been and still was to be a place dominated by the Keiths.
It was to be his lot in life to share and continue that
domination. He was to end his days in a house like
Clibran Hall, to be buried as Andrew had been, to have,
as Andrew soon would have, his statue in the Town Hall
Square. He would sit in Andrew's study and enjoy
the humour of it. He had Clibran Hall, by Andrew's
last sardonic stroke, but empty, crowded in on all sides
by the unpleasing manifestations of industrialism, the
ugliness and squalor upon which it built its success. In
the garden grew foul docks and smoky nettles with here
and there an obstinate garden plant, a rose or a holly-
hock, that would not be denied. How swiftly wild



258 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

nature asserted itself: weeds everywhere, and the neat
gravel overgrown with grass. And the wild nature in
man? Would not that too take its revenge? Jamie
had been reading Erasmus Darwin and the Lord of his
young religion had departed out of his mind for ever.
He had been helped out by public events. No God
could both bless England and allow the Crimean War.
Not that Jamie was unpatriotic : he had been as excited
as any of them, as uncritically ready to assume vile bar-
barism in the Russians because they wished to take
Constantinople from the gentle Turk in order the more
dreadfully to threaten India. Our James, like other
good and true men, was not consistent either mentally
or emotionally. So far as he took any interest in politics
he was a Disraelian ; Tom was a Gladstonian and indeed
there was something repulsive about English Liberalism.
It was so infernally complacent. Better a little vulgar
swagger than its super-Christian humility. So Jamie
joined the vulgar swagger and partly out of good nature,
partly out of genuine sensibility to the new excitement
of Imperialism, joined the Volunteers and wore a uni-
form on Saturdays. He trimmed his beard to be like
Lord Raglan's and began vaguely to feel that he was
making a fool of himself. This was quite pleasant:
hundreds of others were doing it too; and they were
doing it publicly. England, after all, was an Empire and
not what it seemed to be, a collection of ugly cities set
in a lovely but impoverished country.

It was generally on Saturdays after his drill or march
through the streets that Jamie would take refuge at
Clibran Hall, in his tunic and shako, generally with the
jeers of little boys ringing in his ears. He could not go
home from the jeering little boys to Tom's sarcasms.
In the Volunteer movement Tom had found a subject



THE EMPTY HOUSE 259

entirely to his liking. "Playing at soldiers. Either be
a soldier and go and die of scrofula outside Sevastopol,
or leave it alone. Defend the country ? Whom against ?
Napoleon couldn't attack it, and, if he couldn't, who
could? Napoleon was quite right, England was a shop.
Europe's shop. Europe would never be fool enough to
wreck it. As for this nonsense about Empire, he had no
patience with it. Directly people called themselves an
Empire they began to decline and fall. There was no
help for it. When a nation called itself an Empire it
was a sign that it had reached its zenith : it had lost its
sense of proportion and would sooner or later make itself
such a nuisance to the world that the world would not
stand it any longer." "At all events," said Margaret,
"I think Jamie looks very handsome in his uniform."
"It makes me sick," said Tom, "to see him on a Saturday
afternoon slinking out of the house dressed up like a
play-actor." "It has made a great difference in your
health, hasn't it, Jamie?" asked Margaret.

It was to avoid such scenes as this that he escaped.
At first he had gone to John's where Sophia applauded
and admired him, and John would be much more gentle
and sensible. He had become very kind, had John, since
his lungs had begun to disappear. He would say: "I
don't know where it's going to end. We thrashed Boney
without making any to-do about it. It was a job that
had to be done. We took our licking in America in
very good part; but I don't like this new spirit at all.
It isn't manly. It isn't English. It is dangerous, and
it is going to be very expensive. We can do the other
nations very nicely over the counter. We don't need to
threaten them or shake the sword at them. We've got
to get rich so as to have time for culture, and as little
as possible should we get rich at other people's expense.



