I believe we had expected to find something more like winter in the country; but it wasn’t there, any more than in London, which it had been possible to imagine kept warm by its houses. The country for that purpose has its hedges and the cuddling lines of its landscape; and the sheep help a good deal, so over-provided as they are. No doubt England owes a great deal of its reputation for solid comfort to the sheep. The air had a pure, still, peaceful chill in it, but there was no look of winter anywhere, only the rain and the rolling ploughed fields, and the grass too ridiculously green; it was a mere withdrawal of summer. One could almost see her anxiously waiting round the corner for the least excuse to come back. Ah! that first drive between the glistening hedges of the English country lanes—who will be the bold person to say at what season it should be taken? The sad, undoubted fact is that it can never be done a second time. One can’t discover twice the fields of home. The English are a hardy and an adventurous people; but I wonder if they know any satisfaction, planting their flag in the ends of the earth, that equals the joy of exploring England?
There was a lodge and a lodge-keeper’s wife who came out to open the gates, and dropped a curtsey. We were surprised and overjoyed, both of us, to find such things still existing. As Graham said, we had no doubt supposed, without the least warrant, that they had long been supplanted by more modern conveniences. We turned into an ordinary English park, if there is such a thing as an ordinary English park; but it seemed to us, in the wet green dusk, enchanted with privacy and repose. Where the grassy spaces ended in copses two or three little forms with sudden movements broke the stillness, but not the silence. I will not mind being thought ridiculous; it is so pleasant to remember and write down the moment of rapt excitement when I laid my hand upon Graham’s knee and exclaimed “Rabbits!” I had never seen them before at home like that, and doing just as they liked in the twilight; and though nobody seems greatly to value the rabbit in England for any reason, I am prepared to maintain that he is the most lovable thing the Lord has put into any landscape.
Tea was going on in the hall, where the firelight flickered on the big staircase and on rows of pictures, one above another. Lady Lippington was there pouring it out, and Mrs. Jerome Jarvis and a Miss Pedlington. It was all dark and vague, with closed doors in the intervals of the pictures; but Lady Lippington made us delightfully welcome, and insisted on tea before anything.
“We own to being the very back of beyond, you know,” she said. “No frivolous week-end journey. Yours was a good train—you didn’t change at Wofford?—but it takes two solid hours and a half. Or would you like to get a little of the Wofford tunnel off before you even have tea?”
Graham was indifferent to the Wofford tunnel, and begged, if its signs weren’t too gross, to be allowed to have tea first; but I elected to go at once to my room.
“I’ll send Batchford,” said Lady Lippington as I followed the maid up the staircase. “Batchford will take care of you. She is one of our very oldest friends—has been here thirty years, dear thing. But be sure to. speak to her right ear. She does weird things if you give directions to her left, poor dear Batchford.”
Batchford was already there, busily unpacking me as far as I was unlocked, and referred with grieved patience to the box to which she found no key. Batchford was as agreeable in the room as the rabbits were in the park, She belonged to it, that is all that one can say, was as happily subdued to its solid mysterious old articles of furniture as the conies were to the elms and the laurels. If the wardrobes and the dressing-table could have given orders, one’s impression was that Batchford would have taken them.
“And I was to ask, miss, if you would prefer cotton to sleep in. There’s linen on, but the cotton ones are all ready, if you’re more used to them, miss.”
I looked at the big four-poster with its canopy, and decided that cotton would be sacrilege.
“Please don’t change them,” I said; “I can sleep very well in either.”
“It’s thoroughly aired, miss—you needn’t be uneasy on that account. The ’ousekeeper slept in it for a week before the family came back to take the edge off the damp; and there’s been fires in the room every day since Sunday. But since she’s been so much abroad her ladyship always orders cotton to be got ready in case it is preferred, miss. But everybody doesn’t, miss, do they?”
