somewhat from want of fires; but neglect has never been so fatal to works of art as attention, and if the pictures cracked and faded a little, at least they were not burnt, or repainted, or buried under a deposit of coachbuilder’s varnish.

To the poor lady, who was occasionally brought from the seclusion of her lord’s hunting-quarters to be exhibited at a drawing-room in the family emeralds and diamonds, a son and heir was born, who received in common with so many of the children of that date the names of Arthur Wellesley. This was the fifth marquis and tenth earl, and the grandfather of the hero of this book. Marquis Arthur differed from his father and grandfather only in his mode of getting rid of money. If he played less, he made up for it by losing large sums on the turf, and by a generally luxurious and extravagant style of living. He was a notorious beauty, and had a straight nose, and an immense bushy pair of whiskers, which were fatal to the peace of mind of great numbers of the fair sex; he was inordinately vain, and a woman had only to tell him she was in love with him, and that she had never seen a man with such small feet, to get anything she wanted out of him. He frittered away more money over bouquets and scent and ugly jewellery than his father and grandfather

had lost in their longest nights at Crockford’s. His triumphs over female virtue were so numerous and notorious that many thought he would never give a hostage to fortune in the shape of a wife of his own. But when the nets of the fowler had been spread for many years in the sight of this volatile bird of gay plumage, he surprised every one by bringing home a bride from across the Channel.

If report said true, this beautiful young woman revenged the wrongs of her sex, and of many husbands, most thoroughly on her whiskered lord, who was not her master. At first it was impossible to Lord Charmington (as he then was) to believe that any woman he honoured with his affection could fail to be madly in love with him; then as the conviction grew upon him (and ideas came to him slowly), there were furious scenes of recrimination, anger, and jealousy on his side, and cold contempt and indifference on hers. More than once they were within a short distance of the divorce court; but his vanity never could be reconciled to the thought of appearing coram populo in the character which to him seemed always the most ludicrous and humiliating possible. His wife soon discovered this weakness, and traded on it freely. If she was not a very clever woman, he was a more than ordinarily stupid man, so that he learned to dread her tongue almost as much as the ridicule that must attach to him in case of a scandal. He also began to take a

certain pride in her position both in London and Paris. She was certainly for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the society of both capitals; and if the more particular and old-fashioned ladies held up their hands in horror at the stories told of her, she had a large share in introducing a different standard of morals for the younger set, in which she was always a leader. When no longer in her first youth, she was one of the galaxy of beautiful women who adorned the Second Empire, and though at the severer Court of St. James she was less smiled{4} upon, there were not wanting circles in the land of her adoption hardly less august, and infinitely more congenial, where she was not only received, but highly popular.

Through long years which converted her contemporaries into invalids or grandmothers, in which her husband grew fat and coarse, and took to drink and low company, in which children were born to her, two of whom died in infancy, in which her eldest son and one daughter grew up and married, in which her grandsons were born, and her son died, she remained always ‘the beautiful Lady Belchamber,’ always in the world, and of the world, immutably ‘gay,’ and fast, and frivolous, following the same dreary round of fashionable existence year in and year out, bedizened in jewels not always virtuously come by, dressed and head-dressed in the latest mode, and absorbed in the newest craze or pastime with women who might have been her daughters, and men who were sometimes the sons of her early lovers. As her natural charms faded, they were of course replaced by art; the raven locks that had been admired by Louis Philippe at first only took on an inkier black, then grew a little brown, and passed through dull burnished copper to a rich

golden red, while the cream-white skin grew more and more rosy in sympathy. Gradually, as fashion artfully disarranged the hair of its votaries, and the wig-makers’ art developed and improved, so much of her ladyship’s elaborate coiffure came to be false, that it could be almost any colour she chose without inconvenience, and was even known to vary with her gowns.

As for her husband, the flattery of women being as the breath of his nostrils, it was only natural that the older and less attractive he became, the lower he went in the social scale in search of it. The poor little feet that had stepped so nimbly on the hearts of many frail ones, began to spread in the vain attempt to support the Silenus-like body, and, cramped in tight boots, carried their tottering owner into very queer byways indeed. The beautiful nose swelled and grew purple, the Hyperean curls, much thinned at the temples, were still carefully oiled and arranged, and with the famous{5} whiskers became more hyacinthine in hue with each advancing year. When I was a young man, this poor, foolish, wicked old marquis was still strutting about Pall Mall, and ogling the women, with a few other bucks of his own generation, padded, laced, and dyed. I dare say there are bad old men still, but they are bald, and have grey beards, and are somehow not so ridiculous as Lord Belchamber and his peers were. He and his wife met but seldom, and

though he sometimes grew quite eloquent over the way she treated him, he was not really unhappy; after all, he was leading just the same life he always had, and if his companions were coarser and commoner, his taste had coarsened too, and the dull, bloodshot eyes had lost their keenness of vision and grown less critical. He outlived his son, and did not die till after the Franco-Prussian war. Almost the only remark of a purely sentimental nature he was ever known to make was on the subject of the siege of Paris and the fall of the Empire. ‘Poor old Paris!’ he said. ‘I’ve had many a good time in Paris, though I did meet my wife there, damn her! but I shouldn’t care to go there again, hanged if I should, with everything so changed, and all that——’

We shall have nothing more to do with him in this work, except to bury him, which, by and by, we will do with befitting pomp. Of direct influence he never had the smallest on any living creature, but who shall say what mysterious legacy of evil tendencies he may have bequeathed to his descendants? The question of heredity is very fashionable just now, but remains not a little obscure; and perhaps it is safer in the interests of morality that we should not know too exactly how little responsibility we have for our bad actions, and how much we can shuffle off on to our grandfathers and grandmothers. Whether it was the result of heredity or education, or a mixture of the two, the children of such a couple did not start in life with the best chance of being quiet, reputable people, and the two who survived the disorders of infancy were left to bring themselves up very much as fortune willed. Lady Eva was a very pretty{6} girl who seldom saw her mother, left entirely to French maids and governesses, and mainly educated on the

novels of that country, which she abstracted from her mother’s boudoir and read on the sly, generally with the connivance of her instructress, on condition that she passed them on to her. Lady Belchamber used sometimes to see this official, when she thought of it, for five minutes while her hair was being done.

