Bealby; A Holiday — The Seeking of Bealby part one
§ 1 On the same Monday evening that witnessed Bealby’s first experience of the theatre, Mr. Mergleson, the house steward of Shonts, walked slowly and thoughtfully across the corner of the park between the laundry and the gardens.
His face was much recovered from the accidents of his collision with the Lord Chancellor, resort to raw meat in the kitchen had checked the development of his injuries, and only a few contusions in the side of his face were more than faintly traceable.
And suffering had on the whole rather ennobled than depressed his bearing.
He had a black eye, but it was not, he felt, a common black eye.
It came from high quarters and through no fault of Mr. Mergleson’s own.
He carried it well.
It was a fruit of duty rather than the outcome of wanton pleasure-seeking or misdirected passion.
He found Mr. Darling in profound meditation over some peach trees against the wall.
They were not doing so well as they ought to do and Mr. Darling was engaged in wondering why.
“Good evening, Mr. Darling,” said Mr. Mergleson.
Mr. Darling ceased rather slowly to wonder and turned to his friend.
“Good evening, Mr. Mergleson,” he said.
“I don’t quite like the look of these here peaches, _blowed_ if I do.
” Mr. Mergleson glanced at the peaches, and then came to the matter that was nearest his heart.
“You ’aven’t I suppose seen anything of your stepson these last two days, Mr. Darling?
” “Naturally _not_,” said Mr. Darling, putting his head on one side and regarding his interlocutor.
“Naturally not,—I’ve left that to you, Mr. Mergleson.
” “Well, that’s what’s awkward,” said Mr. Mergleson, and then, with a forced easiness, “You see, I ain’t seen ’im either.
” “No!
” “No. I lost sight of ’im—” Mr. Mergleson appeared to reflect—“late on Sattiday night.
” “’Ow’s that, Mr. Mergleson?
” Mr. Mergleson considered the difficulties of lucid explanation.
“We missed ’im,” said Mr. Mergleson simply, regarding the well-weeded garden path with a calculating expression and then lifting his eyes to Mr. Darling’s with an air of great candour.
“And we continue to miss him.
” “_Well!
_” said Mr. Darling.
“That’s rum.
” “Yes,” said Mr. Mergleson.
“It’s decidedly rum,” said Mr. Darling.
“We thought ’e might be ’iding from ’is work.
Or cut off ’ome.
” “You didn’t send down to ask.
” “We was too busy with the week-end people.
On the ’ole we thought if ’e _’ad_ cut ’ome, on the ’ole, ’e wasn’t a very serious loss.
’E got in the way at times....
And there was one or two things ’appened—...
Now that they’re all gone and ’e ’asn’t turned up—Well, I came down, Mr. Darling, to arst you.
Where’s ’e gone?
” “’E ain’t come ’ere,” said Mr. Darling surveying the garden.
“I ’arf expected ’e might and I ’arf expected ’e mightn’t,” said Mr. Mergleson with the air of one who had anticipated Mr. Darling’s answer but hesitated to admit as much.
The two gentlemen paused for some seconds and regarded each other searchingly.
“Where’s ’e _got_ to?
” said Mr. Darling.
“Well,” said Mr. Mergleson, putting his hands where the tails of his short jacket would have been if it hadn’t been short, and looking extraordinarily like a parrot in its more thoughtful moods, “to tell you the truth, Mr. Darling, I’ve ’ad a dream about ’im—and it worries me.
I
got a sort of ideer of ’im as being in one of them secret passages.
’Iding away.
There was a guest, well, I say it with all respec’ but _anyone_ might ’ave ’id from ’im....
S’morning soon as the week-end ’ad cleared up and gone ’ome, me and Thomas went through them passages as well as we could.
Not a trace of ’im.
But I still got that ideer.
’E was a wriggling, climbing,—enterprising sort of boy.
” “I’ve checked ’im for it once or twice,” said Mr. Darling with the red light of fierce memories gleaming for a moment in his eyes.
“’E might even,” said Mr. Mergleson, “well, very likely ’ave got ’imself jammed in one of them secret passages....
” “Jammed,” repeated Mr. Darling.
“Well—got ’imself somewhere where ’e can’t get out.
I’ve ’eard tell there’s walled-up dungeons.
” “They say,” said Mr. Darling, “there’s underground passages to the Abbey ruins—three good mile away.
” “Orkward,” said Mr. Mergleson....
“Drat ’is eyes!
” said Mr. Darling, scratching his head.
“What does ’e mean by it?
” “We can’t leave ’im there,” said Mr. Mergleson.
“I knowed a young devil once what crawled up a culvert,” said Mr. Darling.
