‘How tiresome to have missed him!’ Miss Compostella exclaimed, sitting up, and blinking a little at the light.
In the window hung a wicker cage of uncertain shape that held a stuffed canary. It had had a note sweeter than Chenal’s once … And there it was! Poor, sad thing.
‘Angel! Sweet! Pet! Pretty!’ Julia would sometimes say to it by mistake.
Through the vigilant bars of the cage she could admire a distant view of a cold stone church by Vanbrugh. The austere and heavy tower, however, did not depress her. On the contrary, she approved its solidity. Flushed at sunset, it suggested quite forcibly a middle-aged bachelor with possessions at Coutts. At times she could almost think of it as James …
‘And there are several hundred more letters waiting for you in the next room, miss,’ Sumph said.
To Julia’s inquiry for a man with ecstasy to stage-manage, she had received several thousand applications.
‘Go to the next room,’ Miss Compostella directed, ‘and choose me two with your eyes shut.’
It was in the ‘next room’ that Miss Compostella sometimes studied her parts; though for modern comedy rôles she usually went ‘upstairs’.
She sank back now and waited.
With five weeks at her disposal, with the exception of a complaisant visit to Stockingham for a race party, it was her intention to lie absolutely still, preferably at a short distance from London, and explore her heart.
For indeed the dread of Miss Compostella’s life was that she had not got one. Unless that sorrowful, soft, vague, yearning, aching, melting, kite-like, soaring emotion was a heart?
Could that be a heart?
From the mantelpiece came a sudden ‘whir’ from an unconcerned Sèvres shepherdess, a coquettish silence, followed by the florid chiming of a clock.
Noon; or very nearly – for as an object submits meekly to its surroundings, Julia’s timepiece, invariably, was a little in advance.
She held out long arms, driftingly.
It was noon! Sultry noon – somewhere in the world. In Cintra now …
She lay back impassively at the sound of Sumph’s Olympian tread.
A gesture might revive a ghost.
It was irritating to discover that one recalled Polly Whatmore in The Vicar’s Vengeance, or Mrs Giltspur in The Lady of the Lake.
The indispensable woman, holding the testimonials of the men of ecstasy, approached the bed.
‘And Mr Harvester is here, miss,’ she said sedately, lifting up her eyes towards the quivering angel. ‘Should I show him into the next room, or shall I take him upstairs?’
Julia reflected.
‘No,’ she murmured; ‘put him in the dining-room and shut the door.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘And, Sumph … offer him a liqueur, and something to read – of his own.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘And Sumph … I shall be getting up now in about half-an-hour.’
She waited – and recast her arms expressively.
‘Claud … ?’
But the worst of it was, she reflected, that with a chair upon Mount Parnassus (half-way up) he was somewhat inclined to dictate …
VI
To Ashringford from Euston is really quite a journey. Only an inconvenient morning train, or a dissipated evening one – described in time-tables as the … Cathedral Express – ever attempt at concentration. Normal middle-day persons disliking these extremes must get out at Totterdown and wait.
As a stimulus to introspection, detention cannot be ignored.
Cardinal Pringle, in his Autobiography, confesses that the hour spent on Totterdown platform, seated in deep despondence upon his trunk, came as the turning-point in his career.
Introspection, however, is not to be enforced.
‘It will hardly take us until five o’clock, Violet,’ Mrs Shamefoot observed to her old crony, Mrs Barrow of Dawn, fumbling, as she spoke, with a basket, ‘to drink a small bottle of champagne. Is there nothing particular to see?’
She looked out at the world, through a veil open as a fishing net, mysteriously.
Where were the sunburned sicklemen of August weary? The ryestraw hats? Surely not many yards off.
Mrs Barrow put up her sunshade.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘a cousin of Oliver Cromwell is buried not far from here; and in the same graveyard there’s also the vault of a Cabinet Minister who died only the other day.’
Mrs Shamefoot produced with perfect sympathy a microscopic affair.
‘In this heat,’ she observed, ‘champagne is so much more refreshing than tea.’
Mrs Barrow accepted with gratitude.
