The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Page 12

  “Now then, steady,” he heard the Doctor say. “That’s not the most useful way of showing your love for her.”

  The irony of it was that his tears were not for Gwen, but for his own dead affection, the little affection he had ever had for her! If she died, he would reproach himself bitterly. But if she lived, how bitter to be tied to a wife he didn’t love!

  As he was wiping his eyes, a two-seater car stopped before the door. Glancing round over his handkerchief, he saw a pair of very long, thin legs in plus-fours and sporting stockings of an uncommon pattern thrust themselves forward. The body of a man slid into view after them, and Dick uttered an exclamation of delighted surprise. “Frank!” he exclaimed.

  “Hello, Scrub, old boy,” Major Stansbury shouted across the hall. Then, on a lower note, “I say! Is anything the matter?”

  Dick went to him and gripped his slim fingers, but could not speak. There was no need; for the visitor, patting him on the back, turned to the Doctor; and it was the Doctor who made apologies and explanations. Dick heard the others in consultation; but was himself powerless to intervene. He was listening to his own past, to the man who had been his hero then and whose voice profoundly stirred and excited him. “Perhaps I’d better go?” Frank was saying.

  No, no! For God’s sake stay and give me some of your confidence, Dick yearned to cry out, but not a sound could he utter.

  “On the contrary, I’d be much obliged to you for stopping,” the Doctor replied; and Dick had a twinge of liking for him. “You might hold on to this young husband. He wants taking out and exercising.”

  Then came the cheery, commanding voice Dick had so often tried in vain to copy. “Right you are! I’ll try him up and down the gallops half a dozen times.”

  They were making a jest of his misery, but he did not resent it.

  He looked up at Frank and, recovering control of his tongue, made a feeble effort to assert himself as the principal character in the tragedy.

  “I must stay within call till it’s over.”

  Dr. Roberts told him brutally that it would be long yet.

  “Tell you what,” Frank suggested. “We needn’t go far. Let’s have a look at the stables and grounds. I’ve not had the honour of seeing your place yet, you lucky devil! Last time I was staying in this neighbourhood, Doctor, I didn’t hear till the day I left that Scrub had set up as a landed proprietor.” Dick was pleased by the familiar bantering tone. It warmed his vitals to find that someone could be lively and normal in this house of sickness and fear.

  “Come on, then,” he exclaimed. “If you’d like to, let’s get out at once. I’ll show you over the house when things are less upset.”

  “Of course. Of course. This won’t be my last visit.”

  It was a blessed relief to see the Doctor go back upstairs and to escape from the house. He found it encouraging to have his arm taken by Frank, and a precious flattery to hear those often scornful lips praise his gardens, his buildings, his timber and the view from his terrace. The pride of ownership rekindled in him, the satisfaction of those few possessive months before he married Gwen.

  “It’s jolly pretty, I must admit,” he said, as he and his visitor leaned on the grey stone balustrade and gazed down through the speckled gold and copper of the beech trees to where the river gleamed in the dingle far below.

  “It’s perfectly charming, my dear fellow,” cried Frank. “You’re too modest about it. You always were too modest by half.”

  Dick did not remember that his senior officer had told him so in the old days. Frank must have liked him better than he had dared to suppose.

  “Shooting and fishing well preserved?” Frank asked.

  “Pretty fair. I’m not much of a sportsman myself, I’m afraid. Can’t stand hanging about in the wet since that go of rheumatic fever. It left my heart dicky, so the medicos say. I’ve got to take care of myself. But you can have all the sport you like if you’ll come and stay here.”

  “Nothing I should enjoy more,” Frank answered, and Dick relished the sensation of conferring favours upon him.

  When he had been subjected to a catechism on the sporting resources of his estate, he saw his guest swing round and contemplate the facade of the house.

  “Good place for parties. I suppose you have them pretty often?”

  “Well, no,” Dick admitted, his face falling. “My wife doesn’t care for a lot of people, except her old friends.”

  “Oh come, you must shake her out of that, as soon as she’s fit again. Doesn’t do to get into a rut in the country. One soon grows unsociable—miserly and all that. What’s the use of having money if you don’t share it out?”

