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Defy the Foul Fiend
by John Collier
Chapter One
Lord Ollebeare — his cook — our hero — Ralph Corbo — I am a villain — a good heart.
Lord Oll ebeare had a face like a coat of arms. His nose might have been a fist, clenched and mailed, gules. In fact, he was one of those men you sometimes see in the street. His mustaches were two dolphins argent, his eyes two étoiles azur. He had also an inalienable two hundred a year, paid weekly, a top bed-sitting-room with a good toasting fire to it, six Norman names, a ruined house, a wild park, and one large and barren farm. That was all the land he might not sell; his next brother held it, and paid him his two hundred a year.
Twenty-odd years ago, for we must hark back a little, he had had less nose, more money, much credit, and the best suite in Albany. There he had a charming cook, on whom, in the most careless fashion imaginable, he begot the hero of this story.
She was so exceedingly honest, this charming cook, that when she ran away with a lawyer's clerk, whom business brought frequently to the door, she could not bring herself to take the principal gift of Lord Ollebeare's bestowing, but left it in his bed awaiting him, that he might sleep the warmer for it, if not perhaps quite as dry.
Lord Ollebeare was no niggard of life's blessings; he gave our hero next day to a brother, not the one who lived in Gloucestershire on the remnant of the estate, but the youngest of the three, a prim stick, who had made a good thing of his patrimony, and who lived at Reigate in what would have been the snuggest box imaginable, except that no one ever felt the least bit snug in it. Lord Ollebeare was as delicate as he was generous, and belittled his princeliness, which might otherwise have been embarrassing to his brother's independent feelings, by describing this really splendid child as a loan.
"It must suck," he said, "and that's not at all in my line. I know nothing about wet-nurses or milk-bottles. You, Clarry," said he to his sister-in-law, "you must fit the child out with one, or it will surely starve. I'll come back when all's fixed, and then we shall see."
His sister-in-law looked plaintively at her husband, who frowned. Our hero set up a yell. "We must see to this," said she.
"Very well, my dear," he replied. "Procure your nurse, keep her here for a day or two under your supervision; when you are satisfied that she is trustworthy, Richard will make his arrangements."
"Thank you very much," struck in Lord Ollebeare. "Damn it, Ralph, I take this very kindly from you."
"My wife is present," replied his brother, without any warmth whatever. "She is holding in her arms such tangible evidence of your character, that oaths are quite a superfluous corroboration."
"God! That's fine," cried his elder. "How you think of such ways of putting things beats me altogether. But, Clarry, I'd be sorry to annoy you by a hasty word. I'm grateful to you, and to you, Ralph; I know how any disturbance makes you look lemonish about the chops. It's good of you."
"Don't waste your thanks," replied his brother. "I shall spend a week in Paris while this nuisance continues. Be sure you take the child away by the fourth day at latest, and you, Clara, have the house aired from attic to cellar against my return."
Now when he was on his way back from Paris a week later, his train halted on the points outside Calais. The south-bound train came bumping slowly past; he saw Lord Ollebeare sitting smiling in one of the carriages. There was no sign he had with him either child or wet-nurse; in fact there were two or three adult males in his company, and it seemed very much as if they were arranging themselves for a game of cards. Next moment the vision was gone.
Ralph Corbo reached his home in a state of great excitement. "Richard has not called for the child," said his wife.
"You simpleton!" said he. "You obstinate simpleton! I gave you a look, you saw it; don't say otherwise. You took the brat against my wishes, and now we are saddled with it for God knows how long. Damn and blast the day that I married a fool!"
Hitherto he had rather avoided his elder brother, now the boot was on the other leg. Ralph Corbo employed agents, took journeys, put himself out in all ways to find Lord Ollebeare, not in much hope of him taking back the child, but just to elicit a definite refusal from him, so that it might be sent to an orphanage. He went to Monte Carlo twice, and burst into a cabinet particulier at Deauville. Each time his little agent had mistaken the man; at Deauville there was a degrading scene. After several months he was walking past Verrey's in Regent Street, when out comes his brother as easy as can be, sees him, offers his hand. "Well, Ralph," says he, "how's Clarry? And how's that youngster of mine getting on?"
An argument ensued, if that can be called an argument, in which deadlock is reached before the second sentences are exchanged. Lord Ollebeare pooh-poohed all idea of taking back the child: he pointed out that God had neglected to bless his brother's marriage with increase; very well, he would supply the deficiency. Possibly the child had been intended to brighten the dull home at Reigate; there had been a little mistake in the delivery. He alluded to the great advantage the child would enjoy, in coming under the influence of so respectable and substantial a man as his uncle was, instead of sharing the vicissitudes to which he himself was unfortunately subject. This did not impress his brother in the least; no more did a fine description of the felicities of family life, and the likelihood of it enriching a nature which some people held to be too narrow and too cold.
Lord Ollebeare came out into the open, and declared he'd not have the boy back, not at any price. The child would, he said rather tactlessly, make life worth living for poor Clarry, and, as a rich patron might force the acceptance of a bank-note by threatening to throw it on the fire if it is refused, so he swore the boy should go to an orphanage if his uncle persisted in his foolish pride and his cruel lack of family feeling. This idea had none of the terrors of unfamiliarity for Ralph Corbo.
