Ordham relapsed into silence. After dinner he smoked on the upper terrace, Lord Bridgminster in his study. They did not meet again even to part for the night.
But they met at breakfast and went together to the covers. It was a long, hot, silent, fatiguing, hideous day. And on the morrow followed its duplicate, and again on the morrow. The bags were small. Bridgminster’s hand was unsteady, and Ordham more and more indifferent as to whether he hit a bird or a bush. (The beater kept out of the way.) Each dinner was a repetition of the first, a cold and tasteless luncheon was served on the moor, and he had to appear at the early breakfast. On the third night he went to bed feeling like a weary soldier on the battle-field, a cow-boy, a day labourer. They were the three most detestable days of his life; even that period of apprehension induced by the vagaries of Frau von Wass was as nothing to this unremitting physical discomfort in the society of a boor that never opened his mouth.
On the morning of the fourth day he deliberately remained in bed until noon, sending his brother word that his wrist was lame. The afternoon he idled about the park, almost happy in visiting every nook associated with his boyhood, and lay for an hour on the edge of the pool in the sunken garden surrounded by its silent rigid pointed trees, reflected like the spires of a submerged city. He had made a bare dash through Italy, and determined to visit it during the autumn with Margarethe Styr. Later he descended into the village at the base of the fell and renewed many old friendships, and promised to take a hand at cricket on the green on the following Saturday. But the cordial welcome he received from these simple folk, who had always regarded themselves as his future tenants, and their ill-concealed dislike of the man who never gave them a nod in passing, revived his despondency and futile annoyance with fate.
He learned upon his return to the castle that his brother had not gone out that day, and when he appeared in the dining room it was apparent that he had been drinking. He made no response to Ordham’s greeting and sat through the dinner speechless, his face purple, his breath hot and fevered, barely touching his food. But when the servants had left for the last time, he opened his mouth and spoke:
“Should you be willing to break the entail of this property?”
Ordham, by this time in a state of boiling wrath, disgust, and gloom, which made him wholly reckless, shot a look of contempt at the noble lord at the head of the table and replied curtly, “Of course not.”
“Then you are a fool. A new millionnaire would pay a cool half million for it.”
“What do you want of more money? You do not spend nine-tenths of what you have.”
“The mills are on their last legs. Money is money. What is the use of a silly ark like this? I have done with it in any case. I’m going back to my box in Scotland—lived too long in a house. This Italian thing should be turned into a barrack or a sanatorium. What rot, what insensate pride, to build a palace too big for the biggest family ever born! I believe it is haunted anyhow. I hate it—and my own shootings are better.”
“You might lend it to my mother and the boys, with the necessary income to keep it up.”