Scales of Justice (6 page)

“Kettle,” Lady Lackiander said, on Wednesday, wincing a little as she endured the approach of a fomentation to her toe, “have you got the cure for a bad conscience?”

Nurse Kettle did not resent being addressed in this restoration-comedy fashion by Lady Lacklander, who had known her for some twenty years and used the form with an intimate and even an affectionate air much prized by Nurse Kettle.

“Ah,” said the latter, “there’s no mixture-as-before for
that
sort of trouble.”

“No. How long,” Lady Lacklander went on, “have you been looking after us in Swevenings, Kettle?”

“Thirty years if you count five in the hospital at Chyning.”

“Twenty-five years of fomentations, enemas, slappings, and thumpings,” mused Lady Lacklander. “And I suppose you’ve learnt quite a lot about us in that time. There’s nothing like illness to reveal character and there’s nothing like a love affair,” she added unexpectedly, “to disguise it. This is agony,” she ended mildly, referring to the fomentation.

“Stick it if you can, dear,” Nurse Kettle advised, and Lady Lacklander for her part did not object to being addressed as “dear” by Nurse Kettle, who continued, “How do you mean, I wonder, about love disguising character?”

“When people are in love,” Lady Lacklander said with a little scream as a new fomentation was applied, “they instinctively present themselves to each other in their most favourable light. They assume pleasing characteristics as unconsciously as a cock pheasant puts on his spring plumage. They display such virtues as magnanimity, charitableness and modesty and wait for them to be admired. They develop a positive genius for suppressing their least attractive points. They can’t help it, you know, Kettle. It’s just the behaviourism of courtship.”

“Fancy.”

“Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, because you most certainly do. You think straight and that’s more than anybody else seems to be capable of doing in Swevenings. You’re a gossip, of course,” Lady Lacklander added, “but I don’t think you’re a malicious gossip, are you?”

“Certainly not. The idea!”

“No. Tell me, now, without any frills, what do you think of
us
?”

“Meaning, I take it,” Nurse Kettle returned, “the aristocracy?”

“Meaning exactly that. Do you,” asked Lady Lacklander with relish, “find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?”

“No,” said Nurse Kettle stoutly, “I don’t.”

“Some of us are, you know.”

Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. “It’s not the people so much as the idea,” she said.

“Ah,” said Lady Lacklander, “you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You
believe
in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.”

Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t krrow what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard, they are asking for trouble. “I mean,” Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain ahd mental concentration, “I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we will give certain reactions. Don’t they, Kettle?”

Nurse Kettle said she supposed they did.

“Not,” Lady Lacklander said, “that I give a damn what they think. But still…”

She remained wrapped in moody contemplation while Nurse Kettle completed the treatment and bandaged the toe.

“In short,” her formidable patient at last declaimed, “we can allow ourselves to be almost anything but shabbily behaved. That we’d better avoid. I’m extremely worried, Kettle.” Nurse Kettle looked up enquiringly. “Tell me, is there any gossip in the village about my grandson? Romantic gossip?”

“A bit,” Nurse Kettle said and after a pause added, “It’d be lovely, wouldn’t it? She’s a sweet girl.
And
an heiress into the bargain.”

“Umph.”

“Which is not to be sneezed at nowadays, I suppose. They tell me everything goes to the daughter.”

“Entailed,” Lady Lacklander said. “Mark, of course, gets nothing until he succeeds. But it’s not that that bothers me.”

“Whatever it is, if I were you, I should consult Dr. Mark, Lady Lacklander. An old head on young shoulders if ever I saw one.”

“My dear soul, my grandson is, as you have observed, in love. He is, therefore, as I have tried to point out, extremely likely to take up a high-falutin’ attitude. Besides, he’s involved. No, I must take matters into my own hands, Kettle. Into my own hands. You go past Hammer on your way home, don’t you?”

Nurse Kettle said she did.

“I’ve written a note to Colonel Cartarette. Drop it there like a good creature, will you?”

Nurse Kettle said she would and fetched it from Lady Lacklander’s writing desk.

