Fen Wyatt had passed smoothly and automatically from father to son for a
couple of centuries or more. A kindly, comfortable old house, mellowed
by time and the care of generations who had lived in it and loved it. It
had cradled their coming and periodically its darkened windows looked
down regretfully upon their going, as first one and then another head of
the family had been borne, shoulder-high, to his last resting-place. But
Fen Wyatt remained—and hitherto there had always been a son to step
into his inheritance.
And now it seemed as though the old house was waiting—gravely, rather
surprisedly waiting for someone to come and take up the reins of
government which Nicholas, the last member of the family upon whom the
churchyard gate had closed finally and for ever, had unexpectedly let
fall a month ago.
Outside, everything appeared just as usual. There was no perceptible
change to mark the fact that Nick Wyatt—bluff, good-hearted, prejudiced
Nick Wyatt—had stepped abruptly out of this world into the next.
Commonplace, everyday little sounds filled the garden—the hum of a
mowing machine as it was driven forward and back across meticulously
shaven lawns; the slow, occasional footstep of a gardener followed by
the metallic clip, clip of his shears as he trimmed a privet hedge;
blithe singing of birds in the green-frocked trees, the piercingly sweet
note of a blackbird fluting high above the twittering chorus. No, life
was going on just the same outside the old house.
But inside, in an old-fashioned, low-ceiled room, with the May sunlight
pouring into it through criss-crossed diamond window-panes, two people
were facing the fact that, with the passing of Nick Wyatt, the whole of
their world had come unstuck—suddenly and unbelievably.
“We’re right up against it.” Bob Wilson spoke with a definiteness which
seemed to imply that he had mentally scoured every nook and corner
wherein a grain of hope might lurk, and found them conspicuously empty.
He was sitting on the arm of a chair, his long legs stretched out
dejectedly in front of him, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and
an expression of half-incredulous dismay on his face. It was rather a
nice face. It possessed no pretensions to good looks, but there was a
certain dogged strength about its square-jawed plainness, and a humorous
frankness in the direct gaze of the pleasant gray eyes, set somewhat
wide apart, that was not without attraction.
“Right up against it,” he repeated dispiritedly.
The girl to whom he vouchsafed this depressing piece of information was
sufficiently like him, although darker in colouring, to justify the
assumption that they were brother and sister. A slim, eager slip of a
girl, she had the same wide-apart gray eyes, their rain-clear grayness
in her case accentuated by a double rim of short black lashes, and the
same determined mouth, only more delicately cut. But whereas Bob’s hair
was of a nondescript brown and unequivocally straight, hers was black as
a crow’s wing—satiny, shingled hair with a fugitive wave in it that
denied it severity. Narrow, straight black brows gave a characteristic
touch to her small, pointed face, and in the thin, sleeveless black
frock she was wearing, sharply contrasting with the warm pallor of her
skin, she conveyed rather the impression of a black-and-white etching.
She regarded her brother curiously.
“Do you mean,” she said slowly, “that we haven’t any money _at all_?”
He gave a short laugh.
“That’s about the size of it,” he admitted ruefully. “Actually, we’ve
about enough to carry us on for a few weeks, with care and
circumspection. But after that’s used up we shall have to fend for
ourselves—unless there are any lineal descendants of Elijah’s ravens
flying about!”
Shirley’s incredulous gaze passed bewilderedly from her brother’s face
to the glimpse of garden visible through the windows. Just within sight,
Tomkins, the ancient head gardener, was busily engaged in tying up some
rose trees, while Mugs, the wire-haired terrier, occupying a strategic
position behind him, was equally busy surreptitiously burying a bone in
the rose-bed’s sacred precincts. It all looked so accustomed, so
_ordinary_, that it seemed impossible to realize the cataclysm which had
suddenly changed the whole of life as far as she and her brother were
concerned.
A month ago they had been living what appeared to be a perfectly safe
and secure existence, the favoured niece and nephew of a devoted
bachelor uncle, surrounded by all those pleasant ways of living which
plenty of money can procure, and with the ultimate prospect, when the
time should eventually come for Nicholas Wyatt to be gathered to his
fathers, of being left in possession of a sum which would at least
maintain them both in independence for the rest of their lives.
