What's Bred in the Bone

  It was not until late in the afternoon that the manager had anything to report. It was a most unfortunate business, said he, but the man could not be found. It was the custom of the hotel on particularly busy evenings—and the occasion of a Court Ball meant a very busy evening with people who were attending and the much greater number who were not but who wished somehow to have a special celebration—to engage extra men, usually soldiers who were supplied by a Regimental Sergeant-Major who had a sideline in such things, to wear livery and adorn the corridors and public rooms, but not to perform any duty as servants. Through some inexplicable muddle—the Senator could not believe how difficult it was to keep perfect discipline everywhere on a great night—one of these had been charged to take the champagne to Mary-Jacobine, and as the men had been paid off when they left the hotel at three o’clock, it was now impossible to trace the culprit. Precisely what was it he had said or done which had given such offence? If the manager had known earlier he might have traced the man, but now, three months later, he greatly feared it was out of the question. He did not know what to suggest in the way of amends, but he would certainly apologize to the young lady on behalf of his hotel. He had indeed already ventured to send some flowers to her room.

  The Senator did not wish to be explicit about the insult. He had been defeated, and as men who are defeated often do, he made a great tale about it to his wife.

  Marie-Louise was not a weeper, but a woman of sterling common sense, so far as her beliefs and experience allowed.

  “We mustn’t lose our heads,” said she. “Perhaps nothing will come of it after all.”

  She set to work to see what could be done to secure a satisfactory outcome. The notion of abortion never entered her head, for it was utterly repugnant to her faith, but in rural Quebec it was not unknown for a pregnancy to fail to reach its term. In any case, a pregnant girl should be in robust health. She adjusted her mind accordingly. Her daughter had been suffering from digestive troubles, and obviously it was too rich a diet that had disturbed her. A good dose of castor oil would put that right. She gave the protesting Mary-Jacobine, who was not now in a position to make too much trouble about anything, a dose that would have astonished a lumberjack. It took the girl a week to recover, but the only effect was to leave her with a look resembling that favourite picture of the period called The Soul’s Awakening, in which a pale maiden gazes to Heaven with glowing eyes.

  Very well. A stubborn case. Next, for her own good, Marie-Louise demanded that her daughter jump to the floor from a table, several times. The only result was exhaustion and despair in the victim. But Marie-Louise had not finished her schemes to give nature a necessary nudge. This time it was not champagne, but a substantial glass of gin—as much as the mother considered to be safe—and a very hot bath.

  Mary-Jacobine was even more unwell than after the castor oil, but the tedious little intruder did not budge. All the natural aids Marie-Louise knew were now exhausted, and she confessed to her husband that she was beaten, and something would have to be done.

  For a miserable week, the parents argued about the possibilities. They could take their daughter to the Continent, wait out the pregnancy, and put the infant in a foundling hospital. They did not like the idea, and after talking with Mary-Jacobine they liked it even less. Everything that lay deep in their composition—the convent, the brother and sister in religious orders, a simple sense of decency—spoke powerfully against it.

  There was, of course, marriage.

  They thought highly of marriage and it was the only means possible of salvaging morality as they understood it. Could a marriage be achieved?

  The Senator was a man for direct action and he knew something of how the world wagged. This time it was he who asked Major Cornish to luncheon, at the Savoy.

  Luncheon in a fashionable dining-room, even outside the Season, when really there is not a soul in London, is not the best place for such delicate negotiations, but the Senator said what he had to say, and asked Major Cornish if, under the circumstances, he was still of the same mind? The Major, coolly eating an ice, said that he would like to think about it, and arranged another luncheon with the Senator for a week from that day.