“’Is father ’ad to dig ’im out like a fox....
Lord!
’ow ’e walloped ’im for it.
” “Mistake to ’ave a boy in so young,” said Mr. Mergleson.
“It’s all very awkward,” said Mr. Darling, surveying every aspect of the case.
“You see—.
’Is mother sets a most estrordinary value on ’im.
Most estrordinary.
” “I don’t know whether she oughtn’t to be told,” said Mr. Mergleson.
“I was thinking of that.
” Mr. Darling was not the sort of man to meet trouble half-way.
He shook his head at that.
“Not yet, Mr. Mergleson.
I don’t think yet.
Not until everything’s been tried.
I don’t think there’s any need to give her needless distress,—none whatever.
If you don’t mind I think I’ll come up to-night—nineish say—and ’ave a talk to you and Thomas about it—a quiet talk.
Best to begin with a _quiet_ talk.
It’s a dashed rum go, and me and you we got to think it out a bit.
” “That’s what _I_ think,” said Mr. Mergleson with unconcealed relief at Mr. Darling’s friendliness.
“That’s exactly the light, Mr. Darling, in which it appears to me.
Because, you see—if ’e’s all right and in the ’ouse, why doesn’t ’e come for ’is vittels?
” § 2 In the pantry that evening the question of telling someone was discussed further.
It was discussed over a number of glasses of Mr. Mergleson’s beer.
For, following a sound tradition, Mr. Mergleson brewed at Shonts, and sometimes he brewed well and sometimes he brewed ill, and sometimes he brewed weak and sometimes he brewed strong, and there was no monotony in the cups at Shonts.
This was sturdy stuff and suited Mr. Darling’s mood, and ever and again with an author’s natural weakness and an affectation of abstraction Mr. Mergleson took the jug out empty and brought it back foaming.
Henry, the second footman, was disposed to a forced hopefulness so as not to spoil the evening, but Thomas was sympathetic and distressed.
The red-haired youth made cigarettes with a little machine, licked them and offered them to the others, saying little, as became him.
Etiquette deprived him of an uninvited beer, and Mr. Mergleson’s inattention completed what etiquette began.
“I can’t bear to think of the poor little beggar, stuck head foremost into some cobwebby cranny, blowed if I can,” said Thomas, getting help from the jug.
“He was an interesting kid,” said Thomas in a tone that was frankly obituary.
“He didn’t like his work, one could see that, but he was lively—and I tried to help him along all I could, when I wasn’t too busy myself.
” “There was something sensitive about him,” said Thomas.
Mr. Mergleson sat with his arms loosely thrown out over the table.
“What we got to do is to tell someone,” he said, “I don’t see ’ow I can put off telling ’er ladyship—after to-morrow morning.
And then—’eaven ’elp us!
” “’Course _I_ got to tell _my_ missis,” said Mr. Darling, and poured in a preoccupied way, some running over.
“We’ll go through them passages again now before we go to bed,” said Mr. Mergleson, “far as we can.
But there’s ’oles and chinks on’y a boy could get through.
” “_I_ got to tell the missis,” said Mr. Darling.
“That’s what’s worrying me....
” As the evening wore on there was a tendency on the part of Mr. Darling to make this the refrain of his discourse.
He sought advice.
“’Ow’d you tell the missis?
” he asked Mr. Mergleson, and emptied a glass to control his impatience before Mr. Mergleson replied.
“I shall tell ’er ladyship, just simply, the fact.
I shall say, your ladyship, here’s my boy gone and we don’t know where.
And as she arsts me questions so shall I give particulars.
” Mr. Darling reflected and then shook his head slowly.
“’Ow’d _ju_ tell the missis?
” he asked Thomas.
“Glad I haven’t got to,” said Thomas.
“_Poor_ little beggar.
” “Yes, but ’ow _would_ you tell ’er?
” Mr. Darling said, varying the accent very carefully.
“I’d go to ’er and I’d pat her back and I’d say, ‘bear up,’ see, and when she asked what for, I’d just tell her what for—gradual like.
” “You don’t know the missis,” said Mr. Darling.
“Henry, ’ow’d _ju_ tell ’er?
” “Let ’er find out,” said Henry.
“Wimmin do.
” Mr. Darling reflected, and decided that too was unworkable.
“’Ow’d _you_?
” he asked with an air of desperation of the red-haired youth.
The red-haired youth remained for a moment with his tongue extended, licking the gum of a cigarette paper, and his eyes on Mr. Darling.
Then he finished the cigarette slowly, giving his mind very carefully to the question he had been honoured with.
“I think,” he said, in a low serious voice, “I should say, just simply, Mary—or Susan—or whatever her name is.
