The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Read online

While he was helping himself to a second whiskey and soda, she came into the room.

  “Hello,” he said, putting down the glass with a feeling of guilt, “I thought you’d gone.”

  “My dear” she exclaimed, closing the door behind her and coming to him with outstretched hands, “as though I could, without saying good night and thanking you for your lovely, lovely party!”

  Rebuked, he felt himself flush. He must try to be civil, though his head was aching. “You must have thought me beastly rude,” he forced himself to apologise, “shutting myself up here. I wouldn’t have done it, only I saw you walking down the drive with that awful female who dug me in the ribs and said—” He stopped abruptly, wishing that he had not alluded to the incident. He could not repeat what she had said in front of Gwen. It had been something coarse about twins—all very well for a music-hall, but before a gentlewoman about to marry—

  To his astonishment she laughed. “You mustn’t mind what they say, Dick. They haven’t left the eighteenth century. I hope they never will.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Well,” she challenged, “aren’t they better than the betwixt-and-betweeners who live in cities—all alike, cardboard dummies cut by the million to one pattern?”

  There was a glow in her cheeks. Dick had never seen her more handsome or animated than now, when he was throbbing with the fatigue and annoyance of the past few hours. Could she really have enjoyed what he had so much disliked? He stared at her dumbfounded.

  “Why are you so solemn?” she asked, seizing the lapels of his coat and playfully shaking him. “Because of what dear old Mrs. Jones Cefn-Coed predicted? You must learn to laugh at our people’s humour, Dick, however crude it may seem. You must practise cracking that sort of homely jest yourself. Father was an adept at it, and they adored him. ‘ A merry gentleman,’ they used to say, ‘ no pride on him at all.’ English people think we’re a gloomy race because we are religious. But let me tell you, you’ll never win a Welshman’s affections, unless you can crack a joke with him. He has the great heart of the ancient Greek, Dick,” she went on with increased vehemence. “Yes indeed! Don’t look so unbelieving. He doesn’t keep his heart in his pocket, whatever his detractors may say. He likes money, like another, and he loves a bargain. But it’s the prosaic English who put money first. Better than gold, we love music and song, poetry and rhetoric, the history and traditions of our race, and, above all, our land.”

  “Oh,” said Dick. He had never known her declaim like this, though she always seemed to him to become unnecessarily enthusiastic when she spoke about the Welsh. He tried to bring the conversation down to a saner level. “Why did you go off with that old woman?”

  Gwenllian let go the lapels of the coat and sighed. “Oh, she wanted to confide in me about her daughter’s trouble. She’s in terrible distress, poor old darling, though she hides it heroically under a lot of nonsense. Nobody guesses in the parish. She’s managed to keep all the prying neighbours at bay. But she trusts us, of course.”

  And suddenly the woman he was going to marry flung her arms round Dick’s neck. The warmth of this unexpected embrace startled him. A chaste kiss was all they had exchanged since the day when she had wept in his arms and he had found himself pledged to marry her.

  “Oh, Dick, Dick,” she cried, “aren’t you proud? Aren’t you glad?”

  “What of? What for?” he had it on his tongue to ask. But discretion kept him silent, staring at her, his arms clasped, rather limply, round her waist. Hers were tight about his neck. She had thrown back her head and was looking intently into his bewildered face.

  “Isn’t it splendid,” she asked him, “that our people love and respect us so? Still, Dick, though taxation has made us so poor. You wouldn’t change places with an upstart millionaire, would you, Dick? Or with any man on earth who draws a fortune from dividend warrants without personal power or family prestige?”

  Dick looked confused. Only that morning, going through his rent-roll, he had wished that his money were invested in the funds.

  “Dick,” Gwenllian persisted, “it does mean something to you to keep going what has gone on for so long?”

  He grinned and tightened his hold on her waist. Her emotion made her look superb, but it appeared to him slightly ridiculous.

  “Say something, Dick,” she urged. “Tell me it’s going to mean to you all that it means to me. Promise, Dick, promise!”

