Young Mr Bond seemed to be taken aback by this news, but the car rolled away before he could make enquiries.
‘C.W. is such a nice boy,’ said Mrs Middleton as they walked homewards. ‘His parents have been a sore trial to him at times, but he bears with them wonderfully. He is in some business firm with a branch in New York. Of course, when Lord Bond dies he will have to live in England and look after the estate and all Lord Bond’s interests. Denis, would you care to come over to Laverings before tea and try our piano? Jack and Alister are going for a walk after lunch, so you wouldn’t be bothered.’
Denis thought that most people would have said You won’t be a bother, and gratefully accepted.
Sunday lunch at Laverings was always the same; what Mrs Middleton called the sacred Sunday joint, followed by a pie of whatever fruit was in season, which happened to-day to be cherries. She herself would like to have ordered milder and cooler food for a hot June day, but any attempt to change the ritual made the iron eat so deeply and loudly into her husband’s soul that she had quite resigned herself. What with beef and cherry pie and beer, Mr Cameron would gladly have stretched himself on one of the long chairs outside the house and gone to sleep till it was time to go to Staple Park, but his senior partner was inexorable, so Mr Cameron made up his mind that he would at least walk him off his legs in revenge.
‘Don’t forget, Jack,’ said Mrs Middleton as the two men were starting, ‘that we are all having tea with the Bonds about five.’
Mr Middleton groaned.
‘I had it in my mind,’ he said, ‘to take Cameron first to Pooker’s Piece, where we shall talk as man to man with old Margett, talk racy of the soil, and then to tramp, burning the long miles beneath our feet, over to Worsted, by the ruins of Beliers Abbey, to Skeynes Agnes and so home, talking as we go.’
‘That is about fifteen miles,’ said Mr Cameron grimly.
‘If you did the walking, Jack could do the talking,’ Mrs Middleton murmured. ‘If I leave it to you will you get him to Staple Park by five o’clock?’
Mr Cameron said he would. Mr Middleton called loudly for Flora who was sleeping off her dinner in the sun. She got up and sauntered towards her master, but suddenly realizing that she was pampering him sat down with her back to him and thought of other things.
‘If you don’t want to come, don’t,’ said Mr Cameron.
Flora at once got up again and approached him, her liquid eyes fixed adoringly on his face.
‘Here, Flora,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘carry Master’s stick. Many is the mile that she has carried my stick or my newspaper, rejoicing in her dear doggy mind that she can be of help to Master. Here, Flora!’
Flora, who understood and resented this statement, took the proffered stick and trotted into the library, where she laid it on the floor by her master’s desk and returned for applause.
‘No, no, Flora. Master’s stick for walkies,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘Fetch stick for walkies.’
But as Flora, who had no intention of encumbering her walk with a large stick, remained deliberately stupid and oafish, Mr Middleton had to go and fetch his stick and announced himself ready for the walk. Flora, who liked long walks, decided that her master had been sufficiently put in his place, pushed her nose against his hand and led the way to the garden gate.
Mrs Middleton went into the library and cleared some books and papers from the piano in case Denis wanted to open it. Then she picked up a book and lay down on the large sofa. The summer peace of Laverings reigned undisturbed. Mrs Middleton opened her book, but her thoughts immediately slid away to the White House. She had a great fondness and a deep admiration for her sister-in-law, although circumstances had never allowed them to become very intimate. Colonel Stonor had not been an easy man to live with and Mrs Middleton knew that only a woman so entirely selfless as Lilian could have dealt with her difficult situation as she had done. From an embittered and disappointed father and two rebellious children, one of them a perpetual anxiety in his health, she had somehow in the few years that Colonel Stonor had lived made a united if not always an harmonious family. With Daphne and Denis she had never attempted to exercise any authority, but both children had felt that it would be a shame to be unkind to so confiding a creature. Owing to her unceasing kindness and her apprehensive nature, Denis had called her the pleasing anxious being, adding not unkindly that the only forgetfulness she wasn’t a prey to was a dumb one, for her vague talk ran on, just as did her brother’s more reasoned flow of speech. Everyone felt when Colonel Stonor died that Providence had arranged quite nicely, for Daphne would surely marry and Denis could live with his stepmother and be cared for. Daphne had not yet married and the three of them lived happily together. That she should marry again herself had not entered Mrs Stonor’s head and it is improbable that Denis or Daphne had thought of it either, for though she was so little older than Denis, one’s father’s wife wasn’t a person that one connected with marriage, except of course to one’s father, a subject from which one mentally shied, feeling that ‘that sort of thing’ wasn’t at all in keeping with a person so obviously destined to look after one as Lilian.
Lilian Stonor was of firmer character than her brother, and this Mrs Middleton quite realized, having found that behind her vague loquacity there were reserves and reticences that no one could approach. She had no intention of trying to penetrate these defences herself, in fact liking her sister-in-law all the better for them. What Lilian thought of her she could not guess, but she hoped that the summer would bring a closer relationship, involving no sentiment, founded on respect and liking; for Mrs Middleton was often alone, or lonely, she wasn’t sure which word to use. Her masterful husband leaned so heavily on her for strength that though she grudged nothing she felt from time to time a weariness of the spirit. It might be more blessed to give than to receive, but there had been times when she would have given a year’s life to be the receiver and not the giver. Her longing to step aside for a moment, to lean on a shoulder, to give gratitude as freely as she gave help was very great, so she had taught herself that one can’t have things both ways and mocked herself for sentimental weakness. Good friends she had, but none to whom she spoke much of herself, except in a gentle sardonic way that made them find her good if baffling company. Alister Cameron was probably the nearest to a confidant that she had ever known, but even so their bond was largely their common wish to defend her husband, who must be allowed to show his faÇade of strength to the world, unhindered by his own weakness.
