Part 18

He couldn’t bear much. It wasn’t only how she said it, but what she said. Charles, who had at first been afflicted by her language, was now afflicted by her facts. He shifted uneasily in his chair. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. His thin brown face was flushed, and he looked distressed. In that strange, defective, yet all too vivid speech which he so deeply deplored, she drew for him a picture of what seemed sheer exploitation, culminating in his own sister’s flinging herself hilariously into the game. This child; this helpless child, who would obey anybody, go anywhere, do anything she was told--in Charles’s eyes, as he listened and drew her out, she became the most pathetic thing on earth. Everybody, it appeared, first grabbed at her and then wanted to get rid of her. Everybody; himself too. Yes, he too had grabbed at her, under a mealy-mouthed pretence of helping her, and now he too wanted--not to get rid of her, that seemed too violent, too brutal a way of putting it, but to hand her over, to pass her on, to send her back to that infernal young Luke, who himself was trying to escape from her and leave her to his mother. And the courage of the child! It was the courage of ignorance, of course, but still it seemed to Charles a lovely thing, that was afraid of nothing, of no discomfort, of no hard work, if only she might be with her husband in their own home. Charles discovered that that was Sally’s one wish, and that her simple ambition appeared to be to do what she called work her fingers to the bone on behalf of that odious youth.

‘Mr. Luke,’ said Sally, who was unacquainted with any reason why she shouldn’t say everything she knew to anyone who wished to hear, ‘Mr. Luke, ’e thinks ’e can’t afford a ’ome yet for me, and so----’

‘Then he oughtn’t to have married you,’ flashed out Charles, infuriated by the young brute.

‘Seemed ’e couldn’t ’elp it,’ said Sally. ‘Seemed as if it ’ad to be. ’E----’

‘Oh yes, _yes_,’ interrupted Charles impatiently, for he hated hearing anything about Jocelyn’s emotions. ‘Of course, of course. That was a quite foolish remark of mine.’

‘Five ’undred pounds a year ’e got,’ went on Sally, ‘and me able to make sixpence go twice as far as most can. Dunno wot ’e’s talkin’ about.’

And indeed she didn’t know, for she shared Mr. Pinner’s opinion that five hundred a year was wealth.

‘Fair beats me,’ she added, after a thoughtful pause.

Well, thought Charles, the Moulsford family had behaved badly, and, under the cloak of sympathy and wishing to help, his and Laura’s conduct had been most base; but they were certainly going to make up for it now. By God, yes. Crippenham, which he had at first thought of from sheer selfishness as the very place to get Sally to himself in, was evidently now the place of all others from which she could be helped. Quite close to Cambridge, within easy reach of young Luke, and in it, all-powerful even now in spite of his age, certainly all-powerful when it came to putting the fear of God into an undergraduate, or whatever he was, his ancient but still inflammable father. Naturally at ninety-three the old man consisted principally of embers; but these embers could still be fanned into a partial glow by the sight of a good horse or a beautiful woman, and Charles would only need to show Sally to him to have the old man on her side. Not able to hear, but able to see: what combination could, in the case of Sally, possibly be more admirable?

He drove on after lunch, his conscience clear; so clear that before leaving Thaxted he sent Laura a telegram telling her they were going to Crippenham, because he no longer wanted her to be made anxious,--for those only, thought Charles, are angry and wish to make others uncomfortable who are themselves in the wrong. He was no longer in the wrong; or, rather, he was no longer thinking with rapture of the wrong he would like to be in if Sally could be in it with him. Her speech made a gulf between them which his fastidious soul couldn’t cross. There had to be h’s before Charles could love with passion. Where there were none, passion with him collapsed and died. On this occasion it died at the inn at Thaxted towards the end of lunch; and he was grateful, really, however unpleasant at the moment its dying was. For what mightn’t have happened if she had gone on being silent and only saying yes and no, and smiling the divine, delicious smile that didn’t only play in her dimples but laughed and danced in her darling eyes? Charles was afraid that in that case he would have been done for. Talking, she had saved him; and though he still loved her, for no man could look at Sally and not love her, he loved her differently,--kindly, gently, with a growingly motherly concern for her welfare. After Thaxted there was no further trace in his looks and manner of that which had made Sally suspect him of a wish to be a husband.