  When the meeting came, the Major looked as if he had grown a few inches. He said that yes, he was prepared to maintain his offer of marriage, but the Senator would understand that things were not altogether as they had been. It was distasteful to talk of one’s people, said he, but the Senator should be aware that the Cornishes were an old county family of, understandably, Cornwall. The family seat, Chegwidden (he pronounced it Cheggin, and explained that it meant, in the old Cornish tongue, the White House), was close to Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur, and Cornishes had lived there (the memory of man going not to the contrary) so long that they had probably counted King Arthur as a neighbour. When Cornwall had become a royal duchy, several Cornishes at various times served the Dukes of Cornwall as Vice-Warden of the Stannaries. It was a proud record, and an association with such a family might be accounted an honour.

  The Major was, however, a younger son, and the family was not a rich one, so it was unlikely that he would ever live at Chegwidden himself, as its master. But he was a Cornish of Chegwidden, all the same. He had served his country honourably as a soldier, but now that he was about to leave the Army, he was undeniably hard up.

  The Senator was not utterly unprepared for this, and hastened to say that an alliance with his daughter would certainly include a settlement that would put her husband’s mind at ease about the future.

  Very generously put, said the Major, but he wanted it to be clear that his suit to Mary-Jacobine was not prompted by any mercenary motive. The Senator would understand that the personal detail he had confided when last they talked could not be a matter of total indifference. Nevertheless he loved her dearly, and over the week past he had come to love her even more, because she had suffered the gravest misfortune that could befall an innocent girl. The Major touched lightly and tactfully upon Our Lord’s behaviour toward the woman taken in adultery, and the Senator could not repress a tear or two at this show of fine religious feeling, though he had never thought of Christ as an Englishman with a monocle and an improbable moustache. Here was chivalry, and from the Wooden Soldier! Oh, God be praised!

  It would be as well, said the Major, for them to understand one another thoroughly. This surprised the Senator, who thought an understanding had been reached. But at this point the Major drew from an inner pocket two pieces of paper which he handed across the table, saying: “These few matters should be understood between us, and if you will be good enough to sign both copies of this agreement I shall ask Mary-Jacobine to marry me tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. Take your time in reading it over. It is not complicated, but I assure you I have thought carefully about what would best work toward our married happiness, and I should not like to abridge that memorandum in any way.”

  He’s as cool as a cucumber, thought the Senator, but he did not find himself particularly cool after he had read what was written, in a very fine hand, on the document—for it could not be otherwise described.

  (1) It will be clear that I do not wish to enter upon marriage burdened with debt, and I have some outstanding obligations of the sort that accrue to my position in the Army and in Society. Therefore immediately upon my acceptance by Mary-Jacobine, I should be obliged to receive a draft for ten thousand pounds (£10,000).

  (2) I estimate that the expenses of marriage, wedding-tour, and subsequent travel to Canada will not be less than twenty-five thousand pounds (£25,000) for which I should be pleased to accept a draft before the wedding ceremony.

  (3) My experience with men, and also with finance, as Adjutant of my regiment, appears to me to fit me for a position in industry in the New World, to which I propose that my wife and myself should emigrate after our wedding tour and the birth of the first child. As we must live in a manner congruous with your position and my own, and not below that to which Ma
ry-Jacobine has been accustomed, I propose a settlement upon her of one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds (£125,000) to be invested or otherwise disposed on my sole authority. In addition, we shall require a dwelling suitable for your daughter and son-in-law and any family we may have, and I think it best that this be a newly-built house, the construction and planning of which I shall be glad to oversee, submitting all bills for building and furnishing to you for settlement. I shall be ready to discuss the position I shall take in your business enterprises and the salary attaching thereto at your convenience.

  (4) I undertake to bring up and show every proper care for any children attaching to the union, with the proviso that they be reared in the Protestant faith as evinced in the Church of England.

  (signed)

  FRANCIS CHEGWIDDEN CORNISH

  (agreed)

  For a time the Senator breathed deeply and audibly through his nose. Should he tear the agreement up and hit the Wooden Soldier on the head with a bottle? He had expected to be generous, but to have his generosity prescribed for him, and in such figures, hit him very hard in his Highland pride. To be tied down to a deal! The Wooden Soldier was sipping a glass of claret with total self-composure; the light falling on his eye-glass gave him the air of a miniature Cyclops, about to eat a sheep.

