Sir Peter was having his annual attack of gout. Staines Court appeared at these times like a ship battened down and running before a storm.
Figures of pale and frightened maids flickered through the long passage-ways. The portly butler violently ejected from the dining-room had been seen passing swiftly through the hall, with the ungainly movement of a prehistoric animal startled from its lair.
The room in which Sir Peter sat burned with his language. Eddies of blasphemous sound rushed out and buffeted the landings like a rising gale.
Sir Peter sat in a big arm chair in the center of the room. His figure gave the impression of a fortressed island in the middle of an empty sea. His foot was rolled in bandages and placed on a low stool before him; within reach of his hand was a knobbed blackthorn stick, a bell and a copy of the “Times” newspaper.
Fortunately Lady Staines was impervious to sound and acclimatized to fury. When Sir Peter was well she frequently raised storms, but when he had gout she let him raise them for himself. He was raising one now on the subject of Winn’s letter.
“What’s that he says? What’s that he says?” roared Sir Peter. “Something the matter with his lungs! That’s the first time a Staines has ever spoken of his lungs. The boy’s mad. I don’t admit it! I don’t believe it for a moment, all a damned piece of doctors’ rubbish, the chap’s a fool to listen to ’em! When has he ever seen me catering to hearse-conducting, pocket-filling asses!”
Charles was home on a twenty-four hours’ leave — he stood by the mantelpiece and regarded his parent with undutiful and critical eyes. “I should say you send for ’em,” he observed, “whenever you’ve got a pain; why they’re always hangin’ about. Look at that table chock full of medicines. ’Nuff to kill a horse — where do they come from?”
“Hold your infernal tongue, Sir!” shouted Sir Peter. “What do I have ’em for? I have ’em here to expose them! That’s why — I just let them try it on, and then hold them up to ridicule! Do you find I ever pay the least attention to ’em, Sarah?” he demanded from his wife.
“Not as a rule,” Lady Staines admitted, “unless you’re very bad indeed, and then you do as you like directly the pain has stopped.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I!” said Sir Peter triumphantly. “Once I get rid of the pain I can do as I like. When I’ve got red hot needles eating into my toes, am I likely to like anything? Of course not, you may just as well take medicine then as anything else, but as to taking orders from a pack of ill-bred bumpkins, full of witch magic as a dog of fleas, I see myself! Don’t stand grinning there, Charles, like a dirty, shock-headed barmaid’s dropped hair pin! I won’t stand it! I can’t see why all my sons should have thin legs, neither you nor I, Sarah, ever went about like a couple of spilikin’s. I call it indecent! Why don’t you get something inside ’em, Charles, eh? No stamina, that’s what it is! Everybody going to the dogs in motor cars with manicure girls out of their parents’ pockets — ! Why don’t you answer me, Charles, when I speak to you?”
“Nobody 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 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.”