“But there’s evidently some trouble about money, the boy writing and asking for it like that. And Rose’s letter reads a bit as though he’d been worrying her in the same way.”
“I hope he isn’t in debt,” said Lady Aviolet vaguely. “But isn’t there this moratorium, or whatever they call it, of the Government, that wipes out all that kind of thing?”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Sir Thomas curtly. “Women don’t understand, my dear. Better leave it alone.”
Lady Aviolet was only too ready to do so, and to return to her knitting, which now took up more of her time than ever.
Ford, to his father’s peremptory injunctions to proceed immediately to Cambridge, politely and coldly presented a refusal.
“I’m not in the least in sympathy with young Cecil, and never have been. I told you at the time that I thought his first letter a piece of emotional bravado. If he seriously intended to join up at once, he only had to ask you, or myself, how to set about it. There wasn’t a single practical suggestion on the subject in the whole letter—mere rodomontade copied from The Daily Mail patriotic flourishes. I daresay he thought himself quite sincere at the time he wrote, but he’s a boaster, and always has been.”
The heavy face of Sir Thomas was gradually becoming suffused, and his dull eyes looked angrier and angrier.
“I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately. “He can’t be playing the fool now, Ford. I don’t know what all this nonsense is about wanting money, but we’d better get to the bottom of it, that’s all I can say. His fool of a mother wants Lucian to go and see to him. Much more sense if the boy came down here, or you went up there.”
“I’m sorry, it’s quite out of the question. I have a good deal to see to on my own account, at present. If Cecil descends from heroics to practical details, I am quite at his disposal. Otherwise, I think he’d better be left to his mother, who plays up to him, and to Lucian—who plays up to her.”
The next day Ford and Diana left Squires.