‘Lady Eva se comporte bien?’

‘Parfaitement, ma’m la marquise.’

‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle apprend? voyons.’

‘Lady Eva étudie, en ce moment, comme géographie, l’Asie orientale, la Chine, le Japon; comme histoire, le dix-septième siècle, les guerres de Louis XIV., la guerre civile en Angleterre, la restauration de Charles II.; comme langues, Italien, I Promessi Sposi, Allemand, la Maria Stuart de Schiller, Français, Le Cid de Corneille; comme mathématique——’

‘Assez, assez! ne faites pas trop étudier cette p’tite, vous en ferez un bas bleu. Elle va bien?’

‘Parfaitement, milady. Désirez-vous voir Lady Eva?’

‘Pas ce soir; je n’ai pas le temps.’

Once, some one asked the little girl to give her mother a message. ‘I will write to her,’ the child said, ‘it will be quicker.’ They were living in the same house.

When in due course she was presented and made her appearance in the world, she was very much admired. At nineteen she was engaged to two men simultaneously, and got out of the difficulty by running away with a third, a rather shady hanger-on of her father, called Captain Morland, who not long afterwards had to disappear from society, owing to an unfortunate difficulty that he experienced in confining himself to the strict laws of the game, at cards. Thenceforth they lived mostly abroad, and little was heard of them. Lady Belchamber, who was not an unkind woman, used to write to her daughter sometimes, and send her old dresses and hats; and the old lord, when on the continent, would have the{7} couple to live with him, and give them money. He had a sneaking kindness for Morland, which he never quite got over, finding him a congenial companion; and his son-in-law was very patient in listening to his tender confidences. Lord Charmington, who was two years older than his sister, had the better chance that comes to boys of being sent away to

school. Unfortunately for him, the one thing he did not inherit from his parents was the naturally strong constitution that was common to them both. Lady Belchamber, though herself a marvel of strength and vitality, came of an extremely old family, of which the blood, enfeebled by much marrying of cousins, had had time to run very thin indeed; and though the Chambers stock was originally strong and healthy, the excesses of the last three bearers of the title had not tended to the transmission of a fine physique to their descendants.

From his childhood poor Charmington was a rickety, feeble lad, and more than once came within a tittle of sharing the fate of his younger brothers, instead of surviving to be the father of our hero, in which case this book would never have been written. If he could have stayed out his time at Eton, it might have done much for him, for he was not without some naturally kindly qualities, though he was as stupid as an owl, and never could learn to spell the simplest words. In those days there existed no ruthless law of superannuation, and he might have remained contentedly in fourth form till he was nineteen, had it not been for his unfortunate health: he was always ill, and always having to be taken away and sent to the seaside, or abroad, in the care of any one who could be got to go and look after him. This employment fell as often as not to his future brother-in-law, Captain Morland, than whom a worse companion for a growing lad could hardly be found, and where he could be, Morland found him, and introduced him to his charge. By the time he

was twenty, the lad was an accomplished little rip, gambler, and spendthrift, and had materially impaired his already feeble constitution. He was bought a commission in the{8} household cavalry, but at the end of a few years, having come to the end of everything—health, money, credit, and the limits of his father’s patience—he was thenceforward lost to the service of his country.

After a severe hæmorrhage of the lungs, he was ordered to winter abroad, and by way of retrenching and building up his strength, he selected Nice as a quiet inexpensive winter resort, with the chance of a little congenial amusement, in the nearness of the tables at Monte Carlo. Here he found his sister and her husband (whose little trouble at the club had befallen the year before) hanging on to the fringe of society. But here, too, he encountered that veteran statesman, the Earl of Firth, who with his wife and two daughters was recruiting his strength after his retirement from public life at a villa in the neighbourhood. The Morlands were established at Monaco, where the Firth party never set foot, so Charmington had no difficulty in keeping his disreputable brother-in-law out of sight of his new acquaintances. He began to frequent the villa of the old Scottish peer with quite surprising assiduity. Just what there was in either Lady Sarah Pagley or her surroundings to attract a man like Charmington will always remain a

mystery. Perhaps the jaded, invalid young man found something of the home atmosphere he had never known among these prosy folk; perhaps the blameless dulness of their lives was rather restful to him; or it may be that he took refuge with them from Morland’s incessant appeals for the money of which he himself was so sorely in need. It has been suggested that he paid court to Lady Sarah from mercenary motives, but to a man of his tastes and traditions her modest £15,000 would have seemed a very trifling price to receive for the surrender of his liberty; and if a rich marriage had been his object, there were wealthier maidens scattered along the Mediterranean shore, who would not have despised the suit of a marquis’s only son. He himself explained his choice to a wondering friend by saying that she was the woman most unlike his mother that he had ever met.

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