But she was surprised when he asked her, as they drove along, whether she would mind if he took her to his father in the country for the night, instead of back to what he called noisy London. Laura was in London; why should she be taken somewhere else, away from her? And to his father too--to more picks, fresh ones; just as she was beginning to shake down nicely with the ones she knew. Surely the father of the picks would be the most frightening of all?

So she said, ‘Pardon?’ and looked so much alarmed that Charles, smiling, explained that his father was staying at that moment quite near Cambridge, and it would be convenient for the search for rooms she had told him Laura had promised to undertake with her next day.

‘He’s quite harmless,’ Charles assured her, for she continued to look alarmed--if where she was to be taken to next was near Cambridge, it must also be near Woodles, and suppose her father were to happen to see her?--‘and he’s all alone there till Laura goes back to him tomorrow. It will cheer him up to have us. He’s ninety-three.’

Ninety-three? ‘Oh, my,’ said Sally politely. ‘’E ain’t ’alf old. Poor old gentleman,’ she added with compassion, old people having been objects of special regard and attention in the Pinner circle.

But for the rest of the drive she was silent, for she was trying to thread her way among her indistinct and entangled thoughts, all of which seemed confusedly to press upon her notice that she oughtn’t to be where she was at all, that if she was anywhere it ought to be with her husband, and that with every hour that passed she was sinking deeper and deeper in wrong-doing.

‘Soon be in right up to the neck,’ she said to herself with resigned unhappiness; and sincerely wished it were that time tomorrow, and she safely joined up with Mr. Luke, and finished for good and all with these soft-spoken but headstrong picks.

XIII

§

While they, along the roads, were drawing every minute nearer, the unconscious Duke was sitting in his plain study, having his plain tea, which had been set beside him by his plain parlourmaid. This is not to say that the parlourmaid was ill-favoured, but only that she wasn’t a footman.

There were no footmen at Crippenham. There was hardly anything there, except the Duke. For years it had been his conviction that this annual fortnight of the rest that is obtained by complete contrast prolonged his life. Something evidently prolonged it, and the Duke was sure it was Crippenham. There he went every Easter alone with Laura, because it was a small house, and an ugly house, and a solitary house, and had nothing to recommend it except that it was the exact opposite of every other Moulsford possession.

Only Charles could come and go as he pleased; only he could dare break in without notice on the sacred yearly business of prolonging life. Although he had had ninety-three years of it, the Duke still wanted more. He liked being alive, and it pleased him to keep Streatley waiting. Streatley, and the other three children of his first marriage--absurd, he thought, to have to refer to those four old things as children--were unpopular with their father. He had never at any time cared much for them, and had begun to be really angry with them when he was a lively seventy, and perceived that the possession of children bordering on a heavy fifty made him seem less young than he felt himself to be. Now that they were practically seventy themselves, and old seventies too, and he not looking a day different, he hoped, from what he had looked thirty years before, he was angrier with them than ever. He admitted that other people might be old at ninety-three, but he wasn’t; he was the exception. He didn’t feel old, and he didn’t, he considered, look old, so what was all this talk of age? The press never mentioned him without the prefix venerable; people pretended he was deaf, when he could hear as well as any man if he wasn’t mumbled at; Laura was continually making him sit out of draughts, just as if he were a damned invalid; arms were offered him if he wanted to walk a few steps--he couldn’t appear in the House without some officious member of it, usually that ass Chepstow, who was eighty if a day himself, ambling across to help; and every time he had a birthday the newspapers tumbled over each other with their offensively astonished congratulations. Couldn’t a man be over ninety without having it perpetually rubbed into him that he was old?

What he loved was his brood of young ones--Laura, Terry, and Charles; and of this lively trio the dearest to him was Charles. So that, looking up from his seedcake and seeing his last born coming into the room, not only entirely unexpectedly but with a young woman, though he was surprised he wasn’t angry; and when on their coming close to him he perceived the exceeding fairness of the young woman, his surprise became pleasurable; very pleasurable; in fact, pleasurable to excess.

He stared up at Sally a moment, not listening to what Charles was saying, and then struggled to get on to his feet. Younger than his three young ones ... much, much younger than his three young ones ... youth, ah, youth ... lovely, lovely youth....