More than that it had been out of Uncle Nick’s power to assure them. Fen
Wyatt itself, together with the monies which provided the big annual
income he enjoyed, was entailed, and at his death must go to Alan Wyatt,
son of his younger brother James. As long as that brother had lived, so
long had Nick quarrelled with him. As is not infrequently the case with
blood relations, the two men had nothing in common, and they had split
finally and completely on the subject of their sister’s marriage, Nick
approving whilst his brother fiercely disapproved the man of her
choice—James’s disapprobation being based upon the fact that the man in
question was painfully lacking in this world’s goods. And when at the
last the death of the younger put an end to the ceaseless warfare
between the brothers, the hostile sentiment had been carried on into the
next generation, and Nicholas and his nephew and heir, Alan Wyatt, had
had nothing to do with each other beyond the interchange of occasional
acrimonious letters relating to family and estate matters.
Meanwhile, Nicholas had concentrated his whole affections upon Bob and
Shirley, the children of his much-loved sister. The latter had been
suddenly and very tragically left a widow, and practically penniless, a
few weeks after the birth of her daughter, and thenceforward he had
charged himself with her entire welfare. His first proposal had been
that she and her children should come and live with him at Fen Wyatt,
but when she rejected this, with all a woman’s innate craving to have a
home of her own, he had established her in a house a few miles distant.
Never very strong, however, and brokenhearted by her husband’s death,
her grip on life had gradually and almost imperceptibly weakened, until
at last, at the end of two years, she quietly faded out of existence.
It was then that Nicholas showed that, just as in the case of his
brother death could not soften his ingrained hostility, so death had no
power to stem his devotion. Equally with his dislike, his affection also
carried itself into the next generation, and when his sister’s death
left her children entirely bereft, he had put into practice his original
idea and brought them to Fen Wyatt, together with the nurse who had seen
them both come into the world and had stood devotedly by their mother
throughout the tragedy which had broken her.
That had been eighteen years ago, when Bob was a sturdy youngster of
nine and Shirley seven years younger, and since then the brother and
sister had learned to look upon Fen Wyatt as so completely “home”—their
own home—that, now, the realization that it was no longer theirs but
their cousin’s, Alan Wyatt’s, that with the death of Nicholas they had
become merely interlopers, had descended upon them as a stunning blow.
Shirley had never associated the thought of death with Uncle Nick—big,
striding Uncle Nick, with his jolly, weather-beaten face and cheery
smile, riding hard and straight to hounds three times a week, driving
his fast sports car with unhesitating steadiness of nerve and judgment,
vital and gay and optimistic as many a far younger man. Twenty years
hence, perhaps, when fifty-five had translated itself into seventy-five.
But not yet—not yet. . . . And already it had happened. Uncle Nick was
dead, had been dead three weeks, and here she was sitting listening to
Bob while he enlightened her as to the precise circumstances in which
his death involved them. Added to the shock of his sudden passing and
the sick, aching misery which had succeeded it, the illimitable sense of
loss of which they were both so desperately conscious, there was to be
this new and acute consideration—a sordid counting up of pounds and
shillings, the necessity for facing the question of ways and means.
A rather wistful smile curved Shirley’s lips for a moment. How stricken
and self-reproachful Uncle Nick would be could he have known the
circumstances! Fortunately he didn’t know. It had always been his chief
desire to make secure the future of his sister’s children. He had a
certain small patrimony of his own, quite apart from the Fen Wyatt
monies, and his aim and object had been so to increase this during his
lifetime that it should be sufficient for their needs after he was gone.
“You’ll never be rich,” he used to say discontentedly. “There’ll not be
a twentieth of what that damned young rotter, Alan, will come in for.
But you’ll have enough to carry on in a little place that’s your own.
Bob knows enough about the management of land to run a small farm off
his own bat.”
Practically it had amounted to an obsession with him, this determination
to make them independent, and latterly he had speculated pretty heavily
with his small personal fortune in his endeavours to accomplish it. At
first he had been amazingly successful, and his capital had augmented
itself by leaps and bounds. Then the tide suddenly turned, and in a few
weeks he had lost it all. But he was still undaunted and optimistic.
Only the day before he died he had been full of fresh plans.
