CATHERINE FROBISHER was one of those women who are more conspicuously successful as widows than as wives. Intensely loyal, she was inclined to be intolerant of faults in a beloved object. Her imagination was stronger than her memory; she was lenient to the dead, she was generous to the past, but she dealt with the living in a temper of irritable, affectionate inclemency. She was an idealist and a romantic to the end of her days.
Her career turned upon this capacity for sentimental retrospect. Her husband was not undistinguished in his lifetime, but he did very little, positively, to deserve the enormous reputation which Catherine achieved for him after he was dead. By sheer persistence she impressed his name upon the world, and within five years she had won for his memory a place which had never been accorded to him by contemporaries.
The chief merit of Charles Frobisher had been his faculty for making friends with abler men than himself. He kept excellent company. He knew everybody and went everywhere. His correspondence was enormous. He was besides a poet and a critic, but most of his work was so good and so dull that nobody read it more than once. It would have gone for very little if he had not had a “circle,” and if he had not managed somehow a little to survive a very interesting generation. He was the inevitable second-rate luminary which becomes for posterity a type of its age: a sort of common denominator of late Victorianism. So that when people thought of the ’seventies, they thought of Frobisher rather than of his more distinctive companions. He presided over the age, a burly, bearded, jovial figure, laughing heartily at his own puns and implacable in his hatred of anything French.
It was with a half-conscious sense of this that his widow began her task of editing The Life and Letters. She took great pains to keep up a correspondence with all his old friends, and to maintain those links with the past which are so important if a tradition is to be preserved. She continued to live, with her two children, at Water Hythe, the Elizabethan farmhouse in Oxfordshire, where Frobisher had entertained his most distinguished guests. And gradually she succeeded in turning this house into a shrine; it was thrown open on Saturday afternoons, so that the public might have an opportunity of seeing the yew parlour where Meredith used to smoke his pipe, the library where Jowett had argued with Herbert Spencer, and the fireplaces which Ruskin had said were all wrong. She altered nothing; the walls of the drawing-room were still decorated with little water-colour landscapes by the first Mrs. Frobisher, the beautiful, unhappy Adelaide. For Charles, in accordance with the tradition of the period, was married twice, and his first wife ran away from him, after twenty years of unconcealed misery. He was nearly sixty before he found happiness with Catherine, who was the daughter of his old friend and neighbour, Bartley Trevor, of Monk’s Hall, and his first child was born when he was sixty-three.
The marriage had been a great surprise to the neighbourhood, and it was generally agreed that Catherine had done very well for herself. Nobody had supposed that she would ever get a husband, for she was plain, rather clumsy, and apparently content to live at home and keep house for her father. The beauty and wit of her younger sister, Pamela, had been an additional disadvantage to her. But in the end it was Catherine who prospered and Pamela who came to grief. For Pamela also married a poet—a better poet than Frobisher. Superficially, it was a brilliant match. Norman Crowne was young, handsome, rich and well-born. He was possessed of a dazzling if fitful genius, and in his brief heyday he attracted a good deal of attention. Frobisher did not like him.
“I feel bound to warn you,” said Catherine to Pamela, before the marriage, “Charles does not like him. He distrusts him. He says he is afraid that Norman has no ballast.”
Norman, when informed that Charles thought he had no ballast, made a historic remark, which is still remembered to his credit.
“Poor Charles,” he said, “is all ballast.”
But Charles was inevitably right, though he did not live to see the bad end which he had so often prophesied for his brother-in-law. The crash came some three years after his death, at the close of the century. Norman Crowne’s career came to an end in a downfall as sudden, as spectacular as his rise to fame. Like a meteor, he exploded one day and disappeared into darkness. He was arrested and tried for murder.
His misfortune lay in being too successful. It might have been better for him had he encountered worse luck at the outset. A little adversity and hard work might have preserved his sense of proportion. Living in a world of phantasy, he lost his bearings and became unable to distinguish between the possible and the impossible, the permissible and the forbidden. He believed quite literally that he might do as he pleased, and it pleased him to do some things which he regretted later.
