Poor Caroline (3 page)

'A perfect scream calling him "Father." '

'I'm not surprised now that Caroline was a little dotty
about him.'

'Now, Dorothy, you shouldn't say such things, really,'
Mrs. Smith remonstrated, secretly enjoying every word
spoken in Caroline's disfavour, but anxious to maintain her
pose of broad-minded matron.

'Well, Mums, she was a bit queer, wasn't she? You ought
to have heard the will."

'The will?'

'Oh, my goodness, I wish you'd both been there. You'd
have
died.
I never saw such a scream. After the funeral
Eleanor insisted on us all going back to Caroline's room -
that
awful
little room in Lucretia Road. There was Mrs.
Hales, the landlady -
what
a dragon! - all hymn singing and vindictiveness; but we let her help herself to Caroline's old clothes, so perhaps she's satisfied. And Eleanor, as queer as ever, in the same old tweed coat, not a
stitch
of mourning,
looking about seventeen and very ill, we thought, and a
queer old stick called Mr. Guerdon and Uncle Ernest and
us. And then Eleanor read the will.'

'And you never smelled anything like that room, cluttered with fearful old papers and all the clothes we've sent Caro
line for years.'

'Mr. Guerdon looked as though he'd like to drown us all.'

'He'd come from the Christian Cinema Company - you
know - the thing she was always trying to get us to put
money into.'

'But, my dears, the
Will.
Do you know, she left five hun
dred pounds each to Betty and me, and eight thousand to
her dear young friend and kinswoman, Eleanor de la Roux,
and twenty thousand - yes, twenty thousand, to the Rev.
Roger Mortimer, Assistant Priest at St. Augustine's, in token
of all that his help and encouragement had meant to her in
her lonely life. Just think of it - she must have been a little
bit potty, wasn't she, Mums, dying in an infirmary at
seventy-two, and making a will like that leaving thousands
of pounds, that she hadn't got, to people she hardly knew?'

'Well, of course, I do think that at the end she must have
been a little odd. But what I do want to know is, did she
really get that three thousand pounds out of Eleanor?'

'Well, Mr. Guerdon seemed to think that Eleanor had put
all her money into the Christian Cinema Company, and of
course as it went bust I suppose the money was lost, but we
couldn't get Eleanor to say anything.'

'Monstrous, monstrous,' said Mr. Smith. 'I always blamed de la Roux. No man ought to leave a child of twenty-two in
sole charge of her capital, without trustees or anything.
Eleanor came over to England simply asking to be robbed,
simply asking for it.'

'Well, we did warn her against Caroline,' said Dorothy.
'We let her see the old girl's letters. We told her she would
cadge, borrow or steal from anyone in the world that she
could get hold of-Eleanor needn't have gone near her
when she went to London.'

'Oh, catch Miss Eleanor taking advice! Dear me no.
More tea, please, Mums. But she certainly seems to have
got more than she bargained for from Caroline. Apparently
she used to lend her money when she was alive, looked after
her while she was ill, and finally arranged the funeral and
saw the undertakers, and everything.'

'I always said,' observed Mr. Smith, 'and I say it again:
Caroline should have gone on the Old Age Pension. She
used to say it wasn't dignified, but it would have been far
more dignified than borrowing from her relatives and being
in debt to the tradesmen.'

'Oh, you can't alter people like Caroline. She always
thought she knew better than anyone. She was always going
to do something extraordinary.'

'Oh, she was extraordinary all right,' laughed Betty. 'She
was an extraordinary nuisance, anyway.'

'Well,' reflected Dorothy, soothed by tea, warmth and
sandwiches into toleration. 'I suppose that making a nuisance
of herself was the only way she had left of making herself
important. It can't have been much of a life, can it? for a
woman of over seventy, living alone in lodgings, in debt to
her landlady, wearing
our cast-off clothes, trotting round
after jobs that never materialized, writing articles that no
body would publish, and eating bread and margarine for supper. There really was something rather pathetic
about
that awful room of hers - crowded with papers full of im
possible schemes. I don't envy Eleanor the job of looking through them all. I don't suppose there can ever have been
anyone whose life was much less important, or who had less
influence on anybody else.'

'Well, she did get us to London, anyway. I suppose that if she hadn't died, and we hadn't gone to the
funeral, we
should have had to do our spring shopping in mouldy old
Kingsport. Oh, Mums, I
must
show you my new blue three-
piece. It's perfectly adorable, isn't it, Dot?'

'It is rather nice - and my evening frock. Do you know,
skirts are getting lower and lower, Mums?'

