Queen Lucia

by E. F. Benson

  Produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team.

  Queen Lucia

  by E. F. Benson

  Chapter ONE

  Though the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred tocover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on herown brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly thather husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in thetrain a short walk would be pleasant, but, though she veiled it fromher conscious mind, another motive, sub-consciously engineered,prompted her action. It would, of course, be universally known to allher friends in Riseholme that she was arriving today by the 12.26, andat that hour the village street would be sure to be full of them. Theywould see the fly with luggage draw up at the door of The Hurst, andnobody except her maid would get out.

  That would be an interesting thing for them: it would cause one ofthose little thrills of pleasant excitement and conjectural exercisewhich supplied Riseholme with its emotional daily bread. They would allwonder what had happened to her, whether she had been taken ill at thevery last moment before leaving town and with her well-known fortitudeand consideration for the feelings of others, had sent her maid on toassure her husband that he need not be anxious. That would clearly beMrs Quantock's suggestion, for Mrs Quantock's mind, devoted as it wasnow to the study of Christian Science, and the determination to denythe existence of pain, disease and death as regards herself, was alwaysfull of the gloomiest views as regards her friends, and on theslightest excuse, pictured that they, poor blind things, were sufferingfrom false claims. Indeed, given that the fly had already arrived atThe Hurst, and that its arrival had at this moment been seen by orreported to Daisy Quantock, the chances were vastly in favour of thatlady's having already started in to give Mrs Lucas absent treatment.Very likely Georgie Pillson had also seen the anticlimax of the fly'sarrival, but he would hazard a much more probable though erroneoussolution of her absence. He would certainly guess that she had sent onher maid with her luggage to the station in order to take a seat forher, while she herself, oblivious of the passage of time, was spendingher last half hour in contemplation of the Italian masterpieces at theNational Gallery, or the Greek bronzes at the British Museum. Certainlyshe would not be at the Royal Academy, for the culture of Riseholme,led by herself, rejected as valueless all artistic efforts later thanthe death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a great deal of what went before.Her husband with his firm grasp of the obvious, on the other hand,would be disappointingly capable even before her maid confirmed hisconjecture, of concluding that she had merely walked from the station.

  The motive, then, that made her send her cab on, though subconsciouslygenerated, soon penetrated into her consciousness, and these guesses atwhat other people would think when they saw it arrive without her,sprang from the dramatic element that formed so large a part of hermentality, and made her always take, as by right divine, the leadingpart in the histrionic entertainments with which the cultured ofRiseholme beguiled or rather strenuously occupied such moments as couldbe spared from their studies of art and literature, and their socialengagements. Indeed she did not usually stop at taking the leadingpart, but, if possible, doubled another character with it, as well asbeing stage-manager and adapter, if not designer of scenery. Whatevershe did--and really she did an incredible deal--she did it with all themight of her dramatic perception, did it in fact with such earnestnessthat she had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all, she simplycontemplated herself and her own vigorous accomplishment. When sheplayed the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practiceevery day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody whopassed down the road outside her house might be thinking of theroulades that poured from her open window: she was simply EmmelineLucas, absorbed in glorious Bach or dainty Scarletti, or nobleBeethoven. The latter perhaps was her favorite composer, and many werethe evenings when with lights quenched and only the soft effulgence ofthe moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows, she sat with herprofile, cameo-like (or like perhaps to the head on a postage stamp)against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and entranced herself andher listeners, if there were people to dinner, with the exquisitepathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Devotedly as sheworshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, shecould never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movementswere on the same sublime level as the first, and besides they "went"very much faster. But she had seriously thought, as she came down inthe train today and planned her fresh activities at home of trying tomaster them, so that she could get through their intricacies withtolerable accuracy. Until then, she would assuredly stop at the end ofthe first movement in these moonlit seances, and say that the other twowere more like morning and afternoon. Then with a sigh she would softlyshut the piano lid, and perhaps wiping a little genuine moisture fromher eyes, would turn on the electric light and taking up a book fromthe table, in which a paper-knife marked the extent of her penetration,say:

  "Georgie, you must really promise me to read this life of AntoninoCaporelli the moment I have finished it. I never understood the rise ofthe Venetian School before. As I read I can smell the salt tidecreeping up over the lagoon, and see the campanile of dear Torcello."