” “Tilda,” supplied Mr. Darling.
“‘Tilda,’ I should say.
‘The Lord gave and the Lord ’ath taken away.
Tilda!
—’e’s gone.
’ Somethin’ like that.
” The red-haired boy cleared his throat.
He was rather touched by his own simple eloquence.
Mr. Darling reflected on this with profound satisfaction for some moments.
Then he broke out almost querulously, “Yes, but brast him!
—_where’s_ ’e gone?
” “Anyhow,” said Mr. Darling, “I ain’t going to tell ’er, not till the morning.
I ain’t going to lose my night’s rest if I _have_ lost my stepson.
Nohow.
Mr. Mergleson, I _must_ say, I don’t think I ever _’ave_ tasted better beer.
Never.
It’s—it’s famous beer.
” He had some more....
On his way back through the moonlight to the gardens Mr. Darling was still unsettled as to the exact way of breaking things to his wife.
He had come out from the house a little ruffled because of Mr. Mergleson’s opposition to a rather good idea of his that he should go about the house and “holler for ’im a bit.
He’d know my voice, you see.
Ladyship wouldn’t mind.
Very likely ’sleep by now.
” But the moonlight dispelled his irritation.
How was he to tell his wife?
He tried various methods to the listening moon.
There was for example the off-hand newsy way.
“You know tha’ boy yours?
” Then a pause for the reply.
Then, “’E’s toley dis’peared.
” Only there are difficulties about the word totally.
Or the distressed impersonal manner.
“Dre’fle thing happen’d. Dre’fle thing.
Tha’ poo’ lill’ chap, Artie—toley dis’peared.
” Totally again.
Or the personal intimate note.
“Dunno wha’ you’ll say t’me, Tilda, when you hear what-togottasay.
Thur’ly bad news.
Seems they los’ our Artie up there—clean los’ ’im.
Can’t fine ’im nowhere tall.
” Or the authoritative kindly.
“Tilda—you go’ control yourself.
Go’ show whad you made of.
Our boy—’e’s—hic—_los’_.
” Then he addressed the park at large with a sudden despair.
“Don’ care wha’ I say, she’ll blame it on to me.
I _know_ ’er!
” After that the enormous pathos of the situation got hold of him.
“Poor lill’ chap,” he said.
“Poor lill’ fell’,” and shed a few natural tears.
“Loved ’im jessis mione son.
” As the circumambient night made no reply he repeated the remark in a louder, almost domineering tone....
He spent some time trying to climb the garden wall because the door did not seem to be in the usual place.
(Have to enquire about that in the morning.
Difficult to see everything is all right when one is so bereaved).
But finally he came on the door round a corner.
He told his wife merely that he intended to have a peaceful night, and took off his boots in a defiant and intermittent manner.
The morning would be soon enough.
She looked at him pretty hard, and he looked at her ever and again, but she never made a guess at it.
Bed.
§ 3 So soon as the week-enders had dispersed and Sir Peter had gone off to London to attend to various matters affecting the peptonizing of milk and the distribution of baby soothers about the habitable globe, Lady Laxton went back to bed and remained in bed until midday on Tuesday.
Nothing short of complete rest and the utmost kindness from her maid would, she felt, save her from a nervous breakdown of the most serious description.
The festival had been stormy to the end.
Sir Peter’s ill-advised attempts to deprive Lord Moggeridge of alcohol had led to a painful struggle at lunch, and this had been followed by a still more unpleasant scene between host and guest in the afternoon.
“This is an occasion for tact,” Sir Peter had said and had gone off to tackle the Lord Chancellor, leaving his wife to the direst, best founded apprehensions.
For Sir Peter’s tact was a thing by itself, a mixture of misconception, recrimination and familiarity that was rarely well received....
She had had to explain to the Sunday dinner party that his lordship had been called away suddenly.
“Something connected with the Great Seal,” Lady Laxton had whispered in a discreet mysterious whisper.
One or two simple hearers were left with the persuasion that the Great Seal had been taken suddenly unwell—and probably in a slightly indelicate manner.
Thomas had to paint Mergleson’s eye with grease-paint left over from some private theatricals.
It had been a patched-up affair altogether, and before she retired to bed that night Lady Laxton had given way to her accumulated tensions and wept.
There was no reason whatever why to wind up the day Sir Peter should have stayed in her room for an hour saying what he thought of Lord Moggeridge.
She felt she knew quite well enough what he thought of Lord Moggeridge, and on these occasions he always used a number of words that she did her best to believe, as a delicately brought up woman, were unfamiliar to her ears....