"Very well," he said, with all the complacency in the world, and our hero would certainly have spent a crop-headed infancy, clothed in duffle grey, but, when it came to the pinch, his aunt could not bear the thought of it: the graft had taken, the only scion of all the Corbo stock was now fast knit to her heart, a circumstance which the good father, lovingly provident for his offspring, had foreseen from the first. There were a good many discussions at Reigate, some of them quite dramatic: in the end young Willoughby Corbo stayed where he was, and was tended very sweetly for two or three years. Then he ran to the gate and caught scarlet fever, his Aunt Clarry sat by his bed, and took the infection and died.
She had the most tender heart, and being a little apprehensive of what her husband had in mind concerning the child, besought him in the last of her speeches never to send him away. He promised what she wished, and being a man of great probity, he kept scrupulously to the letter of his word. It was well this letter extended no farther, or he might have had difficulty in doing so, for his frozen love for his wife broke up like a frozen river when she died, like the grinding tumult of the pack ice, and he, who had given and taken so little pleasure in his marriage, now had all the torments of hell in his widowerhood. "I never loved her," he said, and became very quietly, respectably, and secretly mad on it, and would have as soon hung a snake round his neck as kept little Willoughby about him.
At four, then, our hero had a pleasant room at the very top of Kent Court, that lovely white house near Reigate. It was larger than that to which his father had just moved, and a good deal fresher, besides being quite as rich in that infinite blessing, that kingdom of the imagination, that eyrie of the spirit, solitude. Unfortunately, the little wretch had no philosophy at all, and was sadly unappreciative of this advantage, except perhaps when he caught his uncle's eye, if he chanced to cross his path below.
The nursemaid he had that first year was so preoccupied by her own affairs that she had little time to waste upon him, and no conversation, and while this made him quick in learning how to wash himself, and button his little breeches, it also made him rather melancholy, so that he spent most of his time in an empty reverie, presenting all the appearance, she told him frankly, of a miserable idiot. However, her affairs came to a head at the end of the year (or rather to a belly, for they were with the footman), and his uncle, whose quiet hatred overrode all discrimination between bastards, immediately sent her packing.
A new girl appeared, who chanced to have a pleasant nature. She had youth in her favor also, for she was only fourteen: she was easy-going, laughed a great deal, a tickler. She anticipated the modern educationalists by treating young Willoughby exactly as an equal, hugged him, took him to bed with her, and told him all that she knew. He might have learned a good deal, but for his lack of enterprise. As it was, he learned the difference between meum and tuum, as everyone should; heard of the black and tyrannous Blossy, who devoured the pickled bed-wetter in his chimney lurk; acquired a nervous distrust of the police, and gazed, like stout Cortez, at the ocean of merriment that surges before us when first we hear, on a giggle, the word bum.
His uncle was now away for months at a time, and the seasons, one of which must have contained a birthday, flowed over the house. Once, as he was going off, he told the butler to send the boy away to school; unfortunately the butler did not catch what he said. Nevertheless, one afternoon, when by an extraordinary coincidence all his little coevals all over England were hearing from their teachers that Sydney was the capital of Australia, and had a magnificent harbor, it so happened that the old coachman, who had taken a horse out there in his groom days, described the capital to Master Willoughby, saying, " 'Twere nought but new wood and old iron, like a lot o' nasty chicken-runs."
For the rest, he learned to read; read about Prince Pippin at a penny a time, and thought him the devil of a fine fellow. The old coachman, who lived over the empty stable-yard, had him spell out the Court and Society from the newspaper. He heard about the people whose names occurred there, and gathered that they led lives like those described in the storybooks. He was told he was a Lord's son, which a little consoled him for being his uncle's nephew. Some trifling disqualification was hinted at: that was all the more true to character.
Now there was nothing middle-class about this childhood, in which Sydney, the headquarters of Antipodean trade, was spoken of with contempt, which is, I believe, not the case at Eton. I could give you a thousand instances of this sort of thing, which was to have the most appalling effect on our hero's future life.
The old coachman was the only decent servant in the place; the rest were very pretty examples of what a damned double-faced lackey can be. Our hero had the advantage, which he did not in the least appreciate at the time, of learning to hate this type, and to recognize it wherever he saw it later on. The old coachman, who had been brought up at Ollebeare, told him of his father, what a real dashing young toff he had been: Dare all, damn all they had called him then — light a cigar with a five-pound note. All this was to have its appalling effect also.
Willoughby found the picture infinitely attractive; he embroidered it with certain chivalrous trimmings from Prince Pippin, and there had his ideal. He would have lost it at school, for it is not by chance that the aristocratic attitude is as rare as a red-skin: it can only be bred on the reservation of a dream-life. To this, as you see, a little love and a lot of hate confined him. His soul hungered for a Ruritania of high feeling; he was convinced it was his birthright, that these years spent in an ante-room mattered nothing. If the under-footman cuffed him, it was as though he had been bitten by a dog. He learned to regulate his conduct so as not to be bitten.
"That's a good boy," the footman would say, when he brought him his tea without spilling it in the saucer, an inefficiency which that young man detested. Willoughby found himself very little honored by the term, which had lost its initial attractiveness.
He said to himself, as if he were in an Elizabethan play: I am a villain, and smiled. Few phrases unchain the spirit as this one does, or admit as many new thoughts. It is true that Willoughby's idea of villainy did not amount to much. He wished to be bold, generous, dashing, and all the rest of it; ride a bay horse, come to a spectacular end; to be bloody to abstract legions, perhaps, but subtle and cruel only to butlers and footmen. On the other hand, butlers and footmen constitute a large part of the world as seen from under a kitchen table.
For the rest, he was a pudding-faced and timid little boy, and he still had a good heart. He longed to visit cottagers, free slaves, and gouge out the eyes of carters who ill-treated their horses.
