Chapter XVIII. The Fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre--fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan,
"Jem Salter," as his neighbours on the Western ranches had called
him, the red-haired, second-class passenger of the Meridiana, sat in
the great library of his desolate great house, and stared fixedly
through the open window at the lovely land spread out before him.
From this particular window was to be seen one of the greatest views
in England. From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he
had seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed to
his young fancy to cover all the plains of the earth. Surely the
rest of the world, he had thought, could be but small-- though
somewhere he knew there was London where the Queen lived, and in
London were Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace and Kensington and
the Tower, where heads had been chopped off; and the Horse Guards,
where splendid, plumed soldiers rode forth glittering, with thrilling
trumpets sounding as they moved. These last he always remembered,
because he had seen them, and once when he had walked in the park
with his nurse there had been an excited stir in the Row, and people
had crowded about a certain gate, through which an escorted carriage
had been driven, and he had been made at once to take off his hat and
stand bareheaded until it passed, because it was the Queen. Somehow
from that afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain
vaguely miserable ideas. Inquiries made of his attendant, when the
cortege had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal Lady
herself had children--little boys who were princes and little girls
who were princesses. What curious and persistent child
cross-examination on his part had drawn forth the fact that almost
all the people who drove about and looked so happy and brilliant,
were the fathers or mothers of little boys like, yet--in some
mysterious way--unlike himself? And in what manner had he gathered
that he was different from them? His nurse, it is true, was not a
pleasant person, and had an injured and resentful bearing. In later
years he realised that it had been the bearing of an irregularly paid
menial, who rebelled against the fact that her place was not among
people who were of distinction and high repute, and whose households
bestowed a certain social status upon their servitors. She was a
tall woman with a sour face and a bearing which conveyed a glum
endurance of a position beneath her. Yes, it had been from
her--Brough her name was --that he had mysteriously gathered that he
was not a desirable charge, as regarded from the point of the
servants' hall --or, in fact, from any other point. His people were
not the people whose patronage was sought with anxious eagerness.
For some reason their town house was objectionable, and Mount Dunstan
was without attractions. Other big houses were, in some marked way,
different. The town house he objected to himself as being gloomy and
ugly, and possessing only a bare and battered nursery, from whose
windows one could not even obtain a satisfactory view of the Mews,
where at least, there were horses and grooms who hissed cheerfully
while they curried and brushed them. He hated the town house and
was, in fact, very glad that he was scarcely ever taken to it.
People, it seemed, did not care to come either to the town house or
to Mount Dunstan. That was why he did not know other little boys.
Again--for the mysterious reason --people did not care that their
children should associate with him. How did he discover this? He
never knew exactly. He realised, however, that without distinct
statements, he seemed to have gathered it through various
disconnected talks with Brough. She had not remained with him long,
having "bettered herself" greatly and gone away in glum satisfaction,
but she had stayed long enough to convey to him things which became
part of his existence, and smouldered in his little soul until they
became part of himself. The ancestors who had hewn their way through
their enemies with battle- axes, who had been fierce and cruel and
unconquerable in their savage pride, had handed down to him a burning
and unsubmissive soul. At six years old, walking with Brough in
Kensington Gardens, and seeing other children playing under the care
of nurses, who, he learned, were not inclined to make advances to his
attendant, he dragged Brough away with a fierce little hand and stood
apart with her, scowling haughtily, his head in the air, pretending
that he disdained all childish gambols, and would have declined to
join in them, even if he had been besought to so far unbend.
Bitterness had been planted in him then, though he had not
understood, and the sourness of Brough had been connected with no
intelligence which might have caused her to suspect his feelings, and
no one had noticed, and if anyone had noticed, no one would have
cared in the very least.