  “There are two copies, of course,” he murmured; “one for you and one for me.”

  Still the Senator glared. He could afford the money, though it had never occurred to him that he might pay his son-in-law’s debts acquired before marriage. It was Number Four that stuck in his craw. Protestants! His grandchildren Protestants! He had no quarrel with Protestants so long as religion did not become an issue; let them be wrong, let them even be damned, if that was their perverse desire. But his grandchildren—and then he bethought himself of that small, obstinate grandchild who had precipitated this whole hateful affair. If Mary-Jacobine did not marry the Wooden Soldier, then who? Where in the time could he find a Catholic who would take her—a Catholic as outwardly suitable, if not really desirable, as Major Cornish?

  “Anything troubling you?” said the Major. “I worked out the financial terms as exactly as I could, and I don’t think I could bring any of the figures down.”

  The figures! How crass these English could be! To hell with the figures! But Number Four—

  “This fourth item,” said the Senator in a voice that trembled a little; “it will not be easy to persuade my wife or my daughter that it is desirable or necessary.”

  “Not negotiable, I’m afraid,” said the Major. “All the Cornishes have been C. of E. since Reformation times.”

  Like his daughter, the Senator was subject to sudden changes of mood. His fury left him naked and weak. What use to struggle? He was beaten.

  He took out his fountain pen and signed the prettily written paper—both copies—in his bold, poorly formed hand.

  “Thank you,” said the Major. “I’m glad we understand each other. If you would ask Mary-Jacobine to be at home tomorrow at eleven o’clock, I shall have the honour of calling upon the ladies.”

  SURELY THE SENATOR might have argued a little more, said the Daimon Maimas. He buckled under very quickly, wouldn’t you say?

  —No, I wouldn’t say that, said the Lesser Zadkiel. It was the temperament of the man, you see, as it was of his daughter. They were so good when they were cool but quite out of their element when they were overcome with feeling. Not that they didn’t feel, or couldn’t feel; not a bit. The trouble was that they felt so powerfully it utterly overset them and brought them sometimes near to panic. A Celtic temperament; a difficult heritage. Often they made terrible mistakes when an intelligent approach to feeling was called for. You know what happened? In later life the Senator became something of a philosopher, which is a great escape from feeling, and Mary-Jim acquired the trick of banishing or trivializing anything that was troublesome.

  —What about the scene in the Cecil Hotel? said the Daimon.

  —Oh, that was a real Celtic hullabaloo. Mary-Jacobine wept and vowed that she’d rather die than marry the Wooden Soldier, and after half an hour of that she caved in and said yes, she’d do it. Her parents didn’t browbeat her; it was the situation itself that overwhelmed her. It was panic and despair.

  —Yes, indeed, said the Daimon. I had to deal with the same temperament in Francis, and sometimes it was hard work. He never became either a philosopher or a trivializer; he faced his troubles head-on. It was a lucky thing for him that he had me at his elbow, more than once.

  —Yes, that’s what they call it; luck. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to observe the parents. It would be quite wrong to say that they sold their daughter to preserve their respectability; they wouldn’t have done that. But you have to understand what respectability meant to those people. It was much more than just What will the neighbours think? It was How will the poor child face the world with such a clouded beginning in life? It was What can I do to save my darling from hurt? It was emotion, disguising itself as reason, that governed the Senator. Marie-Louise had a good hard Norman head on her shoulders, but the Church had relieved her of any necessity to use it for thinking. She had done the best she knew, and failed. They faced real wretchedness in their terms. It wasn’t worry about London, which wouldn’t have cared even if it knew. It was Blairlogie. How Blairlogie would have gloried in the fall of a virgin McRory! How she would have felt the whip, all her life!

