He could not conceal from himself that his memory was failing though otherwise he considered himself to be as sound a man as he had ever been. But when it came to memory, ever since that day his brain had checked at times as a tired horse will at a fence…. A tired horse!
He could not bring himself to the computation of what three weeks back from the 11th of November came to; his brain would not go at it. For the matter of that he could remember precious little of the events of that three weeks in their due order. Christopher had certainly been about, relieving Marie Léonie at night and attending to him with a soft, goggle-eyed attentiveness that only a man with a saint for a mother could have put up. For hours and hours he would read aloud in Boswell’s Life of Johnson for which Mark had had a fancy.
And Mark could remember drowsing off with satisfaction to the sound of the voice and drowsing with satisfaction awake again, still to the sound of the voice. For Christopher had the idea that if his voice went droning on it would make Mark’s slumbers more satisfactory.
Satisfaction…. Perhaps the last satisfaction that Mark was ever to know. For at that time — during those three weeks — he had not been able to believe that Christopher really meant to stick out about the matter of Groby. How could you believe that a fellow who waited on you with the softness of a girl built of mealsacks was determined to… call it, break your heart. That was what it came to… A fellow too who agreed in the most astounding manner with your views of things in general; a fellow for the matter of that who knew ten times as much as you did. A damned learned fellow….
Mark had no contempt for learning — particularly for younger sons. The country was going to the dogs because of the want of education of the younger sons whose business it was to do the work of the nation. It was a very old North Country rhyme that, that when land is gone and money spent then learning is most excellent. No, he had no contempt for learning. He had never acquired any because he was too lazy: a little Sallust, a little Cornelius Nepos, a touch of Horace, enough French to read a novel and follow what Marie Léonie said…. Even to himself he called her Marie Léonie once he was married to her. It had made her jump at first!
But Christopher was a damned learned fellow. Their father, a younger son at the beginning, had been damned learned too. They said that even at his death he had been one of the best Latinists in England — the intimate friend of that fellow Wannop, the Professor…. A great age at which to die by his own hand, his father’s! Why, if that marriage had been on the 29th October, 1918, his father, then dead, must have been born on the 29th October what… 1834…. No, that was not possible… No, ’44. His father, Mark knew, had been born in 1812 — before Waterloo!
Great stretches of time. Great changes! Yet Father had not been an incult sort of a man. On the contrary, if he was burly and determined, he was quiet. And sensitive. He had certainly loved Christopher very dearly — and Christopher’s mother.
Father was very tall; stooping like a toppling poplar towards the end. His head seemed very distant, as if he hardly heard you. Iron-grey; short-whiskered. Absent-minded towards the end. Forgetting where he had put his handkerchief and where his spectacles were when he had pushed them up onto his forehead…. He had been a younger son who had never spoken to his father for forty years. Grand-father had never forgiven him for marrying Miss Selby of Biggen… not because it was marrying below him but because Grand-father had wanted their mother for his eldest son…. And they had been poor in their early childhood, wandering over the continent to settle at last in Dijon where they had kept some sort of state… a large house in the middle of the town with several servants. He never could imagine how their mother had done it on four hundred a year. But she had. A hard woman. But Father had kept in with French people and corresponded with Professor Wannop and Learned Societies. He had always regarded him, Mark, as a dunce…. Father would sit reading in elegantly bound books, by the hour. His study had been one of the show rooms of the house in Dijon.
Did he commit suicide? If so then Valentine Wannop was his daughter. There could not be much getting away from that, not that it mattered much. In that case Christopher would be living with his half-sister…. Not that it mattered much. It did not matter much, to him, Mark… but his father was the sort of man that it might drive to suicide.
A luckless sort of beggar, Christopher!… If you took the whole conglobulation at its worst – the father suiciding, the son living with his sister in open sin, the son’s son not his son and Groby going over to Papist hands…. That was the sort of thing that would happen to a Tietjens of the Christopher variety: to any Tietjens who would not get out or get under as he, Mark, had done. Tietjenses took what they damn well got for doing what they damn well wanted to. Well, it landed them in that sort of post…. A last post, for, if that boy was not Christopher’s, Groby went out of Tietjens’ hands. There would be no more Tietjenses. Spelden might well be justified.
The grand-father of Father scalped by Indians in Canada in the war of 1810; the father dying in a place where he should not have been — taking what he got for it and causing quite a scandal for the Court of Victoria; the elder brother of Father killed drunk whilst fox-hunting; Father suicided; Christopher a pauper by his own act with a by-blow in his shoes. If then there were to be any more Tietjenses by both name and blood…. Poor little devils! They would be their own cousins. Something like that….
And possibly none the worse off for that…. Either Spelden or Groby Great Tree had perhaps done for the others. Groby Great Tree had been planted to commemorate the birth of Great-grand-father who had died in a whoreshop — and it had always been whispered in Groby, amongst the children and servants that Groby Great Tree did not like the house. Its roots tore chunks out of the foundations and two or three times the trunk had had to be bricked into the front wall of the house. They always quoted too the Italian saying about trees over the house. Obviously Christopher had told it to his son and the young man had told it to Mrs. de Bray Pape. That was why the saying had been referred to three times that day…. Anyway it was an Italian tree! It had been brought as a sapling from Sardinia at a time when gentlemen still thought about landscape gardening. A gentleman in those days consulted his heirs about tree planting. Should you plant a group of copper beeches against a group of white maples over against the haha a quarter of a mile from the house so that the contrast seen from the ball-room windows should be agreeable — in thirty years’ time. In those days thought, in families, went in periods of thirty years, owner gravely consulting the heirs who should see that development of light and shade that the owner never would.
Nowadays the heir apparently consulted the owner as to whether the tenant who was taking the ancestral home furnished might not cut down trees in order to suit the sanitary ideas of the day…. An American day! Well, why not. Those people could not be expected to know how picturesque a contrast the tree would make against the roofs of Groby Great House when seen from Peel’s Moorside. They would never hear of Peel’s Moorside, or John Peel, or the coat so grey….
Apparently that was the meaning of the visit of that young colt and Mrs. de Bray Pape. They had come to ask his, Mark’s sanction as owner, to cut down Groby Great Tree. And then they had funked it and bolted. At any rate the boy was still talking earnestly to the woman in white over the hedge. As to where Mrs. de Bray Pape had got to he had no means of knowing; she might be among the potato rows studying the potatoes of the poor for all he knew. He hoped she would not come upon Marie Léonie because Marie Léonie would make short work of Mrs. de Bray Pape and be annoyed on top of it.