  And Georgie would put down the tambour on which he was working his copyof an Italian cope and sigh too.

  "You are too wonderful!" he would say. "How do you find time foreverything?"

  She rejoined with the apophthegm that made the rounds of Riseholme nextday.

  "My dear, it is just busy people that have time for everything."

  It might be thought that even such activities as have here beenindicated would be enough to occupy anyone so busily that he wouldpositively not have time for more, but such was far from being the casewith Mrs Lucas. Just as the painter Rubens amused himself with beingthe ambassador to the Court of St. James--a sufficient career in itselffor most busy men--so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of herpursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but amonarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism ofmaps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more realand inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queenwas undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracypleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, andimperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds. Theruler of Riseholme, happier than he of Russia, had no need to fear thefinger of Bolshevism writing on the wall, for there was not in thewhole of that vat which seethed so pleasantly with culture, one bubbleof revolutionary ferment. Here there was neither poverty nor discontentnor muttered menace of any upheaval: Mrs Lucas, busy and serene, workedharder than any of her subjects, and exercised an autocratic controlover a nominal democracy.

  Something of the consciousness of her sovereignty was in her mind, asshe turned the last hot corner of the road and came in sight of thevillage street that constituted her kingdom. Indeed it belonged to her,as treasure trove belongs to the Crown, for it was she who had been thefirst to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan villageinto the palace of culture that was now reared on the spot where tenyears ago an agricultural population had led bovine and unilluminatedlives in their cottages of grey stone or brick and timber. Before that,while her husband was amassing a fortune, comfortable in amount andrespectable in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small dimlamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and his hadbeen to bask and be busy in artistic realms of their own when thematerialistic needs were provided for by sound investments, and so whenthere were the requisite thousands of pounds in secure securities shehad easily persuaded him to buy three of these cottages that stoodtogether in a low two-storied
block. Then, by judicious removal ofpartition-walls, she had, with the aid of a sympathetic architect,transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently buildingon to them a new wing, that ran at right angles at the back, which was,if anything, a shade more inexorably Elizabethan than the stem ontowhich it was grafted, for here was situated the famous smoking-parlour,with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with pewter tankards,and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practicallyimpossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed inoak-beams with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within thechimney, and a genuine spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here,though in the rest of the house she had for the sake of convenienceallowed the installation of electric light, there was no suchconcession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so thatonly those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even thenreading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table containednothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not laterthan the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a franticallyElizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas oftenspent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playingon the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in thefumes of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an ElzevirHorace rather late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubtedbargain.

  The house stood at the end of the village that was nearest the station,and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she hadbut a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from aneighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth andindignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of gardenfrom the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which itwas cut, across the little lawns inside. Here, as was only right andproper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentionedin the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare's garden,and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was Ophelia'sborder, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraughtmaiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in alunatic asylum. Mrs Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that suchinstitutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day, or that, if known,Shakespeare artistically ignored their existence. Pansies, naturally,formed the chief decoration--though there were some very flourishingplants of rue. Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when inflower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfullyefficacious. Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one ofthe squares of grass between which a path of broken paving-stone led tothe front door, was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, forit harboured only the spring-flowers enumerated by Perdita. But thefirst day every year when Perdita's border put forth its earliestblossom was a delicious anniversary, and the news of it spread likewild-fire through Mrs Lucas's kingdom, and her subjects were veryjoyful, and came to salute the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was.

