Gods Men (46 page)

“I can't imagine ourselves part of an empire,” William said.

“Not now, of course,” the Earl conceded. He stole a sharp shrewd darting glance at William. “Certainly not when you're dreaming of your own empire.”

“I doubt we want an empire,” William replied.

Nevertheless the idea played about his mind as they walked across the meadow. Empires had their day, and the ancient British Empire was dying as surely as the sun was setting across the wooded hill opposite the brook. He saw the sunset bright in the still-flowing wafers.

“Do you fish in the brook?” he asked Michael.

“Nothing much there,” Michael replied. “A trout now and then.”

“The boys in the village catch everything. They've got very lax about poaching,” the Earl said rather angrily.

They reached the brook after another silence and stood gazing into its shallow clarity. There were minnows in plenty darting about under the surface, snatching at the last chance for food. The Earl stirred them with his walking stick. “There're always minnows, somehow.”

He said it in a musing voice but William saw no significance in the words and did not answer.

“Millions of minnows,” Michael said.

The Earl was looking across the brook as though he pondered the other side and then changed his mind. “We'd better go back, I dare say. The evening is turning chill.”

They climbed the hill again, this time in silence that none broke. When they entered the great square hall of the castle, Simpkins met them and took their hats and sticks. The Earl yawned.

“We'll meet again at dinner—in an hour.” He walked away with his heavy step and William stood uncertainly.

Michael, so fresh and friendly, now seemed uncertain too. “I hope you won't mind my parents, sir. I always forget how they are until I'm home again. Will you come in by the fire or go upstairs?”

“I shall enjoy you all,” William said with unusual grace. He looked into the great room behind the hall and saw it empty. Lady Emory had gone. “And I think I shall go upstairs until dinner.”

After that day William made no pretense to himself. For the first time in his life, he had fallen desperately in love.

His eyes, covert but acute, had searched every woman whom he had met and others whom he had not met. Their eyes in turn had gazed upon him with courtesy and with indifference. The young had looked upon him as old and forbidding, and from those who were not young he had averted his own eyes. English women did not age with grace or beauty. He found them garrulous or caustic, and from sharpness he shrank by instinct. He wanted intelligence but not sarcastic wit which he was not skilled enough to master and therefore despised. If he disapproved he said so plainly and finally. Sarcasm, he said often, was the exhibitionism of a showy but weak ego, the displeasure of a coward, and the natural refuge of those who had only their tongues for weapons.

All that he had ever dreamed of England and what England had meant to him, all that he had never acknowledged even to himself, now centered in a woman whom he did not ask himself if he understood, for he knew she understood him. He was able to talk at last and to tell her all that he had never told anyone. She listened, her eyes thoughtful and kind. Kindness was her genius. It shone not only upon him but upon everyone who was near her. Her father and brother basked in it, accepted it, took it for granted, imposed upon her, William decided, during the week of days that followed one after the other. Guests came and went and drew from her kindness what they needed. She was busy continually and yet she had time for him, lending him her whole attention in the hours they were together.

He supposed she was not young—that is, she was certainly not a young girl. She was perhaps thirty. He could not understand how it was that he had found her unmarried and one day told her so in words that he feared were crude. She hesitated, then said with scarcely a change in her look or in that sweet deep voice:

“I suffered the same fate that so many English women did. My fiancé was killed during the war. He was Cecil Randford, son of the Earl of Randford. We had grown up together.”

William heard the name with pangs of jealousy which he tried to hide. “Forgive me,” he muttered.

“I do,” she replied simply.

By the third day he wished that he dared to ask her to call him by his Christian name. Lady Emory had a sort of intimacy which Mr. Lane did not have. If he had been Sir William! But he was not. He fretted himself about his courtship. There was so little time. He wanted to get it over, to have her love him quickly, to take her home with him soon and begin their life together. When he went back at Christmas he wanted to get through the hateful business of telling Candace and his sons and of consulting with his lawyers and his public-relations men as to how divorce and remarriage might be accomplished swiftly and privately. He ground his teeth when he thought of the pleasure that common people took in these matters, which should be as private as a man's own thoughts.

Meantime it was impossible to talk to the Earl or to Lady Hulme, he discovered. He did not exist for them, and yet they were aware that in his way he was important because he was rich. Nor was he at ease with them even though his week was swiftly passing. This castle, this English family, he approached with a diffidence that he would not recognize although he had long since reached a height in his own country that made a secretary's telephone call enough to open even the door of the White House—not the big front door into which sightseers and patriotic Americans swarmed but the side door where a huge brass key is kept turned. He reminded himself that the Earl of Hulme was not the King of England, that there were many peers of whom he was only one.

The first sight of the castle by daylight had been comforting. It would take a great deal of money to modernize it. For fifty bedrooms there were only five baths, inconvenient, and of plumbing so ancient that tanks of water hung above the toilet seats and water for the enormous tub was warmed by gas heaters that threatened to asphyxiate bathers unless carefully tended. William was surprised to have a manservant remain in the room, his back carefully turned, when he took his bath the first night because the heater had looked for the last few months as though it might explode if overworked, and Americans, as everyone knew, insisted on having their tubs full.

“It was much easier, sir, in the old days when we fetched in tin baths,” the man had said, not looking around.

“Why don't you get some American plumbers?” William asked, submerged in soapsuds. The water was beautifully soft.

“They could never understand the system, sir,” the man said. “Let me know when you've quite done, sir. I'll turn it off and get quite out of your way.”

He did so a few minutes later and William, wrapped in a bath sheet, had returned to his own room down a hall an eighth of a mile long.

