Scales of Justice (3 page)

“Poorest Rose,” she said, glancing at her stepdaughter, “you’re wearing such suitable gloves. Do cope with your scratchy namesakes for Mark. A box perhaps.”

“Please don’t bother,” Mark said. “I’ll take them as they are.”

“We can’t allow that,” Mrs. Cartarette murmured. “You doctors mustn’t scratch your lovely hands, you know.”

Rose took the basket from him. He watched her go into the house and turned abruptly at the sound of Mrs. Cartarette’s voice.

“Let’s have a little drink, shall we?” she said. “That’s Maurice’s pet brandy and meant to be too wonderful. Give me an infinitesimal drop and yourself a nice big one. I really prefer
crème de menthe,
but Maurice and Rose think it a common taste, so I have to restrain my carnal appetite.”

Mark gave her the brandy. “I won’t, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I’m by way of being on duty.”

“Really? Who are you going to hover over, apart from the gardener’s child?”

“My grandfather,” Mark said.

“How awful of me not to realize,” she rejoined with the utmost composure. “How is Sir Harold?”

“Not so well this evening, I’m afraid. In fact I must get back. If I go by the river path, perhaps I’ll meet the Colonel.”

“Almost sure to I should think,” she agreed indifferently, “unless he’s poaching for that fable fish on Mr. Phinn’s preserves, which, of course, he’s much too county to think of doing, whatever the old boy may say to the contrary.”

Mark said formally, “I’ll go that way, then, and hope to see him.”

She waved her rose at him in dismissal and held out her left hand in a gesture that he found distressingly second-rate. He took it with his own left and shook it crisply.

“Will you give your father a message from me?” she said. “I know how worried he must be about your grandfather. Do tell him I wish so much one could help.”

The hand inside the glove gave his a sharp little squeeze and was withdrawn. “Don’t forget,” she said.

Rose came back with the flowers in a box. Mark thought, “I can’t leave her like this, half-way through a proposal, damn it.” He said coolly, “Come and meet your father. You don’t take enough exercise.”

“I live in a state of almost perpetual motion,” she rejoined, “and I’m not suitably shod or dressed for the river path.”

Mrs. Cartarette gave a little laugh. “Poor Mark!” she murmured. “But in any case, Rose, here
comes
your father.”

Colonel Cartarette had emerged from a spinney half-way down the hill and was climbing up through the rough grass below the lawn. He was followed by his spaniel Skip, an old, obedient dog. The evening light had faded to a bleached greyness. Stivered grass, trees, lawns, flowers and the mildly curving thread of the shadowed trout stream joined in an announcement of oncoming night. Through this setting Colonel Cartarette moved as if he were an expression both of its substance and its spirit. It was as if from the remote past, through a quiet progression of dusks, his figure had come up from the valley of the Chyne.

When he saw the group by the lawn he lifted his hand in greeting. Mark went down to meet him. Rose, aware of her stepmother’s heightened curiosity, watched him with profound misgiving.

Colonel Cartarette was a native of Swevenings. His instincts were those of a countryman and he had never quite lost his air of belonging to the soil. His tastes, however, were for the arts and his talents for the conduct of government services in foreign places. This odd assortment of elements had set no particular mark upon their host. It was not until he spoke that something of his personality appeared.

“Good evening, Mark,” he called as soon as they were within comfortable earshot of each other. “My dear chap, what do you think! I’ve damned near bagged the Old ’Un.”

“No!” Mark shouted with appropriate enthusiasm.

“I assure you! The old ’Un! below the bridge in his ustial lurk, you know. I could see him.…”

And as he panted up the hill, the Colonel completed his classic tale of a magnificent strike, a Homeric struggle and a broken cast. Mark, in spite of his own preoccupations, listened with interest. The Old ’Un was famous in Swevenings: a trout of magnitude and cunning, the despair and desire of every rod in the district.

“…so I lost him,” the Colonel ended, opening his eyes very wide and at the same time grinning for sympathy at Mark. “What a thing! By Jove, if I’d got him I really believe old Phinn would have murdered me.”

“Are you still at war, sir?”

“Afraid so. The chap’s impossible, you know. Good God, he’s accused me in so many words of poaching. Mad! How’s your grandfather?”

Mark said, “He’s failing pretty rapidly, I’m afraid. There’s nothing we can do. It’s on his account I’m here, sir.” And he delivered his message.