260 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

I'm a Free Trade man, as you know, and I believe that
if we give the others a good lead they'll follow. I'm
not in Palmerston's confidence but this Crimean business
looks to me like turning our backs on our own tradition.
Palmerston's a fool and a high and dry old Tory and
doesn't see that the English tradition has passed out of
the hands of his class, into the hands of men with better
brains, more experience and a closer contact with life
as it is lived by the many, who ultimately, whether you
like them or not and I don't are the people who mat-
ter. He has landed us in this mess to assert his class
and I shouldn't be surprised if he hasn't smashed old
England as the leader of the world, though she'll go on
getting richer and richer. I know, if I were a Dutchman
or a Swede or an Austrian, I should find it hard to believe
in old England ever again. We've become just like the
rest of them, you see." "Still," said Jamie, "it may be
a mistake, but I don't like this settling down to the shop,
and we are Europeans and if Europe has to go through
the fire we have to go through it too."- -"But we've
done it," said John. "We went through our fire in the
Civil War, and we settled down to the rights of man
long before the Frenchies began to screech about it.
When the divine right of kings went out the divine rights
of men came in. That is how I look at it and the rest
of the world will slowly come into line. What is Amer-
ica but the creation of the few stubborn Englishmen who
were in too great a hurry to see the new idea take shape
in the old country?'*

There were many such talks, and Jamie and John
became good friends in the few months before the lat-
ter's departure with Sophia and their first-born, Angus,
for Australia. When they were gone Jamie had no other
refuge than his own solitude. He would return with



THE EMPTY HOUSE 261

pipe and tobacco to Clibran Hall, take off his tunic and
shako if it were Saturday and lay them on a chair
on the other side of the fireplace and look at them. The
Queen's Uniform : and he would remember a saying
of Cobbett's to the effect that the Queen had every-
thing: her Majesty's Judges, her Majesty's Army, her
Majesty's Navy, her Majesty's Government, her Majes-
ty's Prisons, while, when it came to Debt, that was
National. Then he would try to account for the pleasure
he had in wearing her Majesty's uniform, though he was
sure he would never desire to kill even the vilest of her
Majesty's enemies. First of all there was the pleasure
of being one of many; it was good to walk in a row of
men and feel at the first glance that he had something in
common with them, even if it were only a matter of
clothes. In ordinary life, there were so many with whom
he had nothing in common. How little he knew even of
his mother and his brothers; only with Mary was there
any real sharing of mind or feeling. Did the others
mind? Were they content with their narrow piety and
close pursuit of their profitable duty ? Was there nothing
outside their Puritanism but frivolity? Escaping An-
drew, was there no alternative but Hubert? He was
dissatisfied with Hubert who had seemed to despise him
for suffering so much over the loss of Selina, who had
gone, as she said, with Henry Acomb and Mrs. Bulloch
and was swallowed up in the remote brilliance of Lon-
don. There were times when Jamie felt so desolate
and dissatisfied with the respectable monotony of his life
that he often thought almost seriously of going for a
soldier indeed, and when there began to come the flood
of war verses his martial spirit was stirred and he
wrote verses too and sent them up to the London papers,
hoping to begin a career with them. But they never



262 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

appeared. The fame of Quintus Flumen was local, and
indeed London in those days was hardly more aware
of Thrigsby than of Penmaenmawr. Money and abomin-
able ideas came out of Thrigsby : it was vulgar because
of the one and obnoxious because of the other. His
poems rejected, his offering to Agnes despised ; Andrew's
will and Donald's behaviour had showed only too plainly
where the Lawries stood; there was nothing for it,
thought Jamie, but to enlist. Unhappily, however, it
was impossible to enlist as a General and nothing less
would satisfy his mother. Madame Mere! What did
she make of Napoleon? Was she disappointed that her
brilliant second son had not fulfilled some secret ambi-
tion for him? Perhaps she had thought her Napoleon
would make a nice little priest, exactly as Margaret had
thought her eldest-born would make a good little mer-
chant.

Sometimes he would write poems, not of the patriotic
kind ; verses beginning "Selina has my heart," but they
were all false and he knew them to be so and tore them
up. Other times he would work, writing either his
dramatic criticism or one of a series of articles he had
begun for the new Thrigsby Weekly Post on Banks and
Bankers. Again he would wander through the great
empty house, from room to room, imagining the life that
had been in them. Andrew had bought it, he knew, on
the occasion of his marriage. It must have seemed the
solid triumph of his life. No one, not even much richer
men, had such houses. No one had such huge, such
massive furniture as had once filled it. No one slept in
such beds as that leviathan four-poster which had domin-
ated and obscured the nuptial chamber. The mockery of
that bed ! A rack on which a miserable woman had been
tortured! And with that tragedy at the heart of its life