  Dick looked at him in wistful longing. If only this prince of good companions, with his irresistible charm, his determination to be gay wherever he was, were a near neighbour, what an ally he would be against Gwen!

  And, as though in answer to his wish, Frank said, “I’d rent a little place hereabouts if I could find one going for a song. I don’t mind telling you I’ve run through nearly all my fortune since I left the Service. The old story,” he explained making a grimace, “fast women and slow horses. But this ought to be a goodish neighbourhood to lie low in, what?”

  “Couldn’t have a better,” Dick grinned ruefully. “It’s dull as ditchwater.”

  “Splendid,” Frank cried. “Suits me down to the ground.”

  Dick laughed—his first laugh for days. “You must have changed then, Flash!”

  “No, But my bank balance has.” And Frank began to make plans for a life of economy at somebody else’s expense. He would not have to entertain or to belong to clubs if he lived in the depths of Wales, nor to tip his friends’ servants on the scale they had learned to expect. “Then there’s a soft billet waiting for me at the Goldmans’,” he chuckled. “The old boy doesn’t know a thing about sport, really, and he likes to pick my brains on the quiet. I could potter about his place with a rod or a gun any day I liked, and drink his champagne, too, if only I could find somewhere to live.”

  “I know,” cried Dick, in a glow of excitement. “There’s the dower house.”

  “Whose dower house?”

  “Mine.” There was warmth in the word.

  Frank looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Is it empty?”

  “Why, yes. The old girl who rented it died a month ago. Her relations carted off the furniture and the place is shut. I’ve got the key in my study. Like to see it?”

  “You bet I would! I say, Scrub, old man, what a lark if I became your tenant, what?”

  “And I your landlord,” said Dick.

  “You haven’t anyone else after it?”

  “Oh, my wife talked of someone. But nothing’s signed yet, luckily.”

  As he spoke, he saw a greedy look flash across the Major’s lean face, with its wide, thin-lipped mouth, and its eyes set close together. He had often likened his friend to a graceful, fine-bred greyhound. Now, for a disconcerting moment, he was reminded of a lurcher closing on a silly hare. The comparison flattered neither himself nor his guest.

  “Come on,” he cried, dismissing it. “Let’s see if the house will serve your turn.”

  It served exceedingly well. The prospective tenant suggested a few improvements, and the landlord agreed to make them.

  “Well, that’s as good as settled,” Dick exclaimed in triumph when twilight drove them to abandon their measuring and tapping in the empty rooms.

  He wasn’t sorry to be in the air again, for the dower house—though Frank hadn’t noticed it—was full of echoes and, he had felt, of hostility. Were the ghosts of malicious, dispossessed dowagers laughing at him? Each succeeding bearer of his name had turned them out of Plâs Einon to end their days here. Was he the hereditary enemy of them all? And were they laughing at him now because he was sliding, as he knew, into a damned bad bargain—failing even to keep his own end up. Nonsense. He was Einon- Thomas of Plâs Einon and they were dead. He was too sensitive—that was the trouble. He’d
do as he pleased.

  “New drainage will be an investment, Scrub,” Frank was saying, “And the new heating apparatus.” “Still,” Dick answered, “it will cost a bit. You don’t want to pay much rent.”

  “Can’t afford to, my dear boy.”

  “Oh, I daresay we shall come to terms,” Dick went on, looking sideways in expectation of gratitude, and he felt an arm linked with his own.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if we did,” Frank said. They went in step up the long avenue in cheerful talk. The air was bitter with a frost that was killing the last of autumn’s flowers, and stars were cold in the darkening sky. For an instant as they were passing the inky circle of yew trees, Dick felt threatened by the majesty of nature. The nakedness of his own soul appeared to him, making him long for the companionable noise of cities. Afraid of the words that might have expressed the terror of space and silence that gripped him, he fell back on a phrase that Stansbury would accept without surprise. “I find the country pretty dull,” he said.

  “Trust me to liven things up, if I settle here,”

  Frank answered, and Dick was reassured. God’s imminence wouldn’t trouble him in the company of jolly old Flash.

  Not until he came within sight of Plâs Einon, ghostly pale among its crouching black laurels, and saw the lighted window of his wife’s room stare at him like an accusing eye, did he begin to feel again unhappy. He left Stansbury and ran upstairs without a word. Soon he stumbled down again, feeling weak at the knees.

