The Dark Tower Part 8

"n.o.body can answer you when you keep roaring like a deuced megaphone,"

said Charles wearily. "Let's hear what the chap's got to say for himself, Mater."

Lady Staines read Winn's letter out loud in a dry voice without expression; it might have been an account of a new lawn mower which she held beneath it.

"I've managed to crock one of my lungs somehow, but they say I've got a chance if I go straight out to Davos for six months. Ask the guv'nor if he'll let me have some money. I shall want it badly. My wife and the kid will go to her people. You might run across and have a look at him sometimes. He's rather a jolly little chap. I shall come down for the week-end to-morrow unless I hear from you to the contrary.

"Your affectionate son, "WINN."

"I think that's all," said his mother.

"What!" shouted Sir Peter. He had never shouted quite like this before.

Charles groaned and buried his head in his hands. Even Lady Staines looked up from the lawn mower's letter, which she had placed on the top of Winn's; the medicine bottles sprang from the table and fell back again sufficiently shaken for the next dose.

"Do you mean to tell me!" cried Sir Peter in a quieter voice, "that that little piece of dandelion fluff--that baggage--that city fellow's half baked, peeled onion of a minx is going to desert her husband? That's what I call it--desertion! What does she want to go back to her people for? She must go with him! She must go to Davos! She shall go to Davos!

if I have to take her there by the hair! I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life! What becomes of domesticity? where's family life?

That's what I want to know! and is Winn such a milk and water noodle that he's going to sit down under it and say 'Thank you!' Not that I think he needs to go to Davos for a moment, mind you. Let him come here and have a nice quiet time with me, that's what he wants."

"That's all very well, Father," said Charles. "But what you mean is you don't want to fork out! If the chap's told to go to Davos, he's got to go to Davos, and it's his own look-out whether he takes his wife with him or not. Consumption isn't a joke, and I tell you plainly that if you don't help him when he's got a chance, you needn't expect _me_ to come to the funeral. No flowers and coffins and beloved sons on tombstones, are going to make me move an inch. It'll be just the same to me as if you'd shoved him under with your own hand, and that's all I've got to say, and it's no use blowing the roof off about it!"

"You'd better go now, Charles," said Lady Staines quietly.

When Sir Peter had finished saying what he thought of Charles and what he intended to do to the entail, Lady Staines gave him his medicine.

"Look here, Peter," she said, "this is a bad business about our boy."

Sir Peter met her eyes and nodded.

"Yes," he agreed, "a d.a.m.ned bad business!"

"We'd better get him off," she added after a moment's pause.

"It's all nonsense," grumbled Sir Peter, "and I told you from the first you ought never to have let him marry that girl. Her father's the poorest tenant I ever had, soft-headed, London vermin! He doesn't know anything about manure--and he'll never learn. I shall cut down all his trees as soon as I'm about again. As for the girl, keep her out of my sight or I'll wring her neck. I ought to have done it long ago. How much does he want?"

"Let's make it three hundred," Lady Staines said. "He may as well be comfortable."

"Pouring money into a sieve," grumbled Sir Peter. "Send for the doctor and bring me the medical dictionary. I may as well see what it says about consumption, and don't mention the word when Winn's about. I _will_ have tact! If you'd used common or garden tact in this house before, that marriage would never have taken place. I sit here simmering with it day in and day out and everybody else goes about giving the whole show away! If it hadn't been for my tact Charles would have married that manicure girl years ago. Bring me my check-book. It's nothing but a school-boy's lark, this going to Davos. Why consumption's a pin-p.r.i.c.k compared to gout! No pain--use of both legs--sanguine disposition. Where the h.e.l.l's that medical dictionary? Ah, it's there, is it--then why the devil didn't you give it me before?"

Sir Peter read solemnly for a few minutes, and then flung the book on the floor.

"Bosh!" he cried angrily. "All old woman's nonsense. Can't tell what's going on inside a pair of bellows--can they? Then why make condemned a.s.ses of themselves, and say they can! Don't tell Charles I've written this check--he's the most uncivil rascal we've got."