“It’s a pity,” Lady Lacklander muttered, as Nurse Kettle was about to leave her. “It’s a pity poor George is such an ass.”

She considered that George gave only too clear a demonstration of being an ass when she caught a glimpse of him on the following evening. He was playing a round of golf with Mrs. Cartarette. George, having attained the tricky age for Lacklanders, had fallen into a muddled, excited dotage upon Kitty Cartarette. She made him feel dangerous, and this sensation enchanted him. She told him repeatedly how chivalrous he was and so cast a glow of knight-errantry over impulses that are not usually seen in that light. She allowed him only the most meagre rewards, doling out the lesser stimulants of courtship in positively homeopathic doses. Thus on the Nunspardon golf course, he was allowed to watch, criticize and correct her swing.

If his interest in this exercise was far from being purely athletic, Mrs. Cartarette gave only the slightest hint that she was aware of the fact and industriously swung and swung again while he fell back to observe, and advanced to adjust, her technique.

Lady Lacklander, tramping down River Path in the cool of the evening with a footman in attendance to carry her sketching impedimenta and her shooting-stick, observed her son and his pupil as it were in pantomime on the second tee. She noticed how George rocked on his feet, with his head on one side, while Mrs. Cartarette swung, as Lady Lacklander angrily noticed, everything that a woman could swing. Lady Lacklander looked at the two figures with distaste tempered by speculation. “Can George,” she wondered, “have some notion of employing the strategy of indirect attack upon Maurice? But no, poor boy, he hasn’t got the brains.”

The two figures disappeared over the crest of the hill, and Lady Lacklander plodded heavily on in great distress of mind. Because of her ulcerated toe she wore a pair of her late husband’s shooting boots. On her head was a battered solar topee of immense antiquity which she found convenient as an eye-shade. For the rest, her vast person was clad in baggy tweeds and a tent-like blouse. Her hands, as always, were encrusted with diamonds.

She and the footman reached Bottom Bridge, turned left and came to a halt before a group of elders and the prospect of a bend in the stream. The footman, under Lady Lacklander’s direction, set up her easel, filled her water-jar at the stream, placed her camp stool and put her shooting-stick beside it. When she fell back from her work in order to observe it as a whole, Lady Lacklander was in the habit of supporting her bulk upon the shooting-stick.

The footman left her. She would reappear in her own time at Nunspardon and change for dinner at nine o’clock. The footman would return and collect her impedimenta. She fixed her spectacles on her nose, directed at her subject the sort of glance Nurse Kettle often bestowed on a recalcitrant patient, and set to work, massive and purposeful before her easel.

It was at half past six that she established herself there, in the meadow on the left bank of the Chyne not far below Bottom Bridge.

At seven, Mr. Danberry-Phinn, having assembled his paraphernalia for fishing, set off down Watt’s Hill. He did not continue to Bottom Bridge but turned left, and made for the upper reaches of the Chyne.

At seven, Mark Lacklander, having looked in on a patient in the village, set off on foot along Watt’s lane. He carried his case of instruments, as he wished to lance the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, and his racket and shoes, as he proposed to play tennis with Rose Cartarette. He also hoped to have an extremely serious talk with her father.

At seven, Nurse Kettle, having delivered Lady Lacklander’s note at Hammer, turned in at Commander Syce’s drive and free-wheeled to his front door.

At seven, Sir George Lacklander, finding himself favourably situated in a sheltered position behind a group of trees, embraced Mrs. Cartarette with determination, fervour and an ulterior motive.

It was at this hour that the hopes, passions and fears that had slowly mounted in intensity since the death of Sir Harold Lacklander began to gather an emotional momentum and slide towards each other like so many downhill streams, influenced in their courses by accidents and detail, but destined for a common and profound agitation.

At Hammer, Rose and her father sat in his study and gazed at each other in dismay.

“When did Mark tell you?” Colonel Cartarette asked.

“On that same night… after you came in and… and found us. He went to Nunspardon and his father told him and then he came back here and told me. Of course,” Rose said looking at her father with eyes as blue as periwinkles behind their black lashes, “of course it wouldn’t have been any good for Mark to pretend nothing had happened. It’s quite extraordinary how each of us seems to know exactly what the other one’s thinking.”

