Scales of Justice

CHAPTER III The Valley of the Chyne

Rose and Mark behaved in the classic manner of surprised lovers. They released each other, Rose turned white and Mark red, and neither of them uttered a word.

The Colonel said, “I’m sorry, my dear. Forgive me,” and made his daughter a little bow.

Rose, with a sort of agitated spontaneity, ran to him, linked her hands behind his head and cried, “It had to happen sometime, darling, didn’t it?”

Mark said, “Sir, I want her to marry me.”

“But I won’t,” Rose said, “I won’t unless you can be happy about it. I’ve told him.”

The Colonel, with great gentleness, freed himself and then put an arm round his daughter.

“Where have you come from, Mark?” he asked.

“From Chyning. It’s my day at the hospital.”

“Yes, I see.” The Colonel looked from his daughter to her lover and thought how ardent and vulnerable they seemed. “Sit down, both of you,” he said. “I’ve got to think what I’m going to say to you. Sit down.”

They obeyed him with an air of bewilderment.

“When you go back to Nunspardon, Mark,” he said, “you will find your father very much upset. That is because of a talk I’ve just had with him. I’m at liberty to repeat the substance of that talk to you, but I feel some hesitation in doing so. I think he should be allowed to break it to you himself.”

“Break it to me?”

“It is not good news. You will find him entirely opposed to any thought of your marriage with Rose.”

“I can’t believe it,” Mark said.

“You will, however. You may even find that you yourself (forgive me, Rose, my love, but it may be so) feel quite differently about…” the Colonel smiled faintly… “about contracting an alliance with a Cartarette.”

“But, my poorest Daddy,” Rose ejaculated, clinging to a note of irony, “what have you been up to?”

“The very devil and all, I’m afraid, my poppet,” her father rejoined.

“Well, whatever it may be,” Mark said and stood up, “I can assure you that blue murder wouldn’t make me change my mind about Rose.”

“O,” the Colonel rejoined mildly, “this is not blue murder.”

“Good.” Mark turned to Rose. “Don’t be fussed, darling,” he said. “I’ll go home and sort it out.”

“By all means, go home,” the Colonel agreed, “and try.”

He took Mark by the arm and led him to the door.

“You won’t feel very friendly towards me tomorrow, Mark,” he said. “Will you try to believe that the action I’ve been compelled to take is one that I detest taking?”

“Compelled?” Mark repeated. “Yes, well… yes, of course.” He stuck out the Lacklander jaw and knitted the Lacklander brows. “Look here, sir,” he said, “if my father welcomes our engagement… and I can’t conceive of his doing anything else… will you have any objection? I’d better tell you now that no objection on either side will make the smallest difference.”

“In that case,” the Colonel said, “your question is academic. And now I’ll leave you to have a word with Rose before you go home.” He held out his hand. “Goodbye, Mark.”

When the Colonel had gone, Mark turned to Rose and took her hands in his. “But how ridiculous,” he said. “How in the world could these old boys cook up anything that would upset us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how they could, but it’s serious. He’s terribly worried, poor darling.”

“Well,” Mark said, “it’s no good attempting a diagnosis before we’ve heard the history. I’ll go home, see what’s happened and ring you up in about fifteen minutes. The all-important, utterly bewildering and Heaven-sent joy is that you love me, Rose. Nothing,” Mark continued with an air of coining a brand-new phrase, “nothing can alter that. Au revoir, darling.”

He kissed Rose in a business-like manner and was gone.

She sat still for a time hugging to herself the knowledge of their feeling for each other. What had happened to all her scruples about leaving her father? She didn’t even feel properly upset by her father’s extraordinary behaviour, and when she realized this circumstance, she realized the extent of her exthrallment. She stood in the French window of the drawing-room and looked across the valley to Nunspardon. It was impossible to be anxious… her whole being ached with happiness. It was now and for the first time that Rose understood the completeness of love.

Time went by without her taking thought for it. The gong sounded for dinner and at the same moment the telephone rang. She flew to it.

“Rose,” Mark said. “Say at once that you love me. At once.”

“I love you.”

“And on your most sacred word of honour that you’ll marry me. Say it, Rose. Promise it. Solemnly promise.”

“I solemnly promise.”

“Good,” said Mark. “I’ll come back at nine.”

“Do you know what’s wrong?”

