THE OSBORNES

BY E. F. B E N S O N NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1910, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1910 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

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CHAPTER I

FOR the last five hours all the windows along the front of the newest and whitest and most pretentious and preposterous house in Park Lane had been blazing with lights, which were kindled while the last flames of the long July day had scarcely died down into the ash-coloured night, and were still shining when morning began to tinge the velvet gray of the sky with colour and extinguish the stars. The lights, however, in No. 92 seemed to be of more durable quality than the heavenly constellations and long after morning had come and the early traffic begun to boom on the roadway, they still burned with undiminished splendour. It was literally true, also, that all the windows in the long Gothic facade which seemed to have strayed from Nuremberg into the West End of London, had been ablaze; not only was the ground floor lit, and the first floor, where was the ballroom, out of which, all night, had floated endless webs of perpetual melody, but the bedrooms above, though sleep then would have been impossible, and, as a matter of fact, they

were yet untenanted, had been equally luminous, while from behind the flamboyant balustrade the top of the house, smaller windows, which{6} might be conjectured to belong to servants’ rooms, had joined in the general illumination. This was strictly in accordance with Mrs. Osborne’s orders, as given to that staid and remarkable person called by her (when she forgot) Willum and (when she remembered) Thoresby, and (also when she remembered) alluded to as “my major domo.” “Willum” he had been in earlier and far less happy years, first as boot boy, then when the family blossomed into footmen, as third, second, and finally first of his order. Afterward came things more glorious yet and Thoresby was major domo. At the present time Mrs. Osborne had probably forgotten that there existed such officers as boot boys, and Willum probably had forgotten too. The rise of the family had been remarkably rapid, but he had kept pace with it, and to-night he felt, as did Mrs. Osborne, that the eminence attained by them all was of a very exalted order.

Mrs. Osborne had ordered that every window in the front of the house was to be lit, and this sumptuous edict not without purpose. She said it looked more joyful and what was a little electric light, and as the evening had been devoted to joy, it was right that the house should reflect this quality. For herself, she felt very joyful indeed; the last month or two had, it is true, been arduous, and in all London it is probable that there had been nobody, man or woman, more incessantly occupied. But had there been an eight hours bill introduced and passed, which should limit the hours of energy for hostesses, she would have scorned to take advantage of so pusillanimous a measure. Besides,{7} the nature of her work necessitated continuous effort, for her work was to effect the siege and secure the capitulation of London. That, with her great natural shrewdness, she realized had to be done quickly, or it would never be done at all. London had, not to be starved, but to be stuffed into surrender. She had to feed it and dance it and ply it with

concerts and plays and entertainments till its power of resistance was sapped. Long quiet sieges, conducted with regularity, however untiring, were, she knew well, perfectly incapable of accomplishing its fall. The enemy—at times, though she loved it so well, she almost considered London to be her enemy—must be given no quarter and no time to consider its plans. The assault had to be violent as well as untiring; the dear foe must be battered into submission. To “arrive” at all, you had to gallop. And she had galloped, with such success that on this night in July, or rather on this cool dewy morning in July, she felt that the capitulation was signed and handed her. But she felt no chill of reaction, as is so often the case even in the very moment of victory, when energies not only can be relaxed, but must be relaxed since there is nothing for them to brace themselves over any more. Her victory was of different sort: she knew quite well that she would have to go on being extremely energetic, else the capitulated garrison would by

degrees rally again. But since the exercise of these energies was delightful to her, she was merely charmed that there would be a continual call for them.

There was no “casement jessamine” on the house,{8} which could “stir to the dancers dancing in tune” but on the walls of the lowest story, growing apparently from large earthenware pots filled with mould, were enormous plants of tin ivy which swarmed up the walls of the house. But it was too strongly and solidly made to stir even to the vibration produced by the earthquaking motor-buses which bounced down Park Lane, and thus the dancers dancing in tune had no effect whatever on it. This stalwart ivy was indeed a sort of symbol of the solidity of the fortunes of the house, for it was made at the manufactories from which her husband derived his really American wealth. They covered acres of ground at Sheffield, and from their doors vomited forth all sorts of metallic hardware of the most reliable quality. The imitation ivy, of course, was but a froth, a chance flotsam on the stream of hardware, and was due to the inventive genius of Mrs. Osborne’s eldest son Percy, who had a great deal of taste. His was no abstruse taste, like an appreciation of

caviare or Strauss, that required an educated—or, as others might say—a vitiated palate or a jaded ear, but it appealed strongly and almost overwhelmingly, to judge by the order book of the Art Department, to the eye of that general public which goes in for forms of decoration which are known as both chaste and “handsome,” and are catholic enough to include mirrors framed in plush on which are painted bunches of flowers and bead curtains that hang over doors. With shrewd commercial instinct Percy never attempted to educate the taste of his customers into what they ought to want, but gave them in “handsome{9}” catalogues lists of the things they did want, and of a quality that they would be sure to find satisfactory. Though this ivy, for instance, was from the excellence of its workmanship and the elaborate nature of its colouring rather expensive, it was practically indestructible till the melting point of the best tin was reached, and it resembled ivy so closely that you might perfectly well prick your fingers on it before you found out

the art that so closely imitated nature. Indeed, before now some very pretty jesting had taken place in the windows of the house with regard to it, when Percy, who liked his joke (amid the scarcely suppressed merriment of the family), asked a stranger to pick a leaf of it and examine the beauties of nature as illustrated in the manner in which the stalk of the leaf was joined to the parent stem. Also it had no inconvenient habits of growing over places on which you did not wish it to trespass (if you wanted more, you ordered more), it harboured neither slugs nor any abominable insects and afforded no resting-place for birds, while it could be washed free from London dust by the simple application of the hand-syringe.