When Brough had gone away to her far superior place, and she had
been succeeded by one variety of objectionable or incompetent person
after another, he had still continued to learn. In different ways he
silently collected information, and all of it was unpleasant, and, as
he grew older, it took for some years one form. Lack of resources,
which should of right belong to persons of rank, was the radical
objection to his people. At the town house there was no money, at
Mount Dunstan there was no money. There had been so little money
even in his grandfather's time that his father had inherited
comparative beggary. The fourteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan did not
call it "comparative" beggary, he called it beggary pure and simple,
and cursed his progenitors with engaging frankness. He never
referred to the fact that in his personable youth he had married a
wife whose fortune, if it had not been squandered, might have
restored his own. The fortune had been squandered in the course of a
few years of riotous living, the wife had died when her third son was
born, which event took place ten years after the birth of her second,
whom she had lost through scarlet fever. James Hubert John Fergus
Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past
existence because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait of a
tall, thin, fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets, and
pearls round her neck. She had not attracted him as a child, and the
fact that he gathered that she had been his mother left him entirely
unmoved. She was not a loveable- looking person, and, indeed, had
been at once empty-headed, irritable, and worldly. He would probably
have been no less lonely if she had lived. Lonely he was. His
father was engaged in a career much too lively and interesting to
himself to admit of his allowing himself to be bored by an unwanted
and entirely superfluous child. The elder son, who was Lord Tenham,
had reached a premature and degenerate maturity by the time the
younger one made his belated appearance, and regarded him with
unconcealed dislike. The worst thing which could have befallen the
younger boy would have been intimate association with this degenerate
youth.

As Saltyre left nursery days behind, he learned by degrees that
the objection to himself and his people, which had at first
endeavoured to explain itself as being the result of an unseemly lack
of money, combined with that unpleasant feature, an uglier
one--namely, lack of decent reputation. Angry duns, beggarliness of
income, scarcity of the necessaries and luxuries which dignity of
rank demanded, the indifference and slights of one's equals, and the
ignoring of one's existence by exalted persons, were all hideous
enough to Lord Mount Dunstan and his elder son--but they were not so
hideous as was, to his younger son, the childish, shamed frenzy of
awakening to the truth that he was one of a bad lot--a disgraceful
lot, from whom nothing was expected but shifty ways, low vices, and
scandals, which in the end could not even be kept out of the
newspapers. The day came, in fact, when the worst of these was
seized upon by them and filled their sheets with matter which for a
whole season decent London avoided reading, and the fast and indecent
element laughed, derided, or gloated over.

The memory of the fever of the monstrous weeks which had passed
at this time was not one it was wise for a man to recall. But it was
not to be forgotten--the hasty midnight arrival at Mount Dunstan of
father and son, their haggard, nervous faces, their terrified
discussions, and argumentative raging when they were shut up together
behind locked doors, the appearance of legal advisers who looked as
anxious as themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which
they were battling, the knowledge that tongues were clacking almost
hysterically in the village, and that curious faces hurried to the
windows when even a menial from the great house passed, the
atmosphere of below-stairs whispers, and jogged elbows, and winks,
and giggles; the final desperate, excited preparations for flight,
which might be ignominiously stopped at any moment by the
intervention of the law, the huddling away at night time, the
hot-throated fear that the shameful, self-branding move might be too
late--the burning humiliation of knowing the inevitable result of
public contempt or laughter when the world next day heard that the
fugitives had put the English Channel between themselves and their
country's laws.

Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said, after
descending into all the hells of degenerate debauch. His father had
lived longer--long enough to make of himself something horribly near
an imbecile, before he died suddenly in Paris. The Mount Dunstan who
succeeded him, having spent his childhood and boyhood under the
shadow of the "bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly,
unattractive young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to
those who knew his stock, as being of a kind which might develop at
any time into any objectionable tendency. His bearing was not such
as allured, and his fortune was not of the order which placed a man
in the view of the world. He had no money to expend, no
hospitalities to offer and apparently no disposition to connect
himself with society. His wild-goose chase to America had, when it
had been considered worth while discussing at all, been regarded as
being very much the kind of thing a Mount Dunstan might do with some
secret and disreputable end in view. No one had heard the exact
truth, and no one would have been inclined to believe if they had
heard it. That he had lived as plain Jem Salter, and laboured as any
hind might have done, in desperate effort and mad hope, would not
have been regarded as a fact to be credited. He had gone away, he
had squandered money, he had returned, he was at Mount Dunstan again,
living the life of an objectionable recluse--objectionable, because
the owner of a place like Mount Dunstan should be a power and an
influence in the county, should be counted upon as a dispenser of
hospitalities, as a supporter of charities, as a dignitary of weight.
He was none of these--living no one knew how, slouching about with
his gun, riding or walking sullenly over the roads and marshland.

