The Truants. A. E. W. Mason

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СКАЧАТЬ into the private bar. Thence he took another omnibus, and finally reached home, where his footmen received him solemnly in the hall. To this home he brought Tony and his wife.

      "There choose your own rooms, Tony," he said magnanimously. "What's that? Money? But what for? You'll have it soon enough."

      Tony Stretton suggested that it was hardly possible for any man, however careful, to retain a commission in the Coldstream without an allowance. Sir John, a tall thin man, with high bald forehead, and a prim puritanical face, looked at his son with a righteous severity.

      "A very expensive regiment. Leave it, Tony! And live quietly at home. Look after your father, my boy, and you won't need money," and he stalked upstairs leaving Tony aghast in the hall. Tony had to sit down and think it over before he could quite realise the fate which had over-taken him. Here he was, twenty-six years old brought up to spend what he wanted and to ask for more when that was ended, and he was to live quietly on nothing at all. He had no longer any profession, he was not clever enough to enter upon a new one without some sort of start and in addition he had a wife. His wife, it was true, had a few thousands; they had remained untouched ever since the marriage and Tony shrank from touching them now. He sat on one of the hall-chairs, twisting his moustache and staring with his blank blue eyes at the opposite wall. What in the world was he to do? Old Sir John was quite aware of those few thousands. They might just as well be used now he thought, and save him expense. Tony could pay them back after his father was dead. Such was Sir John's plan and Tony had to fall in with it. The horses and the brougham and all the furniture, the prints, the pictures and the mirrors which had decked out so gaily the little house in Deanery Street went to the hammer. Tony paid off his debts and found himself with a hundred pounds in hand at the end; and when that was gone he was forced to come to his wife.

      "Of course," said she, "we'll share what I have, Tony."

      "Yes, but we must go carefully," he replied. "Heaven knows how long we will have to drag on like this."

      So the money question was settled, but that was in reality the least of their troubles. Sir John, for the first time in his life, was master in fact as well as in name. He had been no match for his wife, but he was more than a match for his son. He was the fifth baronet of his name, and yet there was no landed property. He was rich, and all the money was safely tucked away in the public funds, and he could bequeath it as he willed. He was in a position to put the screw on Tony and his wife, and he did not let the opportunity slip. The love of authority grew upon him. He became exacting and portentously severe. In his black, shabby coat, with his long thin figure, and his narrow face, he had the look of a cold self-righteous fanatic. You would have believed that he was mortifying his son for the sake of his son's soul, unless perchance you had peeped into that private bar in the Tottenham Court Road and had seen him drinking gloomily alone.

      He laid down rules to which the unfortunate couple must needs conform. They had to dine with him every night and to sit with him every evening until he went to bed. It followed that they lost sight of their friends, and every month isolated them more completely. The mere humiliation of the position in which they stood caused them to shrink more and more into their privacy. When they walked out in the afternoon they kept away from the Park; when they played truant in the evening, at the Savoy, they chose a little table in an obscure corner. This was the real history of the truants with whose fortunes those of Warrisden and Pamela were to be so closely intermingled. For that life in the dark house was not to last. Even as Warrisden passed them in Berkeley Street, Tony Stretton was saying over and over again in his inactive mind--

      "It can't go on. It can't go on!"

      In the after times, when the yapping of dogs in the street at night would wake Tony from his sleep, and set him on dreaming of tent villages in a wild country of flowers, or when the wind in the trees would recall to him a little ship labouring on short steep seas in a mist of spray, he always looked back to this night as that on which the venture of his wife's fortunes and his own began.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

TONY STRETTON MAKES A PROPOSAL

       Table of Contents

      Regular as Warrisden had declared the lives of the truants to be, on the night following the dance at Lady Millingham's there came a break in the monotony of their habits. For once in a way they did not leave the house in their search for light and colour as soon as they were free. They stayed on in their own sitting-room. But it seemed that they had nothing to speak about. Millie Stretton sat at the table, staring at the wall in front of her, moody and despairing. Tony Stretton leaned against the embrasure of the window, now and then glancing remorsefully at his wife, now and then looking angrily up to the ceiling where the heavy footsteps of a man treading up and down the room above sounded measured and unceasing.

      Tony lifted a corner of the blind and looked out.

      "There's a party next door," he said, "there was another at Lady Millingham's last night. You should have been at both, Millie, and you were at neither. Upon my word, it's rough."

      He dropped the blind and came over to her side. He knew quite well what parties and entertainments meant to her. She loved them, and it seemed to him natural and right that she should. Light, admiration, laughter and gaiety, and fine frocks--these things she was born to enjoy, and he himself had in the old days taken a great pride in watching her enjoyment. But it was not merely the feeling that she had been stripped of what was her due through him which troubled him to-night. Other and deeper thoughts were vaguely stirring in his mind.

      "We have quarrelled again to-night, Millie," he continued remorsefully. "Here we are cooped up together with just ourselves to rely upon to pull through these bad years, and we have quarrelled again."

      Millie shrugged her shoulders.

      "How did it begin?" he asked. "Upon my word I don't remember. Oh yes, I----" and Millie interrupted him.

      "What does it matter, Tony, how the quarrel began? It did begin, and another will begin to-morrow. We can't help ourselves, and you have given the reason. Here we are cooped up by ourselves with nothing else to do."

      Tony pulled thoughtfully at his moustache.

      "And we swore off quarrelling, too. When was that?"

      "Yesterday."

      "Yesterday!" exclaimed Tony, with a start of surprise. "By George, so it was. Only yesterday."

      Millie looked up at him, and the trouble upon his face brought a smile to hers. She laid a hand upon his arm.

      "It's no use swearing off, Tony," she said. "We are both of us living all the time in a state of exasperation. I just--tingle with it, there's no other word. And the least, smallest thing which goes wrong sets us quarrelling. I don't think either of us is to blame. The house alone gets on our nerves, doesn't it? These great empty, silent, dingy rooms, with their tarnished furniture. Oh! they are horrible! I wander through them sometimes and it always seems to me that, a long time ago, people lived here who suddenly felt one morning that they couldn't stand it for a single moment longer, and ran out and locked the street door behind them; and I have almost done it myself. The very sunlight comes through the windows timidly, as if it knew it had no right here at all."

      She СКАЧАТЬ