A sudden sense of the hopelessness of it all came over him—the net in which he struggled, in which he was being dragged away from those he could help and love. He dropped his head in his hands. Harry stood for a moment awestruck beside him, a grotesque figure with Tom’s coat hanging over his bare thighs. Then he turned and crept away to bed.
The clock struck nine, and Tom lifted his head. He was utterly weary, but he knew that if he did not take his letter over to Bucksteep to-night he would not have time in the morning. There was no good leaving it to other hands to deliver, for he felt that his mother would resent its humble tone, and perhaps send instead an angry demand which, by rousing Mus’ Archie’s rage, might end by landing Harry before the Senlac Bench. So he put on his father’s driving coat, which hung in the passage and smelt of manure and stale spirits, and let himself out into the soft, throbbing darkness, lit only by a few dim stars of the Plough.
12
Bucksteep Manor was the smaller kind of country-house, smuggled away from the cross-roads in a larch plantation, with a tennis lawn at the back, and a more open view swinging over a copsed valley to Rushlake Green. It had once been a farmhouse, but a wing had been added in modern style, and inside, the low raftering had been swept away, so that when Tom stood in the dimly-lighted hall, which had once been the kitchen, he could look up to a ceiling dizzily high to his sag-roofed experience.
The Lambs were the aristocracy of Dallington, a neighbourhood strikingly empty of “society” in the country-house sense. They had themselves been yeoman farmers a couple of generations back, and the present squire still interested himself shamefacedly in Bucksteep’s hundred acres. The Beatups had but little truck with the Manor; precarious yeomen, no rents or dues demanded intercourse, and Mus’ Beatup had often been heard to say that some folks were no better than other folks, for all their airs and acres.
Tom had given his letter to a rustling parlourmaid, and stood meekly waiting for an answer, his large bovine eyes blinking with sleepiness. From an adjoining room came the throaty music of a gramophone, playing:
“When we wind up the Watch on the Rhine
Everything will be Potsdam fine....”
There was girls’ laughter, too—probably Miss Marian Lamb and Mus’ Archie’s intended—and every now and then he heard Mrs. Lamb’s voice go rocketing up. He did not feel envious of all this jollity, neither did it grate upon him; he just stood and waited under the shaded lamps of the hall, and had nearly fallen asleep on his legs when suddenly the door opened, with a flood of light and noise, and shut again behind Mus’ Archie.
“Good evening, Beatup. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I couldn’t make this out at first—had no idea your young brother was one of the culprits to-night, or I shouldn’t have played that trick on ’em.”
“It doan’t matter, sir. Harry desarved it. It’s only as we can’t afford to lose the clothes.”