Just one man knew him intimately, and this one had been from his
fifteenth year the sole friend of his life. He had come, then--the
Reverend Lewis Penzance--a poor and unhealthy scholar, to be vicar of
the parish of Dunstan. Only a poor and book-absorbed man would have
accepted the position. What this man wanted was no more than quiet,
pure country air to fill frail lungs, a roof over his head, and a
place to pore over books and manuscripts. He was a born monk and
celibate--in by-gone centuries he would have lived peacefully in some
monastery, spending his years in the reading and writing of black
letter and the illuminating of missals. At the vicarage he could
lead an existence which was almost the same thing.

At Mount Dunstan there remained still the large remnant of a
great library. A huge room whose neglected and half emptied shelves
contained some strange things and wonderful ones, though all were in
disorder, and given up to dust and natural dilapidation. Inevitably
the Reverend Lewis Penzance had found his way there, inevitably he
had gained indifferently bestowed permission to entertain himself by
endeavouring to reduce to order and to make an attempt at
cataloguing. Inevitably, also, the hours he spent in the place
became the chief sustenance of his being.

There, one day, he had come upon an uncouth-looking boy with
deep eyes and a shaggy crop of red hair. The boy was poring over an
old volume, and was plainly not disposed to leave it. He rose, not
too graciously, and replied to the elder man's greeting, and the
friendly questions which followed. Yes, he was the youngest son of
the house. He had nothing to do, and he liked the library. He often
came there and sat and read things. There were some queer old books
and a lot of stupid ones. The book he was reading now? Oh, that
(with a slight reddening of his skin and a little awkwardness at the
admission) was one of those he liked best. It was one of the queer
ones, but interesting for all that. It was about their own
people--the generations of Mount Dunstans who had lived in the
centuries past. He supposed he liked it because there were a lot of
odd stories and exciting things in it. Plenty of fighting and
adventure. There had been some splendid fellows among them. (He was
beginning to forget himself a little by this time.) They were afraid
of nothing. They were rather like savages in the earliest days, but
at that time all the rest of the world was savage. But they were
brave, and it was odd how decent they were very often. What he meant
was--what he liked was, that they were men-- even when they were
barbarians. You couldn't be ashamed of them. Things they did then
could not be done now, because the world was different, but if--well,
the kind of men they were might do England a lot of good if they were
alive to-day. They would be different themselves, of course, in one
way--but they must be the same men in others. Perhaps Mr. Penzance
(reddening again) understood what he meant. He knew himself very
well, because he had thought it all out, he was always thinking about
it, but he was no good at explaining.

Mr. Penzance was interested. His outlook on the past and the
present had always been that of a bookworm, but he understood enough
to see that he had come upon a temperament novel enough to awaken
curiosity. The apparently entirely neglected boy, of a type
singularly unlike that of his father and elder brother, living his
life virtually alone in the big place, and finding food to his taste
in stories of those of his blood whose dust had mingled with the
earth centuries ago, provided him with a new subject for
reflection.

