Part 27 (1/2)
”You forget,” he said, ”that this is not early for me. All my life I have risen with the sun and gone to bed with it. Come inside, David.
I'll get this muck off my hands. You spoke of the afternoon.”
”I came direct from the village,” David replied, as he followed his uncle into the house. ”I came because I thought you would like to know that there is another visitor on the way to see you.”
Richard Vont looked round and faced his nephew. His s.h.i.+rt was open at the throat, his trousers were tied up with little pieces of string. In whatever labour he had been engaged, it had obviously been of a strenuous character. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
”What's that, David?” he demanded. ”A visitor?”
”Marcia is at the Mandeleys Arms,” David told him. ”I am taking it for granted that she is on her way to see you.”
Vont turned deliberately away, and David heard his heavy feet ascending the staircase. In a few moments he called downstairs. His voice was as usual.
”Step round this afternoon, lad, if you think it's well.”
David pa.s.sed out of the little garden, crossed the strip of park, and, taking the wheel, drove slowly round by the longer route to Broomleys.
He pa.s.sed before the front of the Abbey--a mansion of the dead, with row after row of closed blinds, ma.s.ses of smokeless chimneys, and patches of weeds growing thick in the great sweep before the house.
Even with its air of pitiless desertion, its severe, semi-ecclesiastical outline, its ruined cloisters empty to the sky on one wing, its unbroken and gloomy silence, the place had its atmosphere. David slackened the speed of his car, paused for a moment and looked back at the little creeper-covered cottage on the other side of the moat. So those two had faced one another through the years--the Abbey, silent, magnificent, historical, with all the placid majesty of its countless rows of windows; its chapel, where Mandeleys for generations had been christened and buried,--at its gates the little cottage, whose garden was filled with spring flowers, and from whose single stack of chimneys the smoke curled upwards. Even while he watched, Richard Vont stood there upon the threshold with a great book under his arm.
David s.h.i.+vered a little as he threw in the clutch, pa.s.sed on round the back of the building and through the iron gates of the ancient dower house. He felt a little sigh of relief as he pulled up in front of the long, grey house, in front of which Sylvia Laycey was waiting to receive him. She waved her hand gaily and looked with admiration at the car.
”They are all here, Mr. Thain,” she exclaimed,--”Mr. Merridrew and father and your own builder. Come along and quarrel about the fixtures. I thought I had better stay with you because dad loses his temper so.”
David descended almost blithely from his car. He was back again in a human atmosphere, and the pressure of the girl's fingers was an instant relief to him.
”I am not going to quarrel with any one,” he declared. ”I shall do exactly what Mr. Muddicombe tells me--and you.”
She was a very pleasant type of young Englishwoman--distinctly pretty, fair-skinned, healthy and good-humoured. Notwithstanding the fact that their acquaintance was of the briefest, David was already conscious of her charm.
”You'll find me, in particular, very grasping,” she declared, as they entered the long, low hall. ”I want to make everything I can out of you, so that daddy and I can have a real good two months in London. I don't believe you know the value of things a bit, do you--except of railways and those colossal things? Cupboards, for instance? Do you know anything about cupboards? And are you going to allow us anything for the extra bathroom we put in?”
”Well, I am rather partial to bathrooms,” he confessed, ”and I should hate you to take it away with you.”
She drew a sigh of relief.
”So long as you look upon the bathroom matter reasonably, I am quite sure we shan't quarrel. Tell me about Lady Let.i.tia, please? Is she quite well--and the Marquis and all of them? And when are they coming down?”
”They are quite well,” he told her, ”and Lady Let.i.tia sent you her love. They talk of coming down almost at once.”
”I do hope they will,” she replied, ”because when we leave here dad and I are going to stay for a week or so with some friends quite near.
There! Did you hear that noise? That's daddy stamping because he is getting impatient.”
”Then perhaps--” David suggested.
”I suppose we'd better,” she interrupted. ”Be lenient about the bathroom, please. And if you could manage not to notice that the dining room wants papering, you'd be an angel. This way.”
CHAPTER XIX