“Yes. It’s damn’ ticklish. Bless you, darling. Till nine.”

“Till nine,” Rose said and in a state of enthrallment went in to dinner.

By eight o’clock the evening depression had begun to settle over Commander Syce. At about five o’clock, when the sun was over the yard-arm, he had a brandy and soda. This raised his spirits. With its successors, up to the third or fourth, they rose still further. During this period he saw himself taking a job and making a howling success of it. From that emotional eminence he fell away with each succeeding dram, and it was during his decline that he usually took to archery. It had been in such a state of almost suicidal depression that he had suddenly shot an arrow over his coppice into Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s bottom meadow and slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett.

To-night the onset of depression was more than usually severe. Perhaps his encounter with the Colonel, whom he liked, gave point to his own loneliness. Moreover, his married couple were on their annual holiday and he had not been bothered to do anything about an evening meal. He found his arrow and limped back to the archery lawn. He no longer wanted to shoot.

His gammy leg ached, but he thought he’d take a turn up the drive.

When he arrived at the top, it was to discover Nurse Kettle seated by the roadside in gloomy contemplation of her bicycle, which stood upside down on its saddle and handlebars.

“Hullo, Commander,” said Nurse Kettle, “I’ve got a puncture.”

“Evening. Really? Bore for you,” Syce shot out at her.

“I can’t make up me great mind to push her the three miles to Chyning, so I’m going to have a shot at running repairs. Pumping’s no good,” said Nurse Kettle.

She had opened a tool kit and was looking dubiously at its contents. Syce hung off and on and watched her make a pass with a lever at her tyre.

“Not like that,” he shouted when he could no longer endure it. “Great grief, you’ll get nowhere that fashion.”

“I believe you.”

“And in any case you’ll want a bucket of water to find the puncture.” She looked helplessly at him. “Here!” he mumbled. “Give it here.”

He righted the bicycle and with a further, completely inaudible remark began to wheel it down his drive. Nurse Kettle gathered up her tool kit and followed. A look strangely compounded of compassion and amusement had settled on her face.

Commander Syce wheeled the bicycle into a gardener’s shed and without the slightest attempt at any further conversation set about the removal of the tyre. Nurse Kettle hitched herself up on a bench and watched him. Presently she began to talk.

“I am obliged to you. I’ve had a bit of a day. Epidemic in the village, odd cases all over the place, and then this happens. There! Aren’t you neat-fingered. I looked in at Nunspardon this evening,” she continued. “Lady Lacklander’s got a ‘toe,’ and Dr. Mark arranged for me to do the fomentations.”

Commander Syce made an inarticulate noise.

“If you ask me, the new baronet’s feeling his responsibilities. Came in just as I was leaving. Very bad colour and jumpy,” Nurse Kettle gossiped cosily. She swung her short legs and interrupted herself from time to time to admire Syce’s handiwork. “Pity!” she thought. “Shaky hands. Alcoholic skin. Nice chap, too. Pity!”

He repaired the puncture and replaced the tube and tyre. When he had finished and made as if to stand up, he gave a sharp cry of pain, clapped his hand to the small of his back and sank down again on his knees.

“Hul-lo!” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. “What’s all this? ’Bago?”

Commander Syce swore under his breath. Between clenched teeth he implored her to go away. “Most frightfully sorry,” he groaned. “Ask you to excuse me. Ach!”

It was now that Nurse Kettle showed the quality that caused people to prefer her to grander and more up-to-date nurses. She exuded dependability, resourcefulness and authority. Even the common and pitilessly breezy flavour of her remarks was comfortable. To Commander Syce’s conjurations to leave him alone, followed in the extremity of his pain by furious oaths, she paid no attention. She went down on all fours beside him, enticed and aided him towards the bench, encouraged him to use it and her own person as aids to rising, and finally had him, though almost bent double, on his feet. She helped him into his house and lowered him down on a sofa in a dismal drawing-room.

“Down-a-bumps,” she said. Sweating and gasping, he reclined and glared at her. “Now, what are we going to do about you, I wonder? Did I or did I not see a rug in the hall? Wait a bit.”

She went out and came back with a rug. She called him “dear” and, taking his pain seriously, covered him up, went out again and returned with a glass of water. “Making myself at home, I suppose you’re thinking. Here’s a couple of aspirins to go on with,” said Nurse Kettle.

