The dressing-gong boomed through the passages, and the sisters sprang up and raced back to their room.
The Marquess of Brightlingsea stood with his coat-tails to the monumental mantelpiece of the red drawing-room, and looked severely at his watch. He was still, at sixty, a splendid figure of a man, firm-muscled, well set up, with the sloping profile and coldly benevolent air associated, in ancestral portraits, with a tie-wig and ruffles crossed by an Order. Lord Brightlingsea was a just man, and having assured himself that it still lacked five minutes to eight he pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at its centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests. These comprised his dealings with his tenantry and his man of business, his local duties as Lord Lieutenant of the County and Master of Fox-hounds, and participation in the manly sports suitable to his rank and age. The persons ministering to these pursuits were necessarily in the foreground, and the local clergy and magistracy in the middle distance, while his family clung in a precarious half-light on the periphery, and all beyond was blackness. Lady Brightlingsea considered it her duty to fish out of this outer darkness, and drag for a moment into the light, any person or obligation entitled to fix her husband’s attention; but they always faded back into night as soon as they had served their purpose.
Lord Brightlingsea had learned from his valet that several guests had arrived that afternoon, his own eldest son among them. Lord Seadown was seldom at Allfriars except in the hunting-season, and his father’s first thought was that if he had come at so unlikely a time it was probably to ask for money. The thought was excessively unpleasant, and Lord Brightlingsea was eager to be rid of it, or at least to share it with his wife, who was more used to such burdens. He looked about him impatiently, but Lady Brightlingsea was not in the drawing-room, nor in the Vandyke saloon beyond. Lord Brightlingsea, as he glanced down the length of the saloon, said to himself: “Those tapestries ought to be taken down and mended”—but that too was an unpleasant thought, associated with much trouble and expense, and therefore belonging distinctly to his wife’s province. Lord Brightlingsea was well aware of the immense value of the tapestries, and knew that if he put them up for sale all the big London dealers would compete for them; but he would have kicked out of the house anyone who approached him. with an offer. “I’m not sunk as low as Thwarte,” he muttered to himself, shuddering at the sacrilege of the Titian carried off from Honourslove to the auction-room.
“Where the devil’s your mother?” he asked, as a big-boned girl in a faded dinner-dress entered the drawing-room.
“Mamma’s talking with Seadown, I think; I saw him go into her dressing-room,” Lady Honoria Marable replied.
Lord Brightlingsea cast an unfavourable glance on his daughter. (“If her upper teeth had been straightened when she was a child we might have had her married by this time,” he thought. But that, again, was Lady Brightlingsea’s affair.)
“It’s an odd time for your mother to be talking in her dressing-room. Dinner’ll be on the table in a minute.”
“Oh, I’m sure Mamma will be down before the others. And Conchita’s always late, you know.”
“Conchita knows that I won’t eat my soup cold on her account. Who are the others?”
“No one in particular. Two American girls who are friends of Conchita’s.”
“H’m. And why were they invited, may I ask?”
Honoria Marable hesitated. All the girls feared their father less than they did their mother, because she sometimes remembered things and he did not. Lord Brightlingsea was swept through life on a steady amnesiac flow; his wife’s forgetfulness was interrupted by occasional jerks forward, as if she were jolted in her side-saddle by an unruly mount. Honoria feared him least of all, and when Lady Brightlingsea was not present was almost at her ease with him. “Mamma told Conchita to ask them down, I think. She says they’re very rich. I believe their father’s in the American army. They call him ‘Colonel.’ ”
“The American army? There isn’t any. And they call dentists ‘Colonel’ in the States.” But Lord Brightlingsea’s countenance had softened. “Seadown ...” he thought. If that were the reason for his son’s visit, it altered the situation, of course. And, much as he disliked to admit such considerations to his mind, he repeated carelessly: “You say these Americans are very rich?”
“Mamma has heard so. I think Miss March knows them, and she’ll be able to tell her more about them. Miss March is here too, you know.”