  “I say, Frank, I’d be grateful if you’d stay the night with me. I know it’s asking a lot—the servants in a stew, and nothing ready. But you’d save my reason if you’d stop and go on talking. She’s about as bad as she can be, though the stubborn old fool of a doctor keeps on telling me it’s only a question of time. I wish to heaven she’d taken my advice and gone up to a nursing home in town. Then we shouldn’t have had this awful upset here. But she would insist that the child must be born in this house. She’s cracked about it, positively cracked.” He moved about the study picking things up and putting them down again. “What will the Goldmans say to your staying, though?” he asked.

  Frank stretched his long legs before the fire, and gave a lazy smile. “Oh, nothing. They eat out of my hand, Pa, Ma and the whole litter of daughters. You can send ’em a wire in the morning, if you like.” He chose and carefully nipped one of Dick’s best cigars. “I say, you do yourself well.”

  “I rarely smoke those myself,” Dick said.

  “Well sit down quietly, there’s a good chap, and smoke one now. You fidget me, hopping about. Your old medicine man put me in charge of your case, remember, and I’m going to prescribe for you. Keep a cellar book?”

  For a moment Dick forgot Gwen’s sufferings as he answered proudly, “You bet I do.”

  “Out with it then,” his guest ordered. “And we’ll pick a bottle of the best.”

  They drank far into the night, and came down sleepy-eyed at half-past ten the next morning. Still Gwenllian was in labour.

  “This is frightful,” Dick groaned, after another visit to her door. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Frank declared. “Does your estate run to a carpenter and a mason? Then let’s have ’em along at the dower house to estimate for our improvements. We’ll take sandwiches and a flask. Agreed?” Of course Dick agreed. And the day passed pleasantly enough, until at dusk a wide-eyed stable-boy came running from Plâs Einon to remind him once more of his wife.

  “The Doctor do want partic’lar to speak to you, sir,” the lad gasped. “It’s about wiring to London, I do believe.”

  “Oh Lord!” groaned Dick, hurrying towards the house.

  When his guest joined him at dinner, he was even more flurried than on the night before.

  “The specialist can’t be here till to-morrow morning,” he complained, “even if he catches the night-mail. She may have died of exhaustion before then. Thank God you’re with me, Frank. I shall never forget your kindness during this time.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Frank answered. “It’s no good worrying yourself into a panic. You had better decide on our drink.”

  “Choose what you like. I couldn’t touch a drop.” But over his best port that night, Dick gave away the dower house at a rent of thirty pounds a year.

  “Thank you for sitting up with me,” he said again and again. “I shan’t be able to sleep a wink.” Soon after one, his head sank on to his shirt-front: his eyes closed; his mouth dropped open. The Major helped him upstairs and into bed. Dick reached up to clasp him round the neck. “You’re my best pal, Flash,” he said very loud and slow. “My very, very, very best pal. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you after this.”

  He seemed scarcely to have fallen asleep when that meddlesome fool Powell, standing at his bedside in full daylight, awoke him with hysterical chatter.

  “It’s a boy, sir! Oh, sir, do listen! It’s a boy! He’s lovely, the nurse do say. He weighs over eight pounds! He’s the spit and image o’ his mother! Oh, sir, get up quick, and come and look! Oh, duwch! Aren’t you thankful to God it’s over, and the poor lady spared to us?” And she broke out crying afresh, though Dick saw with disgust that her silly face was already swollen and blotched with weeping.

  Damn these emotional Welsh! Of course he was glad, he answered her. Where the devil was his dressing-gown? Who had hidden his slippers? His head was aching and his mouth seemed to be full of fur. He blundered into the passage where Dr. Roberts was leaning against the wall, his big hands hanging at his sides. Sick and cross though he felt, Dick had a spasm of pity for the old fellow, for he had the appearance of a veteran who had been long in the front line. A greyish pallor showed beneath the weathering of his skin, and his big shoulders were bowed.

  “Well,” he said, without moving, “you have your heir, at last.”