THE EMPTY HOUSE 263

what splendour and ostentation, what feasts, what a
show of princely hospitality there must have been. And
suppose, thought Jamie, suppose there had been no Hu-
bert, no crisis, no climax : suppose Andrew's life had been
undisturbed, suppose he and Elisabeth had had children :
would the tragedy have been any less ? Would the house
have been less grim and empty? Andrew was still very
much alive : he was still in Jamie's way, though the fear
of him was gone. It was wonderful how its going made
thought easier and sweeter the contemplation of An-
drew's tragedy. Torment can be sweet if it be shot, how-
ever dimly, with the light of understanding, and here
there was at least the will to understand, and, finally,
the passionate desire. Jamie found himself living in
that old story. His mother had wished him to live by
and from Andrew Keith, to occupy that corner of the
world which Andrew had prepared. He had obliged
her more thoroughly than she could possibly imagine.
He must know what that world was like before he could
live in it. Neither Andrew nor Margaret could or would
give him any clue to it. He must find his own. What
had they done to make entrance so difficult? Was the
gulf between the generations impassable? Jamie often
thought sadly of his mother's face, how little meaning
its expressions could convey to him, how very little he
knew of the life behind it, that had made it, and how
easy it was to fill the void of his ignorance with charm-
ing fantasy. She was not such a mother as Mrs. Leslie
was to her children, but how delightful it would have
been to pretend that she was, and yet how disgusting too !
For Margaret was much finer than that, stronger,
prouder, bolder, hugging the griefs her children brought
her and never acquiescing in their misdeeds. Margaret
was Biblical ; Mrs. Leslie Dickensian. There was a weak-



264 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

ening in the attempt to make a philosophy of palliation.
Jamie needed the Biblical idea of his mother, her own
idea of herself, for his task of unravelling the Andrew
story. It became his dearest joy. For months together
he needed no other life. It came very near to Mary's
description of the philosophic life, but it was not disin-
terested. He had accepted Andrew's world and accord-
ing to his nature had to make the best of it. He envied
Tom, who was so constituted that he could take the
money and the success and leave the rest. He envied
John who could reject the whole creation. Yet he would
have changed with neither. This employment of his
was its own reward. It was as near to art, he began
vaguely to perceive, as he would ever go. He often
laughed to himself as he thought that he was passing
through the crisis of his life; the mental crisis coinciding
with the physical entrance into maturity. What luck,
he thought, that he was not married! All that could
come later, when he had emerged triumphant over the
secret of the world he had inherited: the moral issue
settled. Ah ! the money and the success would be worth
while then. He would know what to do with them.
Otherwise they were trash and he would be overwhelmed
by them as Andrew had been and Tom bade fair to be.
And, in the moments when he was sure of his triumph,
he would feel sorry for Tom.

One night as he returned from prowling through the
house to the study he sat at Andrew's desk and began
to work. His dramatic criticisms had lately become
rather intellectual and academic and he took scanty notice
of the actors. Currie Bigge had complained : "I don't
want you to be vulgar, but you must be readable." He
tried to make himself readable and imitated Lamb's man-
ner, caught from him some of his enthusiasm for acting



THE EMPTY HOUSE 265

as acting without reference to the general effect of the
play. Even so it was heavy work and he was often
stopped for want of a word. Looking round the desk,
he found himself wondering whether it had not a secret
drawer and he spent over an hour searching. At last
in one of the pigeon-holes he found a crack, inserted his
fingernail and pressed a spring. Down fell an inlaid
panel to disclose an aperture full of papers and books.
Currie Bigge had to do without his dramatic criticism
that week. There were letters, notes, diaries, cuttings
from newspapers, reports of public utterances, all the
documents which could be a source of pride to old An-
drew. Jamie found them of no great interest until he
came to the diaries, a series covering a period of over
fifty years, though pages and pages were filled with noth-
ing more than entries like : "Better weather. Napoleon
dead and a good job too." Or, "Gave orders for new
boiler; engineer says two not enough. Rubbish. Must
see about coal supply. Prince Consort turning out bet-
ter than I expected," or "Afraid the railway business is
being overdone. After all, there is a limit and water will
remain best for heavy goods. Must take to hunting.
Kennedy is doing it and goes down to his warehouse in
riding-boots and breeches." The hunting led to Elisa-
beth, an Adlington, of an old family of squires upon
whose estate coal had been discovered. There was an
entry: "England's wealth (i) agriculture, (2) coal, (3)
cotton, (i) and (2) Adlington: (3) A. K. Elisabeth
or Agatha? Agatha is the more comely, but Elisabeth
is the more sensible. Agatha would give herself airs.
She would insist on the superiority of coal and birth
over cotton and brains. She is not beautiful enough to
justify the sacrifice. I want a wife that Thrigsby will
look up to, but not one who will look down on Thrigsby.