Charles wanted to help him, but was thrust aside. ‘Poor old gentleman,’ said Sally, catching him by the arm as he seemed about to lose his balance and drop back into the chair.

‘Married?’ asked the Duke, breathing hard after his exertion, and looking at Charles.

Charles shook his head.

‘’Course I’m married,’ said Sally with heat.

‘He means us,’ said Charles.

‘Us?’ repeated Sally, much shocked.

‘You’re going to be, then,’ said the Duke, looking first at her and then at Charles, his face red with pleasure.

Charles shook his head again, and laughed.

But the Duke didn’t laugh. He stared at him a minute, and then said, ‘Fool.’

‘I _got_ a nusband,’ said Sally indignantly.

‘He can’t hear,’ said Charles. ‘He’s very deaf.’

‘What does she say?’ asked the Duke. ‘Speak clearly, my dear--no, don’t shout,’ he added; though Sally, far from going to shout, wasn’t even opening her mouth. Poor old gentleman, she thought, gazing at him in silent compassion; fancy him still being anybody’s father.

The Duke took her hand in a dry, cold grip.

‘Like shakin’ ’ands with a tombstone,’ thought Sally. And she was filled with so great a pity for anything so old that she didn’t feel shy of him at all, and in the coaxing voice of one who is addressing a baby she said, ‘’Ave yer tea while it’s ’ot--do, now.’

Charles looked at her astonished. Nearly everybody was afraid of his father. She reminded him of the weaned child in Isaiah, who put its hand fearlessly on the cockatrice’s den.

‘What does she say?’ asked the Duke, gazing at her with delight.

‘This is Mrs. Luke, Father--a friend of Laura’s,’ shouted Charles, ‘and I’ve brought her----’

‘Write it down, my dear,’ said the Duke, not heeding Charles, and drawing Sally into a chair next his own and pushing paper and a pencil towards her with his shaking old hands. ‘Write down what you were saying to me.’

Charles became anxious. He felt sure Sally couldn’t write anything down. Nor could she; for if her spoken words were imperfect her written ones were worse, so that to be given a pencil and paper by the Duke and told to write might have been embarrassing if she hadn’t, owing to his extreme age and evident dilapidation, felt he wasn’t, as she said to herself, all there. Poor old gentleman, she thought, full of pity. What she saw, sitting heavily in the chair, breathing hard and blinking at her so kindly, was just, thought Sally, the remains, the left-overs; like, she said to herself, her images being necessarily domestic, Sunday’s dinner by the time one got to Friday,--not much good, that is, but had to be put up with. No; there was nothing frightening about _him_, poor old gentleman. More like a baby than anything else.

‘’Ave yer tea while it’s ’ot,’ she said again, gently putting the paper and pencil aside. ‘Do you good,’ she encouraged, ‘a nice ’ot cup of tea will.’

‘He can’t hear, you know,’ said Charles, much relieved by Sally’s attitude. But with what confidence, he thought, couldn’t a thing so gracious approach the most churlish, disgruntled of human beings; and his father wasn’t either churlish or disgruntled,--he only looked as if he were, and frightened people, and when he saw they were frightened he didn’t like them, and frightened them more than ever.

The Duke, watching Sally’s every movement with rapt attention, thought when she put her hand on the teapot to feel if it was still hot that she wanted tea herself, and bade Charles ring the bell and order more to be brought, and meanwhile he took the cup she offered him obediently, his eyes on her face. He hadn’t got as far, being still in too great a condition of amazement at her beauty, as wondering which of the ancient families of England had produced this young shoot of perfection, and not being able to hear a word she said took it for granted that the delicate-ankled--he was of the practically extinct generation that looks first at a woman’s ankles,--slender-fingered creature belonged to his own kind. True her hands were red hands; surprisingly red, he thought, on her presently taking off her gloves, which she rolled up together into a neat tight ball, compared to the flawless fairness of her face; but they were the authentic shape of good-breeding, even if her nails----

The Duke was really surprised when his eyes reached Sally’s nails.

Charles drew a chair close up to his father, and began his explanations. He was determined the old man should attend, and shouted well into his ear as he told him that he had motored Laura’s friend, Mrs. Luke, down from London, where she had been staying with Laura at Goring House, to Crippenham for the night because it was quieter, and she hadn’t been well----

‘_I’m_ all right,’ interrupted Sally, who had been listening in an attitude of polite attention.