'Well, of course, dears,' said Mrs. Smith gently. 'I don't
like to seem heartless in any way, but it would have been a
pity to waste the expense of going up to London, and it
wasn't as though Caroline were more than your second
cousin. I am very glad that you were able to do something
really useful.'

'Nothing like combining business and pleasure, eh, girls?"
Mr. Smith smothered a great yawn. 'Well, I'm off to bed.
Don't you women sit gossiping till to-morrow.' He rose
laboriously, and went to the door, but with his hand on the
knob he turned. 'Good night, all. There is one thing; she'll
never trouble us again
this
side the golden gates, poor Caro
line.'

Mr. Smith, rope merchant of Marshington in the East
Riding of Yorkshire, went upstairs to bed.

Chapter 1 :
Basil Reginald Anthony St. Denis

§1

providence
failed to do its duty by Basil Reginald Anthony
St. Denis. If he had been born heir to Lord Herringdale's
title and estate, instead of being merely a second cousin on
his mother's side, he would have been an ornament to the
peerage. The stately ritual of the House of Lords would
have been decorated by his presence. The bay windows of
a certain club overhanging Piccadilly would have derived distinction from his profile.

But his birth and station were unpropitious to his happine
ss; for he was the only son of a country rector who inhabited a Devonshire rectory seven times too large for his
stipend or his needs.

His father came of Huguenot stock, and his mother was
a descendant of that Countess Herringdale whose melting
delicious beauty languishes from more than one of the can
vases of Sir Peter Lely. If life in the Rectory at Trotover was frugal, it was dignified. Basil's infant porringer was
bent and dented, but it was an heirloom of seventeenth-
century silver. He cut his teeth on fine Georgian plate, and
bruised his head against the angle of a Jacobean oak chest.
The Rector, his father, dined easily and often with the
County, and carried the ordered ritual of his Services into
the conduct of his daily life.

As for Basil, he was a lovely child. His flower-like complexion and sweet fluting voice won the hearts of his papa's
parishioners. Had the laburnum trees from the Rectory
garden scattered golden sovereigns instead of golden blossoms on to his perambulator, no family in his father's parish
would have grudged the compliment, and Basil himself would have recognized that nature did no more than her
duty by him.

It was not that in adult life he cultivated appetites for
great wealth and luxury. Political responsibility fatigued, and business adventure repelled him. He remarked upon
several occasions that true civilization was incompatible
with the life of action, and he disliked nothing more heartily
than the untempered energy of pioneers. All that he asked of fortune was adequate opportunity to exercise fastidious
taste.

It must be admitted that, considering the circumstances
of his birth, Providence made erratic efforts to assist him.
Lord Herringdale, charmed by the manner and appearance
of his young kinsman, offered to bear the expenses of Basil's
education at Eton and at Oxford. At Eton, Basil laid the
foundation of a fine sense of social discrimination and
achieved an understanding of the gulf which separates those
who have been to the greater English public schools from those who have not. It took him several years to realize in how considerable a majority are those who have not been
there.

Dependence upon charity, however, is accompanied by
notable disadvantages. When Basil eventually went to Ox
ford, his education in the arts of civilized living involved him
in certain trivial expenses. The cultivation of a palate cannot be achieved on grocer's port and Australian Harvest
Burgundy. The arts of hospitality cannot be mastered without practice. The unerring discipline of the collector's taste
cannot be achieved without trial and error. Naturally, such
education costs money. Naturally, it was for such education
that Basil assumed he had been sent to Oxford.

Lord Herringdale failed to realize his full responsibility.
When the bills came in after Basil's first year, he sent for the
young man and subjected him to the discomfort of an inter
view which, in Basil's opinion, transgressed the bonds of civil
ized conversation. Lord Herringdale demanded promises;
he made conditions; he filled his kinsman with vicarious
shame. At that age Basil blushed to see gentlemen miscondu
ct themselves. For the first and last time he abandoned
his own principle of compromise and resignation. He re
fused to return to Oxford on Lord Herringdale's terms.

He went home to the Rectory. He remained there for

several weeks contemplating the re-edition of some trifles of
eighteenth-century verse which had appealed to him at Ox
ford. He applied unsuccessfully for the posts of assistant-
curator of Chinese embroideries at the Dulwich Museum,
and adviser on Adams Decorations to Messrs. Maring and
Staple. But his experience only confirmed his theory that
one essential condition of a civilized existence is a small in
dependent income of-say-three thousand a year. He
was beginning to consider that
twelve hundred might be
just tolerable.