  Dick blurted out the truth. “I never wanted him.” The Doctor’s wide-set eyes grew hard as slate. “Don’t go saying that to your poor wife, young man.”

  “Of course not,” Dick answered in a sulk. “Is she all right?”

  “May have to lie up for two or three months. Her heart’s a bit strained.”

  Dick surveyed this dismal prospect in silence. Then, because he could think of nothing else to say, he asked, “Will you have a drink?”

  “Thanks,” growled the old man, eyeing him with scorn. “Now my job’s done, I can do with a drop of the liquor you and your friend found so cheering last night. You haven’t asked to see your wife yet, I notice.”

  Dick felt his face redden and cursed the Welshman’s insolence. “No,” he said, very stiff and on his dignity, wishing that his attire were more formal. “May I?”

  “No, you may not. She’s too exhausted.”

  “Oh,” said Dick, and led the way down to the dining-room.

  When Dr. Roberts had swallowed his brandy, he looked more genially upon his sullen host. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy,” he said. “I’m sure I hope you’ll be happy.” He seemed on the point of saying more, but to Dick’s relief, thought better of it. “You’ll have something to live for now,” was all that he added.

  “Yes,” answered Dick, busily mixing himself a “prairie-oyster.” That would clear his head if anything could. “Yes, I suppose I shall,” he repeated mechanically, and glanced at the clock. Frank would be down soon. Then there’d be someone to talk to, thank God!

  Chapter III

  SHE MEETS AN OBSTACLE

  As Gwenllian opened the front door, the wind strove to wrench it from her grasp. She held fast, enjoying the tussle and the victory. Wisps of hair were flicked into her eyes. Her skirt flapped against her legs when she struggled down the steps. This wild weather exhilarated her. She would not get into the car until she had stood with head raised, breathing deep. The air was moist with rain that had come down in angry squalls for days past, and with yet more rain that lowered from the dark sky. She glanced up at the grey ribbons of cloud, taut and ragged on
the gale. A black flight of rooks swirled overhead, and one white seagull uttered its desolate cry. The soul of a drowned sailor, she thought. There’ll be wrecks at sea tonight. She wished she could fly, like a witch on a broomstick, to the fiercest part of the coast where cliffs of iron dropped sheer into deep water, and gigantic waves were splintered into a steam of spray.

  But she would go, instead, to meet Dick at the station. It was her practice to be on the platform to greet him with a set smile whenever he returned from his costly, foolish trips to London. She allowed no word of reproach to pass her lips, but tried to shame him into repentance by telling in a cheerful manner of how she had been working and saving for their estate and their child. Dick was not proving as easy to mould as she had hoped, but today she had renewed hope, for, in his absence, she had given battle to his false friend, her enemy.

  From the moment she had set eyes on Dick’s new tenant, installed with such deceitful haste while she lay ill, she had known she would have trouble with him. He was more dangerous than their noisy neighbour, Lewis Vaughan, or Dick’s common little best-man, whose visits her ridicule had soon made impossible. Major Stansbury was her equal in breeding and self-assurance, and Dick feared his sarcasm more than he feared her own. Silly little Dick, she said to herself, to be overawed by a waster! But for months after her baby’s birth, she had been too tired to do more than warn her husband and her warnings had failed. Dick needed a firm hand. Now that she had regained her health, she would apply it.

  Her plans for routing the intruder had been carefully matured. She had made sure that no other house within his means would be let to him in the district. Secretly, she had sought and found a tenant willing to pay a hundred pounds a year for the dower house. Then, having seen Dick off to London, she had told Major Stansbury that he must go. The duel had been fought in her own study, beneath her father’s scowling portrait. There, standing up so that her visitor might not sit down, she had apologised with frigid dignity for having to put the interests of her family before those of an acquaintance. As she recalled her carefully chosen words and his sneering, mock-deferential replies, she put up her gauntleted hand to her face. It must be the wind which was making it so hot, for she was not Dick to be humiliated by such a man’s irony. Thank goodness he had only a yearly tenancy! She had made it clear that the moment a more profitable tenant offered, a man of breeding would cease to trade upon his landlord’s generosity. The word charity had slipped into her speech. No man, unless he had a hide too thick to feel the lash of any verbal whip, could stay after what she had said.