He took them without looking at her. “Please don’t trouble,” he groaned. “Thank you. Under my own steam.” She gave him a look and went out again.

In her absence, he attempted to get up but was galvanized with a monstrous jab of lumbago and subsided in agony. He began to think she had gone for good and to wonder how he was to support life while the attack lasted, when he heard her moving about in some remote part of the house. In a moment she came in with two hot-water bags.

“At this stage,” she said, “heat’s the ticket.”

“Where did you get those things?”

“Borrowed ’em from the Cartarettes.”

“My God!”

She laid them against his back.

“Dr. Mark’s coming to look at you,” she said.

“My God!”

“He was at the Cartarettes and if you ask me, there’s going to be some news from that quarter before any of us are much older. At least,” Nurse Kettle added rather vexedly, “I would have said so, if it hadn’t been for them all looking a bit put out.” To his horror she began to take off his shoes.

“With a yo-heave-ho,” said Nurse Kettle out of compliment to the navy. “Aspirin doing its stuff?”

“I… I think so. I do beg…”

“I suppose your bedroom’s upstairs?”

“I do BEG…”

“We’ll see what the doctor says, but I’d suggest you doss down in the housekeeper’s room to save the stairs. I mean to say,” Nurse Kettle added with a hearty laugh, “always provided there’s no housekeeper.”

She looked into his face so good-humouredly and with such an air of believing him to be glad of her help that he found himself accepting it.

“Like a cup of tea?” she asked.

“No thank you.”

“Well, it won’t be anything stronger unless the doctor says so.”

He reddened, caught her eye and grinned.

“Come,” she said, “that’s better.”

“I’m really ashamed to trouble you so much.”

“I might have said the same about my bike, mightn’t I? There’s the doctor.”

She bustled out again and came back with Mark Lacklander.

Mark, who was a good deal paler than his patient, took a crisp line with Syce’s expostulations.

“All right,” he said. “I daresay I’m entirely extraneous. This isn’t a professional visit if you’d rather not.”

“Great grief, my dear chap, I don’t mean that. Only too grateful but… I mean… busy man… right itself…”

“Well, suppose I take a look-see,” Mark suggested. “We won’t move you.”

The examination was brief. “If the lumbago doesn’t clear up, we can do something a bit more drastic,” Mark said, “but in the meantime Nurse Kettle’ll get you to bed…”

“Good God!”

“…and look in again to-morrow morning. So will I. You’ll need one or two things; I’ll ring up the hospital and get them sent out at once. All right?”

“Thank you. Thank you. You don’t,” said Syce, to his own surprise, “look terribly fit yourself. Sorry to have dragged you in.”

“That’s all right. We’ll bring your bed in here and put it near the telephone. Ring up if you’re in difficulties. By the way, Mrs. Cartarette offered…”

“NO!” shouted Commander Syce and turned purple,

“…to send in meals,” Mark added. “But of course you may be up and about again to-morrow. In the meantime I think we can safely leave you to Nurse Kettle. Good-night.”

When he had gone, Nurse Kettle said cheerfully, “You’ll have to put up with me, it seems, if you don’t want lovely ladies all round you. Now we’ll get you washed up and settled for the night.”

Half an hour later when he was propped up in bed with a cup of hot milk and a plate of bread and butter and the lamp within easy reach, Nurse Kettle looked down at him with her quizzical air.

“Well,” she said, “I shall now, as they say, love you and leave you. Be good and if you can’t be good, be careful.”

“Thank you,” gabbled Commander Syce, nervously. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She had plodded over to the door before his voice arrested her. “I… ah… I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you are familiar with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, are you?”

“No,” she said. “Who was he when he was at home?”

“He wrote a ‘brief life’ of a man called Sir Jonas Moore. It begins: ‘Sciatica he cured it, by boyling his buttocks.’ I’m glad, at least, you don’t propose to try that remedy.”

“Well!” cried Nurse Kettle delightedly. “You are coming out of your shell, to be sure. Nighty-bye.”

During the next three days Nurse Kettle, pedalling about her duties, had occasion to notice, and she was sharp in such matters, that something untoward was going on in the district. Wherever she went, whether it was to attend upon Lady Lacklander’s toe, or upon the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, or upon Commander Syce’s strangely persistent lumbago, she felt a kind of heightened tension in the behaviour of her patients and also in the behaviour of young Dr. Mark Lacklander. Rose Cartarette, when she encountered her in the garden, was white and jumpy; the Colonel looked strained and Mrs. Cartarette singularly excited.

