The heavy man with the three horses approached slowly, with the air of a small army in the narrow road. He was grubby and unbuttoned, but he regarded her intently with eyes a little bloodshot. He said from a distance something that she did not altogether understand. It was about her chestnut. He was asking her to back that ’ere chestnut’s tail into the hedge. She was not used to being spoken to by the lower classes. She kept her horse along the road. In that way the fellow could not pass. She knew what was the matter. Her chestnut would lash out at Gunning’s charges if they got near her stern. In the hunting season it wore a large K on its tail.
Nevertheless the fellow must be a good man with horses: otherwise he would not be perched on one with the stirrups crossed over the saddle in front of him and lead two others. She did not know that she would care to do that herself nowadays; there had been a time when she would have. She had intended to slip down from the chestnut and hand it, too, over to Gunning. Once she was down on the road he could not very well refuse. But she felt disinclined—to cock her leg over the saddle. He looked like a fellow who could refuse.
He refused. She had asked him to hold her horse whilst she went down and spoke to his master. He had made no motion towards her; he had continued to stare fixedly at her. She had said:
“You’re Captain Tietjens’ servant, aren’t you? I’m his wife. Staying with Lord Fittleworth!”
He had made no answer and no movement except to draw the back of his right hand across his left nostril—for lack of a handkerchief. He said something incomprehensible—but not conciliatory. Then he began a longer speech. That she understood. It was to the effect that he had been thirty years, boy and man, with his Lordship and the rest of his time with th’ Cahptn. He also pointed out that there was a hitching post and chain by the gate there. But he did not advise her to hitch to it. The chestnut would kick to flinders any cart that came along the road. And the mere idea of the chestnut lashing out and injuring itself caused her to shudder; she was a good horsewoman.
The conversation went with long pauses. She was in no hurry; she would have to wait till Campion or Fittleworth came back—with the verdict probably. The fellow when he used short sentences was incomprehensible because of his dialect. When he spoke longer she got a word or two out of it.
It troubled her a little, now, that Edith Ethel might be coming along the road. Practically she had promised to meet her at that spot and at about that moment, Edith Ethel proposing to sell her love-letters to Christopher—or through him. … The night before she had told Fittleworth that Christopher had bought the place below her with money he had from Lady Macmaster because Lady Macmaster had been his mistress. Fittleworth had boggled at that … it had been at that moment that he had gone rather stiff to her.
As a matter of fact Christopher had bought that place out of a windfall. Years before—before even she had married him—he had had a legacy from an aunt, and in his visionary way had invested it in some Colonial—very likely Canadian—property or invention or tramway concession, because he considered that some remote place, owing to its geographical position on some road—was going to grow. Apparently during the war it had grown, and the completely forgotten investment had paid nine and sixpence in the pound. Out of the blue. It could not be helped. With a monetary record of visionariness and generosity such as Christopher had behind him some chickens must now and then come home—some visionary investment turn out sound, some debtor turn honest. She understood even that some colonel who had died on Armistice night and to whom Christopher had lent a good sum in hundreds had turned honest. At any rate his executors had written to ask her for Christopher’s address with a view to making payments. She hadn’t at the time known Christopher’s address, but no doubt they had got it from the War Office or somewhere.
With windfalls like those he had kept afloat, for she did not believe the old-furniture business as much as paid its way. She had heard through Mrs. Cramp that the American partner had embezzled most of the money that should have gone to Christopher. You should not do business with Americans. Christopher, it is true, had years ago—during the war—predicted an American invasion—as he always predicted everything. He had, indeed, said that if you wanted to have money you must get it from where money was going to, so that if you wanted to sell you must prepare to sell what they wanted. And they wanted old furniture more than anything else. That was why there were so many of them here. She didn’t mind. She was already beginning a little campaign with Mrs. de Bray Pape to make her refurnish Groby—to make her export all the clumsy eighteen-forty mahogany that the great house contained to Santa Fe, or wherever it was that Mr. Pape lived alone; and to refurnish with Louis Quatorze as befitted the spiritual descendant of the Maintenon. The worst of it was that Mr. Pape was stingy.
She was, indeed, in a fine taking that morning—Mrs. de Bray Pape. In hauling out the stump of Groby Great Tree the woodcutters had apparently brought down two-thirds of the ballroom exterior wall, and that vast, gloomy room, with its immense lustres, was wrecked, along with the old schoolrooms above it. As far as she could make out from the steward’s letter Christopher’s boyhood’s bedroom had practically disappeared. … Well, if Groby Great Tree did not like Groby