I had never lived in a climate that wanted such assiduous airing, or heard of the person of a housekeeper being laid under contribution for the purpose, but I concealed my ignorance and said I believed they didn’t; and when Batchford asked me what she should “put out” for dinner I indicated my black chiffon quite calmly. I longed to linger and hear Batchford talk, and look out of the big windows with their rep curtains and gilt lambrequins, that made such great soft blurred pictures at the end of the room; but I longed even more to know what was happening downstairs, so I descended.
The first person I saw was Billy, in knickerbockers, eating bread-and-butter with an air of solidly deserving it. Lord Lippington was there, too, and one perceived at once that he would be more delightfully himself than ever in the country. They had all come in from shooting, that was clear in their beatific looks as well as their clothes, in the peaceful way they sat or stood about, as if the real history of the day were over, and they merely celebrated the close of it. There was another young man, who was immediately introduced as Captain Pedlington, though one would have known at once, by the architecture of their noses, that he and Miss Pedlington were brother and sister. Lord Lippington and Graham, a little aside, were deep in conversation. I wondered if the good news had come that our host had been appointed to Canada. I hoped so, with all my heart.
“I hope you won’t mind our being such a very tiny party,” said Lady Lippington to me. “Various people are coming next week, but for the first bit of your visit we could make up our minds to share you with only a very few friends.”
“We shall appreciate each other all the more, Margot,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “Shan’t we, Miss Trent? Shan’t we, Billy?”
“I hope to be appreciated,” said Billy, “I’m sure.”
Everybody laughed, and Lady Lippington said, “You always are, dear Billy. And as to other people, we all know you do your best, don’t you?”
“I wonder how many of us,” remarked Miss Pedlington, “appreciate ourselves properly.”
“Query?” said her brother.
“I more than appreciate myself,” declared Mrs. Jerome Jarvis—“I adore myself! I find myself a fascinating companion, a person whose opinion I always want, the only friend I have in the world that I positively couldn’t get on without.”
“But I said ‘properly,’” insisted Miss Pedlington.
“You mean I think too much of myself,” replied Mrs. Jarvis. “But that’s only because you don’t know how nice I really can be when I like. Besides, we should all do it. To be pleased with oneself is good for the health; it improves the digestion. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do,” she went on, “to improve my digestion—no crime I wouldn’t commit.”
“I suppose there is some crime that each of us would commit,” remarked Miss Pedlington, holding her chin thoughtfully in her hand, “if we only knew what it was.”
“A very good thing we don’t know,” said her brother; “otherwise we might go and do it.”
“There will be all sorts of new crimes soon,” said Mrs. Jarvis cheerfully, “won’t there? A chance for everybody. With the laws of the land being made by the trades’ unions. It will be—what do they say?—cognisable to send out the washing, penal to travel first class. And I think week-end parties, Margot, will be capital.”
“Then I must lose my head,” said Lady Lippington. “I won’t give them up. But people are talking, aren’t they, of burying their jewels? Even the dear princess, I hear—ah, here you are, Christopher! Had a good scrub?”
The immaculate little gentleman who appeared offered a striking rebuke to the others, so creaseless was his attire and so frigidly fresh his
whole appearance. He was very thin and very bald, with a cold blue eye and a hooked nose and a grey moustache; he looked like a depository of views and archives; one of those people whose chief function in life is to express opinions and quote authorities. I wondered that Lady Lippington dared to question him about his scrub; but he replied with a frosty smile that he had.
“I call such cleanliness disgusting,” remarked Mrs. Jarvis to me. “I much prefer the natural man in the others, the dear pigs, don’t you?”
I said I hadn’t thought about it. “Is he a soldier?” I asked.
“Was once, a hundred years ago, but resigned as a lieutenant when the second brother died—had to, I suppose—things were in a fearful muddle. He’s been appallingly conscientious and economical, and I believe he has straightened them out more or less; but it’s been practically the work of a lifetime. Not a bad old boy really, if he were only alive; and he’ll be Duke of Dulwich, you know.”