That had been the beginning of an unusual friendship. Gradually
Penzance had reached a clear understanding of all the building of the
young life, of its rankling humiliation, and the qualities of mind
and body which made for rebellion. It sometimes thrilled him to see
in the big frame and powerful muscles, in the strong nature and
unconquerable spirit, a revival of what had burned and stirred
through lives lived in a dim, almost mythical, past. There were
legends of men with big bodies, fierce faces, and red hair, who had
done big deeds, and conquered in dark and barbarous days, even Fate's
self, as it had seemed. None could overthrow them, none could stand
before their determination to attain that which they chose to claim.
Students of heredity knew that there were curious instances of
revival of type. There had been a certain Red Godwyn who had ruled
his piece of England before the Conqueror came, and who had defied
the interloper with such splendid arrogance and superhuman lack of
fear that he had won in the end, strangely enough, the admiration and
friendship of the royal savage himself, who saw, in his, a kindred
savagery, a power to be well ranged, through love, if not through
fear, upon his own side. This Godwyn had a deep attraction for his
descendant, who knew the whole story of his fierce life--as told in
one yellow manuscript and another--by heart. Why might not one
fancy--Penzance was drawn by the imagining--this strong thing reborn,
even as the offspring of a poorer effete type. Red Godwyn springing
into being again, had been stronger than all else, and had swept
weakness before him as he had done in other and far-off days.

In the old library it fell out in time that Penzance and the boy
spent the greater part of their days. The man was a bookworm and a
scholar, young Saltyre had a passion for knowledge. Among the old
books and manuscripts he gained a singular education. Without a
guide he could not have gathered and assimilated all he did gather
and assimilate. Together the two rummaged forgotten shelves and
chests, and found forgotten things. That which had drawn the boy
from the first always drew and absorbed him--the annals of his own
people. Many a long winter evening the pair turned over the pages of
volumes and of parchment, and followed with eager interest and
curiosity the records of wild lives--stories of warriors and abbots
and bards, of feudal lords at ruthless war with each other, of
besiegings and battles and captives and torments. Legends there were
of small kingdoms torn asunder, of the slaughter of their kings, the
mad fightings of their barons, and the faith or unfaith of their
serfs. Here and there the eternal power revealed itself in some
story of lawful or unlawful love--for dame or damsel, royal lady,
abbess, or high-born nun--ending in the welding of two lives or in
rapine, violence, and death. There were annals of early England, and
of marauders, monks, and Danes. And, through all these, some thing,
some man or woman, place, or strife linked by some tie with Mount
Dunstan blood. In past generations, it seemed plain, there had been
certain of the line who had had pride in these records, and had
sought and collected them; then had been born others who had not
cared. Sometimes the relations were inadequate, sometimes they wore
an unauthentic air, but most of them seemed, even after the passing
of centuries, human documents, and together built a marvellous great
drama of life and power, wickedness and passion and daring deeds.

When the shameful scandal burst forth young Saltyre was seen by
neither his father nor his brother. Neither of them had any desire
to see him; in fact, each detested the idea of confronting by any
chance his hot, intolerant eyes. "The Brat," his father had called
him in his childhood, "The Lout," when he had grown big-limbed and
clumsy. Both he and Tenham were sick enough, without being called
upon to contemplate "The Lout," whose opinion, in any case, they
preferred not to hear.

Saltyre, during the hideous days, shut himself up in the
library. He did not leave the house, even for exercise, until after
the pair had fled. His exercise he took in walking up and down from
one end of the long room to another. Devils were let loose in him.
When Penzance came to him, he saw their fury in his eyes, and heard
it in the savagery of his laugh.

He kicked an ancient volume out of his way as he strode to and
fro.

"There has been plenty of the blood of the beast in us in bygone
times," he said, "but it was not like this. Savagery in savage days
had its excuse. This is the beast sunk into the gibbering,
degenerate ape."

Penzance came and spent hours of each day with him. Part of his
rage was the rage of a man, but he was a boy still, and the
boyishness of his bitterly hurt youth was a thing to move to pity.
With young blood, and young pride, and young expectancy rising within
him, he was at an hour when he should have felt himself standing upon
the threshold of the world, gazing out at the splendid joys and
promises and powerful deeds of it--waiting only the fit moment to
step forth and win his place.