The ivy has been insisted on at some little length because it was typical of the fortunes and family of its inventor. It was solid, indestructible and new, and in just the same way the Osbornes were very strong and well, held large quantities of gilt-edged stock, and had no family history whatever. In one point only were they unlike the ivy that clung to the limestone wall of the house in Park Lane, but that was an important one. The point of the ivy was to deceive—it{10} was often successful in so doing—while the Osbornes never intended to deceive anybody. There was, with regard at any rate to Mrs. Osborne, her husband, and Percy, no possibility of being taken in. You could see at once what they were like; a glance would save you any subsequent disappointment or surprises. And no one, it may be added at once, ever pricked his fingers over them. They were as kind as they were new. But since many strains of blood have gone to the making of each member of the human race, one strain prospering and predominating in this specimen

while in another, though of the same blood, it scarcely shows a trace of existence, the divergence of type even in one generation is often very marked indeed. Thus, though Mr. Osborne felt that he both understood and admired his eldest son, his admiration for the younger was agreeably tempered with mystification. “Old Claude’s a rum fellow,” he often said, and Mrs. Osborne agreed with him. But, as will be seen, there was still much in common between Claude and them.

The house, like the ivy, was also new and solid and in point of fact none of its inhabitants, again with the curious exception of Claude, were quite used to it yet. This they concealed as far as they were able, but the concealment really went little further than the fact that they did not openly allude to it. They all agreed that the house was very handsome, and Mr. Osborne had a secret gratification not unmingled with occasional thrills of misgiving as to whether he had wasted his money in the knowledge of the frightful costliness of it. Outside, as has been said, it was{11} of Gothic design; but if a guest thought that he was to pass his evening or listen to music in a Gothic interior, he would have been rudely undeceived. It had been unkindly said that you went through a Gothic door to find Vandals within, and if Vandalism includes the appropriation of beautiful things, the Vandalism exhibited here was very complete. But the destructive side of Vandalism had no counterpart; Mr. Osborne was very careful of his beautiful things and very proud of them.

He admired them in proportion to their expensiveness, and having an excellent head for figures could remember how much all the more important pictures, articles of furniture, and tapestries had “stood him in.” And he ran no risk of forgetting these items, for he kept them green in his memory by often speaking of them to his guests.

“Yes,” he would say, “there’s three thousand pounds worth of seating accommodation in this very drawing-room, and they tell me ’twas lucky to have got the suite at that figure. All Louis—Louis—Per, my boy, did they tell us it was Louis XV. or XVI.? Sixteenth, yes, Louis XVI. Divide it up and you’ll find that it averages two hundred pounds a chair. Seems funny to sit on two hundred pounds, hey? Mrs. Osborne, she said a bright thing about that. ‘Sit firm then,’ she said and you’ll keep it safe.’”

The furnishing and appointments of the house had in fact been entrusted to a notable firm, which though it had certainly charged Mr. Osborne a great deal of money for what it supplied, had given him very good for his cheque, and both he and his wife, after{12} they had got over the unusual feeling of sitting on two hundred pounds, and if you chose putting your feet up on another two hundred, were quite content that both the furniture of this Louis XVI. room for instance and the cheque for it, should be what they called a “little stiff.” It was the same in the Italian room that opened out of it, and matters were no better in the dining room, which was furnished with Chippendale. Here indeed a very dreadful accident had happened on the first evening that they had got into the house, now two months ago, for Mr. Osborne, alone with Percy his wife for that night, had drawn his chair up to the fire—the night being chilly—to drink his second and third glasses of port and had rested his feet on the pierced steel fender that guarded the hearth.

This led to his tilting his Chippendale chair back on to its hind legs, which, designed to bear only half the weight of its occupant, had crashed into splinters and deposited Mr. Osborne on the floor and his second glass of port on his shirt front. But he had taken the incident with great good-humour.

“Live and learn,” he had said, “live and learn. Got to sit up and behave now, Maria. Per, my boy, don’t you finish all the port while your dad changes his shirt. Drink fair, for fair play’s a jewel, and fill your mother’s glass.”