“Then this,” I said, “is the only bulwark at present against ”
“An American duchess. Quite right, my dear. I see you are beginning to take notice, as they say of the babies. Did Evelyn come down with you?”
“No,” I said; “I think she was to go to Pavis Court yesterday. She was going to motor down.”
“Isn’t it exciting!” murmured Mrs. Jarvis. “Dear Evelyn! I do hope, for everybody’s sake, that it will come off. I can say it sincerely now; but I once thought, do you know, that my Billy was rather épris—I had some very anxious moments. It never would have done, you know, for an instant. Evelyn’s a great dear; but she has what I call a sophisticated mind—there would have been no happiness in it for my poor, tender-hearted Billy. But I’m thankful to say it was a passing fancy—old Billy was wise enough to wait.”
“I should think he might wait for ages,” I said. “Isn’t he very young to be thinking of such things?”
“Billy is twenty-four and a half,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “His father and I married at twenty-two and seventeen. And we were so happy!”
Mrs. Jarvis gently stroked my hand. It was nice of her, I thought, to make so intimate a reference to so new a friend; and I stroked hers back.
It was all very pleasant, the firelight on the silver urn, and the dark polished doors leading I didn’t know whither, and the simple talk about the day’s doings; and we sat on in the hall until the dressing gong sounded. It was so much less alarming and impressive than I had expected, that I went up the big staircase quite light-heartedly to dress for dinner by candlesticks. It is worth going to Great Britain and penetrating to the country, for people who have been brought up by electric light, merely to realise how delightful candles can be, wavering as they do on one’s dressing-table in the draughts that no curtain can be wholly drawn against, filling the room with mystery and movement—more interesting even than Batchford. One of mine melted too fast, sent up a curl of smoke and made icicles over the edge; and Batchford apologised.
“I’m afraid there’s a thief in it, miss,” she said, sniffing.
“Is there?” I asked, fascinated. “Then do you mind letting him stay in it? I rather like the smell.”
“Oh, do you, miss!” said Batchford, pausing with the snuffers.
“I truly do. And I am afraid you will think me a very ignorant person, but all my life I have heard of a thief in a candle, but never until this moment have I seen one.”
“La, miss!” said Batchford.
CHAPTER XVII
“I’M sorry for your sakes,” Lady Lippington said next morning at breakfast, “that this isn’t at all really an old house. Early Hanoverian is all we are, I’m afraid, but the neighbourhood is quite rich in historic places, and there are several I can take you to.”
“The object of my life-long reverence up to now,” said Graham, “on the score of antiquity, has been a communion service presented to a mission to the Massauqua Indians by Queen Anne. Knowes will at all events develop that church plate.”
Lady Lippington gave him an uncertain glance, as if she found a little flippancy in his rejoinder, not on the score of the communion service, but on that of Knowes. All that she had meant to imply was, of course, that Knowes made no great pretensions with its two hundred years, beside other domestic monuments she could mention; but it should nevertheless be understood that Knowes was to be taken with all seriousness, especially by persons whose national past was furnished with no domestic monuments at all. Lady Lippington knew those unkempt places in the world, and came back from each of them, I am sure, more than ever impressed with the treasures of her country and her order, and more than ever desirous that the Colonial mind should also perceive them. She thought, quite rightly, that it ought to do us an enormous amount of good, and have no end of an effect in drawing closer the ties that bind. Nor was her feeling at all confined to architecture or to art; it embraced customs, castes, and institutions. It was she, I remember, who hinted that it was better usage, in the fount of usage, to spell honour with the “u,” and she who sent her very intelligent maid to take some New Zealanders over the London Post Office. She, too, was an energetic promoter of those Colonial lunches in great houses of London. She said rank had its duties as well as royalty, and insisted that the hostess on each occasion should be present in person. She said it would make all the difference to the warm Colonial heart and was far more important than anything you could give them to eat, which was, of course, quite true. She called it backing up the King.
