The Dark Tower

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 damned 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-prick compared to gout! No pain — use of both legs — sanguine disposition. Where the hell’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 asses 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.