It had been his intention, on his marriage, to blot out from his mind certain incidents of the past, to free himself from certain associations which had become distasteful to him. But he found himself in a trap. Reality asserted itself too late. The past would not leave him in peace. Continually he was haunted by shadows of an evil world, by dark memories, by threats of exposure. He was at no time a very sensible man, and he lacked sound friends to whom he could turn for advice or help in his difficulties. Gradually he allowed himself to become the victim of a secret and rapacious persecution, which overcast the whole of his short, unhappy married life. Even before the death of his much-loved wife, he had begun to ponder upon desperate remedies, and he fell thereafter into a condition of mind which looked very like insanity.
He shut himself up and would see no friends save one, a very doubtful companion, the evil genius of his life. And this was not probably from choice, but because he had no other alternative. It was proved later that he had come to be entirely in the power of this man, that he had every reason for wishing him out of the way, and that he had, more than once, expressed some obscure intention of violent measures. The friend died, in suspicious circumstances, and Crowne was charged with the crime. Many people believed in his innocence, but nobody could disregard the history of squalid vice revealed during the trial. Crowne was, in any event, a ruined man and an acquittal could bring no escape from the disgrace which had fallen upon him. His children must bear through life a tarnished name, though they were, at the time, too mercifully young to be aware of their fate.
“But they’ll have to be told some time,” said Catherine. “And what can I say to them? How can I ever tell them that their father was hanged?”
She said this to Philip Luttrell, the young rector and squire of Water Hythe and Ratchet, who had called to condole with her. And as this was on the first day of the trial, he felt bound to express a hope that Crowne might not be hanged after all.
“But, my dear Philip, everybody knows that he did it!”
“I’ve met a good many people who would dispute that. When I was in Oxford last week I came across some men who knew Crowne very well indeed when he was at The House. They all agreed that he probably didn’t do it.”
She took no notice of this. She had at times a concentration upon her own point of view only possible to the very determined or to the deaf.
“It’s a most marvellous instance,” she said, “of my dear husband’s foresight. He was a wonderful judge of character. He always said something like this would happen. He never liked that man. He never trusted him. I remember his saying once to me: ‘There’s a false glitter about his work which I don’t like.’ I thought that was so good. A false glitter! It just sums up one’s feeling about those early sonnets. My husband had a deep suspicion of that sort of cleverness. He thought that it was meretricious. I remember he called it the iridescence of corruption. And the chemist identified him as the man who bought all that arsenic.”
Philip reminded her of the most puzzling feature in the case. The victim, according to medical evidence, had not died of arsenic poisoning.
“I know all that,” she exclaimed impatiently. “But you must admit that it looks very bad. What did he want arsenic for? He was planning the murder when he got it. Of course he was.”
“Probably. And it certainly looks as if he had argued himself into believing that it would be right to rid the world of such a wretch. That’s what these friends of his were saying the other day. Their view was that he lived entirely in a world of his own, and if he found himself in a difficulty he flew into an unreasoning, childish rage. He was fantastically indignant. He could not understand the idea of yielding to necessity. It was just like him to go off openly and buy a lot of poison. It was a gesture.”
“You mean he was posing? But then, if he meant to do it, that’s surely just as bad as if he had done it.”
“He won’t be convicted unless it can be proved that he did actually do it. You see, the law …”
“Oh, my dear Philip, you needn’t explain the law to me. I’ve heard all that you are going to say, years before you were born.”
Philip held his peace, as he always did when she referred to the years before he was born. The difference in their ages gave her the right to take this tone, and though he was her rector he was a little frightened of her. They had been neighbours all their lives, and he could never forget the days when she had been a grown-up young lady and he a little boy, the playmate and contemporary of her young brother, Bobbie. This brother had gone into the Army, and his absence in India at the time of the Crowne trial was deplored by Catherine as a heavy misfortune.
“If only Bobbie was here!” she sighed. “I know he would have done something. He would have stopped this horrible business. He was so fond of poor Pamela; he never approved of her marrying that man. He would have arranged all this. He would have advised Norman, and seen the lawyers, and that sort of thing. And he would have been such a help to me. I do miss him.”
“You must make use of me,” said Philip gently. “You must let me help you in every possible way.”
She assented, not because she had very much reliance upon his judgment, but because she had the Victorian widow’s traditional respect for the clergy. In the absence of Bobbie she turned instinctively to her rector, and Philip, in the following distracted days, did all that a kind heart could suggest for her comfort and relief. She would not leave Water Hythe on account of her children, and she would not read the newspapers because it was all so sordid, so that he had to impart to her the details of the trial from day to day. He sent many telegrams. He arranged for the future of the Crowne children, who were to be placed thenceforth entirely in the charge of their aunt, whatever the verdict might be, and he went himself to bring them from London to Water Hythe. Catherine was grateful, but she considered that he had done no more than he ought.
