'My uncle has been very much concerned,' said John, 'about that unfortunate thing that happened in the park some weeks ago. It has been on his mind.'
The desire to say something almost inhumanly sarcastic and the difficulty of finding just the right words caused the Colonel to miss his chance of interrupting at this point. What should have been a searing retort became a mere splutter.
'He feels he behaved badly to you. He admits freely that in grabbing you round the waist and putting you in between him and that dynamite he acted on the spur of an impulse to which he should never have yielded. He has been wondering ever since how best he might heal the breach. Haven't you, Uncle Lester?'
Mr Carmody swallowed painfully.
'Yes.'
'He says "Yes",' said John, relaying the information to its receiving station. 'You have always been his closest friend, and the thought that there was this estrangement has been preying on my uncle's mind. This morning, unable to endure it any longer, he came to me and asked my advice. I was very glad to give it him. And I am still more glad that he took it. My uncle will now say a few words . . . Uncle Lester!'
Mr Carmody rose haltingly from his seat. He was a man who stood on the verge of parting with one thousand pounds in cool cash, and he looked it. His face was haggard, and his voice, when he contrived to speak, thin and trembling.
'Wyvern, I...'
'...thought...' prompted John.
'I thought,' said Mr Carmody, 'that in the circumstances. . . .'
'It would be best...'
'It would be best if...'
Words – and there should have been sixty-three more of them – failed Mr Carmody. He pushed a slip of paper across the table and resumed his seat, a suffering man.
'I fail to...' began Colonel Wyvern. And then his eye fell on the slip of paper, and pomposity slipped from him like breath off a razor-blade. 'What – what—?' he said.
'Moral and intellectual damages,' said John. 'My uncle feels he owes it to you.'
Silence fell upon the room. The Colonel had picked up the cheque and was scrutinizing it as if he had been a naturalist and it some rare specimen encountered in the course of his walks abroad. His eyebrows, disentangling themselves and moving apart, rose in an astonishment he made no attempt to conceal. He looked from the cheque to Mr Carmody and back again.
'Good God!' said Colonel Wyvern.
With a sudden movement he tore the paper in two, burst into a crackling laugh and held his hand out.
'Good God!' he cried jovially. 'Do you think I want money? All I ever wanted was for you to admit you were an old scoundrel and murderer, and you've done it. And if you knew how lonely it's been in this infernal place with no one to speak to or smoke a cigar with . . .'
Mr Carmody had risen, in his eyes the look of one who sees visions and beholds miracles. He gazed at his old friend in awe. Long as he had known him, it was only now that he realized his true nobility of soul.
'Wyvern!'
'Carmody,' said Colonel Wyvern, 'how are the pike?'
'The pike?' Mr Carmody blinked, still dazed. 'Pike?'
'In the moat. Have you caught the big one yet?'
'Not yet.'
'I'll come up and try for him this afternoon, shall I?'
'Yes.'
'He says "Yes",' said John, interpreting.
'And only just now,' said Colonel Wyvern, 'I was savaging my daughter because she wanted to marry into your family!'
'What's that?' cried Mr Carmody, and John clutched the edge of the table. His heart had given a sudden ecstatic leap, and for an instant the room had seemed to rock about him.
'Yes,' said Colonel Wyvern. He broke into another of his laughs, and John could not help wondering where Pat had got that heavenly tinkle of silver bells which served her on occasions when she was amused. Not from her father's side of the family.
'Bless my soul!' said Mr Carmody.
'Yes,' said Colonel Wyvern. 'She came to me just before you arrived and told me that she wanted to marry your nephew Hugo.'
15 PLAIN SPEECH FROM AN ANCESTOR
I
Some years before, in pursuance of his duties as a member of the English Rugby Football fifteen, it had become necessary for John one rainy afternoon in Dublin to fall on the ball at a moment when five or six muscular Irish forwards full of Celtic enthusiasm were endeavouring to kick it. Until this moment he had always ranked that as the most unpleasant and disintegrating experience of his life.