"But we are done for," he shouted once. "We are done for. And
I am as much done for as they are. Decent people won't touch us.
That is where the last Mount Dunstan stands." And Penzance heard in
his voice an absolute break. He stopped and marched to the window at
the end of the long room, and stood in dead stillness, staring out at
the down-sweeping lines of heavy rain.

The older man thought many things, as he looked at his big back
and body. He stood with his legs astride, and Penzance noted that
his right hand was clenched on his hip, as a man's might be as he
clenched the hilt of his sword --his one mate who might avenge him
even when, standing at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he
must fall. Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly
bald clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its
way, or fails to sweep a path before it. The sun rises and sets, the
seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as unchangeable.
Much of it stood before him embodied in this strongly sentient thing.
In this way the Reverend Lewis found his thoughts leading him, and
he--being moved to the depths of a fine soul--felt them profoundly
interesting, and even sustaining.

He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long thin
hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre.
He said, at last, in a sane level voice:

"Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan."

After which the stillness remained unbroken again for some
minutes. Saltyre did not move or make any response, and, when he
left his place at the window, he took up a book, and they spoke of
other things.

When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger son
succeeded, there came a time when the two companions sat together in
the library again. It was the evening of a long day spent in
discouraging hard work. In the morning they had ridden side by side
over the estate, in the afternoon they had sat and pored over
accounts, leases, maps, plans. By nightfall both were fagged and
neither in sanguine mood.

Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time. The pair often sat
silent. This pause was ended by the young man's rising and standing
up, stretching his limbs.

"It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few years
ago," he said. "It has just come back to me."

Singularly enough--or perhaps naturally enough--it had also just
arisen again from the depths of Penzance's subconsciousness.

"Yes," he answered, "I remember. To-night it suggests
premonition. Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan."

"In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all," answered the
other man. Then he suddenly threw out his arms in a gesture whose
whole significance it would have been difficult to describe. There
was a kind of passion in it. "I am the last Mount Dunstan," he
harshly laughed. "Moi qui vous parle! The last."

Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the
far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without living
in it. He presently shook his head.

"No," he said. "I don't see that. No--not the last. Believe
me.

And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at
him without speaking. The eyes of each rested in the eyes of the
other. And, as had happened before, they followed the subject no
further. From that moment it dropped.

Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to America.
Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews with him and
restraining expression of their absolute disapproval of such
employment of his inadequate resources, knew no more than that this
Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or
Monte Carlo, or in Paris as the last one had done, prefers to waste
it in newer places. The head of the firm, when he bids him
good-morning and leaves him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and
returns to his letter writing with the corners of his elderly mouth
hard set.

Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return. In

the library they sat and talked it over, and, having done so,
closed the book of the episode.

  .  .  .  .  .

He sat at the table, his eyes upon
the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought
elsewhere. It wandered over the years already lived through,
wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before
the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.

When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a servant,
his face wore the look his friend would have been rejoiced to see
swept away to return no more.

Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some casual
talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make him forget
such things as it is not good to remember. That is what we have done
many times in the past, and may find it well to do many a time
again.

He begins with talk of the village and the country-side.
Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the country- side
are sometimes--not always--interesting. Tom Benson's wife has
presented him with triplets, and there is great excitement in the
village, as to the steps to be taken to secure the three guineas
given by the Queen as a reward for this feat. Old Benny Bates has
announced his intention of taking a fifth wife at the age of ninety,
and is indignant that it has been suggested that the parochial
authorities in charge of the "Union," in which he must inevitably
shortly take refuge, may interfere with his rights as a citizen. The
Reverend Lewis has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at
once irate and obdurate.