“Miss March?” Lord Brightlingsea’s sloping brow was wrinkled in an effort of memory. He repeated: “March—March. Now, that’s a name I know.”
Lady Honoria smiled. “I should think so, Papa!”
“Now, why? Do you mean that I know her too?”
“Yes. Mamma told me to be sure to remind you.”
“Remind me of what?”
“Why, that you jilted her, and broke her heart. Don’t you remember? You’re to be particularly nice to her, Papa; and be sure not to ask her if she’s ever seen Allfriars before.”
“I—what? Ah, yes, of course ... That old nonsense! I hope I’m ‘nice,’ as you call it, to everyone who comes to my house,” Lord Brightlingsea rejoined, pulling down the lapels of his dress-coat, and throwing back his head majestically.
At the same moment the drawing-room door opened again, and two girls came into the room. Lord Brightlingsea, gazing at them from the hearth, gave a faint exclamation, and came forward with extended hand. The elder and taller of the two advanced to meet it.
“You’re Lord Brightlingsea, aren’t you? I’m Miss St. George, and this is my sister, Annabel,” the young lady said, in a tone that was fearless without being familiar.
Lord Brightlingsea fixed on her a gaze of undisguised benevolence. It was a long time since his eyes had rested on anything so fresh and fair, and he found the sensation very agreeable. It was a pity, he reflected, that his eldest son lacked his height, and had freckles and white eye-lashes. “Gad,” he thought, “if I were Seadown’s age...”
But before he could give further expression to his approval another guest had appeared. This time it was someone vaguely known to him: a small elderly lady, dressed with a slightly antiquated elegance, who came toward him reddening under her faint touch of rouge. “Oh, Lord Brightlingsea—” And as he took her trembling little hand he repeated to himself: “My wife’s old friend, of course; Miss March. The name’s perfectly familiar to me—what the deuce else did Honoria say I was to remember about her?”
XII.
When the St. George girls, following candle in hand the bedward procession headed by Lady Brightlingsea, had reached the door of their room, they could hardly believe that the tall clock ticking so loudly in the corner had not gone back an hour or two.
“Why, is it only half past ten?” Virginia exclaimed.
Conchita, who had followed them in, threw herself on the sofa with a laugh. “That’s what I always think when I come down from town. But it’s not the clocks at Allfriars that are slow, my father-in-law sees to that. It’s the place itself.” She sighed. “In London the night’s just beginning. And the worst of it is that when I’m here I feel as dead with sleep by ten o’clock as if I’d been up till daylight.”
“I suppose it’s the struggling to talk,” said Nan irrepressibly.
“That, and the awful certainty that when anybody does speak nothing will be said that one hasn’t heard a million times before. Poor little Miss March! What a fight she put up; but it’s no use. My father-in-law can never think of anything to say to her.—Well, Jinny, what did you think of Seadown?”
Virginia coloured; the challenge was a trifle too direct. “Why, I thought he looked pretty sad too, like all the others.”
“Well, he is sad, poor old Seedy. The fact is—it’s no mystery—he’s tangled up with a rapacious lady who can’t afford to let him go; and I suspect he’s so
sick of it that if any nice girl came along and held out her hand...”
Virginia, loosening her bright tresses before the mirror, gave them a contemptuous toss. “In America girls don’t have to hold out their hands.”
“Oh, I mean, just be kind; show him a little sympathy. He isn’t easy to amuse; but I saw him laugh once or twice at things Nan said.”
Nan sat up in surprise. “Me? Jinny says I always say the wrong thing.”
“Well, you know, that rather takes in England. They’re so tired of the perfectly behaved Americans who are afraid of using even a wrong word.”
Virginia gave a slightly irritated laugh. “You’d better hold your hand out, Nan, if you want to be Conchita’s sister-in-law.”
“Oh, misery! What I like is just chattering with people I’m not afraid of—like that young man we met the other day in London who said he was a friend of yours. He lives somewhere near here, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, Guy Thwarte. Rather! He’s one of the most fascinating detrimentals in England.”