His fingers tightened their clutch on the table. He found its support grateful. He blinked, once very quickly as if he had just received a blow in the face, and then a second time more slowly.
'Hugo?' he said.
He felt numbed, just as he had felt numbed in Dublin when what had appeared to be a flock of centipedes with cleated boots had made him the object of their attentions. All the breath had gone out of him, and though what he was suffering was at the present more a dull shock than actual pain, he realized dimly that there would be pain coming shortly in full measure.
'Hugo?' he said.
Faintly blurred by the drumming of the blood in his ears, there came to him the sound of his uncle's voice. Mr Carmody was saying that he was delighted. And the utter impossibility of remaining in the same room with a man who could be delighted at the news that Pat was engaged to Hugo swept over John like a wave. Releasing his grip on the table, he laid a course for the French windows and, reaching them, tottered out into the garden.
Pat was walking on the little lawn, and at the sight of her his numbness left John. He seemed to wake with a start, and waking, found himself in the grip of a great many emotions which, after seething and bubbling for a while, crystallized suddenly into a white-hot fury.
He was hurt all over and through and through, but he was so angry that only subconsciously was he aware of this. Pat was looking so cool and trim and alluring, so altogether as if it caused her no concern whatever that she had made a fool of a good man, raising his hopes only to let them fall and encouraging him to dream dreams only to shatter them, that he felt he hated her.
She turned as he stepped on to the grass, and they looked at one another in silence for a moment. Then John, in a voice which was strangely unlike his own, said 'Good morning.'
'Good morning,' said Pat, and there was silence again.
She did not attempt to avoid his eye – the least, John felt, that she could have done in the circumstances. She was looking straight at him, and there was something of defiance in her gaze. Her chin was tilted. To her, judging from her manner, he was not the man whose hopes she had frivolously raised by kissing him that night on the Skirme, but merely an unwelcome intruder interrupting a pleasant reverie.
'So you're back?' she said.
John swallowed what appeared to be some sort of obstruction half-way down his chest. He was anxious to speak, but afraid that, if he spoke, he would stammer. And a man on an occasion like this does not wish to give away by stammering the fact that he is not perfectly happy and debonair and altogether without a care in the world.
'I hear you're engaged to Hugo,' he said, speaking carefully and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.
'Yes.'
'I congratulate you.'
'You ought to congratulate him, oughtn't you, and just say to me that you hope I'll be happy?'
'I hope you will be happy,' said John, accepting this maxim from the Book of Etiquette.
'Thanks.'
'Very happy.'
'Thanks.'
There was a pause.
'It's – a little sudden, isn't it?'
'Is it?'
'When did Hugo get back?'
'This morning. His letter arrived by the first post, and he came in right on top of it.'
'His letter?'
'Yes. He wrote asking me to marry him.'
'Oh?'
Pat traced an arabesque on the grass with the toe of her shoe.
; 'It was a beautiful letter.'
'Was it?'
'Very. I didn't think Hugo was capable of it.'
John remained for a moment without speaking. He searched his mind for care-free, debonair remarks, and found it singularly short of them.
'Hugo's a splendid chap.'
'Yes.'
'Yes – so bright!'
'Yes.'
'Nice-looking fellow.'
'Yes.'
'A thoroughly good chap.'
'Yes.'
John found that he had exhausted the subject of Hugo's qualities. He relapsed into a grey silence and half thought of treading on an offensively cheerful worm which had just appeared beside his shoe and seemed to be asking for it.
Pat stifled a little yawn.
'Did you have a nice time yesterday?' she asked carelessly.
'Not so very nice,' said John. 'I daresay you heard that we had a burglary up at the Hall? I went off to catch the criminals and they caught me.'
'What!'
'I was fool enough to let myself be drugged, and when I woke up I was locked in a room with bars on the windows. I only got out an hour or so ago.'
'Johnnie!'