  The three cottages dexterously transformed into The Hurst, presented acharmingly irregular and picturesque front. Two were of the grey stoneof the district and the middle one, to the door of which led the pavedpath, of brick and timber; latticed windows with stone mullions gavelittle light to the room within, and certain new windows had beenadded; these could be detected by the observant eye for they had amarkedly older appearance than the rest. The front-door, similarly,seemed as if it must have been made years before the house, the factbeing that the one which Mrs Lucas had found there was too dilapidatedto be of the slightest service in keeping out wind or wet or undesiredcallers. She had therefore caused to be constructed an even older onemade from the oak-planks of a dismantled barn, and had it studded withlarge iron nails of antique pattern made by the village blacksmith. Hehad arranged some of them to look as if they spelled A.D. 1603. Overthe door hung an inn-sign, and into the space where once the sign hadswung was now inserted a lantern, in which was ensconced, well hiddenfrom view by its patinated glass sides, an electric light. This was oneof the necessary concessions to modern convenience, for no lampnurtured on oil would pierce those genuinely opaque panes, andilluminate the path to the gate. Better to have an electric light thancause your guests to plunge into Perdita's border. By the side of thisfortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. Whenfirst Mrs Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sensethat an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and plantedhis feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung inthe servants' passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athletecontinued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash fromthe ceiling fell down in flakes. She had therefore made anotherconcession to the frailty of the present generation and theinconveniences of having whitewash falling into salads and puddings ontheir way to the dining room, and now at the back of the mermaid's tailwas a potent little bone button, coloured black and practicallyinvisible, and thus the bell-pull had been converted into an electricbell-push. In this way visitors could make their advent known withoutviolent exertion, the mermaid lost no visible whit of her Elizabethanvirginity, and the spirit of Shakespeare wandering in his garden wouldnot notice any anachronism. He could not in fact, for there was none tonotice.

  Though Mrs Lucas's parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, itwas not to be wondered at that she was always known among the moreintimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in theItalian mode--La Lucia, the wife of Lucas; and it was as "Lucia mia"that her husband hailed her as he met her at the door of The Hurst.

  He had been watching for her arrival from the panes of the parlourwhile he meditated upon one of the little prose poems which formed sodelectable a contribution to the culture of Riseholme, for though, ashad been hinted, he had in practical life a firm grasp of the obvious,there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and etherealprospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible.In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, buttheir smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever tothe productions of that barbaric bard, whose works were quite unknownin Riseholme. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems had beenpublished, not of course in the hard business-like establishment ofLondon, but at "Ye Sign of ye Daffodil," on the village green, wheretype was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, wasprinted. The press had only been recently started at Mr Lucas'sexpense, but it had put forth a reprint of Shakespeare's sonnetsalready, as well as his own poems. They were printed in blunt type onthick yellowish paper, the edges of which seemed as if they had beencut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregularwere they, and they were bound in vellum, the titles of these two slimflowers of poetry, "Flotsam" and "Jetsam," were printed in black lettertype and the covers were further adorned with a sort of embossed sealand with antique looking tapes so that you could tie it all up with twobows when you had finished with Mr Lucas's "Flotsam" for the timebeing, and turned to untie the "Jetsam."

  Today the prose-poem of "Loneliness" had not been getting on very well,and Philip Lucas was glad to hear the click of the garden-gate, whichshowed that his loneliness was over for the present, and looking up hesaw his wife's figure waveringly presented to his eyes through thetwisted and knotty glass of the parlour window, which had taken so longto collect, but which now completely replaced the plain, commonplaceunrefracting stuff which was there before. He jumped up with analacrity remarkable in so solid and well-furnished a person, and hadthrown open the nail-studded front-door before Lucia had traversed thepath of broken paving-stones, for she had lingered for a sad moment atPerdita's empty border.

  "_Lucia mia_!" he exclaimed. "_Ben arrivata_! So you walkedfrom the station?"

  "_Si, Peppino, mio caro_," she said. "_Sta bene_?"

