Knight Without Armour

Timperleigh was a dull village in the midst of passable hunting country, and the Reverend Wilson, despite his small income, managed to hunt once a week during the season. It meant that the elder children could not be sent to a good school, but that did not trouble him. He hunted in the same joyless, downright manner as he preached and thrashed. Sometimes the hunt would meet in the rectory drive and the children would run about among the horses and dogs and have their heads patted by high-up gruff voiced men in scarlet coats. Ainsley liked this, but not quite so much as he enjoyed having tea in the kitchen with Cook. She was called Cook, but she was really only a good-natured person of middle age who, being also mentally deficient, had been willing for years to do all the rough work of the household in return for a miserably poor wage. Ainsley was fond of her, and the look of the large rectory kitchen, with the window-panes slowly changing from grey to black and the firelight flickering on all the pots and dish-covers, gave him a comfortable feeling that he was certain only Cook could share. And her talk seemed far more thrilling than any fairy-story; she had been born in Whitechapel, and she made Whitechapel seem a real place, full of real people and real if horrible happenings; whereas Capernaum, which his father talked about in Sunday sermons, and Gibraltar, which Aunt Nellie insisted belonged to England, were vague, shadowy, and impossible to believe in.

When Ainsley was seven, his father was killed in a hunting mishap. Aunt Nellie, behind a seemly grief, was again rather thrilled; next to being trampled to death on an Indian polo-ground, to die on the hunting-field was perhaps the most socially eligible of all earthly exits. The boy, quite frankly, felt no grief at all; he had had hardly anything to do with his father, having not yet attained the age of chastisement. Nor was he old enough to realise the problem presented by the existence of himself and his nine brothers and sisters. There was practically no money, not even an insurance; the family, in terms of hard cash, was scarcely better off than that of a deceased farm-labourer. Fortunately the Reverend Wilson had been one of as large a family as his own, and communication was soon and inevitably opened up with uncles and aunts, many far distant and some almost mythical. After long and peevish negotiations, the family was divided somehow or other amongst such relatives, until only the two youngest remained Then, in sheer desperation, a letter was written to Sir Henry Jergwin, whose wife had been Aunt Helen, and after whom the youngest Fothergill had been hopefully but so far fruitlessly named. Could Sir Henry do anything for Barbara, aged eight, and for Ainsley Jergwin, aged seven? The great man commanded the children to visit him at his London house; they were taken there by Aunt Nellie and solemnly exhibited. After a week he decided; he would have the boy, but not the girl. So Barbara, after further struggles, was pushed on to one of the other uncles, while Ainsley came to live at a big Victorian house in Bloomsbury already inhabited by his uncle, a secretary, a butler, a cook, a coachman, three maids, and a gardener.

Sir Henry, in fact, was tolerably rich. He had always cultivated influential friendships in the City, and he was also editor and proprietor of the Pioneer, a weekly paper of Liberal views. Sixty-three years of age, with a vigorous body, an alert mind, a mellow booming voice, and an impressively long and snow-white beard, he was almost as well known as he wished to be. He entertained; he was invited to speak at public dinners; he knew everybody; Garibaldi had stayed a night at his house; Gladstone had knighted him. Besides all this, his reputation as a man of letters stood high—and curiously high, for he had written nothing that could be considered really first-rate. Only, all along, he had had the knack of making the most of everything he did; even a very mediocre poem he had once composed had managed an entry into most of the anthologies. Somehow, too, he had got himself accepted as an authority on Elizabethan literature; he had edited the Hathaway edition of Shakespeare, and thousands of schoolchildren had fumbled over his glossaries. Surmounting and in addition to all else, the man was a character; should any big controversy arise in the Press, he was always asked for his opinion, and always, without fail, gave it. His views, though unexciting, stood for something that still existed in far greater proportions than the brilliant youngsters realised—a certain slow and measured solemnity that flowed in the bloodstream of every Englishman who had more than a thousand pounds in Consols.