'However, it all ended happily. I've got back the stuff that was stolen.'
'But, Johnnie! I thought you had gone off picnicking with that Molloy girl.'
'It may have been her idea of picnicking. She was one of the gang. Quite the leading spirit, I gather.'
He had lowered his eyes, wondering once more whether it would not be judicious to put it across that worm after all, when an odd choking sound caused him to look up. Pat's mouth had opened, and she was staring at him wide-eyed. And if she had ever looked more utterly beautiful and marvellous, John could not remember the occasion. Something seemed to clutch at his throat, and the garden, seen indistinctly through a mist, danced a few steps in a tentative sort of way, as if it were trying out something new that had just come over from America.
And then, as the mist cleared, John found that he and Pat were not, as he had supposed, alone. Standing beside him was a rugged and slightly unkempt person clad in a bearskin which had obviously not been made to measure, in whom he recognized at once that Stone Age Ancestor of his who had given him a few words of advice the other night on the path leading to the boat-house.
The Ancestor was looking at him reproachfully. In appearance he was rather like Sergeant-Major Flannery, and when he spoke it was with that well-remembered voice.
'Oo-er,' said the Ancestor, peevishly twiddling a flint axe in his powerful fingers. 'Now you see, young fellow, what's happened or occurred or come about, if I may use the expression, through your not doing what I told you. Did I or did I not repeatedly urge and advise you to be'ave towards this girl in the manner which 'as been tested and proved the correct one by me and all the rest of your ancestors in the days when men were men and knew how to go about these matters? Now you've lost her, whereas if you'd done as I said...'
'Stay!' said a quiet, saintly voice, and John perceived that another form had ranged itself beside him.
'Still, maybe it's not too late even now . . .'
'No, no,' said the newcomer, and John was now able to see that this was his Better Self, 'I really must protest. Let us, please, be restrained and self-effacing. I deprecate these counsels of violence.'
'Tested and proved correct . . .' inserted the Ancestor. 'I'm giving him good advice, that's what I'm doing. I'm pointing out to 'im, as you may say, the proper method.'
'I consider your advice subversive to a degree,' said Better Self coldly, 'and I disapprove of your methods. The obviously correct thing for this young man to do in the circumstances in which he finds himself is to accept the situation like a gentleman. This girl is engaged to another man, a good-looking, bright young man, the heir to a great estate and an excellent match . . .'
'Mashed potatoes!' said the Stone Age Ancestor coarsely. 'The 'ole thing 'ere, young fellow, is you just take this girl and grab her and 'old 'er in your arms, as the saying is, and never mind how many bright, good-looking young men she's engaged to. 'Strewth! When I was in me prime you wouldn't have found me 'esitating. You do as I say, me lad, and you won't regret it. Just you spring smartly to attention and grab 'er with both 'ands in a soldierly manner.'
'Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie, Johnnie!' said Pat, and her voice was a wail. Her eyes were bright with dismay, and her hands fluttered in a helpless manner which alone would have been enough to decide a man already swaying towards the methods of the good old days when cave-men were cave-men.
John hesitated no longer. Hugo be blowed! His Better Self be blowed! Everything and everybody be blowed except this really excellent old gentleman who, though he might have been better tailored, was so obviously a mine of information on what a young man should know. Drawing a deep breath and springing smartly to attention, he held out his arms in a soldierly manner, and Pat came into them like a little boat sailing into harbour after a storm. A faint receding sigh told him that his Better Self had withdrawn discomfited, but the sigh was drowned by the triumphant approval of the Ancestor.
'Oo-er,' boomed the Ancestor thunderously.
'So this is how it feels!' said John to himself.
'Oh, Johnnie!' said Pat.
The garden had learned that dance now. It was simple once you got the hang of it. All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round. So the trees jumped up and down and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.
'Oh, Johnnie,' said Pat. 'What on earth shall I do?'
'Go on just like you are now.'