“Kettle,” Lady Lackiander said, on Wednesday, wincing a little as she endured the approach of a fomentation to her toe, “have you got the cure for a bad conscience?”

Nurse Kettle did not resent being addressed in this restoration-comedy fashion by Lady Lacklander, who had known her for some twenty years and used the form with an intimate and even an affectionate air much prized by Nurse Kettle.

“Ah,” said the latter, “there’s no mixture-as-before for that sort of trouble.”

“No. How long,” Lady Lacklander went on, “have you been looking after us in Swevenings, Kettle?”

“Thirty years if you count five in the hospital at Chyning.”

“Twenty-five years of fomentations, enemas, slappings, and thumpings,” mused Lady Lacklander. “And I suppose you’ve learnt quite a lot about us in that time. There’s nothing like illness to reveal character and there’s nothing like a love affair,” she added unexpectedly, “to disguise it. This is agony,” she ended mildly, referring to the fomentation.

“Stick it if you can, dear,” Nurse Kettle advised, and Lady Lacklander for her part did not object to being addressed as “dear” by Nurse Kettle, who continued, “How do you mean, I wonder, about love disguising character?”

“When people are in love,” Lady Lacklander said with a little scream as a new fomentation was applied, “they instinctively present themselves to each other in their most favourable light. They assume pleasing characteristics as unconsciously as a cock pheasant puts on his spring plumage. They display such virtues as magnanimity, charitableness and modesty and wait for them to be admired. They develop a positive genius for suppressing their least attractive points. They can’t help it, you know, Kettle. It’s just the behaviourism of courtship.”

“Fancy.”

“Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, because you most certainly do. You think straight and that’s more than anybody else seems to be capable of doing in Swevenings. You’re a gossip, of course,” Lady Lacklander added, “but I don’t think you’re a malicious gossip, are you?”

“Certainly not. The idea!”

“No. Tell me, now, without any frills, what do you think of us?”

“Meaning, I take it,” Nurse Kettle returned, “the aristocracy?”

“Meaning exactly that. Do you,” asked Lady Lacklander with relish, “find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?”

“No,” said Nurse Kettle stoutly, “I don’t.”

“Some of us are, you know.”

Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. “It’s not the people so much as the idea,” she said.

“Ah,” said Lady Lacklander, “you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You believe in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.”

Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t krrow what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard, they are asking for trouble. “I mean,” Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain ahd mental concentration, “I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we will give certain reactions. Don’t they, Kettle?”

Nurse Kettle said she supposed they did.

“Not,” Lady Lacklander said, “that I give a damn what they think. But still…”

She remained wrapped in moody contemplation while Nurse Kettle completed the treatment and bandaged the toe.

“In short,” her formidable patient at last declaimed, “we can allow ourselves to be almost anything but shabbily behaved. That we’d better avoid. I’m extremely worried, Kettle.” Nurse Kettle looked up enquiringly. “Tell me, is there any gossip in the village about my grandson? Romantic gossip?”

“A bit,” Nurse Kettle said and after a pause added, “It’d be lovely, wouldn’t it? She’s a sweet girl. And an heiress into the bargain.”

“Umph.”

“Which is not to be sneezed at nowadays, I suppose. They tell me everything goes to the daughter.”

“Entailed,” Lady Lacklander said. “Mark, of course, gets nothing until he succeeds. But it’s not that that bothers me.”

“Whatever it is, if I were you, I should consult Dr. Mark, Lady Lacklander. An old head on young shoulders if ever I saw one.”

“My dear soul, my grandson is, as you have observed, in love. He is, therefore, as I have tried to point out, extremely likely to take up a high-falutin’ attitude. Besides, he’s involved. No, I must take matters into my own hands, Kettle. Into my own hands. You go past Hammer on your way home, don’t you?”

Nurse Kettle said she did.

“I’ve written a note to Colonel Cartarette. Drop it there like a good creature, will you?”

Nurse Kettle said she would and fetched it from Lady Lacklander’s writing desk.

“It’s a pity,” Lady Lacklander muttered, as Nurse Kettle was about to leave her. “It’s a pity poor George is such an ass.”