The Colonel leant his head on his hand and half smiled at this expression of what he regarded as one of the major fallacies of love. “My poor darling,” he murmured.

“Daddy, you do understand, don’t you, that theoretically Mark is absolutely on your side? Because… well, because the facts of any case always should be demonstrated. I mean, that’s the scientific point of view.”

The Colonel’s half-smile twisted, but he said nothing.

’’And I agree, too, absolutely,” Rose said, “other things being equal.”

“Ah!” said the Colonel.

“But they’re not, darling,” Rose cried out, “they’re nothing like equal. In terms of human happiness, they’re all cockeyed. Mark says his grandmother’s so desperately worried that with all this coming on top of Sir Harold’s death and everything she may crack up altogether.”

The Colonel’s study commanded a view of his own spinney and of that part of the valley that the spinney did not mask: Bottom Bridge and a small area below it on the right bank of the Chyne. Rose went to the window and looked down. “She’s down there somewhere,” she said, “sketching in Bottom Meadow on the far side. She only sketches when she’s fussed.”

“She’s sent me a chit. She wants me to go down and talk to her at eight o’clock when I suppose she’ll have done a sketch and hopes to feel less fussed. Damned inconvenient hour but there you are. I’ll cut dinner, darling, and try the evening rise. Ask them to leave supper for me, will you, and apologies to Kitty.”

“O.K.,” Rose said with forced airiness. “And, of course,” she added, “there’s the further difficulty of Mark’s papa.”

“George.”

“Yes, indeed, George. Well, we know he’s not exactly as bright as sixpence, don’t we, but all the same he
is
Mark’s papa, and he’s cutting up most awfully rough and…”

Rose caught back her breath, her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. She launched herself into her father’s arms and burst into a flood of tears. “What’s the use,” poor Rose sobbed, “of being a brave little woman? I’m not in the least brave. When Mark asked me to marry him, I said I wouldn’t because of you and there I was, so miserable that when he asked me again I said I would. And now, when we’re so desperately in love, this happens. We have to do them this really frightful injury. Mark says of course they must take it and it won’t make any difference to
us,
but of course it
will,
and how can I bear to be married to Mark and know how his people feel about you when next to Mark, my darling, darling Daddy, I love you best in the world? And
his
father,” Rose wept, “
his
father says that if Mark marries me, he’ll never forgive him and that they’ll do a sort of Montague and Capulet thing at us and, darling, it wouldn’t be much fun for Mark and me, would it, to be star-crossed lovers?”

“My poor baby,” murmured the agitated and sentimental Colonel, “my poor baby!” And he administered a number of unintentionally hard thumps between his daughter’s shoulder blades.

“It’s so many people’s happiness,” Rose sobbed. “It’s all of us.”

Her father dabbed at her eyes with his own handkerchief, kissed her and put her aside. In his turn he went over to the window and looked down at Bottom Bridge and up at the roofs of Nunspardon. There were no figures in view on the golf course.

“You know, Rose,” the Colonel said in a changed voice, “I don’t carry the whole responsibility. There is a final decision to be made, and mine must rest upon it. Don’t hold out too many hopes, my darling, but I suppose there is a chance. I’ve time to get it over before I talk to Lady Lacklander, and indeed I suppose I should. There’s nothing to be gained by any further delay. I’ll go now.”

He went to his desk, unlocked a drawer and took out an envelope.

Rose said, “Does Kitty…?”

“Oh, yes,” the Colonel said. “She knows.”

“Did you tell her, Daddy?”

The Colonel had already gone to the door. Without turning his head and with an air too casual to be convincing, he said, “O, no. No. She arranged to play a round of golf with George, and I imagine he elected to tell her. He’s a fearful old gas-bag is George.”

“She’s playing now, isn’t she?”

“Is she? Yes,” said the Colonel, “I believe she is. He came to fetch her, I think. It’s good for her to get out.”

“Yes, rather,” Rose agreed.