It may be remembered from some exclamations of Lady Listless that just lately she had ‘heard the Raven’. It was said, however, about Dawn, that whenever she wished to escape to town for a theatre or to shop she would manage to hear its croak.
‘I do hope,’ she exclaimed, ‘that Sartorious won’t be at Ashringford to meet me; it’s perfectly possible that he may.’
‘Well, there’s no good in singing a dirge over what can’t be helped; the connection’s gone.’
‘What tactless things trains are!’
Mrs Shamefoot shook a panoply of feathers.
‘What is that curious watch-tower,’ she asked diplomatically, ‘between the trees?’
Mrs Barrow began to unbend.
Life after all, seemed less raw after a glass of champagne.
‘I don’t know, dear,’ she said, ‘but I think the scenery’s so perfectly French.’
‘Isn’t there a hospital near here – for torn hearts, where love-sick persons can stay together in quarantine to enjoy their despair and help each other to forget?’
‘I don’t know, dear,’ Mrs Barrow said again, ‘but I believe there’s a sanatorium for nervous complaints … All the country round Totterdown belongs to Lord Brassknocker.’
‘Oh, he’s dreadful!’
‘And she’s such a thorough cat.’
‘And poor Lord Susan!’
‘Poor, poor Lord Susan!’
‘I can almost feel Ashringford Cathedral here,’ Mrs Shamefoot remarked. ‘Aren’t the hedges like the little low curtains of a rood-screen?’
‘Exactly!’
‘And aren’t the—’
‘My dear, what a dreadful amount of etceteras you appear to bring,’ Mrs Barrow replied with some aridity.
Mrs Shamefoot’s principal portmanteau was a rose-coloured chest, which, with its many foreign labels, exhaled an atmosphere of positive scandal. No nice maid would stand beside it.
A number of sagacious smaller cases clambered about it now into frantic streets, and sunny open piazzas, like a small town clustering about the walls of some lawless temple.
Mrs Barrow was appalled at so much luggage. She had been to the ends of the earth, it seemed, with only a basket.
Mrs Shamefoot re-helped herself to Clicquot.
She was looking to-day incomparably well, draped in a sort of sheet à la Puvis de Chavanne, with a large, lonely hat suggestive of der Wanderer.
‘The relief,’ she explained, ‘of getting somewhere where clothes don’t matter!’
‘But surely to obtain a window in the Cathedral they will. You’ll need an old Ascot frock, sha’n’t you, for the Bishop?’
‘Violet, I’m shocked! Can such trifles count?’
‘Well, I dare say, dear, they help to persuade.’
‘Bishop Pantry is quite unlike Bishop Henedge, isn’t he?’
‘Oh, quite. The present man’s a scholar! Those round shoulders. He will probably die in his library by rolling off the final seat of his portable steps.’
‘But not just yet!’
‘You have read his Inner Garden?’
‘Oh yes … And Even-tide, and Night Thoughts, and the sequel, Beans. But they’re so hard. How can it be good for the soul to sleep upon the floor, although it mayn’t be bad for the spine.’
‘Besides, to tread the spir
al path means usually a bother …’ Mrs Barrow observed. ‘There are the servants! And to get a girl to stay in Ashringford—’
Mrs Shamefoot fixed her gaze wistfully upon an advertisement board, exhorting the public to purge itself freely with Syros Syrop.
‘And is he very plain?’ she asked.
‘I should never say so. It’s a fine Neronian head.’
‘Lady Anne is charming, isn’t she?’
Mrs Barrow hesitated.
‘Sartorious,’ she replied, ‘thinks her wily.’
‘But she is charming?’
‘Oh, well,’ Mrs Barrow said evasively, ‘she doesn’t shine perhaps at the Palace like dear Mrs Henedge. I suppose we shall never replace her again! Fortunately, however, she’s devoted to Ashringford and comes there nearly every summer. Since she’s taken the Closed House she’s thrown out fourteen bow-windows.’
Mrs Shamefoot snapped the lid of her basket.
‘Who are these condottieri?’ she inquired, as an imperious party drove up with considerable clatter.
Mrs Barrow turned.
‘Don’t look more than you can help, dear,’ she exclaimed, in a voice that would have piqued a stronger character than Mrs Lott, ‘it’s the Pontypools.’