So on Monday, as soon as the guests had gone, she went to bed again and stayed there, trying as a good woman should to prevent herself thinking of what the neighbours could be thinking—and saying—of the whole affair, by studying a new and very circumstantial pamphlet by Bishop Fowle on social evils, turning over the moving illustrations of some recent antivivisection literature and re-reading the accounts in the morning papers of a colliery disaster in the north of England.
To such women as Lady Laxton, brought up in an atmosphere of refinement that is almost colourless, and living a life troubled only by small social conflicts and the minor violence of Sir Peter, blameless to the point of complete uneventfulness, and secure and comfortable to the point of tedium, there is something amounting to fascination in the wickedness and sufferings of more normally situated people, there is a real attraction and solace in the thought of pain and stress, and as her access to any other accounts of vice and suffering was restricted she kept herself closely in touch with the more explicit literature of the various movements for human moralization that distinguish our age, and responded eagerly and generously to such painful catastrophes as enliven it.
The counterfoils of her cheque book witnessed to her gratitude for these vicarious sensations.
She figured herself to herself in her day dreams as a calm and white and shining intervention checking and reproving amusements of an undesirable nature, and earning the tearful blessings of the mangled by-products of industrial enterprise.
There is a curious craving for entire reality in the feminine composition, and there were times when in spite of these feasts of particulars, she wished she could come just a little nearer to the heady dreadfulnesses of life than simply writing a cheque against it.
She would have liked to have actually _seen_ the votaries of evil blench and repent before her contributions, to have, herself, unstrapped and revived and pitied some doomed and chloroformed victim of the so-called “scientist,” to have herself participated in the stretcher and the hospital and humanity made marvellous by enlistment under the red-cross badge.
But Sir Peter’s ideals of womanhood were higher than his language, and he would not let her soil her refinement with any vision of the pain and evil in the world.
“Sort of woman they want up there is a Trained Nurse,” he used to say when she broached the possibility of _going_ to some famine or disaster.
“_You_ don’t want to go prying, old girl....
” She suffered, she felt, from repressed heroism.
If ever she was to shine in disaster that disaster, she felt, must come to her, she might not go to meet it, and so you realize how deeply it stirred her, how it brightened her and uplifted her to learn from Mr. Mergleson’s halting statements that perhaps, that probably, that almost certainly, a painful and tragical thing was happening even now within the walls of Shonts, that there was urgent necessity for action—if anguish was to be witnessed before it had ended, and life saved.
She clasped her hands; she surveyed her large servitor with agonized green-grey eyes.
“Something must be done at once,” she said.
“Everything possible must be done.
Poor little Mite!
” “Of course, my lady, ’e _may_ ’ave run away!
” “Oh no!
” she cried, “he hasn’t run away.
He hasn’t run away.
How can you be so _wicked_, Mergleson.
Of course he hasn’t run away.
He’s there now.
And it’s too dreadful.
” She became suddenly very firm and masterful.
The morning’s colliery tragedy inspired her imagination.
“We must get pick-axes,” she said.
“We must organize search parties.
Not a moment is to be lost, Mergleson—not a moment....
Get the men in off the roads.
Get everyone you can....
” And not a moment was lost.
The road men were actually at work in Shonts before their proper dinner-hour was over.
They did quite a lot of things that afternoon.
Every passage attainable from the dining-room opening was explored, and where these passages gave off chinks and crannies they were opened up with a vigour which Lady Laxton had greatly stimulated by an encouraging presence and liberal doses of whisky.
Through their efforts a fine new opening was made into the library from the wall near the window, a hole big enough for a man to fall through, because one did, and a great piece of stonework was thrown down from the Queen Elizabeth tower, exposing the upper portion of the secret passage to the light of day.
Lady Laxton herself and the head housemaid went round the panelling with a hammer and a chisel, and called out “Are you there?
” and attempted an opening wherever it sounded hollow.
The sweep was sent for to go up the old chimneys outside the present flues.
Meanwhile Mr. Darling had been set with several of his men to dig for, discover, pick up and lay open the underground passage or disused drain, whichever it was, that was known to run from the corner of the laundry towards the old ice-house, and that was supposed to reach to the abbey ruins.
After some bold exploratory excavations this channel was located and a report sent at once to Lady Laxton.
It was this and the new and alarming scar on the Queen Elizabeth tower that brought Mr. Beaulieu Plummer post-haste from the estate office up to the house.
Mr. Beaulieu Plummer was the Marquis of Cranberry’s estate agent, a man of great natural tact, and charged among other duties with the task of seeing that the Laxtons did not make away with Shonts during the period of their tenancy.
