CHAPTER V

Eustace Cardoc, Viscount Miltoun, had lived a very lonely life, since
he first began to understand the peculiarities of existence.  With
the exception of Clifton, his grandmother's 'majordomo,' he made, as
a small child, no intimate friend.  His nurses, governesses, tutors,
by their own confession did not understand him, finding that he took
himself with unnecessary seriousness; a little afraid, too, of one
whom they discovered to be capable of pushing things to the point of
enduring pain in silence.  Much of that early time was passed at
Ravensham, for he had always been Lady Casterley's favourite
grandchild.  She recognized in him the purposeful austerity which had
somehow been omitted from the composition of her daughter.  But only
to Clifton, then a man of fifty with a great gravity and long black
whiskers, did Eustace relieve his soul.  "I tell you this, Clifton,"
he would say, sitting on the sideboard, or the arm of the big chair
in Clifton's room, or wandering amongst the raspberries, "because you
are my friend."

And Clifton, with his head a little on one side, and a sort of wise
concern at his 'friend's' confidences, which were sometimes of an
embarrassing description, would answer now and then: "Of course, my
lord," but more often: "Of course, my dear."

There was in this friendship something fine and suitable, neither of
these 'friends' taking or suffering liberties, and both being
interested in pigeons, which they would stand watching with a
remarkable attention.

In course of time, following the tradition of his family, Eustace
went to Harrow.  He was there five years--always one of those boys a
little out at wrists and ankles, who may be seen slouching, solitary,
along the pavement to their own haunts, rather dusty, and with one
shoulder slightly raised above the other, from the habit of carrying
something beneath one arm.  Saved from being thought a 'smug,' by his
title, his lack of any conspicuous scholastic ability, his obvious
independence of what was thought of him, and a sarcastic tongue,
which no one was eager to encounter, he remained the ugly duckling
who refused to paddle properly in the green ponds of Public School
tradition.  He played games so badly that in sheer self-defence his
fellows permitted him to play without them.  Of 'fives' they made an
exception, for in this he attained much proficiency, owing to a
certain windmill-like quality of limb.  He was noted too for daring
chemical experiments, of which he usually had one or two brewing,
surreptitiously at first, and afterwards by special permission of his
house-master, on the principle that if a room must smell, it had
better smell openly.  He made few friendships, but these were
lasting.

His Latin was so poor, and his Greek verse so vile, that all had been
surprised when towards the finish of his career he showed a very
considerable power of writing and speaking his own language.  He left
school without a pang.  But when in the train he saw the old Hill and
the old spire on the top of it fading away from him, a lump rose in
his throat, he swallowed violently two or three times, and, thrusting
himself far back into the carriage corner, appeared to sleep.

At Oxford, he was happier, but still comparatively lonely; remaining,
so long as custom permitted, in lodgings outside his College, and
clinging thereafter to remote, panelled rooms high up, overlooking
the gardens and a portion of the city wall.  It was at Oxford that he
first developed that passion for self-discipline which afterwards
distinguished him.  He took up rowing; and, though thoroughly
unsuited by nature to this pastime, secured himself a place in his
College 'torpid.'  At the end of a race he was usually supported from
his stretcher in a state of extreme extenuation, due to having pulled
the last quarter of the course entirely with his spirit.  The same
craving for self-discipline guided him in the choice of Schools; he
went out in 'Greats,' for which, owing to his indifferent mastery of
Greek and Latin, he was the least fitted.  With enormous labour he
took a very good degree.  He carried off besides, the highest
distinctions of the University for English Essays.  The ordinary
circles of College life knew nothing of him.  Not once in the whole
course of his University career, was he the better for wine.  He, did
not hunt; he never talked of women, and none talked of women in his
presence.  But now and then he was visited by those gusts which come
to the ascetic, when all life seemed suddenly caught up and devoured
by a flame burning night and day, and going out mercifully, he knew
not why, like a blown candle.  However unsocial in the proper sense
of the word, he by no means lacked company in these Oxford days.  He
knew many, both dons and undergraduates.  His long stride, and
determined absence of direction, had severely tried all those who
could stomach so slow a pastime as walking for the sake of talking.
The country knew him--though he never knew the country--from Abingdon
to Bablock Hythe.  His name stood high, too, at the Union, where he
made his mark during his first term in a debate on a 'Censorship of
Literature' which he advocated with gloom, pertinacity, and a certain
youthful brilliance that might well have carried the day, had not an
Irishman got up and pointed out the danger hanging over the Old
Testament.  To that he had retorted: "Better, sir, it should run a
risk than have no risk to run."  From which moment he was notable.