Lady Lippington confessed to one weakness in the exercise of this virtue—she did look for appreciation. She said she knew the dear old Stoics told one not to, but she could not help it; and the thing that really wounded her was anything like coldness or indifference. To which I saw, by the way she looked at Graham, she would be very ready to add levity. I longed to tell her that the real Graham was only too deeply impressed, so deeply that I trembled for him; but my apprehensions were, above all, the things I had to keep to myself, even if there had been any way of showing them.
“The worst of Early Hanoverian is that it was so apt to be amateur,” continued Lady Lippington. “Knowes was built by an amateur, an ancestor of Lippington’s. He was very proud of having designed it himself. His portrait is on the staircase.”
“And it’s such a bad one,” said Lord Lippington from the sideboard, where he was discovering what there was for breakfast, “that we think he must have designed that himself, too. A regular Jack-of-all-trades, that fellow.”
“We are afraid poor Knowes is ugly,” confessed Lady Lippington. “But, after all, it is English, and it might so easily at that time have been an Italian villa, full of porphyry and inconveniences.”
“You only just escaped,” said Lord Scansby, taking with precision a chair beside me. “Quite recently I came across letters of his—Villiers Morville, wasn’t he?—died without issue. Yes, that’s the man. He thought seriously of employing an Italian architect at one time; had the fellow here, and went all over the ground with him. But I don’t think the amateurs of those days were altogether to be despised. One of them built Blenheim; and some people thought Burlington improved on Inigo Jones.”
“I imagine there was generally a practical man to look at the plans,” said Lord Lippington. “The owner got the credit—more of it than he deserved, I daresay. Just as one gets it for being supposed to run one of these Colonial shows, whereas the real business is put through by a half a dozen old chaps who have never left the country.”
“I don’t think that is true of your administrations, Amherst,” said Lady Lippington reproachfully. “Well, I am very glad that Hanoverian gentleman didn’t listen to the Italian’s blandishments. What there is to see, though,”—she turned to Graham,—“you must see to-day, for to-morrow we are going to Pavis Court, and after that you will have no eyes for anything.”
“We are already in love with the idea of Pavis Court,” I remarked, and felt as if I had told everything, but nobody noticed it.
“Oh, Pavis Court is one of our wonders!�
�� said Lady Lippington.
“A sadly dilapidated wonder, I am afraid,” said Lord Scansby to me. “It used to be shown—the state rooms—and was very well worth showing, too; but of late years my sister has been unwilling to admit the public. It entailed more of an establishment than she cared to be burdened with. Heigh-ho!”
“An American friend of ours, a Miss Dicey, is staying there just now, I think,” said I. To my horror I detected a ring of reassurance in the words; but it is hard to hear a British nobleman say “Heigh-ho!” and not involuntarily try to cheer him. Nor did Lord Scansby cast upon me the look of stony reserve I felt I merited.
“She is,” he said. “I am supposed to be at Pavis Court myself—only here for a day or two’s shoot. My nephew—Doleford—makes practically no attempt to preserve—abroad too much. A very agreeable and intelligent young lady, Miss Dicey. I have no prejudices against Americans myself.”
“Has anybody?” I asked.
“Dear me, yes,” replied Lord Scansby. “My sister-in-law, the Duchess of Dulwich, is what I call shockingly prejudiced. So are numbers of people. Numbers of people—chiefly ladies, I must say. You yourselves are not Americans, I know. My cousin told me. You are not American; therefore you haven’t got indigestion; therefore I see you can eat ham—a thing I haven’t touched for years. Let me give you a piece of advice in case it ever does overtake you. Avoid the three P’s—pork, pastry and potatoes—you may thank me some day.”
Then down came Billy Milliken last of all, except his mother, who did not appear at breakfast, and the conversation at once became so derisive and so personal that I had no chance of discovering how far Lord Scansby’s approval of Evelyn was general at Pavis Court. I could only thank Lord Scansby, who was breakfasting upon dry toast and a patent food, for the hint about the three P’s, and promise to remember.
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