"Vicar," says old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no man. Law
won't let him." Such refusal, he intimates, might drive him to wild
and riotous living. Remembering his last view of old Benny tottering
down the village street in his white smock, his nut-cracker face like
a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff
his bent body leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little. He did not
smile when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church
at Mellowdene. "Restoration" usually meant the tearing away of
ancient oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment of smug new
benches, suggesting suburban Dissenting chapels, such as the feudal
soul revolts at. Neither did he smile at a reference to the
gathering at Dunholm Castle, which was twelve miles away. Dunholm
was the possession of a man who stood for all that was first and
highest in the land, dignity, learning, exalted character,
generosity, honour. He and the late Lord Mount Dunstan had been born
in the same year, and had succeeded to their titles almost at the
same time. There had arrived a period when they had ceased to know
each other. All that the one man intrinsically was, the other man
was not. All that the one estate, its castle, its village, its
tenantry, represented, was the antipodes of that which the other
stood for. The one possession held its place a silent, and perhaps,
unconscious reproach to the other. Among the guests, forming the
large house party which London social news had already recorded in
its columns, were great and honourable persons, and interesting ones,
men and women who counted as factors in all good and dignified things
accomplished. Even in the present Mount Dunstan's childhood, people
of their world had ceased to cross his father's threshold. As one or
two of the most noticeable names were mentioned, mentally he recalled
this, and Penzance, quick to see the thought in his eyes, changed the
subject.

"At Stornham village an unexpected thing has happened," he said.
"One of the relatives of Lady Anstruthers has suddenly appeared--a
sister. You may remember that the poor woman was said to be the
daughter of some rich American, and it seemed unexplainable that none
of her family ever appeared, and things were allowed to go from bad
to worse. As it was understood that there was so much money people
were mystified by the condition of things."

"Anstruthers has had money to squander," said Mount Dunstan.
"Tenham and he were intimates. The money he spends is no doubt his
wife's. As her family deserted her she has no one to defend her."

"Certainly her family has seemed to neglect her for years.
Perhaps they were disappointed in his position. Many Americans are
extremely ambitious. These international marriages are often
singular things. Now--apparently without having been expected--the
sister appears. Vanderpoel is the name-- Miss Vanderpoel."

"I crossed the Atlantic with her in the Meridiana," said Mount
Dunstan.

"Indeed! That is interesting. You did not, of course, know
that she was coming here."

"I knew nothing of her but that she was a saloon passenger with
a suite of staterooms, and I was in the second cabin. Nothing? That
is not quite true, perhaps. Stewards and passengers gossip, and one
cannot close one's ears. Of course one heard constant reiteration of
the number of millions her father possessed, and the number of cabins
she managed to occupy. During the confusion and alarm of the
collision, we spoke to each other."

He did not mention the other occasion on which he had seen her.
There seemed, on the whole, no special reason why he should.

"Then you would recognise her, if you saw her. I heard to-day
that she seems an unusual young woman, and has beauty."

"Her eyes and lashes are remarkable. She is tall. The
Americans are setting up a new type."

"Yes, they used to send over slender, fragile little women.
Lady Anstruthers was the type. I confess to an interest in the
sister."

"Why?"

"She has made a curious impression. She has begun to do things.
Stornham village has lost its breath." He laughed a little. "She
has been going over the place and discussing repairs."

Mount Dunstan laughed also. He remembered what she had said.
And she had actually begun.

"That is practical," he commented.

"It is really interesting. Why should a young woman turn her
attention to repairs? If it had been her father--the omnipotent Mr.
Vanderpoel--who had appeared, one would not have wondered at such
practical activity. But a young lady--with remarkable eyelashes!"

His elbows were on the arm of his chair, and he had placed the
tips of his fingers together, wearing an expression of such absorbed
contemplation that Mount Dunstan laughed again.

"You look quite dreamy over it," he said.

"It allures me. Unknown quantities in character always allure
me. I should like to know her. A community like this is made up of
the absolutely known quantity--of types repeating themselves through
centuries. A new one is almost a startling thing. Gossip over
teacups is not usually entertaining to me, but I found myself
listening to little Miss Laura Brunel this afternoon with rather
marked attention. I confess to having gone so far as to make an
inquiry or so. Sir Nigel Anstruthers is not often at Stornham. He
is away now. It is plainly not he who is interested in repairs."

"He is on the Riviera, in retreat, in a place he is fond of,"
Mount Dunstan said drily. "He took a companion with him. A new
infatuation. He will not return soon."