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 meal-sacks 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 damn 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 damn learned fellow. Their father, a younger son at the beginning, had been damn 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 20th October, 1918, his father, then dead, must have been born on the 20th 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! Absentminded towards the end. Forgetting where he had put his handkerchief and where his spectacles were when he had pushed them up on to his forehead. … He had been a younger son who had never spoken to his father for forty years. Father’s father had never forgiven him for marrying Miss Selby of Biggen … not because it was marrying below him, but because his 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 rather a dunce. … Father would sit reading in elegantly bound books, by the hour. His study had been one of the showrooms 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 grandfather of Father scalped by Indians in Canada in the war of 1812; 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 foxhunting; 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 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-grandfather 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. It had been brought as a sapling from Sardinia at a time when gentlemen still thought about landscape gardening. A