She considered that George gave only too clear a demonstration of being an ass when she caught a glimpse of him on the following evening. He was playing a round of golf with Mrs. Cartarette. George, having attained the tricky age for Lacklanders, had fallen into a muddled, excited dotage upon Kitty Cartarette. She made him feel dangerous, and this sensation enchanted him. She told him repeatedly how chivalrous he was and so cast a glow of knight-errantry over impulses that are not usually seen in that light. She allowed him only the most meagre rewards, doling out the lesser stimulants of courtship in positively homeopathic doses. Thus on the Nunspardon golf course, he was allowed to watch, criticize and correct her swing.

If his interest in this exercise was far from being purely athletic, Mrs. Cartarette gave only the slightest hint that she was aware of the fact and industriously swung and swung again while he fell back to observe, and advanced to adjust, her technique.

Lady Lacklander, tramping down River Path in the cool of the evening with a footman in attendance to carry her sketching impedimenta and her shooting-stick, observed her son and his pupil as it were in pantomime on the second tee. She noticed how George rocked on his feet, with his head on one side, while Mrs. Cartarette swung, as Lady Lacklander angrily noticed, everything that a woman could swing. Lady Lacklander looked at the two figures with distaste tempered by speculation. “Can George,” she wondered, “have some notion of employing the strategy of indirect attack upon Maurice? But no, poor boy, he hasn’t got the brains.”

The two figures disappeared over the crest of the hill, and Lady Lacklander plodded heavily on in great distress of mind. Because of her ulcerated toe she wore a pair of her late husband’s shooting boots. On her head was a battered solar topee of immense antiquity which she found convenient as an eye-shade. For the rest, her vast person was clad in baggy tweeds and a tent-like blouse. Her hands, as always, were encrusted with diamonds.

She and the footman reached Bottom Bridge, turned left and came to a halt before a group of elders and the prospect of a bend in the stream. The footman, under Lady Lacklander’s direction, set up her easel, filled her water-jar at the stream, placed her camp stool and put her shooting-stick beside it. When she fell back from her work in order to observe it as a whole, Lady Lacklander was in the habit of supporting her bulk upon the shooting-stick.

The footman left her. She would reappear in her own time at Nunspardon and change for dinner at nine o’clock. The footman would return and collect her impedimenta. She fixed her spectacles on her nose, directed at her subject the sort of glance Nurse Kettle often bestowed on a recalcitrant patient, and set to work, massive and purposeful before her easel.

It was at half past six that she established herself there, in the meadow on the left bank of the Chyne not far below Bottom Bridge.

At seven, Mr. Danberry-Phinn, having assembled his paraphernalia for fishing, set off down Watt’s Hill. He did not continue to Bottom Bridge but turned left, and made for the upper reaches of the Chyne.

At seven, Mark Lacklander, having looked in on a patient in the village, set off on foot along Watt’s lane. He carried his case of instruments, as he wished to lance the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, and his racket and shoes, as he proposed to play tennis with Rose Cartarette. He also hoped to have an extremely serious talk with her father.

At seven, Nurse Kettle, having delivered Lady Lacklander’s note at Hammer, turned in at Commander Syce’s drive and free-wheeled to his front door.

At seven, Sir George Lacklander, finding himself favourably situated in a sheltered position behind a group of trees, embraced Mrs. Cartarette with determination, fervour and an ulterior motive.

It was at this hour that the hopes, passions and fears that had slowly mounted in intensity since the death of Sir Harold Lacklander began to gather an emotional momentum and slide towards each other like so many downhill streams, influenced in their courses by accidents and detail, but destined for a common and profound agitation.

At Hammer, Rose and her father sat in his study and gazed at each other in dismay.

“When did Mark tell you?” Colonel Cartarette asked.

“On that same night… after you came in and… and found us. He went to Nunspardon and his father told him and then he came back here and told me. Of course,” Rose said looking at her father with eyes as blue as periwinkles behind their black lashes, “of course it wouldn’t have been any good for Mark to pretend nothing had happened. It’s quite extraordinary how each of us seems to know exactly what the other one’s thinking.”

The Colonel leant his head on his hand and half smiled at this expression of what he regarded as one of the major fallacies of love. “My poor darling,” he murmured.

“Daddy, you do understand, don’t you, that theoretically Mark is absolutely on your side? Because… well, because the facts of any case always should be demonstrated. I mean, that’s the scientific point of view.”