  He kissed her and relapsed into Shakespeare's tongue, for theirItalian, though firm and perfect as far as it went, could not beconsidered as going far, and was useless for conversational purposes,unless they merely wanted
to greet each other, or to know the time. Butit was interesting to talk Italian, however little way it went.

  "_Molto bene_," said he, "and it's delightful to have you homeagain. And how was London?" he asked in the sort of tone in which hemight have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was notlikely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.

  "Terrifically busy about nothing," she said. "All this fortnight I havescarcely had a moment to myself. Lunches, dinners, parties of allkinds; I could not go to half the gatherings I was bidden to. Dear goodSouth Kensington! Chelsea too!"

  "_Carissima_, when London does manage to catch you, it is nowonder it makes the most of you," he said. "You mustn't blame Londonfor that."

  "No, dear, I don't. Everyone was tremendously kind and hospitable; theyall did their best. If I blame anyone, I blame myself. But I think thisRiseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one forother places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life ofits own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades.Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together,gabbles and gobbles: am not I naughty? If there is a concert in aprivate house--you know my views about music and the impossibility ofhearing music at all if you are stuck in the middle of a row ofpeople--even then, the moment it is over you are whisked away to supper,or somebody wants to have a few words. There is always a crowd, there isalways food, you cannot be alone, and it is only in loneliness, asGoethe says, that your perceptions put forth their flowers. No one inLondon has time to listen: they are all thinking about who is there andwho isn't there, and what is the next thing. The exquisite present, asyou put it in one of your poems, has no existence there: it is alwaysthe feverish future."

  "Delicious phrase! I should have stolen that gem for my poor poems, ifyou had discovered it before."

  She was too much used to this incense to do more than sniff it inunconsciously, and she went on with her tremendous indictment.

  "It isn't that I find fault with London for being so busy," she saidwith strict impartiality, "for if being busy was a crime, I am surethere are few of us here who would escape hanging. But take my lifehere, or yours for that matter. Well, mine if you like. Often and oftenI am alone from breakfast till lunch-time, but in those hours I getthrough more that is worth doing than London gets through in a day anda night. I have an hour at my music not looking about and wondering whomy neighbours are, but learning, studying, drinking in divine melody.Then I have my letters to write, and you know what that means, and Istill have time for an hour's reading so that when you come to tell melunch is ready, you will find that I have been wandering throughVenetian churches or sitting in that little dark room at Weimar, or wasit Leipsic? How would those same hours have passed in London?

  "Sitting perhaps for half an hour in the Park, with dearest Aggiepointing out to me, with thrills of breathless excitement, a woman whowas in the divorce court, or a coroneted bankrupt. Then she would dragme off to some terrible private view full of the same people allstaring at and gabbling to each other, or looking at pictures that madepoor me gasp and shudder. No, I am thankful to be back at my own sweetRiseholme again. I can work and think here."

  She looked round the panelled entrance-hall with a glow of warm contentat being at home again that quite eclipsed the mere physical heatproduced by her walk from the station. Wherever her eyes fell, thosesharp dark eyes that resembled buttons covered with shiny Americancloth, they saw nothing that jarred, as so much in London jarred. Therewere bright brass jugs on the window sill, a bowl of pot-pourri on theblack table in the centre, an oak settee by the open fireplace, acouple of Persian rugs on the polished floor. The room had itsquaintness, too, such as she had alluded to in her memorable essay readbefore the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture,"and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas.Equally quaint was the dish of highly realistic stone fruit that stoodbeside the pot-pourri and the furry Japanese spider that sprawled in asilk web over the window.