CHAPTER IX

It was odd how Winn looked forward to seeing Staines; he couldn't remember ever having paid much attention to the scenery before; he had always liked the bare backs of the downs behind the house where he used to exercise the horses, and the turf was short and smelt of thyme; and of course the shooting was good and the house stood well; but he hadn't thought about it till now, any more than he thought about his braces.

He decided to walk up from the station. There was a short cut through the fields and then you came on the Court suddenly, over-looking a sheet of water.

It was a still November day, colorless and sodden. The big elms were as dark as wet haystacks and the woods huddled dispiritedly in a vague mist.

The trees broke to the right of the Court and the house rose up like a gigantic silver ghost.

It was a battered old Tudor building with an air of not having been properly cleaned; blackened and weather-soaked, unconscionably averse from change, it had held its own for four hundred years.

The stones looked as if they were made out of old moonlight and thin December sunshine. A copse of small golden trees, aspen and silver birches made a pale screen of light beside the house and at its feet, the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.

There wasn't a tree Winn hadn't climbed or an inch he hadn't explored, fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging at his menaced life.

His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it had been discarded by a jockey.

In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs.

She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked, "You've just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us--your father threw a watering can at him. I can't think what's happened to the men nowadays, they don't seem to be able to stand anything, and I've sent Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago if it was only ducks, but probably it's a girl at the mill as well."

Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. "Hang it all, Mother," he objected, "it's such a messy day for planting bulbs!" "Nonsense," said Lady Staines firmly, "I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don't you, you can get the dirt off then? It's a perfect day for bulbs as you'd know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There's another trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin." Winn strode off to the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and Judy show.

In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn't hit out all round if the other person wouldn't hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their armor as easily as milk slips into a gla.s.s. It was Lady Staines and Winn who were the deadly fighters.

They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.

It was difficult to say what they fought for but it was a magnificent spectacle to see them fight, and they had for each other a regard which, if it was never tender, had every element of respect.

They worked now for some time in silence. Suddenly Lady Staines c.o.c.ked a wintry blue eye in her son's direction and remarked, "Why ain't your wife going with you to Davos?" Winn hurled a bulb into the small hole prepared for it before answering, then he said:

"She's too delicate to stand the cold."

"Is there anything the matter with her?" asked his mother.

Winn preferred to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn't going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. "Marriage don't seem to have agreed with either of you particularly well," observed Lady Staines with a grim smile.

"We haven't got your const.i.tution," replied her son. "If either you or Father had married any one else--they'd have been dead within six months."

"Humph!" said his mother. "That only shows our sound judgment; we took what we could stomach! It's her look-out of course, but I suppose she knows she's running you into the Divorce Court, letting you go out there by yourself? All those snow places bristle with gra.s.s widows and girls who have outstayed their market and have to get a hustle on! Sending a man out there alone is like driving a new-born lamb into a pack of wolves!" Lady Staines with her eye on the heavily built and rather leathery lamb beside her gave a sardonic chuckle. Winn ignored her ill.u.s.tration.

"You needn't be afraid," he replied. "I'm done with women; they tempt me about as much as stale sponge cakes."

"Ah!" said his mother, "I've heard that tale before. A man who says he's done with women simply means one of them's done with him. Besides, you're to be an invalid, I understand! An invalid man is as exposed to women as a young chicken to rats. You won't stand a ghost of a chance.

Look at your father, if I left him alone when he was having an attack of gout with a gray-haired matron of a reformatory, he'd be on his knees to her before I could get back."

"You can take it from me," said Winn, "that even if I _should_ need such a thing as a petticoat, I'd try a kind that won't affect marriage. I'll never look at another good woman again--the other sort will do for me if I can't stick it without."

"Don't racket too much," said Lady Staines, planting her last bulb with scientific skill. "They say keeping women's very expensive up there--on account of the Russian Princes."

"By the by," said Winn, "thanks for the money. Had any difficulty in extracting it?"

"Not much," said Lady Staines, withdrawing to the lawn. "Charles got rather in the way."