DOUBTFUL POSITION AT WORSTED SKEYNES

Then George’s answer came at last, the flags were in full bloom round the Scotch garden at Worsted Skeynes.  They grew in masses and of all shades, from deep purple to pale grey, and their scent, very penetrating, very delicate, floated on the wind.

While waiting for that answer, it had become Mr. Pendyce’s habit to promenade between these beds, his hand to his back, for he was still a little stiff, followed at a distance of seven paces by the spaniel John, very black, and moving his rubbery nostrils uneasily from side to side.

In this way the two passed every day the hour from twelve to one.  Neither could have said why they walked thus, for Mr. Pendyce had a horror of idleness, and the spaniel John disliked the scent of irises; both, in fact, obeyed that part of themselves which is superior to reason.  During this hour, too, Mrs. Pendyce, though longing to walk between her flowers, also obeyed that part of her, superior to reason, which told her that it would be better not.

But George’s answer came at last.

“Stoics’ club.

“Dear father,

“Yes, Bellew is bringing a suit.  I am taking steps in the matter.  As to the promise you ask for, I can give no promise of the sort.  You may tell Bellew I will see him d –­d first.

“Your affectionate son,

“George Pendyce.”

Mr. Pendyce received this at the breakfast-table, and while he read it there was a hush, for all had seen the handwriting on the envelope.

Mr. Pendyce read it through twice, once with his glasses on and once without, and when he had finished the second reading he placed it in his breast pocket.  No word escaped him; his eyes, which had sunk a little the last few days, rested angrily on his wife’s white face.  Bee and Norah looked down, and, as if they understood, the four dogs were still.  Mr. Pendyce pushed his plate back, rose, and left the room.

Norah looked up.

“What’s the matter, Mother?”

Mrs. Pendyce was swaying.  She recovered herself in a moment.

“Nothing, dear.  It’s very hot this morning, don’t you think?  I’ll Just go to my room and take some sal volatile.”

She went out, followed by old Roy, the Skye; the spaniel John, who had been cut off at the door by his master’s abrupt exit, preceded her.  Norah and Bee pushed back their plates.

“I can’t eat, Norah,” said Bee.  “It’s horrible not to know what’s going on.”

Norah answered

“It’s perfectly brutal not being a man.  You might just as well be a dog as a girl, for anything anyone tells you!”

Mrs. Pendyce did not go to her room; she went to the library.  Her husband, seated at his table, had George’s letter before him.  A pen was in his hand, but he was not writing.

“Horace,” she said softly, “here is poor John!”

Mr. Pendyce did not answer, but put down the hand that did not hold his pen.  The spaniel John covered it with kisses.

“Let me see the letter, won’t you?”

Mr. Pendyce handed it to her without a word.  She touched his shoulder gratefully, for his unusual silence went to her heart.  Mr. Pendyce took no notice, staring at his pen as though surprised that, of its own accord, it did not write his answer; but suddenly he flung it down and looked round, and his look seemed to say:  ’You brought this fellow into the world; now see the result!’

He had had so many days to think and put his finger on the doubtful spots of his son’s character.  All that week he had become more and more certain of how, without his wife, George would have been exactly like himself.  Words sprang to his lips, and kept on dying there.  The doubt whether she would agree with him, the feeling that she sympathised with her son, the certainty that something even in himself responded to those words:  “You can tell Bellew I will see him d –­d first!” ­all this, and the thought, never out of his mind, ‘The name ­the estate!’ kept him silent.  He turned his head away, and took up his pen again.

Mrs. Pendyce had read the letter now three times, and instinctively had put it in her bosom.  It was not hers, but Horace must know it by heart, and in his anger he might tear it up.  That letter, for which they had waited so long; told her nothing; she had known all there was to tell.  Her hand had fallen from Mr. Pendyce’s shoulder, and she did not put it back, but ran her fingers through and through each other, while the sunlight, traversing the narrow windows, caressed her from her hair down to her knees.  Here and there that stream of sunlight formed little pools in her eyes, giving them a touching, anxious brightness; in a curious heart-shaped locket of carved steel, worn by her mother and her grandmother before her, containing now, not locks of their son’s hair, but a curl of George’s; in her diamond rings, and a bracelet of amethyst and pearl which she wore for the love of pretty things.  And the warm sunlight disengaged from her a scent of lavender.  Through the library door a scratching noise told that the dear dogs knew she was not in her bedroom.  Mr. Pendyce, too, caught that scent of lavender, and in some vague way it augmented his discomfort.  Her silence, too, distressed him.  It did not occur to him that his silence was distressing her.  He put down his pen.

“I can’t write with you standing there, Margery!”

Mrs. Pendyce moved out of the sunlight.

“George says he is taking steps.  What does that mean, Horace?”

This question, focusing his doubts, broke down the Squire’s dumbness.

“I won’t be treated like this!” he said.  “I’ll go up and see him myself!”