'But about Hugo, I mean.'
Hugo? Hugo? John concentrated his mind. Yes, he recalled now, there had been some little difficulty about Hugo. What was it? Ah, yes.
'Pat,' he said, 'I love you. Do you love me?'
'Yes.'
'Then what on earth,' demanded John, 'did you go and do a silly thing like getting engaged to Hugo for?'
He spoke a little severely, for in some mysterious fashion all the awe with which this girl had inspired him for so many years had left him. His inferiority complex had gone completely. And it was due, he gathered, purely and solely to the fact that he was holding her in his arms and kissing her. At any moment during the last half-dozen years this childishly simple remedy had been at his disposal and he had not availed himself of it. He was astonished at his remissness, and his feeling of gratitude towards that Ancestor of his in the baggy bearskin who had pointed out the way became warmer than ever.
'But I thought you didn't care a bit for me,' wailed Pat.
John stared.
'Who, me?'
'Yes.'
'Didn't care for you?'
'Yes.'
'You thought I didn't care for you?'
'Well, you had promised to take me to Wenlock Edge and you never turned up and I found you had gone out in your car with that Molloy girl. Naturally I thought . . .'
'You shouldn't have.'
'Well, I did. And so when Hugo's letter came it seemed such a wonderful chance of showing you that I didn't care. And now what am I to do? What can I say to Hugo?'
It was a nuisance for John to have to detach his mind from what really mattered in life to trivialities like this absurd business of Hugo, but he supposed the thing, if only to ease Pat's mind, would have to be given a little attention.
'Hugo thinks he's engaged to you?'
'Yes.'
'Well, he isn't.'
'No.'
'Then that,' said John, seeing the thing absolutely clearly, 'is all we've got to tell him.'
'You talk as if it were so simple!'
'So it is. What's hard about it?'
'I wish you had it to do instead of me!'
'But of course I'll do it,' said John. It astonished him that she should have contemplated any other course. Naturally, when the great strong man becomes engaged to the timid, flutterin
g little girl, he takes over all her worries and handles in his efficient, masculine way any problem that may be vexing her.
'Would you really, Johnnie?'
'Certainly.'
'I don't feel I can look him in the face.'
'You won't miss much. Where is he?'
'He went off in the direction of the village.'
'Carmody Arms,' diagnosed John. 'I'll go and tell him at once.' And he strode down the garden with strong masterful steps.
II
Hugo was not in the Carmody Arms. He was standing on the bridge over the Skirme, his elbows resting on the parapet, his eyes fixed on the flowing water. For a suitor recently accepted by – presumably – the girl of his heart, he looked oddly downcast. His eye, when he turned at the sound of his name, was the eye of a fish that has had trouble.
'Hullo, John, old man,' he said in a toneless voice.
John began to feel his way into the subject he had come to discuss.
'Nice day,' he said.
'What is?' said Hugo.
'This.'
'I'm glad you think so. John,' said Hugo, attaching himself sombrely to his cousin's coat sleeve, 'I want your advice. In many ways you're a stodgy sort of a Gawd-help-us, but you're a levelheaded kind of old bird, at that, and I want your advice. The fact is, John, believe me or believe me not, I've made an ass of myself.'
'How's that?'
'I've gone and got engaged to Pat.'
Having exploded this bomb-shell, Hugo leaned against the parapet and gazed at his cousin with a certain moody satisfaction.
'Yes?' said John.
'You don't seem much surprised,' said Hugo, disappointed.
'Oh, I'm astonished,' said John. 'How did it happen?'
Hugo, who had released his companion's coat sleeve, now reached out for it again. The feel of it seemed to inspire him.
'It was that bloke Bessemer's wedding that started the whole trouble,' he said. 'You remember I told you about Ronnie's man, Bessemer?'
'I remember you said he had remarkable ears.'
'Like aeroplane wings. Nevertheless, in spite of that he got married yesterday. The wedding took place from Ronnie's flat.'