No More Parades - Ford Madox Ford (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📗

yourself die in your hole. Groby will have to be looked after, and even if you do not live there you can keep a strong hand on Sanders, or whoever you elect to have as manager. That monstrosity you honour with your name⁠—which is also mine, thank you!⁠—suggested that if I consented to let her live at Groby she would have her mother to live with her, in which case her mother would be good to look after the estate. I dare say she would, though she has had to let her own place. But then almost everyone else has. She seems anyhow a notable woman, with her head screwed on the right way. I did not tell the discreditable daughter that she⁠—her mother⁠—had come to see me at breakfast immediately after seeing you off, she was so upset. And she keawert ho down i’ th’ ingle and had a gradely pow. You remember how Gobbles the gardener used to say that. A good chap, though he came from Lancasheere!⁠ ⁠… The mother has no illusions about the daughter and is heart and soul for you. She was dreadfully upset at your going, the more so as she believes that it’s her offspring has driven you out of the country and that you purpose⁠ ⁠… isn’t stopping one the phrase? Don’t do that.

“I saw your girl yesterday⁠ ⁠… She looked peaky. But of course I have seen her several times, and she always looks peaky. I do not understand why you do not write to them. The mother is clamorous because you have not answered several letters and have not sent her military information she wants for some article she is writing for a Swiss magazine⁠ ⁠…”

Sylvia knew the letter almost by heart as far as that because in the unbearable white room of the convent near Birkenhead she had twice begun to copy it out, with the idea of keeping the copies for use in some sort of publicity. But, at that point, she had twice been overcome by the idea that it was not a very sporting thing to do, if you really think about it. Besides, the letter after that⁠—she had glanced through it⁠—occupied itself almost entirely with the affairs of Mrs. Wannop. Mark, in his naive way, was concerned that the old lady, although now enjoying the income from the legacy left her by their father, had not immediately settled down to write a deathless novel; although, as he added, he knew nothing about novels⁠ ⁠…

Christopher was reading away at his letters beneath the green-shaded lamp; the ex-quartermaster had begun several sentences and dropped into demonstrative silence at the reminder that Tietjens was reading. Christopher’s face was completely without expression; he might have been reading a return from the office of statistics in the old days at breakfast. She wondered, vaguely, if he would see fit to apologize for the epithets that his brother had applied to her. Probably he would not. He would consider that she having opened the letter must take the responsibility of the contents. Something like that. Thumps and rumbles began to exist in the relative silence. Cowley said: “They’re coming again then!” Several couples passed them on the way out of the room. Amongst them there was certainly no presentable man; they were all either too old or too hobbledehoy, with disproportionate noses and vacant, half-opened mouths.

Accompanying Christopher’s mind, as it were, whilst he read his letter had induced in her a rather different mood. The pictures in her own mind were rather of Mark’s dingy breakfast-room in which she had had her interview with him⁠—and of the outside of the dingy house in which the Wannops lived, at Bedford Park⁠ ⁠… But she was still conscious of her pact with the father and, looking at her wrist watch, saw that by now six minutes had passed⁠ ⁠… It was astonishing that Mark, who was a millionaire at least, and probably a good deal more, should live in such a dingy apartment⁠—it had for its chief decoration the hoofs of several deceased race-winners, mounted as inkstands, as pen-racks, as paperweights⁠—and afford himself only such a lugubrious breakfast of fat slabs of ham over which bled pallid eggs⁠ ⁠… For she too, like her mother, had looked in on Mark at breakfast-time⁠—her mother because she had just seen Christopher off to France, and she because, after a sleepless night⁠—the third of a series⁠—she had been walking about St. James’s Park and, passing under Mark’s windows, it had occurred to her that she might do Christopher some damage by putting his brother wise about the entanglement with Miss Wannop. So, on the spur of the moment, she had invented a desire to live at Groby with the accompanying necessity for additional means. For, although she was a pretty wealthy woman, she was not wealthy enough to live at Groby and keep it up. The immense old place was not so immense because of its room-space, though, as far as she could remember, there must be anything between forty and sixty rooms, but because of the vast old grounds, the warren of stabling, wells, rose-walks and fencing⁠ ⁠… A man’s place, really, the furniture very grim and the corridors on the ground floor all slabbed with great stones. So she had looked in on Mark, reading his correspondence with his copy of The Times airing on a chair-back before the fire⁠—for he was just the man to retain the eighteen-forty idea that you catch cold by reading a damp newspaper. His grim, tight, brown-wooden features that might have been carved out of an old chair, had expressed no emotion at all during the interview. He had offered to have up some more ham and eggs for her and had asked one or two questions as to how she meant to live at Groby if she went there. Otherwise he had said nothing about the information she had given him as to the Wannop girl having had a baby by Christopher⁠—for purposes of conversation she