When Blackbirds Sing Read Free Page B

greyhounds on the pillars. He told the driver to turn in. He did not doubt that the Tunstalls would welcome him, though he had not seen them for five years, and their last meeting, when he had practically jilted Sylvia, had been the most awkward possible. He judged other people by himself, and as he never nursed a grievance, he was sure that they would welcome him with the same affection, which, remembering only happy times, he felt as the car sped through the familiar park. He was sure that his arrival would be a pleasant surprise, and that with homely warmth, which had never been a Tunstall trait, he would immediately be restored to the family circle.
    But when the car stopped below the steps of the huge late Georgian house there was little sign of welcome or even of life. The blinds were drawn in many rooms, and the front door had that indefinable look, perhaps from dust in the jambs, of being seldom opened.
    Again he had the feeling of changed laws of gravity, and sometimes in later life he dreamed of this arrival at the forbidding door of Dilton, itself at this moment like something in a dream. But his feeling did not prevent him telling the driver to take out his luggage, and he paid him off. He rang, but it was a long time before the door was opened, and then not by the butler whom he knew, but by a parlourmaid. He asked if Miss Sylvia was at home.
    “Miss Sylvia’s been married two years,” said the young woman, looking with puzzled disapproval at thisapparently foreign gentleman, and the luggage piled at the bottom of the steps.
    “Is his lordship in?” asked Dominic.
    “His lordship’s at the depot.”
    “What depot?”
    “Where he’s the colonel,” said the parlourmaid, slightly indignant at his ignorance.
    “Oh.” Dominic thought for a moment. He had asked for the family according to the degree of attachment he had had for them. He realized he should first have asked for Lady Dilton, and did so now. “Will you tell her Mr Langton’s here?” he said.
    She told him to wait, and she shut the heavy iron-studded door in his face. Like the people on the ship she thought that he might be a spy. In a few minutes he heard again the grating of the bolts and she reappeared, asking him to enter. Lady Dilton, her curiosity aroused by the parlourmaid, who had given his name wrongly, had come out into the vast empty hall. Dominic was standing against the light.
    “Who is it?” she asked with the fretfulness of a large woman who is a little nervous.
    “It’s me, Dominic,” he said.
    “Oh!” She hesitated a moment, then added: “Come in.” She led the way back into the little drawing-room which she used mostly during the war, and turned to face him.
    “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, without excessive geniality, but she shook hands. “I didn’t know you were in England.”
    He explained that he had just arrived, that he had beengoing to Waterpark, but passing Dilton he had come in to see them.
    “Where are you staying?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Where is your luggage?”
    “On the steps.”
    She smiled with that grim smile which Dominic had sometimes provoked in her. When she had seen him in the hall she had felt indignation which had lain dormant since their last encounter. But it had only been a flicker, and now it died.
    “You’d better stay here,” she said. “That parlourmaid’s a fool. All the men have gone into the army.” She tugged a bell pull and when the maid came she told her to take the luggage up into Mr Richard’s room. She explained that both her sons were in France.
    “I suppose you have come over to fight for us,” she said. This made her more inclined to let bygones be bygones.
    “Yes,” said Dominic, though it had not occurred to him that he had come over to fight for Lady Dilton. He thought that he had come so that he and Helena, or if he did not return, Helena and the baby, could go on living on their farm in New South Wales, and so that it would