Castle Orchard Read Online Free Page A

stick to a darker shade. Your coat needs altering at the shoulder. The cap of the sleeve could be a little less, I suppose, though it’s useless to endeavour to turn you into a seriously fashionable man.’
    ‘Why ever not?’ Rampton asked, affronted, for he had been under the impression he was already a seriously fashionable man.
    ‘Not a hope.’ Johnny Arthur gave his customary peal of laughter. He leaped out of his chair, seized one of his canes and darted about the room while making slashing motions, both at Rampton and his valet, the latter dodging and skipping to avoid him. ‘If this were a sabre I could cut off your head.’
    He sat down as abruptly as he had got up. His servant settled to rescuing the dressing case that had been dislodged.
    ‘Allington has a cane,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t we all?’ Rampton replied abruptly, not pacified.
    ‘We all have canes but we don’t need them. They are only for show. Allington’s is more of a walking stick.’
    ‘Mine is for show,’ Rampton said, picking it up and admiring its fine, flexible length and the little gold knob at the top with his engraved initials. ‘My father had it made for me.’
    ‘Your father is a poet. Why could I not have a poet for a father? How he would have understood and appreciated me. Alack, it was not so and my father has been dead these last ten years without ever knowing what a treasure he had in his only child. Oh, the filial piety I would have expressed in exchange for a few kind words.’
    Arthur took the cane and examined it closely. He then said, ‘The only cane my father gave me was one with which to give me a hiding. Well, that’s not true, but it sounds good. I don’t recall he ever beat me much, but he was so stern and so dull. He would have made a good soldier, he had so little feeling. They can have no feeling or they couldn’t do the things they have to do. You listen to the way they talk. A military man will tell you how a bullet did for his best coursing dog at Salamanca and how he had his favourite horse shot from under him at Vitoria and a couple more after that. He might continue by saying the regiment lost a hundred men that day, or the Army several thousand. What he will not mention is the loss of his best friend and both his brothers. No, no, he is more likely to remark that they had only half a chicken for the officers’ mess and nowhere to eat it but a roofless barn while the wolves ate the corpses outside.’
    ‘And such a man is this Allington?’ Rampton asked, slightly shocked.
    ‘How should I know? He doesn’t say enough to me that I should ever find out. Indeed, I believe some military men may be retrained for civilisation – I know of a few – and we must have soldiers or Napoleon would have translated us all into French by now. Your father never wanted you to be a soldier?’
    ‘Certainly not, though he thought it all very well and good for some.’
    ‘My father thought to be a soldier would make a man of me and I should come home all glorious, if minus a limb or two. If I wouldn’t be a soldier I must at least be a fox hunter. Now the fox hunter is a soldier manqué, but his injuries are self-inflicted. He thinks himself a hero all the same and his broken bones honourable. My father would hunt when he was seventy-three and then coming off, as was inevitable, my mother must nurse him, attend to his whims and his bad temper. Allington is, I believe, a fox hunter, and under his circumstance, I doubt he’s any safer than my father was in advanced old age. God knows who would nurse Allington. His servant, I suppose, if he was sober.’
    Arthur’s own servant here emerged from a closet with an armful of clothes and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but you asked me to remind you of the time. You are to meet Sir John.’ He spoke with a French accent.
    ‘Dear me,’ Arthur said, looking at his watch. ‘It takes me hours to dress. I shall be late.’
    Rampton stood up to take his leave but there was