266 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

I should say E. would be the better breeder." Not much
romance about old Andrew, and where was his wonder-
ful trick of self-deception? Perhaps that developed later.
He had a certain private humour that reminded Jamie
of Tom. There were many pages that Tom might have
written. The courtship was fully recorded: "Squire
Adlington not averse. Financial position quite up to the
mark. Proposed and honourably refused Mr. Keith,
I am fully aware of the honour you do me O ! but she
has the daintiest ankle! Shall wait six weeks and try
again. Good weather, good scent, good run. I can't
think what possesses that fellow Cobden, who has made
himself a good position and a fair business, to go run-
ning about the country. He'll ruin it as well as himself
if he does not take care. Fortunately the people will
never listen to a demagogue who has taken care to fill
his own pockets first. There always will be Haves and
Have-nots and they are as different as the sexes. I am
a Have, Shiel is a Have-not, and we shall never under-
stand each other. I am a Have, Madame Elisabeth, and
I mean to have you." Jamie hurried on to the next
proposal : "Refused, but argued. Love not out of the
question, as E. seems to have feared. Wives love their
husbands, because they are wived by them. Could not
of course explain this, but was as tender as it is in my
nature to be. Perfectly sound man, I explained, sound
in wind, limb and religion. Birth Scots, and therefore,
when not illegitimate, good enough. Keiths at Naseby.
Where were the Adlingtons then ? I asked and she with
her dearest smile replied: 'At Adlington.' I find she
likes to laugh. Dull life at Adlington, I fancy. Father
drinks. No wonder, if the family has been there two
hundred years and more. And to think that Thrigsby
is only fourteen miles away !" "She reads Jane Austen,



THE EMPTY HOUSE 267

whom I cannot stomach. Fancy that mild babble being
written while all Europe was in a blaze. I suppose she
would wish me to be like Captain Wentworth. Have told
the old father and left it to him to bring her to reason."
"Adlington came to see me to-day to suggest Agatha.
I insist on Elisabeth. Let him bring her to town to see
what money can do there." In the end he wore down
Elisabeth's resistance. There were no entries in the
diary for some weeks until at last came: "Married.
Good. Liverpool, I can see, is going to be an infernal
nuisance. Shall give up hunting. It is expensive and
takes up too much time. Trouble in Ireland. There is
always trouble in Ireland, and we have too many Irish
here." After that there was no mention of Elisabeth ex-
cept three years later: "E. has had a miscarriage!
Damn it!"

For years then the diaries rambled on, an odd com-
mentary on the period, remarkable more for what it
omitted than for what it mentioned. Tremendous events
were only remarked on in so far as they affected the
buying and selling of cotton. The only indication of
the growing tragedy was the increasing bitterness of
the sardonic note in the writer's humour. He was often
brilliant, sometimes coarse and the jests made Jamie
shout with laughter as he sat in the empty house opposite
his tunic and shako. Suddenly almost the whole diary
was occupied with the entry of one day : "She came to
me this morning and asked me to stay as she had some-
thing important to say to me. I told her bed was the
place for that. In a very low voice she said she had
never admired me. She informed me that I was vulgar,
hard, insensitive, grasping, and that the love I had offered
her was an insult to a woman. I refused to listen to
more and left her to recover herself. I am what I am,