“We’ll economize a bit,” he declared, “and invest whatever I can save
out of the Fen Wyatt income. After all, the income’s mine to do what I
like with as long as I live, provided I keep the place up adequately.”
He beamed cheerily at niece and nephew. “There’s nothing to make a song
about. The luck was out and my castle’s tumbled down. But there’s plenty
of time to make a fresh start and build it up again. I’m not much more
than half-way through life, after all.”
But sometimes Fate doesn’t give a fresh start. Nick Wyatt didn’t get
one. Instead, he died that night, passing quietly in his sleep from this
world to the next, and Bob and Shirley were left alone to face the
music.
“I’m glad—glad he never knew,” said Shirley, speaking her thoughts
abruptly. “He would have hated it so for us.”
“We shall hate it pretty badly ourselves before long, I expect,”
rejoined her brother grimly. “You’ve not realized it yet. Neither have
I. That we’re practically penniless. . . . We shall begin to realize it
when we turn out of here.”
She glanced round the room and her eyes misted suddenly. The dearness of
it all! Dearness of books, their covers faded with much fingering, of
the little low stool on which she used to sit in front of the big fire,
yawning about the day’s sport with Uncle Nick when they had come home
together from a day with hounds; above all, dearness of the big,
old-fashioned arm-chair where he himself had always sat. Instinctively
she and Bob had avoided its use since he was no longer there to fill it.
“Yes, I suppose we shall have to go,” she said unevenly. “It doesn’t
seem real, does it? When—when do we go, Bob?”
“Well, Alan Wyatt’s been quite sporting over that. He wrote at once, you
remember, saying that there was no hurry. And now I’ve had another
letter from him.”
“Another? What about?”
Bob foraged in his pockets, finally producing the letter in question and
unfolding it.
“He says that of course he knows Uncle Nick’s death will make a great
difference to us and—and all that. And he suggests making us an
allowance—thinks it would be only fair in the circumstances.”
A swift flush dyed Shirley’s face scarlet.
“Oh, Bob——!” She broke off, then added quietly: “May I see the
letter?”
He handed it across to her in silence. There was a curious expression in
his eyes as he did so, half deprecating, half interrogative, as though
he wondered how she would regard its contents.
“. . . _Naturally_,” ran the small, somewhat pedantic script,
“_I am quite aware that my father and my Uncle Nicholas hated
each other cordially, and perhaps there was good reason for it.
Nor do I imagine that there is the least likelihood of anything
in the nature of friendship between ourselves. We have been too
long reared in an atmosphere of mutual hostility. But the fact
remains that we are branches of the same family, and for the
credit of that family I should prefer that you and your sister
were not dependent upon others for your livelihood. For this
reason, therefore, I propose to make you each an annual
allowance which would provide you with at least a livable
income._”
Here the letter branched off into details of amount and mode of payment,
concluding rather pompously:
“_And I trust that you will see your way to accepting this in
the spirit in which it is offered._”
Shirley read the letter in silence. Then she looked across at her
brother, and in her eyes there was the same interrogative, uncertain
expression that had been in his.
“It’s very unexpected, isn’t it?” she said at last. “And rather nice of
him—in the circumstances.”
“And it provides a way out,” he answered briefly.
“No.” She shook her head with decision. “It doesn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
A look of sudden anxiety, of apprehension, sprang into her face.
“Why, you couldn’t—we couldn’t possibly accept this,” she said swiftly.
“You think that, too, Bob? Oh, you must think that!”
“Must I? What’s your reason for saying we can’t accept it?”
“Uncle Nick is the reason. You know, and I know, that there is nothing
he would have hated more than for us to accept anything whatever from
the James Wyatt family. He would never have allowed it while he was
alive, and it wouldn’t seem straight or—or honourable to do the very
thing he would have loathed now he’s dead.”
Bob slipped off the arm of the chair on which he had been perched, and
stood up.
“Well said, old thing. Them’s exactly my sentiments—only I didn’t want
to express them till I knew how you felt about it.”
A little sigh of relief escaped between her lips.
“Then that’s all right,” she replied. “Do you know, for a moment you
quite frightened me, Bob. I thought”—slowly—“that you wanted to take
this wretched money.”
Bob’s eyes twinkled.
“I do,” he said. “I want it no end. I feel exactly like a donkey who
sees a bunch of carrots dangled in front of his nose—just out of
reach.”