Mr. Osborne would never have attained to the eminence he occupied as a manufacturer of hardware, had he not been a man of intelligence, and instead of upbraiding the furnishing firm for charging so high a price for a “four legs of carved dry{13} rot” which a momentary irritation carefully kept to himself might have led him to do, drew the lesson that it was unwise to tilt chairs unless they were clearly tiltable. But this accident had caused him to insist on his own room, which he called his snuggery, being furnished as he chose and not as anybody else chose, and here he rejoiced in chairs of the pattern known as Chesterfield, a solid mahogany table, on which stood a telephone, and a broad firm mantel-shelf where he could put a box of cigars without fear of its overbalancing. On this point also, his wife had adopted a similar attitude and her own sitting room opening out of the white-furnished bedroom where she was afraid to touch anything for fear of “soiling” it, was thoroughly to her taste. As in her husband’s snuggery she had

matters arranged for her own comfort and not for other people’s admiration. Percy had “done” the room for her, and sometimes when she came up here to look at her letters before going to bed, and drink the glass of hot water which was so excellent a digestive after the dinner that was still a little curious to her, she wondered whether Percy did not understand house furnishing better than the great French firm, the name of which she was always rather shy of pronouncing. She had asked him to choose all the furniture himself, remarking only that she was a little rheumatic, and found it difficult to get out of very low chairs. And he had succeeded to admiration, not only had he consulted her comfort, but he had divined and satisfied her taste. The paper of the walls was a pattern of ferns with iridescent lilies of the valley neatly disposed{14} among them, so that it was almost a shame to hang pictures thereon; indeed it would have been quite a shame had not those pictures been so well selected. For Mrs. Osborne cared far more about the subject

of a picture than the manner in which it was presented, and all the subjects were admirably chosen. There was a beautiful “view” of the church that Edward had built at Sheffield, a print of the Duke of Wellington in a garter and of Queen Victoria in a bonnet and a couple of large oil-paintings, one of the Land’s End and the other of Koynance Cove, both of which were intimately associated in her affectionate heart with her honeymoon. Edward and she had spent a month in Cornwall, staying at little inns and walking as much as possible to save expense, and though all that was thirty years ago, she never entered this room now without remembering how they had sat just on that very bluff above the emerald sea, and read the “Idylls of the King” together, and he had promised her, when they were rich enough, to give her an emerald necklace to remind her of the colour of the sea. It is true that those emeralds (which were remarkably fine) were not exactly of the tint that either nature had given to the sea, or the very vivid artist had

reproduced in the painting that hung on the walls, but they still reminded both her and Edward of those enchanted weeks in Cornwall, and it was but seldom, when she wore her emeralds, that he did not say “Mrs. O. has got the Land’s End emeralds on to-night.”

Then, more often than not would follow the explanation of this cryptic remark, and the whispered{15} information of how much the emeralds had cost. Mrs. Osborne, as a matter of fact, had overheard, again and again, what the figure was, but she was still officially ignorant of it, and generally closed the subject by saying, “Mr. Osborne won’t never tell me what he paid for them. I believe he got them cheap, and that’s why.”

But she secretly rejoiced to know that this was not the reason. The reason was just the opposite; they had been so enormously expensive. That expense would not be unreasonable now, but at the time, for she had worn the Land’s End necklace for twenty years, it had been preposterous. They had had no holiday one year in consequence, but had grilled in Sheffield throughout August and September. But during those months she had worn the emeralds every evening, and it had been a sort of renewal of the honeymoon. Though they had not been able to go away themselves, they had managed to send Percy and Claude to the seaside, and the two months in Sheffield, when every night she wore the emeralds which had been the cause of their remaining there, was still one of Mrs. Osborne’s most delightful memories, as a sort of renewed honeymoon. Since then times had considerably changed, and though to many the change from simplicity of life and not uncomfortable narrowness of means to the wider horizons which the rapid accumulation of an enormous fortune

brings within the view, implies a loss of happiness rather than an extension of it, neither Edward nor she were of that Arcadian build. They both immensely enjoyed the wider horizon; the humble establishment with parlour maids had been all very{16} well, but how much more enjoyable was the brownstone house on the outskirts of Sheffield with footmen and a carriage. For Mrs. Osborne did not find it in the least interfered with her happiness to have men to manage or “richer” things to eat. As a matter of fact she liked managing, and rejoiced in the building of a new wing to the brown stone house, in the acquisition of motor cars and in the drain on their time and resources by Edward being made Mayor of Sheffield. Neither of them ever thought that they had been happier when their means were more straitened and their establishment humbler. Both of them, in spite of an essential and innate simplicity of nature rejoiced in these establishments, and were always ready to enlarge and embellish and rejoice. They had always made the most of their current

resources—though in a merely financial sense they had always saved—and it was as great a pleasure to Mrs. Osborne to see her table plentifully loaded with the most expensive food that money could provide, and press second helpings on her guests, as it had been to have a solid four courses at midday dinner on Sunday in Sheffield and tell her friends that Mr. Osborne liked nothing better than to have a good dinner on Sunday, and see a pleasant party to share it with him. She still inquired if she might not “tempt” her neighbours at table to have another quail, just as she had tried to persuade them to have a second cut of roast lamb, when in season, while from the other end of the table she would hear as a hospitable echo her husband’s voice recommending Veuve Clicquot of 1884, just as in the old days he had recommended{17} the sound whiskey which would hurt nobody, not if you drank it all afternoon.