268 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

like Dean Swift. All the same she had spoiled my appe-
tite either for work or for my victuals. When I returned
home I found a letter to say that she had gone with her
lover, Hubert, of all people; Hubert, the petticoat-hunter,
Hubert, the effeminate dandy, Hubert, whom I used to
tip when he went back to school ! The woman's a whore
and has dishonoured me. My God ! does she know what
she has done ? Her own family : they won't like having
bred a whore. I am almost afraid of my own rage. I
gave her everything she wanted. She had her own car-
riage. Fool that I am! I knew what was going on,
but would never admit it to myself. I shall be laughed
at. Laugh then! Go on, laugh! I'll laugh at myself
first! Now you can't hurt me. I'm laughing. D'ye
think I set much store by this marriage? It was barren."
Jamie could hardly read through his excitement. O!
the strong obstinate vanity of the man ! He would not
admit either his own fault or his own grief. The woman
was a whore, she had injured Hubert far more than she
had hurt him. Thrigsby might snigger to itself, but
openly it would say: "Poor Keith! He doted on that
wife of his." They would remember, as he was doing,
her faults and forget her virtues, her charm, her kind-
ness, the gracious hospitality they had received at her
hands. Her hospitality ? He paid for it. That was the
final argument behind which, sore and bewildered, An-
drew took refuge. Jamie could feel the soreness and
the bewilderment and respond, but what infuriated him
was that he was given no clue to Elisabeth's mind and
feelings, while Hubert was for Andrew non-existent.
The episode spoiled his appetite, but when he realised that
Thrigsby would take his view of the affair he recovered
himself and set about making more money and creating



THE EMPTY HOUSE 269

for himself a fine official position so that Elisabeth should
feel what she had missed.

It amused Jamie to recollect that when Selina had
jilted him his first impulse had been to dismiss her
angrily as worthless, and he wondered if he would have
felt the same if he had been married to Selina. And
he tried to work out the tragedy of Andrew with the
aid of his own experience : not very successfully until
he began painfully to think that Selina might have left
him for the same reason which had led Elisabeth to aban-
don her husband. He could see in himself some of the
same blind humourless egoism, though it had not yet
been so fatal, but he did not believe that Selina could
have perceived it in him and suffered from it. No: he
decided she had left him for a bird of her own feather.
But might not that have been the case with Elisabeth?
It is absurd to ascribe superhuman insight to the female.
What kind of woman would attract and bind Hubert?
And where would she touch him? In his pity and
chivalry, thought Jamie, feeling that he was coming
near the heart of the mystery. Of course, passion might
very easily have little to do with it, and there would
lie its pity, there the fascination of the imbroglio to
Hubert. Jamie felt sick at heart: Andrew cold as ice;
Hubert cold as stone; the woman between them. Ah!
that was the sting of it, that the cause of the obsession.
A fine thrilling story and the end of it was Andrew
making money, Hubert making money, and the woman
dead. There was no possibility anywhere of life for
her. Hubert seemed as detestable as Andrew.

Jamie whistled "The Russians shall not get to Con-
stantinople" as he lay back and thought it over. "So
this," he thought, "is what lay beyond the Blue Moun-
tains; this is what they have made of life and it doesn't



270 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

look as if we were going to make it much better. John
with his lungs half gone: Tom turning into one huge
trouser-pocket full of money: myself running after
coloured gas-light dreams: mother eating her heart out
because the Lawries aren't as important as the Keiths:
and Tibby oh ! well, there's always Tibby." In a shift-
ing, uneasy and changing world, that most inconsider-
ately refused to allow itself to be understood, he clung
to Tibby as a comprehensible reality, though he was as
ignorant of the detail of her life as of anyone's. "Good
God!" he said to himself, "I don't know what is going
on in my own life and if that knowledge is impossible
how can I expect to have any other?"



CHAPTER XXIV

FANNY SHAW



' I A HE Saturday soldiers might be jeered at by little
boys as they marched on parade through the streets
with the Colonel on horseback and a band with a real
drum-major going before. The Colonel of the 3rd
V.B.T.R. was a wealthy man and liked everything well
done. Wealthy too were many of the rank and file and
if their regiment were not going to have a chance of
proving its mettle in the war, it should at least make a
show in the peaceful city of Thrigsby, and give the people
something for the money the war was costing and remind
them that the world was not subdued by Waterloo. There
were public functions too. The Volunteers lined the
streets when an august personage visited Thrigsby, and
was received by the Mayor, the Town Clerk, the Re-
corder, and the City Treasurer. The Volunteers had a
Sunday set apart for them in the Cathedral; a Sunday
in May, and then, when the greengrocers' shops were
gay with hyacinths and daffodils and tulips and oranges