The Stranger From The Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

county - or where not esteemed at least respected -or where not respected at least feared - a borough monger, a banker, a smelter, and now a knight! And only just turned forty! The catch of the county! One of the catches of the country! He could take his pick! Some of the noble families might not perhaps yet quite see it in that light, but they were few, and, as he progressed, becoming fewer. To grieve for a year was the maximum that decorum would dictate. To go on year after year, getting older and steadily more influential, and yet growing each year a little more like his Uncle Cary whose only interest in life was his ledgers and his rates of interest ... It was too much. Nicholas, who had started all this from nothing, who had laid the foundations on which George had built his empire, who had seen all that he worked and planned for come to fruition and to prosper, had died the month after Pitt, and, as he lay in bed with his heart fluttering at a hundred and sixty to the minute, it had come to his mind to wonder why some sense of achievement, of satisfaction, was lacking. And he could only think that the circumstance disturbing his dying thoughts was his son's failure to react normally to a normal hazard of married life.
    When Nicholas was gone Mary Warleggan continued to prod George about it, but with growing infrequency. What elderly widowed woman can really object to having her only son living at home, or at least be too complaining about it? After all, George had two children, and even if Valentine was growing into a rather peculiar boy, this would no doubt right itself as he became an adult; and she did see a lot of her grandchildren. Valentine spent most of his holidays at home, and little Ursula, the apple of her eye, was at Cardew all the time.
    The situation also suited Cary. He had always disliked Elizabeth and she had disliked him, each thinking the other an undesirable influence on George. Now she was gone uncle and nephew had come even closer. Indeed in the first year of widowerhood Cary had twice saved George from making unwise speculative investments; George's grasp of the helm was as firm as ever, but the bereavement had temporarily deprived him of his instinct for navigation.
    That time was now long past. Lately George had even recovered some of his taste for London life and for the larger scale of operations he had been beginning in 1799. He had found a friend in Lord Grenville, one-time prime minister and now the leader of the Whigs, and visited him sometimes at his house in Cornwall. In the endless manipulation of parties and loyalties and seats which had followed the death first of Pitt and then of Fox, George had gradually aligned himself with the Opposition in Parliament. Although he owed his knighthood to Pitt, he had never become a 'Pittite', that nucleus of admirers of the dead man notably centring round George Canning. He was convinced that the weak and fumbling Tory administration was bound to come down very soon, and his own interests would be better furthered by becoming a friend of the new men than of the old.
    True, some of them had crack-brained schemes about reform and liberty, fellows like Whitbread and Sheridan and Wilberforce; but he swallowed these and was silent when they were aired, feeling sure that when the reformers came to power they would be forced to forget their high ideals in the pressures and exigencies of cabinet office. When the time came he might well be offered some junior post himself.
    But George still had no thought of another marriage. Such sexual drive as remained to him seemed permanently to have sublimated itself in business and political affairs. Of course over the years he had not lacked the opportunity to taste the favours of this or that desirable lady who had set her cap at him, either with a view to marriage or because her husband was off somewhere and she wanted to add another scalp to her belt. But always he had hesitated and drawn back out of embarrassment