‘I want him to get my solicitor down—no time to lose,’ said the Duke. ‘You’re to have the place lock, stock and barrel, my dear, such as it is—servants and all.’
Servants and all? Poor old gentleman. Why, she wouldn’t know which end of a servant to start with. She with servants? And these ones here who, however hard she tried up there in the bedroom, wouldn’t make friends. They called her Madam. She Madam? Oh, my gracious, thought Sally, shrinking in horror from such a dreadful picture.
‘It’s a hole of a place,’ went on the Duke, ‘and quite unworthy of you, but we can have more bathrooms put in, and it’ll do till we find something you like better. And Charles tells me you married rather suddenly, and haven’t got anywhere to go to at present. He also says you have to live close to Cambridge, because of your husband’s studies. And he also says, and I entirely agree with him, my dear, that you oughtn’t to be in Cambridge itself, but somewhere more secluded—somewhere where you won’t be seen quite so much, somewhere hidden, in fact. Now I think, I really do think, that Crippenham, in spite of all its disadvantages, does exactly fulfil these requirements. And I want you to have it, my dear—to take it as my wedding present to you, and to live in it very happily, and bless it and make it beautiful by your presence.’
Thus the Duke.
‘’E don’t ’alf talk,’ thought Sally, quivering to be gone.
§
Charles, on being sent for by the Duke, was nowhere to be found. That was because he was in South Winch. He had gone off at daybreak in his car, and at the very moment his father woke up to the fact of his absence and asked where he was, he was standing in the drawing-room at Almond Tree Cottage, his eyes fixed eagerly on the door, waiting for Mrs. Luke.
He hadn’t been able to sleep for thinking of her. Somehow he had got it into his head that she, more than her son, would suffer through Sally’s disappearance, and be afraid. Because, thought Charles, she would feel that it was from her the girl had run, and that any misfortune that might happen to her would be, terribly, laid at her door. For two whole days and two whole nights that unfortunate woman must have gone through torture. What Charles couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t thought of this before. Indeed his and Laura’s conduct had been utterly unpardonable. The least he could now do, he thought, as he lay wide awake throughout the night, was to get to South Winch without losing a minute, and put Mrs. Luke out of her misery, and beg her forgiveness.
She was in the garden when he arrived. The little maid, staring at the card he asked her to take to her mistress, said she would fetch her, and ushered him into the drawing-room, where he waited with the books, the bright cushions, the Tiepolo, and two withered tulips in a glass from which nearly all the water had dried away; and while he waited he fought with a feeling he considered most contemptible, in face of the facts, that he was somehow on an errand of mercy, and arriving with healing in his wings,—that he was somehow a benefactor.
Sternly he told himself he ought to feel nothing but shame; sternly he tried to suppress his glow of misplaced self-satisfaction. There was nothing good about him and Laura in this business. They had, the pair of them, been criminally impulsive and selfish. He knew it; he acknowledged it. Yet here he was, secretly glowing, his eyes watching the door, as much excited as if he were going to bestow a most magnificently generous, unexpected present.