  Such was the fearful verisimilitude of this that Lucia's new housemaidhad once fled from her duties in the early morning, to seek theassistance of the gardener in killing it. The dish of stone fruit hadscored a similar success, for once she had said to Georgie Pillson,"Ah, my gardener has sent in some early apples and pears, won't youtake one home with you?" It was not till the weight of the pear (heswiftly selected the largest) betrayed the joke that he had any notionthat they were not real ones. But then Georgie had had his revenge, forwaiting his opportunity he had inserted a real pear among those stonyspecimens and again passing through with Lucia, he picked it out, andwith lips drawn back had snapped at it with all the force of his jaws.For the moment she had felt quite faint at the thought of his teethcrashing into fragments.... These humorous touches were altered fromtime to time; the spider for instance might be taken down and replacedby a china canary in a Chippendale cage, and the selection of theentrance hall for those whimsicalities was intentional, for guestsfound something to smile at, as they took off their cloaks and enteredthe drawing room with a topic on their lips, something light, somethingamusing about what they had seen. For the gong similarly was sometimessubstituted a set of bells that had once decked the collar of theleading horse in a waggoner's team somewhere in Flanders; in fact whenLucia was at home there was often a new little quaintness for quite asequence of days, and she had held out hopes to the Literary Societythat perhaps some day, when she was not so rushed, she would jot downmaterial for a sequel to her essay, or write another covering a ratherlarger field on "The Gambits of Conversation Derived from Furniture."

  On the table there was a pile of letters waiting for Mrs Lucas, foryesterday's post had not been forwarded her, for fear of its missingher--London postmen were probably very careless and untrustworthy--andshe gave a little cry of dismay as she saw the volume of hercorrespondence.

  "But I shall be very naughty," she said "and not look at one of themtill after lunch. Take them away, _Caro_, and promise me to lockthem up till then, and not give them me however much I beg. Then I willget into the saddle again, such a dear saddle, too, and tackle them. Ishall have a stroll in the garden till the bell rings. What is it thatNietzsche says about the necessity to _mediterranizer_ yourselfevery now and then? I must _Riseholme_ myself."

  Peppino remembered the quotation, which had occurred in a review of somework of that celebrated author, where Lucia had also seen it, and wentback, with the force of contrast to aid him, to his prose-poem of"Loneliness," while his wife went through the smoking-parlour into thegarden, in order to soak herself once more in the cultured atmosphere.

  In this garden behind the house there was no attempt to construct aShakespearian plot, for, as she so rightly observed, Shakespeare, wholoved flowers so well, would wish her to enjoy every conceivablehorticultural treasure. But furniture played a prominent part in theplace, and there were statues and sundials and stone-seats scatteredabout with almost too profuse a hand. Mottos also were in greatevidence, and while a sundial reminded you that "_Tempus fugit,_"an enticing resting-place somewhat bewilderingly bade you to "Bide awee." But then again the rustic seat in the pleached alley of laburnumshad carved on its back, "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,"so that, meditating on Keats, you could bide a wee with a clearconscience. Indeed so copious was the wealth of familiar andstimulating quotations that one of her subjects had once said that tostroll in Lucia's garden was not only to enjoy her lovely flowers, butto spend a simultaneous half hour with the best authors. There was adovecote of course, but since the cats always killed the doves, MrsLucas had put up round the desecrated home several pigeons ofCopenhagen china, which were both imperishable as regards cats, andalso carried out the suggestion of humour in furniture. The humour hadattained the highest point of felicity when Peppino concealed amechanical nightingale in a bush, which sang "Jug-jug" in the mostrealistic manner when you pulled a string. Georgie had not yet seen theCopenhagen pigeons, or being rather short-sighted thought they werereal. Then,
oh then, Peppino pulled the string, and for quite a longtime Georgie listened entranced to their melodious cooings. That servedhim out for his "trap" about the real pear introduced among the stonespecimens. For in spite of the rarefied atmosphere of culture atRiseholme, Riseholme knew how to "_desipere in loco_," and itsstrenuous culture was often refreshed by these light refined touches.