The Colonel’s half-smile twisted, but he said nothing.

’’And I agree, too, absolutely,” Rose said, “other things being equal.”

“Ah!” said the Colonel.

“But they’re not, darling,” Rose cried out, “they’re nothing like equal. In terms of human happiness, they’re all cockeyed. Mark says his grandmother’s so desperately worried that with all this coming on top of Sir Harold’s death and everything she may crack up altogether.”

The Colonel’s study commanded a view of his own spinney and of that part of the valley that the spinney did not mask: Bottom Bridge and a small area below it on the right bank of the Chyne. Rose went to the window and looked down. “She’s down there somewhere,” she said, “sketching in Bottom Meadow on the far side. She only sketches when she’s fussed.”

“She’s sent me a chit. She wants me to go down and talk to her at eight o’clock when I suppose she’ll have done a sketch and hopes to feel less fussed. Damned inconvenient hour but there you are. I’ll cut dinner, darling, and try the evening rise. Ask them to leave supper for me, will you, and apologies to Kitty.”

“O.K.,” Rose said with forced airiness. “And, of course,” she added, “there’s the further difficulty of Mark’s papa.”

“George.”

“Yes, indeed, George. Well, we know he’s not exactly as bright as sixpence, don’t we, but all the same he is Mark’s papa, and he’s cutting up most awfully rough and…”

Rose caught back her breath, her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. She launched herself into her father’s arms and burst into a flood of tears. “What’s the use,” poor Rose sobbed, “of being a brave little woman? I’m not in the least brave. When Mark asked me to marry him, I said I wouldn’t because of you and there I was, so miserable that when he asked me again I said I would. And now, when we’re so desperately in love, this happens. We have to do them this really frightful injury. Mark says of course they must take it and it won’t make any difference to us, but of course it will, and how can I bear to be married to Mark and know how his people feel about you when next to Mark, my darling, darling Daddy, I love you best in the world? And his father,” Rose wept, “his father says that if Mark marries me, he’ll never forgive him and that they’ll do a sort of Montague and Capulet thing at us and, darling, it wouldn’t be much fun for Mark and me, would it, to be star-crossed lovers?”

“My poor baby,” murmured the agitated and sentimental Colonel, “my poor baby!” And he administered a number of unintentionally hard thumps between his daughter’s shoulder blades.

“It’s so many people’s happiness,” Rose sobbed. “It’s all of us.”

Her father dabbed at her eyes with his own handkerchief, kissed her and put her aside. In his turn he went over to the window and looked down at Bottom Bridge and up at the roofs of Nunspardon. There were no figures in view on the golf course.

“You know, Rose,” the Colonel said in a changed voice, “I don’t carry the whole responsibility. There is a final decision to be made, and mine must rest upon it. Don’t hold out too many hopes, my darling, but I suppose there is a chance. I’ve time to get it over before I talk to Lady Lacklander, and indeed I suppose I should. There’s nothing to be gained by any further delay. I’ll go now.”

He went to his desk, unlocked a drawer and took out an envelope.

Rose said, “Does Kitty…?”

“Oh, yes,” the Colonel said. “She knows.”

“Did you tell her, Daddy?”

The Colonel had already gone to the door. Without turning his head and with an air too casual to be convincing, he said, “O, no. No. She arranged to play a round of golf with George, and I imagine he elected to tell her. He’s a fearful old gas-bag is George.”

“She’s playing now, isn’t she?”

“Is she? Yes,” said the Colonel, “I believe she is. He came to fetch her, I think. It’s good for her to get out.”

“Yes, rather,” Rose agreed.

Her father went out to call on Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn. He took his fishing gear with him as he intended to go straight on to his meeting with Lady Lacklander and to ease his troubled mind afterwards with the evening rise. He also took his spaniel Skip, who was trained to good behaviour when he accompanied his master to the trout stream.

Lady Lacklander consulted the diamond-encrusted watch which was pinned to her tremendous bosom and discovered that it was now seven o’clock. She had been painting for half an hour and an all-too-familiar phenomenon had emerged from her efforts.

“It’s a curious thing,” she meditated, “that a woman of my character and determination should produce such a puny affair. However, it’s got me in better trim for Maurice Cartarette, and that’s a damn’ good thing. An hour to go if he’s punctual, and he’s sure to be that.”

