The Last Post

He lay staring at the withy binders of his thatch; the grass was infinitely green; his view embraced four counties; the roof was supported by six small oak sapling-trunks, roughly trimmed and brushed from above by apple boughs. French crab-apple! The hut had no sides.

The Italian proverb says: “He who allows the boughs of trees to spread above his roof, invites the doctor daily.” Words to that effect. He would have grinned, but that might have been seen.

For a man who never moved, his face was singularly walnut-coloured; his head, indenting the skim-milk white of the pillows should have been a gipsy’s, the dark, silvered hair cut extremely close, the whole face very carefully shaven and completely immobile. The eyes moved, however, with unusual vivacity, all the life of the man being concentrated in them and their lids.

Down the path that had been cut in swathes from the knee-high grass, and came from the stable to the hut, a heavy elderly peasant rolled in his gait. His over-long, hairy arms swung as if he needed an axe or a log or a full sack to make him a complete man. He was broad-beamed, in cord breeches, very tight in the buttock; he wore black leggings, an unbuttoned blue waistcoat, a striped flannel shirt, open at the perspiring neck, and a square, high hat of black felt.

Mark Tietjens thought that a cow or a hog must have got into the orchard, there was such a rushing in the grass. He said to himself that that damn Gunning was always boasting about his prowess as a hedger; he might see that his confounded hedges kept out the beasts from the Common. An unusual voice⁠—unusual in its intonation⁠—remarked:

“Oh, Sir Mark Tietjens, this is dreadful!”

It appeared to be dreadful. A lady in a long skirt⁠—an apparently elderly Di Vernon out of Waverley, which was one of the few novels Mark had ever read⁠—was making dreadful havoc with the standing grass. The beautiful, proud heads swayed and went down as she rushed knee-deep amongst it; stopped, rushed again across his view and then stopped apparently to wring her hands and once more explain that it was dreadful. A tiny rabbit, scared out by her approach, scuttered out under his bed and presumably down into the vegetable beds. Marie Léonie’s Mistigris would probably get it and, since it was Friday, Marie Léonie would be perturbed.

The lady pushed through the remaining tall grass that stood between them and had the air of rising up at his bed-foot. She was rather a faint figure⁠—like the hedge-sparrow. In grey, with a grey short coat and a waistcoat with small round buttons and a three-cornered hat. A tired, thin face.⁠ ⁠… Well, she must be tired, pushing through that long grass with a long skirt.

A gentleman owes that to his fellows!

The lady was continuing:

“I may as well tell you at once that I am Mrs. Millicent de Bray Pape. And hasn’t it struck you that but for his depravity⁠—unbridled depravity⁠—your brother might today be operating in Capel Court instead of peddling old furniture at the end of the world?”

She added disconcertingly:

“It’s nervousness that makes me talk like this. I have always been shy in the presence of notorious libertines. That is my education.”

Her name conveyed to him that this lady was going to occupy Groby. He saw no objection to it. She had, indeed, written to ask him if he saw any objection to it.

Sylvia Tietjens, using the persuasion of her left knee, edged her chestnut nearer to the bay mare of the shining general. She said:

“If I divorce Christopher, will you marry me?”

He exclaimed with the vehemence of a shocked hen:

“Good God, no!”

He shone everywhere except in such parts of his grey tweed suit as would have shown by shining that they had been put on more than once. But his little white moustache, his cheeks, the bridge but not the tip of his nose, his reins, his Guards’ tie, his boots, martingale, snaffle, curb, fingers, fingernails⁠—all these gave evidence of interminable rubbings.⁠ ⁠… By himself, by his man, by Lord Fittleworth’s stable-hands, grooms.⁠ ⁠… Interminable rubbings and supervisions at the end of extended arms. Merely to look at him you knew that he was something like Lord Edward Campion, Lieutenant-General retired, M.P., K.C.M.G. (military), V.C., M.C., D.S.O.⁠ ⁠…

So he exclaimed:

“Good God, no!” and using a little-finger touch on his snaffle-rein, made his mare recoil from Sylvia Tietjens’ chestnut.

Annoyed at its mate’s motion, the bad-tempered chestnut with the white forehead showed its teeth at the mare, danced a little and threw out some flakes of foam. Sylvia swayed backwards and forwards in her saddle and smiled down into her husband’s garden.

“You can’t, you know,” she said, “expect to put an idea out of my head just by flurrying the horses.⁠ ⁠…”

“A man,” the general said between “Come ups” to his mare, “does not marry his⁠ ⁠…”