Читать книгу The Secret Sanctuary - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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The Stretton ménage interested Beal. He came down to Lavinia Stretton's pink drawing-room, and found two women by the fire. Mrs. Stretton had introduced Beal to her daughter, a ruddy young woman with very white teeth who got up from a pink tuffet with the briskness of a boy and gave Beal a hard and vigorous hand. He was alone with them for five minutes.

John's mother would have made a mystery of those five minutes, but the daughter with her ruddy and unmysterious face stood with two solid feet on such flimsies, and looked Beal straight in the eyes. He could see her in brogues, despising shin-pads, leading her forwards and smiting hard and true.

Mrs. Stretton asked Beal if he had enjoyed his walk. She conspired with him in asking the question, giving him a little sly upward flicker of the eyes.

"The autumn tints were beautiful, I'm sure."

The daughter's impulse was to blow such sentimentalities to tatters. She looked at her mother with her stalwart and rather swashbuckling sureness, and her air of "Mater, don't talk such tosh."

"I expect it bucked John up."

She bounced down again on the tuffet, and let it be known quite frankly that John needed bucking up.

"He's a jolly sight too introspective."

Her mother threw a deprecating, reassuring glance at Beal.

Then Bartholomew came in, cuddling something in his left hand. He was pink from a hot bath, genial, ready for his dinner, and in a mood to hope that Beal would be able to prove this the best of all possible worlds. He sidled to the mantelpiece and deposited something round and white on the bottom of an upturned Chelsea cup. He had an air of expectancy.

His wife knew what to do.

"Oh, Bart, you've won again! Another ball!"

Old Stretton glanced casually at the trophy as though he had been thinking of Einstein's theory.

"Oh, that! Took it off poor old Lambrick."

"They will have to lower your handicap," said his wife.

"By the way, Dad," asked the daughter, "what is your handicap? Old Lambrick used to be a rotten twenty-two."

Such are our children, and Beal made a mental note of the young woman's temperamental flatness. He preferred the mother, at any rate, so far as cooperation was concerned, for even if she did not understand her son she wanted to understand him, and she was eager to help.

Old Stretton had taken the hearthrug and was snubbing his daughter by talking exclusively to Beal. Now and again he glanced at the door. He still looked expectant, but like a man who was waiting for an unpleasant telegram.

John came in. He looked at no one in particular. His mouth was curved in a smile, an absent, impersonal smile, elusive and slightly mischievous, and reminding Beal very vividly of a picture he once had seen of a gentle and satirical faun looking out of a mass of dusky foliage at a naked girl combing her hair. He brought something elusive and eternal into the room, something that was before time, a suggestion of moonlight among old sacred trees, of naiads dancing, of the grail shining in the deeps of a wild wood. There was a spirit in him which listened to a sound of stirring in a forest at dawn.

His father glanced at him nervously.

"Well, John, well! Had a good walk?"

"Splendid."

He replied with an empty voice, and he went and stood beside his mother. Beal saw them smile at each other; Mrs. Stretton went as pink as her cushions. Her son's eyes had some message for her; there was a sudden kinship of feeling between them.

Madge Stretton looked at her brother as she might have looked at a man who had lost a race through being out of training. She had the hard, bright colour of to-day. She measured a man's success.

"Buck up, John!"

She did not utter her favourite cry, but it was there in her hard, frank, sexless eyes.

The gong rang, and they went in to dinner. Beal was on Mrs. Stretton's right, John on her left, and Beal was aware of something passing between these two, a quick and half-puzzled glance of the son's, a smile in the mother's eyes, and then an answering smile in the son's. Bartholomew, with white shirt-front and rosy face, sat like a chairman at a board meeting, slightly self-conscious and judicial. Madge did not utter a word throughout the meal. She had been put off her game—as she might have expressed it—by seeing a really impressive looking man showing an interest in her mother. She wondered why.

Beal made the dinner table a field of manoeuvre. He wanted the party to split into two pairs, and for that self-sure young woman to be eliminated. He was so quick a gatherer of impressions that by the end of the meal he knew what he wanted, and when John went to open the door for his mother, Beal, with an almost excessive politeness, followed as though to share in the act. John had half-closed the door when he caught Beal's eye and that slight movement of the big, shapely head.

John's glance at his father put a question. "You want me to clear out?" it said.

Beal answered it in a half-whisper.

"Go and tell her everything—what your idea is. Your mother, I mean."

John looked at him searchingly. Then he nodded and went out.

Rollin Beal returned to the table and helped himself to port. Bartholomew had risen, and Beal saw his broad, comfortable back in the corner where his cigar cabinet stood on a walnut side table. He came back with two boxes of cigars and a tin of cigarettes, his knowledge of their choiceness swelling in him happily.

"Have a cigar, Beal. Try one of these."

"Thanks. I will."

"What! John has gone? Oh, perhaps it's as well."

His blue eyes looked at Beal with a clouded and almost furtive expectancy. After dinner and with a cigar between his lips a man hopes for comfortable news.

"I am very grateful to you for coming, and so is my wife. It's unusual, I know, for you big men to take so much trouble. A match? Here you are. I hear you and John had a walk?"

Beal knew so very well what was to be conjectured in Bartholomew Stretton's mind. There is not a man who does not wish to have his anxiety relieved, to hear comfortable news, to find the expert, the magician who will lift the bugbear of an unexpected responsibility from his shoulders. But would Bartholomew Stretton pay the price? Beal had no intention of being too comfortable in his attempt to persuade an old man to sympathize with the unconventional tendencies of a young one.