“What’s a detrimental?”
“A young man that all the women are mad about, but who’s too poor to marry. The only kind left for the married women, in fact—so hands off, please, my dear. Not that I want Guy for myself,” Conchita added with her lazy laugh. “Dick’s enough of a detrimental for me. What I’m looking for is a friend with a settled income that he doesn’t know how to spend.”
“Conchita!” Virginia exclaimed, flushed with disapproval.
Lady Richard rose from the sofa. “So sorry! I forgot you little Puritans weren’t broken in yet. Good night, dears. Breakfast at nine sharp; and don’t forget family prayers.” She stopped on the threshold to add in a half-whisper: “Don’t forget, either, that the day after tomorrow we’re going to drive over to call on him— the detrimental, I mean. And even if you don’t care about him, you’ll see the loveliest place in all England.”
Well, it was true enough, what Conchita said about nobody speaking,” Virginia remarked when the two sisters were alone. “Did you ever know anything as awful as that dinner? I couldn’t think of a word to say. My voice just froze in my throat.”
“I didn’t mind so much, because it gave me a chance to look,” Nan rejoined.
“At what? All I saw was a big room with cracks in the ceiling, and bits of plaster off the walls. And after dinner, when those great bony girls showed us albums with views of the Rhine, I thought I should scream. I wonder they didn’t bring out a magic lantern!”
Nan was silent. She knew that Virginia’s survey of the world was limited to people, the clothes they wore, and the carriages they drove in. Her own universe was so crammed to bursting with wonderful sights and sounds that, in spite of her sense of Virginia’s superiority—her beauty, her ease, her self-confidence—Nan sometimes felt a shamefaced pity for her. It must be cold and lonely, she thought, in such an empty colourless world as her sister’s.
“But the house is terribly grand, don’t you think it is? I like to imagine all those people on the walls, in their splendid historical dresses, walking about in the big rooms. Don’t you believe they come down at night sometimes?”
“Oh, shut up, Nan. You’re too old for baby-talk.... Be sure you look under the bed before you blow out the candle....”
Virginia’s head was already on the pillow, her hair overflowing it in ripples of light.
“Do come to bed, Nan. I hate the way the furniture creaks. Isn’t it funny there’s no gas? I wish we’d told that maid to sit up for us.” She waited a moment, and then went on: “I’m sorry for Lord Seadown. He looks so scared of his father; but I thought Lord Brightlingsea was very kind, really. Did you see how I made him laugh?”
“I saw they couldn’t either of them take their eyes off you.”
“Oh, well—if they have nobody to look at but those daughters I don’t wonder,” Virginia murmured complacently, her lids sinking over her drowsy eyes.
Nan was not drowsy. Unfamiliar scenes and faces always palpitated in her long afterward; but the impact of new scenes usually made itself felt before that of new people. Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely. Splendour neither frightened her, nor made her self-assertive, as it did Virginia; she never felt herself matched against things greater than herself, but softly merged in them; and she lay awake, thinking of what Miss Testvalley had told her of the history of the ancient Abbey, which Henry VIII had bestowed on an ancestor of Lord Brightlingsea’s, and of the tragic vicissitudes following on its desecration. She lay for a long time listening to the mysterious sounds given forth by old houses at night, the undefinable creakings, rustlings, and sighings which would have frightened Virginia had she remained awake, but which sounded to Nan like the long murmur of the past breaking on the shores of a sleeping world.
In a majestic bedroom at the other end of the house the master of Allfriars, in dressing-gown and slippers, appeared from his dressing-room. On his lips was a smile of retrospective satisfaction seldom seen by his wife at that hour.
“Well, those two young women gave us an unexpectedly lively evening—eh, my dear? Remarkably intelligent, that eldest girl; the beauty, I mean. I’m to show her the pictures tomorrow morning. By the way, please send word to the Vicar that I shan’t be able to go to the vestry meeting at eleven; he’d better put it off till next week.... What are you to tell him? Why—er— unexpected business.... And the little one, who looks such a child, had plenty to say for herself too. She seemed to know the whole history of the place. Now, why can’t our girls talk like that?”