“I’ll come at once,” the Colonel said. “Better drive round. Just give me a minute or two to clean up. Come round with me, won’t you?”

But Mark felt suddenly that he could not face another encounter with Rose and said he would go home at once by the river path and would prepare his grandfather for the Colonel’s arrival.

He stood for a moment looking back through the dusk towards the house. He saw Rose gather up the full skirt of her house-coat and run across the lawn, and he saw her father set down his creel and rod, take off his hat and wait for her, his bald head gleaming. She joined her hands behind his neck and kissed him. They went on towards the house arm-in-arm. Mrs. Cartarette’s hammock had begun to swing to and fro.

Mark turned away and walked quickly down into the valley and across Bottom Bridge.

The Old ’Un, with Colonel Cartarette’s cast in his jaw, lurked tranquilly under the bridge.

Sir Harold Lacklander watched Nurse Kettle as she moved about his room. Mark had given him something that had reduced his nightmare of discomfort and for the moment he seemed to enjoy the tragic self-importance that is the prerogative of the very ill. He preferred Nurse Kettle to the day-nurse. She was, after all, a native of the neighbouring village of Chyning, and this gave him the same satisfaction as the knowledge that the flowers on his table came out of the Nunspardon conservatories.

He knew now that he was dying. His grandson had not told him in so many words, but he had read the fact of death in the boy’s face and in the behaviour of his own wife and son. Seven years ago he had been furious when Mark wished to become a doctor: a Lacklander and the only grandson. He had made it as difficult as he could for Mark. But he was glad now to have the Lacklander nose bending over him and the Lacklander hands doing the things doctors seemed to think necessary. He would have taken a sort of pleasure in the eminence to which approaching death had raised him if he had not been tormented by the most grievous of all ills. He had a sense of guilt upon him.

“Long time,” he said. He used as few words as possible because with every one he uttered it was as if he squandered a measure of his dwindling capital. Nurse Kettle placed herself where he could see and hear her easily and said, “Doctor Mark says the Colonel will be here quite soon. He’s been fishing.”

“Luck?”

“I don’t know. He’ll tell you.”

“Old ’n.”

“Ah,” said Nurse Kettle comfortably, “they won’t catch him in a hurry.”

The wraith of a chuckle drifted up from the bed and was followed by an anxious sigh. She looked closely at the face that seemed during that day to have receded from its own bones.

“All right?” she asked.

The lacklustre eyes searched hers. “Papers?” the voice asked.

“I found them just where you said. They’re on the table over there.”

“Here.”

“If it makes you feel more comfortable.” She moved into the shadows at the far end of the great room and returned carrying a package, tied and sealed, which she put on his bedside table.

“Memoirs,” he whispered.

“Fancy,” said Nurse Kettle. “There must be a deal of work in them. I think it’s lovely to be an author. And now I’m going to leave you to have a little rest.”

She bent down and looked at him. He stared back anxiously. She nodded and smiled and then moved away and took up an illustrated paper. For a time there were no sounds in the great bedroom but the breathing of the patient and the rustle of a turned page.

The door opened. Nurse Kettle stood up and put her hands behind her back as Mark Lacklander came into the room. He was followed by Colonel Cartarette.

“All right, Nurse?” Mark asked quietly.

“Pretty much,” she murmured. “Fretting. He’ll be glad to see the Colonel.”

“I’ll just have a word with him first.”

He walked down the room to the enormous bed. His grandfather stared anxiously up at him and Mark, taking the restless old hand in his, said at once, “Here’s the Colonel, Grandfather. You’re quite ready for him, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Right.” Mark kept his fingers on his grandfather’s wrist. Colonel Cartarette straightened his shoulders and joined him.

“Hullo, Cartarette,” said Sir Harold so loudly and clearly that Nurse Kettle made a little exclamation. “Nice of you to come.”

“Hullo, sir,” said the Colonel, who was by twenty-five years the younger. “Sorry you’re feeling so cheap. Mark says you want to see me.”

“Yes.” The eyes turned towards the bedside table. “Those things,” he said. “Take them, will you? Now.”

“They’re the memoirs,” Mark said.

“Do you want me to read them?” Cartarette asked, stooping over the bed.

“If you will.” There was a pause. Mark put the package into Colonel Cartarette’s hands. The old man’s eyes watched in what seemed to be an agony of interest.