He was a sound compact little man, rarely out of extreme riding breeches and gaiters, and he wore glasses, that now glittered with astonishment as he approached Lady Laxton and her band of spade workers.
At his approach Mr. Darling attempted to become invisible, but he was unable to do so.
“Lady Laxton,” Mr. Beaulieu Plummer appealed, “may I ask—?
” “Oh Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, I’m so _glad_ you’ve come.
A little boy—suffocating!
I can hardly _bear_ it.
” “Suffocating!
” cried Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, “_where_?
” and was in a confused manner told.
He asked a number of questions that Lady Laxton found very tiresome.
But how did she _know_ the boy was in the secret passage?
Of course she knew; was it likely she would do all this if she didn’t know?
But mightn’t he have run away?
How could he when he was in the secret passages?
But why not first scour the countryside?
By which time he would be smothered and starved and dead!...
They parted with a mutual loss of esteem, and Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, looking very serious indeed, ran as fast as he could straight to the village telegraph-office.
Or to be more exact, he walked until he thought himself out of sight of Lady Laxton and then he took to his heels and ran.
He sat for some time in the parlour post office spoiling telegraph forms, and composing telegrams to Sir Peter Laxton and Lord Cranberry.
He got these off at last, and then drawn by an irresistible fascination went back to the park and watched from afar the signs of fresh activities on the part of Lady Laxton.
He saw men coming from the direction of the stables with large rakes.
With these they dragged the ornamental waters.
Then a man with a pick-axe appeared against the skyline and crossed the roof in the direction of the clock tower, bound upon some unknown but probably highly destructive mission.
Then he saw Lady Laxton going off to the gardens.
She was going to console Mrs. Darling in her trouble.
This she did through nearly an hour and a half.
And on the whole it seemed well to Mr. Beaulieu Plummer that so she should be occupied....
It was striking five when a telegraph boy on a bicycle came up from the village with a telegram from Sir Peter Laxton.
“Stop all proceedings absolutely,” it said, “until I get to you.
” Lady Laxton’s lips tightened at the message.
She was back from much weeping with Mrs. Darling and altogether finely strung.
Here she felt was one of those supreme occasions when a woman must assert herself.
“A matter of life or death,” she wired in reply, and to show herself how completely she overrode such dictation as this she sent Mr. Mergleson down to the village public-house with orders to engage anyone he could find there for an evening’s work on an extraordinarily liberal overtime scale.
After taking this step the spirit of Lady Laxton quailed.
She went and sat in her own room and quivered.
She quivered but she clenched her delicate fist.
She would go through with it, come what might, she would go on with the excavation all night if necessary, but at the same time she began a little to regret that she had not taken earlier steps to demonstrate the improbability of Bealby having simply run away.
She set to work to repair this omission.
She wrote off to the Superintendent of Police in the neighbouring town, to the nearest police magistrate, and then on the off chance to various of her week-end guests, including Captain Douglas.
If it was true that he had organized the annoyance of the Lord Chancellor (and though she still rejected that view she did now begin to regard it as a permissible hypothesis), then he might also know something about the mystery of this boy’s disappearance.
Each letter she wrote she wrote with greater fatigue and haste than its predecessor and more illegibly.
Sir Peter arrived long after dark.
He cut across the corner of the park to save time, and fell into one of the trenches that Mr. Darling had opened.
This added greatly to the _éclat_ with which he came into the hall.
Lady Laxton withstood him for five minutes and then returned abruptly to her bedroom and locked herself in, leaving the control of the operations in his hands....
“If he’s not in the house,” said Sir Peter, “all this is thunderin’ foolery, and if he’s in the house he’s dead.
If he’s dead he’ll smell in a bit and then’ll be the time to look for him.
Somethin’ to go upon instead of all this blind hacking the place about.
No wonder they’re threatenin’ proceedings....
” § 4 Upon Captain Douglas Lady Laxton’s letter was destined to have a very distracting effect.
Because, as he came to think it over, as he came to put her partly illegible allusions to secret passages and a missing boy side by side with his memories of Lord Moggeridge’s accusations and the general mystery of his expulsion from Shonts, it became more and more evident to him that he had here something remarkably like a clue, something that might serve to lift the black suspicion of irreverence and levity from his military reputation.
And he had already got to the point of suggesting to Miss Philips that he ought to follow up and secure Bealby forthwith, before ever they came over the hill crest to witness the disaster to the caravan.
Captain Douglas, it must be understood, was a young man at war within himself.
He had been very nicely brought up, firstly in a charming English home, then in a preparatory school for selected young gentlemen, then in a good set at Eton, then at Sandhurst, where the internal trouble had begun to manifest itself.
Afterwards the Bistershires.