‘Ashringford people?’
‘Theoretically.’
Mrs Shamefoot smiled.
‘Sartorious—’ Mrs Barrow began.
‘Thinks them?’
‘Totally dreadful. They’re probably reconnoitring. Mrs Pontypool is usually spinning a web for someone.’
‘The dowager’s very handsome,’ Mrs Shamefoot remarked, ‘in a reckless sort of way, but the girl’s a fairy!’
‘Oh, don’t swear! Don’t swear!’ Mrs Pontypool was adjuring a member of her family, with brio, stepping, as she spoke, right into Mrs Barrow’s arms.
‘Is it quite true,’ she asked shaking hands, ‘that the connection’s gone?’
‘Quite!’
Mrs Pontypool sat down. ‘It needs heroism in the country,’ she explained, ‘to keep sight of anybody.’
‘Certainly. Crusading and without a car—’
‘Crusading, dear Mrs Barrow! Yet how did one’s ancestors get along?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Barrow said. ‘It’s so rare, isn’t it, nowadays, to find anybody who had a grandmother.’
‘In the times I mean,’ Mrs Pontypool said, undismayed, ‘women went for miles in a sedan-chair, and crossed continents in their tilburies, and in their britschkas, and in their cabriolets!’
‘Heroic!’
‘Less heroic, surely, than those women one sometimes sees who fasten their bath-chairs to their lovers’ auto-bicycles.’
‘And where have you been – if it isn’t indiscreet …?’
‘We’ve been spending a few hours at Castle Barbarous.’
‘I heard Lord Brassknocker is going to open his pictures to the public,’ Mrs Shamefoot said. ‘He has, of course, a very fine Ruisdael, an attractive Sisley and a charming Crome, but really, the rest of the collection is only fit for the Sacristy scene in Manon.’
‘A Last Supper at two tables,’ Mrs Pontypool said confidentially, ‘struck one as – scarcely—’
‘Not if it was Veronese.’
‘It was Rubens.’
‘The busiest man who ever lived most certainly was Rubens!!’
‘Was it a party?’ Mrs Barrow asked, less from curiosity than because she would be glad to have something to say to Sartorious during dinner.
Oh, the trial of those dreary dinners at Dawn … What wonder was it that Mrs Barrow should sometimes become peevish or invent things that were untrue, or in her extremity, hear the Raven’s croak? Had she been neurasthenic she would have probably sometimes screamed at the sight of her Lord enjoying an artichoke, slowly, leaf by leaf.
‘Was it a party?’ Mrs Barrow asked again.
‘Only old Mr James and little Mrs Kilmurry,’ Mrs Pontypool replied. ‘Such a strange old man, who strolled once with the Tennisons in the Cascine in Florence.’
There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.
‘Was Lord Susan there?’ Mrs Barrow inquired.
‘He very seldom is,’ Miss Pontypool said.
‘Unfortunate young man,’ Mrs Pontypool exclaimed, playing with the tails of her stole; ‘perpetually he’s on the verge of … and, although I’m told he’s gun-shy, in my opinion … and I would willingly have sent a wreath … only where’s the use in sending one the day afterwards?’
‘But you’ve heard nothing?’
‘No … Naturally the Brassknockers don’t care to talk of it before they’re quite obliged; but Lady Brassknocker did strike me as being so unusually distrait. Didn’t you think so, Queenie?’
‘I really didn’t notice,’ Miss Pontypool said. ‘Where’s Goosey?’
‘To be sure! I thought if Lord Brassknocker could only see the boy he might take a fancy to him,’ Mrs Pontypool said.
‘Really, in what way?’ Mrs Barrow wondered.
‘Who can tell? Lord Brassknocker’s a very important man.’
‘He is a very rich one.’
‘Poor child! What is one to do with him? In any other age, of course, he could have ambled along in the retinue of some great lady.’
‘Oh, be thankful,’ Mrs Barrow began.
‘As it is, with a little influence, he’s hoping to get into some garage.’
‘Poor young man,’ Mrs Shamefoot said, with sympathy, ‘such a bending life!’