  “Of course, my dear,” was all he could say. He felt extremely foolish. But she was so close, so warm, so vibrant, that her passion communicated itself to him. Suddenly excited, though not by the subject of her appeal, he buried his face in the mass of her hair, and kissed it. He kissed her ear, then her neck. He pulled back her head and kissed her mouth. His kisses were not dry and quick as they had been hitherto. Fatigue and boredom were swept away. For the moment he was eager, who had been reluctant, or at least indifferent. “I love you,” he told her, “I love you,” because, for an instant, his pulses were throbbing with desire for her or for any other comely, responsive woman.

  But she believed what he said. She looked up at him with an expression of mingled tenderness and triumph.

  “Oh my dear,” she whispered, “my darling! I want to be so proud of you—always. We’re going to make a success of it, aren’t we, you and I, for the sake of the place?”

  He was too excited to read the omens.

  BOOK II

  I. He foresees her triumph

  II. He and she give hostages to fortune

  III. She meets an obstacle

  IV. She makes sure of the inheritance

  Chapter I

  HE FORESEES HER TRIUMPH

  Softly, steadily, day after day, the rain had been falling. It pattered on the window-panes whenever the crackling of log fires was hushed. For hours there would be no other sound but the quiet footfall of Gwenllian’s disciplined servants, and the scurry of mice behind the wainscot. After Christmas so few people came up the drive beneath the naked, dripping branches of the trees, that to Dick any visitor would have been welcome. He had bought a gramophone and been delighted with it in the South of France, but when its dance music clashed with the quiet of Plâs Einon, he became, against his will, ashamed of it and turned it off. The small voice of the rain rose through the following silence. He awoke at night, and heard it gurgling down the pipes below the eaves. He stood in the portico, tapping the barometer for promise of change, but always there reached his ears the same hissing and whisper from among the laurels.

  Gwenllian would come in from the garden, shiny and stiff as a laurel leaf, in her oilskin and sou’wester. “You haven’t been out to-day, Dick.”

  “I was hoping it might clear.”

  “No use to wait for that, dear. This is ‘February Fildyke.’”

  “By Jove, it is. I tried to plough round the home farm to please you yesterday. It was a morass.”

  “That won’t hurt you, if you’re properly shod. I’ve got the dubbin for your boots, and I’ve ordered those rubber ones I was telling you about.”

  “You’re determined to have me out in all weathers,” he grumbled. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “Because you’ve been growing depressed and liverish, my dear, with not enough to do. I go out, wet or fine, and I’m never ill. I haven’t the time.”

  To be proud of one’s own tough constitution, he decided, was the most annoying form of self-righteousness. Since he had had rheumatic fever and a piece of shrapnel in his chest, he had learned to be interested in the variations of his health. His wife would not have been so monotonously well nor so brisk at breakfast, if she had fought in the war.

  “I wish we’d stayed a bit longer on the Riviera,” he sighed.

  “We couldn’t holiday-make all our lives,” she would answer, taking up a seedsman’s catalogue and beginning to compile one of her many lists.

  Why not, he often wondered! There were plenty of retired Army men, like himself, who led a care-free existence in
well-warmed hotels, enjoying the sunshine, enjoying golf, dancing, a game of bridge every night, and the society of their own kind.

  Lucky devils! However good a woman a fellow’s wife might be, he didn’t want to see no face but hers, meal after meal, to hear only her improving conversation throughout long fireside evenings. Plâs Einon was all very well for a month or two in summer. But if it were not for Gwen, he would let it for the rest of the year. He might get a good price for it from some stout hero with a taste for standing at drenching covert sides waiting to pot pheasants, or for wading icy rivers with the patience of Job. Dick liked the friendliness and the pretty setting of a cricket pitch or a tennis court. He was a moderate batsman, and a good enough tennis player to win garden-party applause. Having no purpose in life, he craved for amusements as a child for sweets, but in sports that were chill, damp and solitary, he found no satisfaction. Already he had discovered with regret that his fine sporting estate was going to give little pleasure to him. The worst of it was he dared not tell his wife so. She seemed unable to understand that he suffered miserably from cold. She herself was capable of changing for dinner in a bedroom as big as a barn with a couple of sticks smouldering in one corner of it. His dressing-room hadn’t even a fireplace.