She tilted her sketch and ran a faint green wash over the foreground. When it was partly dry, she rose from her stool, tramped some distance away to the crest of a hillock, seated herself on her shooting-stick and contemplated her work through a lorgnette tricked out with diamonds. The shooting-stick sank beneath her in the soft meadowland so that the disk which was designed to check its descent was itself imbedded to the depth of several inches. When Lady Lacklander returned to her easel, she merely abandoned her shooting-stick, which remained in a vertical position and from a distance looked a little like a giant fungoid growth. Sticking up above intervening hillocks and rushes, it was observed over the top of his glasses by the longsighted Mr. Phinn when, accompanied by Thomasina Twitchett, he came nearer to Bottom Bridge. Keeping on the right bank, he began to cast his fly in a somewhat mannered but adroit fashion over the waters most often frequented by the Old ’Un. Lady Lacklander, whose ears were as sharp as his, heard the whirr of his reel and, remaining invisible, was perfectly able to deduce the identity and movements of the angler. At the same time, far above them on Watt’s Hill, Colonel Cartarette, finding nobody but seven cats at home at Jacob’s Cottage, walked round the house and looking down into the little valley at once spotted both Lady Lacklander and Mr. Phinn, like figures in Nurse Kettle’s imaginary map, the one squatting on her camp stool, the other in slow motion near Bottom Bridge.

“I’ve time to speak to him before I see her,” thought the Colonel. “But I’ll leave it here in case we don’t meet.” He posted his long envelope in Mr. Phinn’s front door, and then, greatly troubled in spirit, he made for the river path and went down into the valley, the old spaniel, Skip, walking at his heels.

Nurse Kettle, looking through the drawing-room window at Uplands, caught sight of the Colonel before he disappeared beyond Commander Syce’s spinney. She administered a final tattoo with the edges of her muscular hands on Commander Syce’s lumbar muscles and said, “There goes the Colonel for the evening rise. You wouldn’t have stood that amount of punishment two days ago, would you?”

“No,” a submerged voice said, “I suppose not.”

“Well! So that’s all I get for my trouble.”

“No, no! Look here, look here!” he gabbled, twisting his head in an attempt to see her. “Good heavens! What are you saying?”

“All right. I know. I was only pulling your leg. There!” she said. “That’s all for to-day and I fancy it won’t be long before I wash my hands of you altogether.”

“Of course I can’t expect to impose on your kindness any longer.”

Nurse Kettle was clearing up. She appeared not to hear this remark and presently bustled away to wash her hands. When she returned, Syce was sitting on the edge of his improvised bed. He wore slacks, a shirt, a scarf and a dressing gown.

“Jolly D.,” said Nurse Kettle. “Done it all yourself.”

“I hope you will give me the pleasure of joining me for a drink before you go.”

“On duty?”

“Isn’t it off duty, now?”

“Well,” said Nurse Kettle, “I’ll have a drink with you, but I hope it won’t mean that when I’ve gone on me way rejoicing, you’re going to have half a dozen more with yourself.”

Commander Syce turned red and muttered something about a fellah having nothing better to do.

“Get along,” said Nurse Kettle, “find something better. The idea!”

They had their drinks, looking at each other with an air of comradeship. Commander Syce, using a walking-stick and holding himself at an unusual angle, got out an album of photographs taken when he was on the active list in the navy. Nurse Kettle adored photographs and was genuinely interested in a long sequence of naval vessels, odd groups of officers and views of seaports. Presently she turned a page and discovered quite a dashing water-colour of a corvette and then an illustrated menu with lively little caricatures in the margin. These she greatly admired and observing a terrified and defiant expression on the face of her host, ejaculated, “You never did these yourself! You did! Well, aren’t you the clever one!”

Without answering, he produced a small portfolio, which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts, and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillea flowered in the background.

“Why,” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. “Why, that’s Mrs. Cartarette!”

If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her, he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly, “Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.”

“That would be before they’were married, wouldn’t it?” Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said, “You know I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings,” and told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings, he too rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.

“I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,” she remarked. “Same time to-morrow suit you?”

“Admirably,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.

Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village, where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the river path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne, and as she descended into it, her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands came the not unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.

She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of elders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow, rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed, but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.

“It’s turned much cooler,” she thought.

A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face, and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.

She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.