“You’ve never encouraged them to chatter,” replied Lady Brightlingsea, settling a weary head on a longed-for pillow; and her lord responded by a growl. As if talk were necessarily chatter! Yet as such Lord Brightlingsea had always regarded it when it issued from the lips of his own family. How little he had ever been understood by those nearest him, he thought; and as he composed himself to slumber in his half of the vast bed, his last conscious act was to murmur over: “The Hobbema’s the big black one in the red drawing-room, between the lacquer cabinets; and the portrait of Lady Jane Grey that they were asking about must be the one in the octagon room, over the fireplace.” For Lord Brightlingsea was determined to shine as a connaisseur in the eyes of the young ladies for whom he had put off the vestry meeting.
The terrace of Honourslove had never looked more beautiful than on the following Sunday afternoon. The party from Allfriars—Lady Richard Marable, her brother-in-law Lord Seadown, and the two young ladies from America—had been taken through the house by Sir Helmsley and his son and, after a stroll along the shady banks of the Love, murmuring in its little glen far below, had returned by way of the gardens to the chapel hooded with ivy at the gates of the park. In the gardens they had seen the lavender borders, the hundreds of feet of rosy brick hung with peaches and nectarines, the old fig-tree heavy with purple fruit in a sheltered corner; and in the chapel, with its delicately traceried roof and dark oaken stalls, had lingered over kneeling and recumbent Thwartes. Thwartes in cuirass and ruff, in furred robes, in portentous wigs, their stiffly farthingaled ladies at their sides, and baby Thwartes tucked away overhead in little marble cots. And now, turning back to the house, they were looking out from the terrace over the soft reaches of country bathed in afternoon light.
After the shabby vastness of Allfriars, everything about Honourslove seemed to Nan St. George warm, cared for, exquisitely intimate. The stones of the houses, the bricks of the walls, the very flags of the terrace were so full of captured sunshine that in the darkest days they must keep an inner brightness. Nan, though too ignorant to single out the details of all this beauty, found herself suddenly at ease with the soft mellow place, as though some secret thread of destiny attached her to it.
Guy Thwarte, somewhat to her surprise, had kept at her side during the walk and the visit to the chapel. He had not said muc
h, but with him also Nan had felt instantly at ease. In his answers to her questions she had detected a latent passion for every tree and stone of the beautiful old place—a sentiment new to her experience, as a dweller in houses without histories, but exquisitely familiar to her imagination. “Why ‘Honourslove’?” Nan asked as they slowly paced the terrace. “I know there’s a river Love; but why—?”
“No one really knows.”
“It makes me think of that portrait of a Cavalier you showed me, with long curls and a plumed hat and lace collar—raising his sword, ready to die for the King!”
Guy smiled. “We had Roundheads in the family too. But I’ve always had the same notion. Do you know the poem by Love-lace?” Nan shook her head, her brown eyes eager. “He was leaving his lady to go to ‘the warres,’ and he ends: ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.’ ”
They had walked together to the far end of the terrace before Nan noticed that the others, guided by Sir Helmsley, were passing through the glass doors into the hall. Nan turned to follow, but her companion laid his hand on her arm. “Stay,” he said quietly.
Without answering, she perched herself on the ledge of the balustrade, and looked up at the long honey-coloured front of the house, with the great carven shield above the door, and the quiet lines of cornice and window-frames.
“I wanted you to see it in this light. It’s the magic hour,” he explained.
She turned her glance from the house to his face. “I see why Conchita says it’s the most beautiful place in England.”
He smiled. “I don’t know. I suppose, if one were married to a woman one adored, one would soon get beyond her beauty. That’s the way I feel about Honourslove. It’s in my bones.”
“Oh, then you understand!” she exclaimed.
“Understand—?”
Nan coloured a little; the words had slipped out. “I mean about the beyondness of things. I know there’s no such word.”
The Buccaneers Page 11