  When he spoke of installing central heating, she provided him with a tiny oil stove and banished the subject. Secretly he had consulted the plumber and the builder at Llanon, talking valiantly of having electric light, a telephone, more and better bathrooms. When Gwenllian heard of these boasts, as she did of everything which was said in the district, she laid account books before him.

  “Just go through these,” she said in a tone of authority, “before you talk any more about spending hundreds of pounds.”

  For the moment he was quelled. But after next quarter, he reassured himself, I shall insist on having my own way. Hang it all, the money was his, not hers! Of course, a wife must be consulted in matters that concerned the house; and for him it was more difficult, as the house was his wife’s old home. Still, he thought, that’s no reason for her vetoing every suggestion I make as though she were my landlady and I her lodger.

  One morning, while riding the cob that he was bound to exercise, he made a resolve to “have it out ” with Gwen before another day passed; but as he was composing phrases of manly firmness with which to overcome her obstinacy, he heard his name shouted. Blinking the raindrops off his lashes, he saw Lewis Vaughan cantering towards him over the sodden grass in a skelter of mud. By Jove! It was good to exchange masculine gossip again of the kind to which the Service had accustomed him— racing tips, news of winter sports from pals in Switzerland, politics treated as a sour joke, and a smoking- room story or two. Moreover, before they parted, his cheerful neighbour gave him a particular piece of news which delighted him. Flash Frank was in the district, staying at Cefnllys. Eager to share his excitement with Gwen, Dick splashed home, flung the reins to the groom in the stable yard, tossed his soaked mackintosh to Powell in the hall, and ran upstairs, two at a time, to the room where he was sure of finding the lady of the house at work. There she sat at her official desk, beneath her father’s portrait.

  “I say, I have news,” he cried from the doorway. She did not look round, but he refused to be chilled by her indifference. One-stepping across the shabby carpet to her Chippendale chair, he perched himself on its arm. He felt affectionate towards her, and being in an exhilarated, optimistic mood, he resolved, here and now, to laugh her out of her pig-headed opposition to modernising the house.

  “Aren’t you going to pay me any attention?” he asked.

  She raised her head, but the smile she gave him was abstracted.

  “Must you finish that letter before hearing my news?” he enquired, hoping to see her put away the sheet of paper.

  Her pen began to move again. “Yes, if you don’t mind, dear,” she said, intent upon her writing.

  “The queen must attend to her dispatches, what?”

  But she was too absorbed to notice his little joke. From over her shoulder he read the words, “very pleased to address the Women’s Institute, if you know certainly that Lady Llangattoc will be prevented from doing so—”

  Dick made a grimace and rose from the arm of his wife’s chair, without bestowing the kiss he had intended for the nape of her neck. He could never come close behind her and look at her abundance of dusky hair, without wishing to pull it down; for when it fell in a cloak of feminine softness about her face and breast, it almost made her seem a girl. To run his hands through it excited him. But she required him to wait until she went to bed—punctually at half-past ten every night. And even then— A fellow felt an ass, kissing a woman’s hair, winding the strange electric stuff round his tingling fingers, burying his face in it, when she looked at her wrist-watch and asked, “D’you know how late it’s growing?” And he remembered that the jolly old writer, Sterne, whom his mother did not think it proper to read, although he was “set ” in school, had written something comic about a husband and wife in bed and the winding of a clock.

  Grinning ruefully, Dick walked over to the window and watched the falling rain. He had had a friend, since killed at Mons, poor devil, who had married young, in spite of his Colonel’s disapproval. She was pretty and a sport, didn’t seem to mind being poor, and spent her time on the links caddying for her husband. He said he was awfully happy, but he seemed gay, rather than content—grew jumpy, took to smoking a hundred cigarettes a day.

