Barry designed it in 1839. A hundred workmen laboured for a year or two. And the third marquess paid the bills. They were heavy, but the suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield had begun to spread over the land which his ancestors had stolen from the monasteries three hundred years before. “The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has from the sacred writings and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.” Rich men with uneasy consciences had left their land to the monks that their souls might be helped through Purgatory by a perpetual performance of the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. But Henry VIII had lusted after a young woman and desired a son; and because Pope Clement VII was in the power of Henry’s first wife’s daughter’s cousin, he would not grant him a divorce. The monasteries were in consequence suppressed. An army of beggars, of paupers, of the infirm died miserably of hunger. But the Tantamounts acquired some scores of square miles of ploughland, forest and pasture. A few years later, under Edward VI, they stole the property of two disestablished grammar schools; children remained uneducated that the Tantamounts might be rich. They farmed their land scientifically with a view to the highest profit. Their contemporaries regarded them as “men that live as though there were no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothing to others, men that be never satisfied.” From the pulpit of St. Paul’s, Lever accused them of having “offended God, and brought a common wealth into a common ruin.” The Tantamounts were unperturbed. The land was theirs, the money came in regularly.
The corn was sown, grew, and was harvested, again and again. The beasts were born, fattened, and went to the slaughter. The ploughmen, the shepherds, the cowherds laboured from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died. Their children took their places. Tantamount succeeded Tantamount. Elizabeth made them barons; they became viscounts under Charles II, earls under William and Mary, marquesses under George II. They married heiress after heiress—ten square miles of Nottinghamshire, fifty thousand pounds, two streets in Bloomsbury, half a brewery, a bank, a plantation, and six hundred slaves in Jamaica. Meanwhile, obscure men were devising machines which made things more rapidly than they could be made by hand. Villages were transformed into towns, towns into great cities. On what had been the Tantamounts’ pasture and ploughland, houses and factories were built. Under the grass of their meadows half-naked men hewed at the black and shining coal face. The laden trucks were hauled by little boys and women. From Peru the droppings of ten thousand generations of sea gulls were brought in ships to enrich their fields. The corn grew thicker; the new mouths were fed. And year by year the Tantamounts grew richer and richer and the souls of the Black Prince’s pious contemporaries continued, no doubt, to writhe, unaided as they were by any acceptable sacrifice of the altar, in the unquenchable fires of purgatory. The money that might, if suitably applied, have shortened their term among the flames served, among other things, to call into existence a model of the Papal Chancellery in Pall Mall.
The interior of Tantamount House is as nobly Roman as its façade. Round a central quadrangle run two tiers of open arcades with an attic, lit by small square windows, above. But instead of being left open to the sky, the quadrangle is covered by a glass roof which converts it into an immense hall rising the whole height of the building. With its arcades and gallery it makes a very noble room—but too large, too public, too much like a swimming bath or a roller-skating rink to be much lived in.
Tonight, however, it was justifying its existence. Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties. The floor was crowded with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.
“What a pantomime!” said old John Bidlake to his hostess. “My dear Hilda, you really must look.”
“Sh-sh!” Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan. “You mustn’t interrupt the music. Besides, I am looking.”
Her whisper was colonial and the r’s of “interrupt” were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from Montreal and her mother had been a French woman. In 1897 the British Association met in Canada. Lord Edward Tantamount read a much admired paper to the Biological Section. “One of the coming men,” the professors had called him. But for those who weren’t professors, a Tantamount and a millionaire might be regarded as already having arrived. Hilda Sutton was most decidedly of that opinion. Lord Edward was the guest, during his stay in Montreal, of Hilda’s father. She took her opportunity. The British Association went home; but Lord Edward remained in Canada.
“Believe me,” Hilda had once confided to a friend, “I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.”
The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward’s attention. He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty. Hilda also knew her woman’s business. Her task was not difficult. At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. Hilda