  Mrs Lucas walked quickly and decisively up and down the paths as shewaited for the summons to lunch, for the activity of her mind reactedon her body, making her brisk in movement. On each side of her foreheadwere hard neat undulations of black hair that concealed the tips of herears. She had laid aside her London hat, and carried a red cottonContadina's umbrella, which threw a rosy glow onto the oval of her thinface and its colourless complexion. She bore the weight of her fortyyears extremely lightly, and but for the droop of skin at the cornersof her mouth, she might have passed as a much younger woman. Her facewas otherwise unlined and bore no trace of the ravages of emotionalliving, which both ages and softens. Certainly there was nothing softabout her, and very little of the signs of age, and it would have beenreasonable to conjecture that twenty years later she would look butlittle older than she did today. For such emotions as she was victim ofwere the sterile and ageless emotions of art; such desires as beset herwere not connected with her affections, but her ambitions. Dynasty shehad none, for she was childless, and thus her ambitions were limited tothe permanence and security of her own throne as queen of Riseholme. Shereally asked nothing more of life than the continuance of such harvestsas she had so plenteously reaped for these last ten years. As long asshe directed the life of Riseholme, took the lead in its culture andentertainment, and was the undisputed fountain-head of all itsinspirations, and from time to time refreshed her memory as to theutter inferiority of London she wanted nothing more. But to securethat she dedicated all that she had of ease, leisure and income.Being practically indefatigable the loss of ease and leisure troubledher but little and being in extremely comfortable circumstances, shehad no need to economise in her hospitalities. She might easily lookforward to enjoying an unchanging middle-aged activity, whilegenerations of youth withered round her, and no star, remotely rising,had as yet threatened to dim her unrivalled effulgence. Thoughessentially autocratic, her subjects were allowed and even encouragedto develop their own minds on their own lines, provided always thatthose lines met at the junction where she was station-master. Withregard to religion finally, it may be briefly said that she believedin God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she hadno doubt whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to churchon Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in theZoological Gardens, for kangaroos come from Australia.

  A low wall separated the far end of her garden from the meadow outside;beyond that lay the stream which flowed into the Avon, and it oftenseemed wonderful to her that the water which wimpled by would (unless acow happened to drink it) soon be stealing along past the church atStratford where Shakespeare lay. Peppino had written a very movinglittle prose-poem about it, for she had royally presented him with theidea, and had suggested a beautiful analogy between the earthly dewthat refreshed the grasses, and was drawn up into the fire of the Sun,and Thought the spiritual dew that refreshed the mind and thereafter,rather vaguely, was drawn up into the Full-Orbed Soul of the World.

  At that moment Lucia's eye was attracted by an apparition on the roadwhich lay adjacent to the further side of the happy stream which flowedinto the Avon. There was no mistaking the identity of the stout figureof Mrs Quantock with its short steps and its gesticulations, but why inthe name of wonder should that Christian Scientist be walking with thedraped and turbaned figure of a man with a tropical complexion and ablack beard? His robe of saffron yellow with a violently green girdlewas hitched up for ease in walking, and unless he had chocolatecoloured stockings on, Mrs Lucas saw human legs of the same shade. Nextmoment that debatable point was set at rest for she caught sight ofshort pink socks in red slippers. Even as she looked Mrs Quantock sawher (for owing to Christian Science she had recaptured the quick visionof youth) and waggled her hand and kissed it, and evidently called hercompanion's attention, for the next moment he was salaaming to her insome stately Oriental manner. There was nothing to be done for themoment except return these salutations, as she could not yell an asideto Mrs Quantock, screaming out "Who is that Indian"? for if MrsQuantock heard the Indian would hear too, but as soon as she could, sheturned back towards the house again, and when once the lilac busheswere between her and the road she walked with more than her usualspeed, in order to learn with the shortest possible delay from Peppinowho this fresh subject of hers could be. She knew there were someIndian princes in London; perhaps it was one of them, in which case itwould be necessary to read up Benares or Delhi in the Encyclopaediawithout loss of time.