“Well, as long as you _know_ they’re out of reach——”
“I’m afraid they are,” he admitted with a short sigh. “It’s a pretty
stiff temptation, though, Shirley. A livable income—just what Uncle
Nick always intended us to have—and we’ve only got to say ‘Yes, please’
for it. I suppose”—thoughtfully—“we are right in refusing it?”
“Right? Of course we’re right,” she answered impetuously. “Uncle Nick’s
been a perfect brick to us all our lives, and we can’t be so utterly
low-down as to have taken everything he’s always given us—and then
respond by taking the very thing of all others he would hate us to do.
Can you imagine what his feelings would be if he knew that we were
living on the charity—for that’s what it would amount to—of the James
Wyatt family. . . _choosing_ to live on it?”
Bob nodded.
“Yes, I can pretty well imagine,” he said gruffly.
“We couldn’t do it. It would be—disloyal, somehow. We owe everything in
the world to Uncle Nick, everything we’ve ever had.” Her voice shook a
little at the remembrance of how much of love and thought and kindness
had been comprehended in that “everything.”
“We can’t let him down over this,” she went on quietly. “You can’t let
down anyone who’s been so unutterably good to you. I should feel ashamed
all my life if we took this money.”
Bob lit a cigarette and stood smoking in silence for a while, staring
down into the fire. Inwardly he agreed heartily with every word his
sister had spoken. Scrupulously honourable himself, Nick Wyatt had
inculcated the same fineness of perception in these two for whose lives
he had made himself responsible—a fineness that carried loyalty and
honour to its uttermost limit. Nevertheless, Bob had all a man’s
practical sense of the value of money, added to which, as considerably
the elder of the two, he had a heavy feeling of responsibility regarding
his sister. And although her impulsive refusal to consider Alan Wyatt’s
proposal met with an instant response in his own heart, he could not but
realize that to turn down an offer of a livable income, in the
circumstances in which they found themselves, would be regarded by most
people as an act of quixotic folly.
Rapidly he envisaged the future. To refuse this offer meant that both he
and Shirley must find work of some kind. Later on he might be able to
earn enough to support them both, but he recognized that unless he had
phenomenal luck it was unlikely he would be able to do much more at the
outset than keep himself. And phenomenal luck rarely comes your way at
the moment when you particularly need it. At length, tossing his
cigarette half smoked into the fire, he turned back to his sister and
put the matter squarely before her, pointing out the advantages of Alan
Wyatt’s offer and painting the alternative future, should they decide to
refuse it, in no uncertain colours.
“After all,” he wound up, “we live in a material world and we’ve got to
look at the thing from a practical point of view. Most people would say
we were utter fools to refuse an offer which means sure and certain
bread-and-butter.”
But Shirley remained unmoved.
“I’d rather be a fool than a knave,” she returned composedly. “And that
particular bread-and-butter—bought with Alan Wyatt’s money—would choke
me. Every mouthful would be a sort of insult to Uncle Nick.”
He nodded assent.
“I know what you mean. Then the alternative is a job for each of us.”
“Well, _you_ won’t find any difficulty in getting one,” she answered,
with sisterly pride in this big brother of hers. “And even I must be of
some sort of use in the world. I know a bit about poultry-keeping and
dairy-work, and I can drive a car and speak French. There must be lots
of people who want that kind of thing.”
“Oh, lots,” agreed Bob.
Both were speaking in happy ignorance of the efficiency demands of the
present day, their viewpoint based on life as it had come to them with
every sharp edge and corner rounded off by the smoothing action of
money.
“Then write to-day and refuse the offer, Bob,” said Shirley. “I shall
feel much happier when we’ve put it right behind us.”
So that same evening a coolly courteous refusal was dispatched to Alan
Wyatt, and Shirley went to bed with a little warm glow of thankfulness
at her heart. She felt as though, had they accepted, they would have
been letting Uncle Nick down, and that was unthinkable. As she said to
Bob, when she kissed him good night:
“One must play the game by someone who has played it so splendidly by
us. I’m glad you refused, Bob.”
But there were days to come when they were to count to the last farthing
the unreckoned cost of “playing the game,” when Bob was to ask himself
bitterly if the price had not been too heavy a one to pay.
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