‘Oh, my dear child--when you fainted,’ protested Charles in his ordinary voice, raising a deprecating hand.

‘Speak up,’ said the Duke, impatiently.

‘’Course I fainted,’ said Sally, looking pleased.

‘What does she say?’ asked the Duke.

‘Yes--and were unconscious for at least half an hour,’ said Charles.

‘That’s right. _And_ sick,’ said Sally, looking proud.

‘Sick? Were you sick as well? Then see how really ill----’

‘Speak up, speak up,’ said the Duke testily.

But Sally said nothing further, and merely smiled indulgently at Charles.

‘What did she say?’ asked the Duke, not wishing to lose a word that fell from that enchanting mouth.

‘She said,’ shouted Charles, ‘that she is quite well now.’

‘Of course she is,’ said the Duke, staring at her face and forgetting her nails. ‘Anyone can see she is as perfectly well as she is perfectly beautiful.’

‘Oh lor,’ thought Sally, ‘now _’e’s_ goin’ to begin.’

§

That afternoon and evening were a triumph for her if she had known it, but all she knew was that she was counting the hours to next day, and Jocelyn, and the settling down at last to her home and her duties. The old man was her slave. Crippenham and everything in it was laid at her feet, and the Duke only lamented that it should be to this one of his houses that she had come, where he couldn’t, he was afraid, make her even decently comfortable. Positively at Crippenham there was only one bathroom. The Duke seemed to regard this as a calamity, and Sally listened with mild wonder to the amount he had to say about it.

‘Fair ’arps on it, don’t ’e, poor old gentleman,’ she remarked to Charles; and bending over to the Duke’s ear--Charles looked on in astonishment at the fearless familiarity of the gesture--she tried to convey to him that it wasn’t Saturday night till the next night, and that by then she’d be in Cambridge, so there was no need for him to take on.

‘Eh?’ said the Duke. ‘What does she say?’ he asked Charles.

‘She says,’ shouted Charles, ‘that it doesn’t matter.’

How very glad he was that his father was so deaf. Often he had found his deafness trying, but how glad he was of it now. Not Saturday night.... Charles fell silent. It was then Friday. Could it be that since the previous Saturday----?

The Duke, however, knew nothing of Sally except what his eyes told him, and accordingly he was her slave. When she presently went up to Laura’s room with the housekeeper, who had instructions to place everything of Lady Laura’s at Mrs. Luke’s disposal--Crippenham had no spare rooms, only a room each for the Duke, and Charles, and Laura, the other six or seven bedrooms being left unfurnished and kept locked up--and Charles, who from long practice could make his father hear better than anyone except Laura, settled down to telling him as much about Sally as he thought prudent, the old man listened eagerly, his hand behind his ear, drinking in every word and asking questions which showed that if he was really interested in a subject he still could be most shrewd.

He was delighted that Sally should have run away from her mother-in-law, said it was proof of a fine, thoroughbred spirit, and asked who her father was.

Charles said his name was Pinner.

The Duke then inquired whether he were one of the Worcestershire Pinners, and Charles said he didn’t know.

The Duke then rambled off among his capacious memories, and presently brought back a Pinner who had been at Christchurch with him, and who had married, he said, one of the Dartmoors, an extremely handsome woman, fair too, who was probably the girl’s grandmother.

Charles merely bowed his head.

The Duke then asked who the Lukes, apart from this boy-husband at Ananias, were; for, he said, except the fellow in the Bible, he couldn’t recollect ever having heard of a Luke before.

Charles said all he knew was that they lived at South Winch.

‘What?’ cried the Duke. ‘Has she married beneath her?’--and was so really upset that for a time he blinked at Charles in silence. Because he felt that if only this dear son of his had secured the beautiful young creature he could have died content; and it seemed to him a double catastrophe that not only should his boy have missed her, but that she should have been caught into a misalliance with some obscure family in a suburb.

‘Upon my word, Charles,’ he said, after a dismayed silence, ‘that’s a pity. A very great pity.’

And rambling off into his memories again, he said it was a good thing that poor Jack Pinner was dead, for no man had a keener family feeling than he, and it would have broken his heart to think his grand-daughter had made a mistake of that kind.