He stayed up four years, and went down with a sense of bewilderment
and loss.  The matured verdict of Oxford on this child of hers, was
"Eustace Miltoun!  Ah!  Queer bird!  Will make his mark!"

He had about this time an interview with his father which confirmed
the impression each had formed of the other.  It took place in the
library at Monkland Court, on a late November afternoon.

The light of eight candles in thin silver candlesticks, four on
either side of the carved stone hearth, illumined that room.  Their
gentle radiance penetrated but a little way into the great dark space
lined with books, panelled and floored with black oak, where the
acrid fragrance of leather and dried roseleaves seemed to drench the,
very soul with the aroma of the past.  Above the huge fireplace, with
light falling on one side of his shaven face, hung a portrait--
painter unknown--of that Cardinal Caradoc who suffered for his faith
in the sixteenth century.  Ascetic, crucified, with a little smile
clinging to the lips and deep-set eyes, he presided, above the
bluefish flames of a log fire.

Father and son found some difficulty in beginning.

Each of those two felt as though he were in the presence of someone
else's very near relation.  They had, in fact, seen extremely little
of each other, and not seen that little long.

Lord Valleys uttered the first remark:

"Well, my dear fellow, what are you going to do now?  I think we can
make certain of this seat down here, if you like to stand."

Miltoun had answered: "Thanks, very much; I don't think so at
present."

Through the thin fume of his cigar Lord Valleys watched that long
figure sunk deep in the chair opposite.

"Why not?" he said.  "You can't begin too soon; unless you think you
ought to go round the world."

"Before I can become a man of it?"

Lord Valleys gave a rather disconcerted laugh.

"There's nothing in politics you can't pick up as you go along," he
said.  "How old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"You look older."  A faint line, as of contemplation, rose between
his eyes.  Was it fancy that a little smile was hovering about
Miltoun's lips?

"I've got a foolish theory," came from those lips, "that one must
know the conditions first.  I want to give at least five years to
that."

Lord Valleys raised his eyebrows.  "Waste of time," he said.  "You'd
know more at the end of it, if you went into the House at once.  You
take the matter too seriously."

"No doubt."

For fully a minute Lord Valleys made no answer; he felt almost
ruffled.  Waiting till the sensation had passed, he said: "Well, my
dear fellow, as you please."

Miltoun's apprenticeship to the profession of politics was served in
a slum settlement; on his father's estates; in Chambers at the
Temple; in expeditions to Germany, America, and the British Colonies;
in work at elections; and in two forlorn hopes to capture a
constituency which could be trusted not to change its principles.  He
read much, slowly, but with conscientious tenacity, poetry, history,
and works on philosophy, religion, and social matters.

Fiction, and especially foreign fiction, he did not care for.  With
the utmost desire to be wide and impartial, he sucked in what
ministered to the wants of his nature, rejecting unconsciously all
that by its unsuitability endangered the flame of his private spirit.
What he read, in fact, served only to strengthen those profounder
convictions which arose from his temperament.  With a contempt of the
vulgar gewgaws of wealth and rank he combined a humble but intense
and growing conviction of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual
superiority to those whom he desired to benefit.  There was no trace,
indeed, of the common Pharisee in Miltoun, he was simple and direct;
but his eyes, his gestures, the whole man, proclaimed the presence of
some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well into which no
disturbing glimmers penetrated.  He was not devoid of wit, but he was
devoid of that kind of wit which turns its eyes inward, and sees
something of the fun that lies in being what you are.  Miltoun saw
the world and all the things thereof shaped like spires--even when
they were circles.  He seemed to have no sense that the Universe was
equally compounded of those two symbols, whose point of
reconciliation had not yet been discovered.

Such was he, then, when the Member for his native division was made a
peer.

He had reached the age of thirty without ever having been in love,
leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown.
Women were afraid of him.  And he was perhaps a little afraid of
woman.  She was in theory too lovely and desirable--the half-moon.
in a summer sky; in practice too cloying, or too harsh.  He had an
affection for Barbara, his younger sister; but to his mother, his
grandmother, or his elder sister Agatha, he had never felt close.  It
was indeed amusing to see Lady Valleys with her first-born.  Her fine
figure, the blown roses of her face, her grey-blue eyes which had a
slight tendency to roll, as though amusement just touched with
naughtiness bubbled behind them; were reduced to a queer, satirical
decorum in Miltoun's presence.  Thoughts and sayings verging on the
risky were characteristic of her robust physique, of her soul which
could afford to express almost ail that occurred to it.  Miltoun had
never, not even as a child, given her his confidence.  She bore him
no resentment, being of that large, generous build in body and mind,
rarely--never in her class--associated with the capacity for feeling
aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its own.  He was, and
always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of it!  Nothing had
perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his want of behaviour in
regard to women.  She felt it abnormal, just as she recognized the
essential if duly veiled normality of her husband and younger son.
It was this feeling which made her realize almost more vividly than
she had time for, in the whirl of politics and fashion, the danger of
his friendship with this lady to whom she alluded so discreetly as
'Anonyma.'