By the time the train reached Totterdown Mrs Barrow congratulated herself that she would be artichoke-proof now, positively, for nearly a week.
In the railway carriage, Mrs Shamefoot was sufficiently fortunate, too, to secure the seat opposite to herself for a magnificent image of the god Ptah.
The terrific immobility of Egyptian things enchanted her, especially on escapades of this sort.
Often the god had aroused her friendliest feelings by saving her from the strain of answering questions, or expressing hopes, or guessing whether the carriage would be there to meet them, or whether it would not, or from the alternative miseries of migraine brought on by feigning to read, for, as Mrs Shamefoot was aware, she might be called upon to remove a dressing-case, but how seldom did it occur to anyone to deplace a god.
But Mrs Pontypool was not to be suppressed.
‘I once met a Mrs Asp,’ she said, ‘who was writing the life of Hepshepset, wife and sister of Thothmes II, who, on becoming a widow, invented a hairwash and dressed as a man.’
The beautiful summer’s day had crumbled to dusk as the twin towers of the Cathedral and the short spire (which was, perhaps, an infelicity), came into view.
How desolate it appeared across the fields of wan white clover, now that the sun had gone! Saint Apollinaris in Classe never looked more alone.
‘Ashringford is quite a healthy place, isn’t it?’ Mrs Shamefoot inquired anxiously, turning towards Mrs Barrow.
Mrs Barrow opened her eyes.
‘One wouldn’t care to say so,’ she replied, ‘there’s usually a good deal of sickness about; of a kind.’
‘I consider it a regular doctor’s town!’ Mrs Pontypool exclaimed; ‘the funeral horses are always on the go.’
Miss Pontypool looked humane.
‘Poor animals!’ she said.
‘You see the Ashringford houses are so old,’ Goosey explained, ‘and so stuffy, and the windows are so small. It’s as if the Ashringford people had made them themselves by poking a finger through the brick.’
‘Which makes us all delicate, of course, and the climate doubly treacherous,’ Mrs Pontypool said. ‘Although at one time I fancy it used not to be so bad. I date the change to Bishop Henedge. He was so High Church. His views were so extremely high! Quite unintentionally, perhaps, he attracted towards us the uncertain climate of Rome. I should advise anyone visiting Ashringford for the first time to do precisely as they would there.’
‘And wh
at is that?’ Mrs Shamefoot demanded, doubtfully.
‘To wear an extra flannel petticoat.’
Much to Mrs Barrow’s disappointment, there was no Sartorious to meet the train; only a footman – Lady Georgia’s chauffeur attended to Mrs Shamefoot and her maid.
‘I wonder she keeps him,’ Mrs Barrow observed, as she climbed into her brougham. ‘From the marks on his cheek he looks as if he had been in more than one break up.’
‘My regards to Lady Georgia,’ Goosey called after Mrs Shamefoot to say.
‘My dear, at nineteen has one regards?’ Mrs Pontypool said. ‘Silly affected boy!’
Mrs Shamefoot was glad to be alone. How wonderful it was to breathe the evening air. As she sped towards Stockingham over a darkening plain, patched with clumps of heavy hyacinthine trees, almost she could catch the peculiar aroma of the Cathedral.
‘As indefinable as piety!’ she exclaimed, drawing on her glove.
VII
Lady Anne Pantry was sitting in the china-cupboard, a room fitted with long glass shelves, on which her fabled Dresden figures, monkey musicians, and sphinx marquises, made perfect blots of colour against the gold woodwork of the walls.
Heedless of her sister-in-law, she was reading her morning letters whilst massaging her nose.
‘Such a dull post, Anne,’ that person exclaimed, lifting up an incomparable, tearful, spiritual and intellectual face from the perusal of a circular.
‘Mine is not,’ said Lady Anne.
‘Indeed?’
Lady Anne rustled her skirt.
‘… Mrs Henedge,’ she said, ‘it appears, has quite gone over to Rome.’
‘But is it settled?’
‘Since she’s to build in our midst a bijou church for Monsignor Parr … Such scenes, I expect, there’ll be.’
‘Certainly. If it’s to be another Gothic fake.’
B007TB5SP0 EBOK Page 10