Here in his vast room he felt the silence centuries deep about him. It made him think of Peking and temples and palaces and the Old Empress again. It was the atmosphere he loved and he would have given his soul to have been born to it, for it was something which could not be imitated or made. To belong in it, to know the certainty of place, would have given him peace. Yet he was ashamed to acknowledge his own longing. Before these English, he must be his best, an American, rich, powerful, able to hold his own, a republican among aristocrats. He looked at himself in the long gilt-framed mirror and chose a somber tie.

Lady Emory had neither wish for love nor expectation of it. Her self-control was absolute and by now had penetrated every fiber of her being. She had been reared in self-control and believed that decency depended upon it. Only with Cecil, whom she had trusted entirely, had she felt that she did not need to think of herself, and so she had loved him with warmth and reality if not with heartiness. Nevertheless she was glad now that she had not married him, since he would have been killed, anyway, and not having married him she had learned to be glad that she had not slept with him that last night before he joined his regiment. They had discussed the last night frankly, as they discussed everything, their vocabulary being the same and their thoughts and ideas identical. It was not a question of sin or decency or of personal morality, since they were irrevocably in love. It was the far more important matter of an heir. Unlikely as it was that there could be any issue after a first and single union it was still possible that she might have a child, the heir of Randford.

“I shouldn't like him born anyhow, you know, darling,” Cecil had said.

“We should have married,” she had murmured.

“I hate these hurried, patched-up weddings,” he had persisted. “I want to marry you in state, my darling. The Earls of Randford have always married their wives in the little abbey, and the tenants would hardly forgive me, you know, if I scamped it.”

“What if …” she had not been able to finish.

“No ifs,” he had said gaily. He was a god, young and blond, defying death.

So they had denied themselves for the sake of the child, who was never to be born, though they could not know it, and she had not allowed herself to regret her acquiescence. Cecil had felt his duty to his race, and though he loved her and she had never doubted his love, he drew her into his duty. This she had understood, for she had been reared within it, too. A noblewoman, however loved and cherished for her own sake, was nonetheless dedicated to the sacred future. She would not have been happy, either, had she forgotten that. Their love was purified by their faith in themselves and their kind, their belief that they were more than simple human beings.

Now that Cecil was dead she was released from that duty. There was nothing sacred in her being anything except herself. She knew no other heir of England whom she wanted to marry, or who wanted to marry her, and had there been such an one, it was doubtful whether the high sense of obligation would have been enough. With Cecil she could consecrate herself but without him, and therefore without love, even duty was not enough for her. There was no reason why she should consider it necessary merely to produce an heir for an ancient house. She was quite free.

Such freedom led to the immense restlessness which her self-control concealed beneath a cloak of consideration and kindness, these being also essentials of habitual good breeding. Only Michael divined that beneath the cloak so gracefully worn she was trembling with discontent.

“You need to get away,” he had told her. “You are jumpy.”

“I am not jumpy,” she had replied with unusual brusqueness.

“Don't pretend,” Michael had said. “You ought to marry. Cecil has been dead for years.”

“I don't see anyone to marry,” she had retorted.

“I'll look about,” he had promised in a lordly way.

To which she had merely said, as she used to say to him when he was a little boy, “Don't be silly.”

Nevertheless he had come back from London some months later with the preposterous declaration that he had found a chap, an American, who might be amusing for her to marry. Such conversation of course was not carried on before their parents. Even so she had been irritated by it. “I can't imagine any marriage amusing,” she had told him. They were outdoors in the yew garden and she was on her knees by the Italian fountain, cleaning away fallen leaves. Michael stood watching her, not offering to help. He did not like to dirty his hands.

“This chap isn't amusing, exactly,” he said.

“He's rather terrifying actually—immensely tall and thin, greenish gray eyes under black brows, and that sort of thing. He looks immensely unhappy, I must say, the way Americans do if they are not the giggling kind. He's searching, if I'm not mistaken.”

“Searching?” She had looked up.

“He's rich as mud,” Michael said. “It can't be that. I can't make him out, except that there's power in him.”

“What power?”

“I don't know—energy, smothered under something impatience held down, enemy of everybody! He's not friendly, doesn't put out his hand when he sees you. I've invited him down—you'll see.”

She had been attracted to William Lane the moment she had looked up from the piano and had seen him standing there. She had gone on playing so that she could look at him without speaking. He was not youthful, and above all things now youth wearied her. For the first time in these ten years she had found herself conscious of being a woman, not young but still beautiful and wanting so to be thought.

She had seen very soon that William thought her beautiful not merely for herself but for what she was over and beyond. He valued her for what she had inherited, but which was nevertheless a part of her, and it pleased her to have it so. He could not, she believed, have fallen in love merely with beauty. A chorus girl whom a king might love would have repelled him.

Pondering upon this, asking herself why it was that kings and peers throughout the history of England could so joyously lie upon hay and straw with milkmaids and gypsies who could not be queens, she penetrated the secret of William's soul. He wanted a queen that he might be king. His kingdom he had made, a modern kingdom, money and power in absolute combination now as always, and over it he reigned ably enough. But the secret longing was in his soul unrevealed, and perhaps unknown even to himself. If she accepted him he would be assured. He would have evidence of what had been unseen, he would become in substance that which he had hoped he was.

At thirty, she reflected, as the days of that week passed, a woman accepts quickly or she rejects. He was in the decade beyond her and was, moreover, a man accustomed to quick decisions. He let her know within a few days that his was made. When he left Hulme Castle at the end of the week he managed to say good-by alone with her, and she helped him to arrange it so.

“May I come back in a fortnight?” he asked.

“We shall be happy to see you,” she had replied, purposely conventional.