Pure chance had been responsible for the inception of that
friendship.  Going one December afternoon to the farmhouse of a
tenant, just killed by a fall from his horse, Miltoun had found the
widow in a state of bewildered grief, thinly cloaked in the manner of
one who had almost lost the power to express her feelings, and quite
lost it in presence of 'the gentry.'  Having assured the poor soul
that she need have no fear about her tenancy, he was just leaving,
when he met, in the stone-flagged entrance, a lady in a fur cap and
jacket, carrying in her arms a little crying boy, bleeding from a cut
on the forehead.  Taking him from her and placing him on a table in
the parlour, Miltoun looked at this lady, and saw that she was
extremely grave, and soft, and charming.  He inquired of her whether
the mother should be told.

She shook her head.

"Poor thing, not just now: let's wash it, and bind it up first."

Together therefore they washed and bound up the cut.  Having
finished, she looked at Miltoun, and seemed to say: "You would do the
telling so much better than I"

He, therefore, told the mother and was rewarded by a little smile
from the grave lady.

>From that meeting he took away the knowledge of her name, Audrey Lees
Noel, and the remembrance of a face, whose beauty, under a cap of
squirrel's fur, pursued him.  Some days later passing by the village
green, he saw her entering a garden gate.  On this occasion he had
asked her whether she would like her cottage re-thatched; an
inspection of the roof had followed; he had stayed talking a long
time.  Accustomed to women--over the best of whom, for all their
grace and lack of affectation, high-caste life had wrapped the manner
which seems to take all things for granted--there was a peculiar
charm for Miltoun in this soft, dark-eyed lady who evidently lived
quite out of the world, and had so poignant, and shy, a flavour.
Thus from a chance seed had blossomed swiftly one of those rare
friendships between lonely people, which can in short time fill great
spaces of two lives.

One day she asked him: "You know about me, I suppose?"  Miltoun made
a motion of his head, signifying that he did.  His informant had been
the vicar.

"Yes, I am told, her story is a sad one--a divorce."

"Do you mean that she has been divorced, or----"

For the fraction of a second the vicar perhaps had hesitated.

"Oh!  no--no.  Sinned against, I am sure.  A nice woman, so far as I
have seen; though I'm afraid not one of my congregation."

With this, Miltoun, in whom chivalry had already been awakened, was
content.  When she asked if he knew her story, he would not for the
world have had her rake up what was painful.  Whatever that story,
she could not have been to blame.  She had begun already to be shaped
by his own spirit; had become not a human being as it was, but an
expression of his aspiration....

On the third evening after his passage of arms with Courtier, he was
again at her little white cottage sheltering within its high garden
walls.  Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging
the old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of
hiding from the world.  Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees
spread their dark boughs over the outhouses, and in any south-west
wind could be heard speaking gravely about the weather.  Tall lilac
bushes flanked the garden, and a huge lime-tree in the adjoining
field sighed and rustled, or on still days let forth the drowsy hum
of countless small dusky bees who frequented that green hostelry.

He found her altering a dress, sitting over it in her peculiar
delicate fashion--as if all objects whatsoever, dresses, flowers,
books, music, required from her the same sympathy.

He had come from a long day's electioneering, had been heckled at two
meetings, and was still sore from the experience.  To watch her, to
be soothed, and ministered to by her had never been so restful; and
stretched out in a long chair he listened to her playing.

Over the hill a Pierrot moon was slowly moving up in a sky the colour
of grey irises.  And in a sort of trance Miltoun stared at the burnt-
out star, travelling in bright pallor.

Across the moor a sea of shallow mist was rolling; and the trees in
the valley, like browsing cattle, stood knee-deep in whiteness, with
all the air above them wan from an innumerable rain as of moondust,
falling into that white sea.  Then the moon passed behind the lime-
tree, so that a great lighted Chinese lantern seemed to hang blue-
black from the sky.

Suddenly, jarring and shivering the music, came a sound of hooting.
It swelled, died away, and swelled again.

Miltoun rose.

"That has spoiled my vision," he said.  "Mrs. Noel, I have something
I want to say."  But looking down at her, sitting so still, with her
hands resting on the keys, he was silent in sheer adoration.

A voice from the door ejaculated:

"Oh!  ma'am--oh!  my lord!  They're devilling a gentleman on the
green!"