“I must say you’ve been very good to me,” she said on the last day, as they sat in the firelight together, waiting for the end. “I shall never forget how helpful you’ve been, all through this terrible time.”
“Why, Catherine! What else could I do? I’m so glad you’ve let me be of any use to you.”
“There was nobody else,” she told him with a certain bleak candour that was hers. “But, oh dear! I wish it was all over. Why doesn’t that telegram come?”
It had been a shattering day. The children, oppressed by a trouble which they could not understand, had surpassed themselves in naughtiness. It had rained so incessantly that nobody could go out. Nervous, exasperating storms had swept the waiting house. The winter dusk was closing in and no message had yet come from London.
Philip and Catherine were sitting in the hall, a great barn of a room, always smelling of wood-smoke, with a log fire at either end. The stone floor and heavy rafters showed it to be the oldest part of the house, the living-room of a fortified grange built by half-savage yokels. Nineteenth-century pictures, two Leightons, a Millais and a portrait of Frobisher by Watts, looked odd and smug upon its walls. A massive door led out through a deep porch into the garden, and a row of little irregular windows gave upon the same view, a square lawn flanked on the left by a dovecot and on the right by a little church. In the distance were the flat, wet river fields and a row of pollarded willows. But now grass, river, church and dovecot were all lost in a blur of misty twilight. The storm wind blew in the wide old chimneys and rain came hissing down upon the logs.
At the further end of the hall, by the other fire, a deafening noise was going on. Charlotte and Trevor Frobisher were quarrelling over a game of Beggar-My-Neighbour, while William and Emily, the twin children of Norman Crowne, were rushing aimlessly about. They were too young for any systematic game, but they had an idea that they were trains, and a good deal of whistling went on. Every now and then a siren-hoot would signify that they had become boats or a terrific growl would turn them into lions and tigers.
“It’s just possible,” shouted Philip over the din, “that it mightn’t be over to-day after all. When I telephoned from Oxford they said that the judge had only begun summing up.”
“Oh, I do hope it won’t drag on another day,” said Catherine in alarm. “This suspense is quite intolerable. Now, Charlotte! Don’t whine. You must let Trevor have his turn at dealing. And please stay at your side of the room. Don’t keep coming over here. Go away now. I suppose that at the worst he could appeal? Couldn’t he appeal on the ground of insanity? Personally, you know, I think he should have pleaded guilty at once, and then tried to get off on the ground that he was insane. Because the Crownes are all queer, you know. There was an old aunt who …”
Her voice sank and Philip lost it in an outburst of hooting from William and Emily. He signified that he could hear nothing, and she told him to come into the drawing-room, where it would be quieter. Protests and tears at once broke out from the twins.
“Oh, Aunt Catherine you … you … you … you mustn’t … you … mustn’t… you … you …”
“William! Don’t get so excited. Finish your sentence. It’s just a silly trick, talking like that.”
William collected himself with an effort and said:
“You mustn’t go off that rug. It’s a boat. You’ll be drowned.”
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t play now I’ll play at boats with you when I come back, perhaps.”
“All right,” he said, pacified.
And they heard him say confidentially to his sister:
“I know what I kin do. I’ll make the whole house be a boat. They’ve just gone to another sort of … sort of … sort of part of it. I told them to. I’m the captain.”
Philip followed Catherine up a little flight of stone steps into the panelled Tudor drawing-room. He said, as he went, that William was very like his father.
“Like his father! Like Norman Crowne!” Catherine looked shocked. “How can you say such a thing? They’re not a bit alike. Not a bit. William is a dear little boy.”
“So was Crowne once I daresay. And still is, from one point of view. That’s the whole trouble. Crowne never quite grew up. He went on thinking he could make houses be boats long after he ought to have known better.”
“He was mad,” said Catherine with conviction. “I’m quite sure of it. This thing that came this morning, while you were at Ratchet proved it to me. I meant to tell you before. I don’t know what to do about it. It came addressed to the twins, but really …”
She pointed to a large box in the corner of the room. Philip took off the lid and peeped inside and saw little dolls. He asked if it was a toy.