  IN BLAIRLOGIE, Aunt Mary-Ben McRory was, in her own phrase, “holding the fort” while her brother and his wife and dear Mary-Jim disported themselves in the fashionable world. She did not mind. She knew she had been born to serve, and she was willing to serve, and if any hint of longing or jealousy entered her mind she prayed it away at once. She was a mighty prayer. In her bedroom she had a little prie-dieu—padded but not overpadded on the kneeling portion—before a fine oleograph of a Murillo Virgin, and the worn upholstery on the kneeler showed how much it was used.

  When she was not much older than Mary-Jim was now, God had made it plain to her that her portion was to serve. Dr. J.A. and many other people had referred to it as a freak accident, but she knew it was God’s way of defining her role in life.

  It had happened at a Garden Party in Government House—or Rideau Hall as it was familiarly called—in Ottawa. That was during Lord Dufferin’s last months as Governor-General and Hamish had been asked, as a rising young man and already a political figure, to a Garden Party in late July. Being still unmarried he had taken his sister Mary-Ben, and for the occasion she had bought a splendid hat covered with black and white plumes. How romantic it had been! Delighting in the romanticism, she had wandered into the shrubbery, her mind on the romantic figure of Vergile Tisserant, who had been increasingly attentive, when suddenly—

  It is now part of ornithological history, and even has its footnote in medical history, that at that time the Great Horned Owl—a species referred to by the Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton as “winged tigers among the most pronounced and savage birds of prey”—had been making occasional forays into the more inhabited parts of the country, and now and then had swooped upon humans, and especially upon ladies who were wearing those fashionable black and white hats; for to the owls they looked like skunks. As Mary-Ben strolled musing in the vice-regal shrubbery, an owl swooped, seized the hat, and soared away with it—and with a considerable portion of the wearer’s scalp in its terrible talons.

  For weeks she had lain in hospital, her head swathed in bandages and her spirit in ruins. How had those girls in mythology survived the fearful, birdlike descents of Jove? But of course they had been singled out for a special destiny, hadn’t they? Had she been so chosen by the God of her own faith, and if so, for what? She found out when, little by little, the bandages were removed and her ravaged skull, with only a few locks of hair still remaining, was revealed. A wig was out of the question, for her scalp was now too tender to endure it. She had to make do with little caps, like turbans, of the softest materia
ls. She never made any attempt to ornament the little caps, for she knew what they were. They were the head-dress of servitude, and she had been marked to serve. So—serve she did, in her brother’s household, with the little caps protecting her little skull. Not even Dr. J.A. had been so harsh as to mention that the swooping god had mistaken her for a skunk.

  She had been keeper of her brother’s household for three years before his marriage to Marie-Louise Thibodeau and there was never any question that she should make way for the wife; no, indeed, she served her, and kept tedious duties from her, and when the first child was born she was invaluable, even suggesting the romantic name by which she was known. Marie-Louise, who found the social obligations of a rising man’s wife wholly agreeable, was glad enough to let Mary-Ben—who was known even more often as Aunt, as soon as Mary-Jim began to speak—see to the household.

  Besides, Aunt had Taste, which can be a form of power in those who possess it.

  Aunt’s taste and Aunt’s judgement came into full sway when Hamish decided to build a fine house, and move up to the hill which dominated the southern horizon of Blairlogie. Marie-Louise had no ideas about houses, but Aunt had enough for three, and it was she who told the builder what was wanted, and drew little pictures, and gently domineered over the workmen. It was a brick house, of course, and not just your common brick but a finely surfaced rosy brick, as impenetrable as tile. Because Hamish was in lumber, the interior finish had all the latest things in turned wood, matched wood, wooden lace worked on the band-saw, and, in the room called the library, wooden panelling, not as it is generally known, but in octagons of what looked like hardwood flooring, set on the bias. Hideous, but of course very hard for the workmen to do, said Dr. J.A., who always had an opinion, and usually a disagreeable one.