“It appears,” Sylvia said, “that Mark Tietjens means to leave the Dower House at the disposal of his French concubine. … Anyhow, you can afford a house of your own. You’re rich enough!”
The general groaned:
“Rich enough! My God!”
She said:
“You have still—trust you!—your younger son’s settlement. You have still your general’s pay. You have the interest on the grant the nation made you at the end of the war. You have four hundred a year as a member of Parliament. You have cadged on me for your keep and your man’s keep and your horses’ and grooms’ at Groby for years and years. …”
Immense dejection covered the face of her companion. He said:
“Sylvia. … Consider the expenses of my constituency. … One would almost say you hated me!”
Her eyes continued to devour the orchard and garden that were spread out below her. A furrow of raw, newly-turned earth ran from almost beneath their horses’ hoofs nearly vertically to the house below. She said:
“I suppose that is where they get their water-supply. From the spring above here. Cramp the carpenter says they are always having trouble with the pipes!”
The general exclaimed:
“Oh, Sylvia. And you told Mrs. de Bray Pape that they had no water-supply so they could not take a bath!”
Sylvia said:
“If I hadn’t she would never have thought of cutting down Groby Great Tree. … Don’t you see that for Mrs. de Bray Pape people who do not take baths are outside the law? So, though she’s not really courageous, she will risk cutting down their old trees. …” She added: “Yes, I almost believe I do hate misers, and you are more next door to a miser than anyone else I ever honoured with my acquaintance. …” She added further: “But I should advise you to calm yourself. If I let you marry me you will have my Satterthwaite pickings. Not to mention the Groby pickings till Michael comes of age, and the—what is it?—ten thousand a year you will get from India. If out of all that you cannot skimp enough to make up for houseroom at my expense at Groby you are not half the miser I took you for!”
A number of horses, with Lord Fittleworth and Gunning, came up from the soft track outside the side of the garden and on to the hard road that bordered the garden’s top. Gunning sat one horse without his feet in the stirrups and had the bridles of two others over his elbows. They were the horses of Mrs. de Bray Pape, Mrs. Lowther and Mark Tietjens. The garden with its quince-trees, the old house with its immensely high-pitched roof such as is seen in countries where wood was once plentiful, the thatch of Mark Tietjens’ shelter and the famous four counties, ran from the other side of the hedge out to infinity. An aeroplane droned down towards them, many miles away. Up from the road ran a slope covered with bracken, to many great beech trees, along a wire hedge. That was the summit of Cooper’s Common. In the stillness the hoofs of all those horses made a noise like that of desultorily approaching cavalry. Gunning halted his horses at a little distance; the beast Sylvia rode was too ill-tempered to be approached.
Lord Fittleworth rode up to the general and said:
“God damn it, Campion, ought Helen Lowther to be down there? Her ladyship will give me no rest for a fortnight!” He shouted at Gunning: “Here you, blast you, you old scoundrel, where’s the gate Speeding complains you have been interfering with?” He added to the general: “This old villain was in my service for thirty years, yet he’s always counter-swinging the gates in your godson’s beastly fields. Of course a man has to look after his master’s interests, but we shall have to come to some arrangement. We can’t go on like this.” He added to Sylvia:
“It isn’t the sort of place Helen ought to go to, is it? All sorts of people living with all sorts … If what you say is true!”
The Earl of Fittleworth gave in all places the impression that he wore a scarlet tailcoat, a white stock with a foxhunting pin, white buckskin breeches, a rather painful eyeglass and a silk top-hat attached to his person by a silken cord. Actually he was wearing a square, high, black, felt hat, pepper-and-salt tweeds and no eyeglass. Still, he screwed up one eye to look at you, and his lucid dark pupils, his contracted swarthy face with its little bristling black-grey moustache, gave him, perched on his immense horse, the air of a querulous but very masterful monkey.
He considered that he was out of earshot of Gunning and so continued to the other two: “Oughtn’t to give away masters before their servants. … But it isn’t any place for the niece of the President of a Show that Cammie has most of her money in. Anyhow she will comb my whiskers!” Before marrying the Earl, Lady Fittleworth had been Miss Camden Grimm. “Regular Aga … Agapemone, so you say. A queer go for old Mark at his age.”
The general said to Fittleworth:
“Here, I say, she says I am a regular miser. … You don’t have any complaints, say, from your keepers that I don’t tip enough? Tell her, will you? That’s the real sign of a miser!”
Fittleworth said to Sylvia:
“You don’t mind my talking like that of your husband’s establishment, do you?” He added that in the old days they would not have talked like that before a lady about her husband. Or perhaps, by Jove, they would have! His grandfather had had a …
Sylvia was of opinion that Helen Lowther could look after herself. Her husband was said not to pay her the attentions that a lady had a right to expect of a husband. So if Christopher …
She took an appraising sideways glance at Fittleworth. That peer was going slightly purple under his brown skin. He gazed out over the landscape and swallowed in his throat. She felt that her time for