"I want to speak to you about John. We had a long talk this afternoon."

"Oh, he did talk, did he?"

"Very seriously. I think all this silence of his has been a sort of preparation. He realizes his own danger."

Bartholomew began to fidget at the word "danger." Here was this mass of high explosive still very much of a reality in the house!

"Oh, he realizes that, does he? Have you any idea, Beal—?"

"John has his own idea. I think I agree with it."

Old Stretton said "Ha!" and blinked his eyes.

"You mean that he understands why he flies into these rages?"

"No; but he has a very strong inclination towards a certain life which he feels may cure him. What I mean is, he thinks he can make his own medicine."

"What sort of life?"

And Beal told him. He put the case very simply and very strongly, and yet Bartholomew Stretton seemed unable or unwilling to understand it. He met the suggestion with an air of puzzled hostility. As a practical man he had expected to be given some nice scientific formula, a plan all prettily drawn out like a scheme for the electrification of a railway or the building of a house. He had the pill-box mind. This whim of his son's seemed preposterous, futile, utterly unconvincing.

"Do you mean to tell me that he wants to bury himself in a ditch? My dear sir, I should have thought that it was the very worst thing possible, messing about with nothing to do, all by himself. Besides, there's no career in it."

Beal's face had a look of patient austerity.

"It depends on what you call a career. There is that other career to be remembered. I have warned you where it may end."

"But, my dear sir—!"

Bartholomew had the appearance of enlarging himself like a frog refusing to be swallowed.

"And you say you approved of it?"

"I believe in the instincts of the impulse."

"Oh—instinct. I thought that only dogs and animals—"

"A dog knows when to eat grass."

Bartholomew was touched by that. He could not follow Beal's psychology, but he could appreciate something which he himself had seen.

"Like Nebuchadnezzar," he said with vague sententiousness.

And then he surrendered. The part of him which had clamoured to have something done prevailed over the part of him which loathed what he called a pig in a poke.

"It sounds absurd. What do you want me to do?"

"Buy him a little place in the country, and settle a small income on him."

Bartholomew jibbed once more.

"What—lay out a lot of capital!"

"Don't call it unproductive capital," said Beal. "After all, the boy gave his youth, and we—we still have our capital."

He had him. It was not that old Stretton was ungenerous, but he had the conventional man's hatred of the impractical, the unusual, the obscure. Yet, even in full retreat, he hoisted his usual flag, the female petticoat.

"Before anything is settled I should like to consult my wife."

Beal had been waiting for this.

"I agree with you. Supposing we ask Mrs. Stretton to join us, and John too."

Bartholomew gave him a suspicious glance.

"I think—my wife—alone."

Beal nodded.

"Will you go to her, and I shall make John play me at billiards? By the way, it was a suggestion of John's that Carlyon should be consulted."

"And Reginald! Why not Reginald?" asked old Stretton with a lift of the eyebrows.

"Ask your wife about it," said Beal. "Women sometimes have a knack of understanding these things."

Bartholomew found his wife and son in the library sitting on the big leather sofa before the fire. Someone had switched off the lights—a woman's hand, no doubt, and old Stretton turned them on again. He saw that his wife had been crying.

"John, Dr. Beal would like a game of billiards."

With John out of the room, and sent thence with a little mysterious nod from his mother, Bartholomew stood on the hearthrug and confronted his wife. He hated tears; they made him uncomfortable, and Lavinia had always been a very comfortable woman. She had not inflicted too much emotion upon him. They were very fond of each other, and their comradeship was a plant of quiet and sure growth. They had never had a serious quarrel; both of them loved peace.

"I want to have a talk about John. Beal has been suggesting what seems to me a most unpractical idea—a little place in the country, miles from anywhere."

"Well, why not, dear?" asked the wife.

Old Stretton stared at her, and swayed from foot to foot, assuring himself that the solid floor was under his feet.

"You know about it," he said.

"John has been telling me. I think it is a beautiful idea."

Old Stretton had nothing to say about the beauty of the idea. He was not a connoisseur of beauty, but he did feel like a practical man who is being persuaded into some mad-cat scheme against his business sense. He began to argue, quite gently, with his wife, but he found her amazingly obstinate—eloquently obstinate. She was feeling the affair very deeply, and she involved her husband in her feeling of it. She soon had him slipping and floundering, and blurting out fragments of affectionate nonsense.

"There, there, Lavie, I only want to do what is best for the boy."

"He must have his chance, Bart," she said. "I don't say I understand it all, but I—feel—that he is right."

"Beal seems to think as you do."

She digressed to utter a panegyric on Beal.

"He has a beautiful nature, Bart. Haven't you noticed his eyes—how they seem to look right down into everything?"

Her husband pulled his nose judicially, but could not say that he had.

"A remarkable man, no doubt. So we are to let John have his bit of woodland and his cottage. We'll do the thing thoroughly when we do do it."

Mrs. Stretton got up and kissed him.

"You have always been very kind and generous to me, Bart—"

"Nonsense; I've liked it," he said, and began to cough and blink a little. "Bother this smoke. I think these cigars are a bit on the strong side."

He turned about and threw the stump into the fire, and while he was doing it his wife made an excursion to the door.

"I'll fetch John," she said.

Beal was leaning over the table, making a stroke, when the door opened.

"John, dear—"

Beal made his cannon and walked along the table with his back to the door. He appeared to take a long time considering the next shot, and when he played it he muffed it. His face lit up with that peculiarly luminous smile of his. He turned a cautious head and glanced over his shoulder. He was alone in the room.

"So that's that," he said.