"It isn't only the stables," said Viviette. "Dick is altogether discontented."
Austin looked at her in amazement. "Discontented?"
"Nonsense," he laughed, with the air of a man certain of his facts. "He's as happy as a king here. He shoots and hunts--looks after the place--runs the garden and potters about in his armoury--in fact, does just what he likes all day long. He goes to bed without a care sharing his pillow, and, when he wakes up, gets into comfortable country clothes instead of a tight-fitting suit of responsibilities. For a man of his tastes he leads an ideal existence."
He threw away the end of the cigarette he was smoking, as though to say that the argument was finished. But Viviette regarded him with a smile--the smile of woman's superior wisdom. How astonishingly little he knew of Dick!
"Do you really think there is one contented being on earth?" she asked. "Even I know better than that."
Austin maintained that Dick ought to be contented.
"Dependent for practically all he has on you?"
"I've never let him feel it," he said quickly.
"He does, though. He wants to get away--to earn his own living--make a way for himself."
"That's the first I've heard of it," said Austin, genuinely surprised. "I really thought he was perfectly contented here. Of course, now and then he's grumpy--but he always has had fits of grumpiness. What kind of work does he want?"
"Something to do with sheep or cattle--in Arizona or New Zealand--the place doesn't matter--any open-air life."
Austin lit another cigarette and walked about the room. He was a man of well-regulated habits, and did not like being taken unawares. Dick ought to have told him. Then there was their mother. Who would look after her? Dick was a dispensation of Providence.
"Perhaps I might be a deputy dispensation, mightn't I?" said Viviette. "I don't think mother is so desperately attached to Dick as all that. It could be arranged somehow or other. And Dick is growing more and more wretched about it every day. Every day he pours out his woes to me till I can almost howl with misery."
"Not to stand in his way if he gets a chance of going abroad."
"Of course I won't," cried Austin eagerly. "It never entered my head that he wanted to go away. I would do anything in the world for his happiness, poor old chap. I love Dick very deeply. In spite of his huge bulk and rough ways there's something of the woman in him that makes one love him."