“I think,” Mark said, “that Grandfather hopes you will edit the memoirs, sir.”

“I’ll… Of course,” the Colonel said after an infinitesimal pause. “I’ll be delighted; if you think you can trust me.”

“Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?”

“Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?”

Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.

“I don’t think,” Mark said, “that it will be much longer.”

“Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.”

“He’d set his will on it. I think,” Mark said, “that he will now relinquish his life.”

Nurse Kettle agreed. “Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.”

In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her labored breathing.

“Steady does it, Gar,” he said.

Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. “Ha!” she said. “It’s the doctor, is it?” Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.

She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner dress followed her, and the diamonds which every evening she absent-mindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.

“Good evening, Miss Kettle,” she panted. “Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?”

“The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.”

“Something about those damned memoirs,” said Lady Lacklander vexedly. “I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.”

“I don’t think they’ll be long.”

There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.

“Your father,” she said, “has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.” She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. “Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,” she said, “you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?”

“Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,” said Nurse Kettle and descended briskly. “Wanted to get rid of me,” she thought, “but it was tactfully done.”

“Nice woman, Kettle,” Lady Lacklander grunted. “She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?”

“Is he unhappy, Gar?”

“Don’t hedge. He’s worried to death…” She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. “He’s troubled in his mind,” she said, “and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?”

“Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.”

“The first occasion,” Lady Lacklander muttered, “was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company… and it has come, child, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.”

“I know. And I’m not. I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,” Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, “there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.”

“What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?” Mark asked gently.

“Your poor papa,” she said, “is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.”

“Which can’t be altered, even by you.”

“They can, however, be… Maurice! What is it?”

Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.

“Can you come, Mark? Quickly.”

Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.

“My dear,” he said, “wait a moment.”

“Not a second,” she said strongly. “Let me in, Maurice.”

A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.

Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.

Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There was a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.

“I’m here, Hal,” she said.

Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.

“Brandy,” she said. “Old-fashioned but good.”

Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. “Try,” he said. “It’ll help. Try.”

The mouth closed over the rim.

“He’s got a little,” Mark said. “I’ll give an injection.”

Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.

“Can I do anything?” George Lacklander asked.

“Only wait here, if you will, Father.”

“Here’s George, Hal,” Lady Lacklander said. “We’re all here with you, my dear.”

From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter, “Vic — Vic… Vic,” as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.

“What is it?” Lady Lacklander asked. “What is it, Hal?”

“Somebody called Vic?” Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.

“There is nobody called Vic,” said George Lacklander and sounded impatient. “For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?”

“In a moment,” Mark said from the far end of the room.

“Vic…”

“The vicar?” Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. “Do you want the vicar to come, Hal?”

His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.

Mark came back with the syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle moved away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.

“What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?” she asked. “Is it the vicar?”

With a distinctness that astonished them he whispered, “After all, you never know,” and with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.

On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine. He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.

Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order, and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries, it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nicknames of “Lucky Lacklanders.” How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark, but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like… But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.

“Hullo, Maurice,” he said when the Colonel came in. “Glad to see you.” He looked self-consciously into the Colonel’s face and with a changed voice said, “Anything wrong?”

“Well, yes,” the Colonel said. “A hell of a lot actually. I’m sorry to bother you, George, so soon after your trouble and all that, but the truth is I’m so damned worried that I feel I’ve got to share my responsibility with you.”

“Me!” Sir George ejaculated, apparently with relief and a kind of astonishment. The Colonel took two envelopes from his pocket and laid them on the desk. Sir George saw that they were addressed in his father’s writing.

“Read the letter first,” the Colonel said, indicating the smaller of the two envelopes. George gave him a wondering look. He screwed in his eyeglass, drew a single sheet of paper from the envelope, and began to read. As he did so, his mouth fell gently open and his expression grew increasingly blank. Once he looked up at the troubled Colonel as if to ask a question but seemed to change his mind and fell again to reading.

At last the paper dropped from his fingers and his monocle from his eye to his waistcoat.

“I don’t,” he said, “understand a word of it.”

“You will,” the Colonel said, “when you have looked at this.” He drew a thin sheaf of manuscript out of the larger envelope and placed it before George Lacklander. “It will take you ten minutes to read. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.”

“My dear fellow! Do sit down. What am I thinking of. A cigar! A drink.”