He went by the 10.20, saying that he would be down again by the 5.55

Soon after seven the same evening a dogcart driven by a young groom and drawn by a raking chestnut mare with a blaze face, swung into the railway-station at Worsted Skeynes, and drew up before the booking-office.  Mr. Pendyce’s brougham, behind a brown horse, coming a little later, was obliged to range itself behind.  A minute before the train’s arrival a wagonette and a pair of bays, belonging to Lord Quarryman, wheeled in, and, filing past the other two, took up its place in front.  Outside this little row of vehicles the station fly and two farmers’ gigs presented their backs to the station buildings.  And in this arrangement there was something harmonious and fitting, as though Providence itself had guided them all and assigned to each its place.  And Providence had only made one error ­that of placing Captain Bellew’s dogcart precisely opposite the booking-office, instead of Lord Quarryman’s wagonette, with Mr. Pendyce’s brougham next.

Mr. Pendyce came out first; he stared angrily at the dogcart, and moved to his own carriage.  Lord Quarryman came out second.  His massive sun-burned head ­the back of which, sparsely adorned by hairs, ran perfectly straight into his neck ­was crowned by a grey top-hat.  The skirts of his grey coat were square-shaped, and so were the toes of his boots.

“Hallo, Pendyce!” he called out heartily; “didn’t see you on the platform.  How’s your wife?”

Mr. Pendyce, turning to answer, met the little burning eyes of Captain Bellew, who came out third.  They failed to salute each other, and Bellow, springing into his cart, wrenched his mare round, circled the farmers’ gigs, and, sitting forward, drove off at a furious pace.  His groom, running at full speed, clung to the cart and leaped on to the step behind.  Lord Quarryman’s wagonette backed itself into the place left vacant.  And the mistake of Providence was rectified.

“Cracked chap, that fellow Bellew.  D’you see anything of him?”

Mr. Pendyce answered: 

“No; and I want to see less.  I wish he’d take himself off!”

His lordship smiled.

“A huntin’ country seems to breed fellows like that; there’s always one of ’em to every pack of hounds.  Where’s his wife now?  Good-lookin’ woman; rather warm member, eh?”

It seemed to Mr. Pendyce that Lord Quarryman’s eyes searched his own with a knowing look, and muttering “God knows!” he vanished into his brougham.

Lord Quarryman looked kindly at his horses.

He was not a man who reflected on the whys, the wherefores, the becauses, of this life.  The good God had made him Lord Quarryman, had made his eldest son Lord Quantock; the good God had made the Gaddesdon hounds ­it was enough!

When Mr. Pendyce reached home he went to his dressing-room.  In a corner by the bath the spaniel John lay surrounded by an assortment of his master’s slippers, for it was thus alone that he could soothe in measure the bitterness of separation.  His dark brown eye was fixed upon the door, and round it gleamed a crescent moon of white.  He came to the Squire fluttering his tail, with a slipper in his mouth, and his eye said plainly:  ’Oh, master, where have you been?  Why have you been so long?  I have been expecting you ever since half-past ten this morning!’

Mr. Pendyce’s heart opened a moment and closed again.  He said “John!” and began to dress for dinner.

Mrs. Pendyce found him tying his white tie.  She had plucked the first rosebud from her garden; she had plucked it because she felt sorry for him, and because of the excuse it would give her to go to his dressing-room at once.

“I’ve brought you a buttonhole, Horace.  Did you see him?”

“No.”

Of all answers this was the one she dreaded most.  She had not believed that anything would come of an interview; she had trembled all day long at the thought of their meeting; but now that they had not met she knew by the sinking in her heart that anything was better than uncertainty.  She waited as long as she could, then burst out: 

“Tell me something, Horace!”

Mr. Pendyce gave her an angry glance.

“How can I tell you, when there’s nothing to tell?  I went to his club.  He’s not living there now.  He’s got rooms, nobody knows where.  I waited all the afternoon.  Left a message at last for him to come down here to-morrow.  I’ve sent for Paramor, and told him to come down too.  I won’t put up with this sort of thing.”

Mrs. Pendyce looked out of the window, but there was nothing to see save the ha-ha, the coverts, the village spire, the cottage roofs, which for so long had been her world.

“George won’t come down here,” she said.

“George will do what I tell him.”

Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct that she was right.

Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.

“George had better take care,” he said; “he’s entirely dependent on me.”

And as if with those words he had summed up the situation, the philosophy of a system vital to his son, he no longer frowned.  On Mrs. Pendyce those words had a strange effect.  They stirred within her terror.  It was like seeing her son’s back bared to a lifted whip-lash; like seeing the door shut against him on a snowy night.  But besides terror they stirred within her a more poignant feeling yet, as though someone had dared to show a whip to herself, had dared to defy that something more precious than life in her soul, that something which was of her blood, so utterly and secretly passed by the centuries into her fibre that no one had ever thought of defying it before.  And there flashed before her with ridiculous concreteness the thought:  ’I’ve got three hundred a year of my own!’ Then the whole feeling left her, just as in dreams a mordant sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache, whose cause is forgotten, behind.

“There’s the gong, Horace,” she said.  “Cecil Tharp is here to dinner.  I asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn’t feel up to it.  Of course they are expecting it very soon now.  They talk of the 15th of June.”

Mr. Pendyce took from his wife his coat, passing his arms down the satin sleeves.

“If I could get the cottagers to have families like that,” he said, “I shouldn’t have much trouble about labour.  They’re a pig-headed lot ­do nothing that they’re told.  Give me some eau-de-Cologne, Margery.”

Mrs. Pendyce dabbed the wicker flask on her husband’s handkerchief.

“Your eyes look tired,” she said.  “Have you a headache, dear?”