At Lady Molly's Read Online Free PDF Page B

aggrieved, although at the same time unwilling to withdraw voluntarily from a conversation devoted to his relations.
    ‘What’s the matter with the Tollands this time, Aunt Molly?’ asked Lovell.
    He had been making a tour of the room, ending with our group.
    ‘Oh, it’s Erridge again,’ she said.
    She spoke as if the question were hardly worth asking.
    ‘What’s Erridge’s latest?’
    Lovell, for his part, spoke as one expecting to hear an enjoyable piece of gossip about a character always to be relied upon to provide a good story.
    ‘Living as a tramp,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘So I’m told at least. Somewhere in the Midlands. Grew a beard. He has still got it, they say. I don’t think he actually slept in casual wards. The other tramps must have had an awful time if he did. As a child he used to talk in his sleep and bawl the house down with night terrors.’
    ‘Is he doing that now?’ asked Lovell. ‘Being a tramp, I mean, not bawling the house down—though I shouldn’t wonder if he doesn’t have night terrors still.’
    ‘He is back at Thrubworth. Getting cleaned up after his adventures—as much as Erry ever gets cleaned up. Smith goes back tomorrow. I am more and more coming to think that Smith is more trouble than he is worth. It’s convenient to have a manservant in the house, but I found this morning we were completely out of gin, and I know at least two inches remained in the bottle left when we went to bed last night.’
    Lovell was obviously disappointed that nothing more sensational about Erridge was to be revealed.
    ‘Feingold had some story about “a lord” who was doing “social research”,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be Erridge. I don’t expect the dumps he stopped at were any more uncomfortable than he has made Thrubworth by now. The whole place has been under dust-sheets since he succeeded, hasn’t it? Do you know Erridge, Nick? He must be about a contemporary of yours.’
    ‘He is a year or two older. I used to know him by sight. His brother, George Tolland, was nearer my age, though I didn’t know him either. But he isn’t “Erridge” any longer, is he?’
    ‘No, no, he is “Warminster” now, of course,’ said Molly Jeavons, impatiently. ‘But Alfred’s family always call their eldest son by the second title. I don’t even know what Erry’s Christian name is. Perhaps he hasn’t got one.’
    ‘Nonsense, of course he has,’ said Tolland, quite angrily. ‘His name is Alfred, like my own. You know that perfectly well, Molly. Besides, to call him “Erridge” is perfectly usual, isn’t it? In fact, off-hand, I can’t think of a single family that does differently.’
    ‘We always used to think it rather pompous,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘I can’t imagine myself ever addressing Jumbo as “Kilkeel” when he was alive. It would sound like a racehorse.’
    ‘Well, “Jumbo” sounds like an elephant to me,’ said Tolland.
    This retort must have struck him as one of unusual subtlety, since he looked round at Lovell and myself in an appeal for applause; or at least for sympathy.
    ‘That’s just it,’ said Molly Jeavons, now speaking almost at the top of her voice. ‘My poor brother did look like an elephant. Nobody denied that, not even himself. But he did not look like a race-horse. Not one I would have put my money on, anyway.’
    ‘Bijou put her shirt on him,’ said Lovell.
    ‘Rubbish, she didn’t,’ said Molly Jeavons, beginning to laugh. ‘He put his shirt on her, you idiot—and lost it, too.’
    I remembered, then, that Tolland had spoken of ‘my nephew, Warminster’, at the Le Bas dinner where we had met; at the same time mentioning that this young man had succeeded his father some years before. Tolland had added that his nephew was ‘a funny boy’. Erridge (as it seems simplest—like his parents—to continue to call him, anyway for the time being) remained in my mind as a gloomy, cadaverous schoolboy, trudging along the road close to