  At last he confessed to Dick that, though he and his wife were first-rate day-time companions, she could not bear “that side of marriage.” Dick had blurted out the confidence to Flash Frank, and, too late, repented. How clearly the scene came back to him now—his admired and dreaded senior astride a chair, laughing cynically! “Let it be a warning to you never to get hooked, Scrub, my lad,” he had scoffed. “If you marry a chaste woman, she won’t respond to your advances. If you marry a hot ’un, yours won’t be the only ones to which she’ll respond. And the devil of it is, you’ll never know what on earth you’re in for until it’s too late to get out— unless she’s the sort you needn’t have married at all. That’s the safest, Scrub, if you’re careful of your health. Consort with the kind little ladies of the town, who’ll give you a good time without chasing you into matrimony.” Since his marriage, Dick had often recalled that saying. Good women, perhaps, were never very responsive. But then, he argued, in loyalty to Gwen, they had been married only three months. She loved him very much, he was sure—in her way. And her way might improve. At Nice, where he had wished to dance and she had failed in the rhythm of jazz music, there had been no sign of jealousy in her when he left her to knit and look on. She had seemed unselfishly glad that he should enjoy himself. When he took her to the Casino, too, he had been proud of being seen with her—so much more handsome in her severe clothes than the flashy, painted women surrounding her. After all, he told himself, I haven’t much to complain of, if only she wouldn’t live the whole year round in this damp hole, and would have the house brought up to date.

  “Are you ever going to finish that letter?” he demanded, nerving himself for good-humoured battle.

  “Oh, my dear Dick,” she answered, laying down her pen, “I quite forgot you were in the room.”

  “Forgot I was in the room,” he repeated, pretending to be amused, and he forced himself to perch once more on the arm of her chair and to hug her more roughly than he would ordinarily have dared.

  She disengaged herself—with annoyance, he fancied; but a moment later she wore her usual composed smile, and asked, “Well, what’s your news?”

  “I met Vaughan as I was out exercising the cob.”

  “Which Vaughan?”

  “Oh, you know who I mean. The other’s only a farmer,” he said, thinking her wilfully stupid.

  Her brows came together in a frown. “He’s by far the better man,” she answered. “Mr. Lewis Vaughan seems to lie in wait for you, Dick. Do take my advice and snub him. You’re far too
indiscriminate in your friendship.”

  “Vaughan’s a jolly amusing fellow,” he protested, “the only one who is about here.”

  “My dear! You know he drinks.”

  Dick tried to laugh at her. “You see to it that he doesn’t put away much in this house!”

  “He was never an intimate of ours. Why should he become so now?”

  “Because I like him.”

  “My brothers didn’t,” she said.

  He felt himself growing hot and flurried. “Well never mind that now. He’s met an old friend of mine, a Major Stansbury. You’ve heard me talk of Frank, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve heard you speak of someone nicknamed Flash Frank,” she said, with a lift of her eyebrows. “He certainly sounds like a friend of Mr. Vaughan’s.”

  “They aren’t friends in the least,” Dick burst out. “I wish to goodness you’d let me tell my story without interruption!” And he got off the arm of her chair. “Vaughan met Frank the other day by chance. He’s staying with some people called Goldman. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them.”

  She smiled in an ironic, irritating fashion. “Jews, who have rented Sir Evan Lewis’s place, Cefnllys. I hear the girls go out with the guns, made up like a musical comedy chorus. Everybody is laughing at them. They offer you these mixed American drinks, before lunch, even. We don’t want to get involved with guests of theirs.”

  “My dear girl,” Dick exclaimed, “try not to be so provincial! Everybody drinks cocktails since the war. And Frank’s most awfully well connected. I daresay his family is as ancient and stuck up as yours—”

  “As ours,” she corrected.

  He hurried on. “There he is, staying within twenty miles of us, and I might never have known it if Vaughan hadn’t mentioned casually what an amusing chap he’d met! I’ve arranged to run over with Vaughan in the car—”

  “But Dick,” Gwenllian cried, “don’t you understand? I don’t wish to know these Goldmans.”