“I suppose you’d call it that.”
“For William and Emily?”
“Their father sent it!” she told him in a horrified whisper.
“Haven’t you given it to them?”
“No. It’s most unsuitable. In any case they’re too young to appreciate it. It’s a little theatre. A beautifully-made little toy, but most unsuitable.”
It was certainly a beautifully-made little toy. Philip was amazed at the perfection of its detail as he and Catherine took it out of its box and set it up. There were several changes of scene, a curtain, footlights, and a whole set of cardboard puppets to be worked on wires.
“I believe he made it himself,” whispered Catherine. “He was very clever at this sort of thing.”
He had made it himself. It had occupied his time during that last half-crazed week before his arrest, when he should have made a bolt for freedom and got out of the country. That he made no such bolt was taken by some people as a proof of innocence and by others as significant of guilt. For six days he never left his house at all. He scarcely ate and never slept. When the police came they found him in an attic, working on his toy theatre, in a great confusion of glue, paint, cardboard and empty champagne-bottles. And now it appeared that he had left orders for the despatch of this toy to his son and daughter. Philip immediately wanted to play with it, but Catherine looked at it with disfavour. She repeated:
“It’s not a child’s toy at all. Those are horrid little dolls.”
He inspected them and agreed with her. The cardboard figures were wonderfully lifelike, but they were not agreeable.
“This piece,” he said, after he had examined them all, “is to be acted entirely by villains, I should think.”
“The play is here. He’s written it himself, in blank verse.”
Catherine fished a note-book out of the box and held it out to Philip, cautiously, as though it might blow up or bite them. He, aware that this latest work of Norman Crowne might very possibly be the last, could not help a small thrill as he began to read. Written in a clear hand, and almost without correction, it was not difficult to decipher. Full directions were given as to changes of scene and the manipulation of the puppets. Philip read on for a few minutes, caught up in the old charm of Crowne’s delectable style. Then he flung the book back into the box again, exclaiming:
“The man was as mad as a hatter!”
“That’s what I say. All the Crownes are mad. He ought to have pleaded insanity. There were things that poor Pamela told me… It’s a mercy, really, that she died when she did. At least, she was spared this. For she was fond of him, you know, in spite of everything. But she went as far as to say to me one day that she thought all Crownes … What is it, Trevor? I thought I told you not to come in here.”
Trevor had poked his head inquisitively round the door, and now, disregarding his mother’s reproof, he came up to the table and looked with interest at the puppet-show.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Never mind. Go away now.”
“It’s a theatre!” he decided. “A little theatre. Is it for me?”
“Trevor! Obey me this instant, or …”
“A theatre! A theatre! I’ve got a theatre!”
He began to shout and jump up and down. Charlotte, who had followed him into the room, began to shout in chorus. And the twins, hearing the din, came stumping up the steps with hoarse demands to see the little theatre too.
“What ought one to do?” sighed Catherine helplessly.
She was not quite herself. The troubles of the day had been too much for her. At any other time she would have made short work of her naughty son.
“A theatre! A theatre!”
“Kin I see? Please, Aunt Catherine, kin I see?”
“Don’t touch it, Car. It’s my theatre.”
“’Tisn’t. It’s all of ours.”
“It’s mine.”
“Who said so?”
“Please kin I see Trevor’s lovely little theatre?”
“I said bags.”
“Mother! It’s not his, is it?”
“It belongs to neither of you. Leave it alone and go away, all of you. I’m very vexed.”
“But who does it belong to?”
“To the twins.”
“The twins!”
Trevor and Charlotte began to grumble.
“The twins are too little. They’d break it. They wouldn’t know how to play with it. Who gave it to them?”
“It will be put away till they are older. Run along!”
“But can’t we play with it till then? We wouldn’t hurt it. We could play with it and they could watch us.”
“No.”
All four children burst into loud howls. It was the climax of a disastrous day. Philip, who had swept together all the little puppets and put them, with the book, on a high shelf, suggested to Catherine that there was, perhaps, very little harm in the theatre itself. It might ensure quiet for the rest of the evening if the children were allowed to play with the scenery and footlights. Catherine agreed. She was glad to compromise, for she was very tired. The toy was taken into the hall and put on a low table, and the Frobishers obligingly played with it while the Crownes looked on. For the twins were really too little to care for it much. They gaped agreeably for a few minutes while Trevor raised and lowered the curtain, and then they went back to being trains.