He couldn’t get over it. He had never, in the whole of his long life, seen anyone to touch this girl for beauty, and that she should, at the very outset of what ought to have been a career of unparalleled splendour and success, have dropped out of her proper sphere and become entangled in a suburb really shocked him. Kings at her feet, all Europe echoing with her name--this seemed to the Duke such beauty’s proper accompaniment.

‘Tut, tut,’ he said, his hands, clasped on the top of his stick, shaking more than usual, ‘tut, tut, tut. What was her mother thinking of?’

‘Her mother is dead,’ said Charles.

‘Her father, then. Jack Pinner was no fool. I don’t understand how his son--where is he, by the way? I heard something about the Worcestershire estates having been sold after the war----’

Charles said he didn’t know where her father was, because, although Sally had told him the shop was at Woodles, he had never heard of Woodles, which indeed is not marked on any map, so that he felt he wasn’t lying in saying he didn’t know.

The Duke, however, appeared to be seized by a sudden fierce desire to track down his old friend’s reprehensible son and tell him what he thought of him, and Charles was dismayed, for no good, he was sure, could come of tracking down Mr. Pinner. Sally, he knew, was anxious her father shouldn’t find out her disobedience to his orders, and though of this disobedience Charles held Laura guilty, not Sally, yet he didn’t suppose Mr. Pinner would look at it like that, and it was, besides, important, Charles considered, that his father, who had always had a rooted objection to any woman who wasn’t well-bred, should go on thinking Sally was a Worcestershire Pinner.

It seemed, then, to Charles a good thing to keep his father and Mr. Pinner apart, and it was therefore with regret that he listened to the old man asking Sally the moment he next saw her, which wasn’t till dinner, for she stayed up in her room till fetched down by the scandalised housekeeper, to whom it was a new experience that His Grace should be kept waiting even a minute after the gong had sounded, where her father was.

‘’Im?’ said Sally, turning pale but forced by nature and her upbringing to an obedient truthfulness. ‘’E’s at Woodles, ’_e_ is.’ And, ‘Oh my gracious,’ she added to herself, ‘they ain’t goin’ to tell ’im I’m ’ere?’

‘What does she say?’ the Duke asked Charles.

‘She says,’ shouted Charles, following his father, who was shuffling along leaning on Sally’s arm, to the dining-room, and shouting with outward composure but inward regret, ‘that he is at Woodles.’

‘Woodles? Woodles?’ repeated the Duke. ‘Never heard of it. Is it in Worcestershire?’

Sally shook her head. She didn’t know where Worcestershire was, but she felt pretty sure Woodles wasn’t in it.

‘_I_ dunno wot it’s in,’ she said. And then, impelled as always to the naked truth, she added, ‘Close by ’ere, any’ow.’

‘What does she say?’ inquired the Duke, turning again to Charles.

‘She says,’ shouted Charles, obliged to hand on the answer correctly with Sally listening, but doing so with increased regret, ‘that it isn’t far from here.’

‘How very lucky,’ said the Duke, ‘and how very odd that I shouldn’t have known he was so near.’ And he added, when he had been lowered into his chair at the head of the table by the parlourmaid, who held one arm, and his servant, who held the other, ‘I’d like to have a talk with that father of yours, my dear.’

Sally turned paler.

‘Your grandfather was one of my oldest friends,’ continued the Duke, with difficulty unfolding his table-napkin because of how much his hands shook.

‘I ain’t _got_ no grandfather,’ said Sally anxiously, who had never heard of him till that moment.

‘What does she say?’ asked the Duke.

‘She says,’ began Charles reluctantly--‘You know,’ he muttered quickly to Sally, for how could he tell the old man what she had said? ‘you _have_ a grandfather--or had. You must have. Everybody has them.’

‘What? What?’ said the Duke impatiently. ‘Send a message round tonight, Charles, and say with my compliments that I’d very much like to see Pinner. Tell him I’m too old to go to him, so perhaps he’ll be obliging enough to come to me some time tomorrow. You can say his father was at Oxford with me if you like, and that I’ve only just heard he is in the neighbourhood. Say his daughter----’

‘Now don’t--now _don’t_ go doin’ a thing like that,’ Sally faintly begged of Charles.

‘What does she say?’ asked the Duke.