“But it was naughty of Trevor,” murmured Catherine. “He is getting very disobedient, and I give in to him too much. If it hadn’t been the end of a tiring day I should have punished him. Really he needs a man over him. I wish Bobbie would come home and settle down. It’s his duty.”
She did not exactly mean that her brother should cut short a promising career in order to come home and beat his nephew. When she talked of Bobbie’s duty, she was thinking of Monk’s Hall, her father’s house, lying deserted among its trees half a mile up the river. It had been empty since Bobbie went to India, and she wanted him to come back and live there.
“I wish he would marry,” she said. “But not out there, of course. Anglo-Indian women are impossible. Nearly always ill-bred. I couldn’t bear to see one in my mother’s place. What’s that? Is it somebody at the garden door?” The telegraph-boy from Ratchet had lost his way in the darkness and had missed the front door, which was among farm buildings at the back of the house. He wandered round in the grey sheets of rain, amid the groaning of hidden trees, till he found the garden porch. Seizing the huge old knocker with both hands, he struck a ringing blow which drowned the howling of the wind. Philip and Catherine wrestled with bolts and locks. A wild drift of rain blew into the hall, and some wet, dead leaves came floating in from the darkness. Catherine took the telegram to the light, while Philip fought with the wind, and got the door shut again. The children, startled by this sudden incursion of excitement into a safe world, glanced up from their play. Catherine was saying:
“Thank God! Oh, thank God!”
“Acquitted?”
Philip took the telegram and read the reassuring word.
“For the children’s sake … oh, thank God!”
They became aware that Trevor and Charlotte were listening, with open mouths. Trevor, who was a sharp little boy, asked if it was about his Uncle Norman. He had heard the servants gossiping.
“Yes, dear,” said Catherine, after a moment’s thought. “It is. This is very good news. We must be glad for the twins’ sake. Your uncle was accused of a terrible crime, but he has been proved to be innocent.”
“What was he accused of?” demanded Trevor and Charlotte at once.
“I can’t tell you the whole story now. You’ll know when you are older. It might have been very terrible, but we have all been spared a great trouble.”
“How was he proved to be innocent?”
“He had a very clever lawyer,” said Catherine, when she had reflected.
“But was he really innocent? Did the judge say so?”
“The jury, Charlotte. You remember, I read to you in Britain’s Story that it is always the jury who …”
“Yes, I know. But will the twins go home now?”
“No, dear. They will go on living with us.”
“But why? If Uncle Norman isn’t put in prison …”
“Hush, Trevor. He will be going abroad for some time.”
She said this with great determination, and she spoke for the whole of England. For everybody said, over the paper next morning, that Crowne was lucky to get off, and must now live abroad. He had made his own country too hot for him.
“But, mother, can’t the twins go abroad too?”
“Why must he go? Did he really not do it?”
Trevor looked suspicious. But his mother told him not to ask so many questions. She again exhorted them to rejoice for William and Emily’s sake.
“They aren’t even listening!” he said scornfully.
Nor were they. This crisis in their destinies had not disturbed them. They had gone back to their private enchanting little games, immune in the delicate radiance of infancy. Only for a moment, when the great door swung open and strange winds blew in, had they looked up and wondered. A dead leaf still clung to Emily’s silvery curls. But when the door was shut they forgot the night and the leaves and the messenger who had come. William, with fair hair all tossed back and a glowing face, was going through tunnels, wriggling himself under all the sofas with piercing shrieks. And Emily, able at last to get near her own toy, was playing with the puppet-show. She had found a picture of a little castle on a steep crag, with pine woods all round it—a little white castle with red turrets. She knew it. She had seen it before, very long ago, when she was a baby. Her father had shown it to her from the window of a train, in some almost forgotten mountain country. To find it now made her remember the mountains; it was like a secret message which nobody else could understand. Very softly she touched it with one finger and found herself back in that land. The little castle entranced her. Its smallness made it seem more real because it was within her compass. Philip heard her calling names over to herself as her finger travelled from one object to another.
“There’s a tree …” she said. “An’ there’s another tree … an’ there’s another tree…” And then, a little uncertainly, in the words of that country: “Baum?”
It was indeed a mercy that she should be so young.