So hot it was, and so confusing are one’s thoughts of oneself, thoughts that are apt to tend to self-pity unless one laughs in their face, that Mrs Middleton went to sleep, or something so near sleep that Denis, coming in by the garden door, thought he had better not play the piano and sat down patiently to wait. Though he was very quiet and didn’t even light a cigarette, the consciousness of a presence in the room troubled her light oblivion and she sat up suddenly, shedding book, spectacles, spectacle case, bag and one shoe.
‘Oh, thank you so much,’ she said, as Denis collected her property and restored it to her. ‘I am so sorry. Why didn’t you amuse yourself with the piano?’
‘Well, I did think of it,’ said Denis, ‘but I thought it would be too affected.’
‘Affected?’ said his hostess. ‘But you were coming over specially to play.’
‘I know,’ said Denis, ‘but I mean you were asleep and besides being rude to wake you up, it would have been rather too much theatre to awaken sleeping heroine with soft music, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Middleton absently, suddenly recognizing in her guest a spirit almost as self-mocking as her own. ‘Yes. I expect you were right,’ she added with more vigour. ‘But do play now. I can write some letters and not disturb you in the least.’
Denis begged her not to as he wouldn’t be disturbed whatever she did and then felt this was rather a proud, conceited way of putting it and began to stammer so much that Mrs Middleton quickly asked him about
his ballet music. He looked at her from his dark sunken eyes with a moment’s suspicion that he was being offered a toy or a sweet to keep him quiet, but reassured by the entire truthfulness in her face he did tell her about his ballet music, with such growing interest in himself that it was suddenly half-past four, and his stepmother and Daphne were on the terrace.
‘Good heavens! Lady Bond!’ cried Mrs Middleton. ‘I’ll be ready in a moment. Come in, Lilian, and be cool. Denis was telling me about his ballet.’
‘Did you play that bit to Catherine that I never can remember?’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘The bit I like?’
Denis, who appeared to recognize this particular bit with no difficulty from her description, said he had only told her about it.
‘Denis!’ said his sister reproachfully. ‘Telling’s no use at all. Why on earth didn’t you play?’
‘It was a matter of the finer feelings,’ said Denis pretentiously. ‘Come and play “The Merry Peasant”.’
Daphne, all willingness, sat down at the piano with her brother and they performed a version of that beginner’s bane arranged by Denis for four hands as vulgarly as possible, which always made them have the giggles, and the giggles they were still having when Mrs Middleton came down and carried them all off in the car to Staple Park.
Staple Park, the seat of Lord and Lady Bond, had been built by Lord Bond’s great-great-grandfather Jedediah Bond, a Yorkshire manufacturer of woollen goods who had come south to spend part of his vast fortune and found a family. He had acquired fame in his own part of the world by paying his operatives less and working them longer than anyone in the South Riding and had with his own hands shot three ringleaders in a gang of machine breakers dead, and dragging two others into his counting-house by their collars had fought them both till they lay bruised and bleeding on the floor. He had then jumped down fifteen feet into the yard, picked up a child of one of the strikers, its arm and leg broken in the tumult after the shooting, galloped with it ten miles to the nearest surgeon and paid for the treatment that led to its subsequent complete cure. A few years after the Repeal of the Orders in Council he was able to retire to the South, and built a mansion upon an approved slope overlooking an ornamental water, a Palladian bridge that led from and to nowhere in particular and a wall the whole way round the estate. It was before him that the regrettable gap of eight hundred years in the Bonds’ Anglo-Saxon pedigree appeared, and though he called his eldest son Ivanhoe, no researches were able to supply with even a reasonable degree of probability the thirty generations or so that were missing. Ivanhoe Bond had gone into Parliament for one of Lord Pomfret’s rotten boroughs; his son Athelstane Bond had entered the House after an expensive but on the whole honourable election and pushed his way resolutely to the front on philanthropy, and his son Ethelwulf had carefully married money and received a peerage in 1907. Alured the second and present Lord Bond was as good a man of business as his great-great-grandfather Jedediah, and fully as philanthropic as his grandfather Athelstane; but besides being almost more dull than any peer has a right to be, he had an extremely kind heart and looked after his tenants with an amount of real kindness that would have shocked his grandfather, who calculated his love of his fellow men on a basis of two and a half per cent. He had married Lucasta, half-sister of the present Lord Stoke, with whom he had a more or less friendly rivalry in pedigree cows. When he succeeded to the title his wife, who never forgot that she had been an Honourable in her own right, became the great lady of the district to the extent that she had made a good many enemies; but the various charities and deserving causes of the county knew very well that provided she was allowed to be Lady Bountiful her cheque book and her really invaluable services as chairman were always at their disposal.
Their only son, whom we have already met, was a faint, a very faint disappointment to them, for though his career had been steady and he was a dutiful son, he saw amusement in things that his parents did not find at all funny and had shown no wish to marry. A few years earlier he had greatly admired a niece of Mr Palmer, the most important neighbouring land-owner, but his parents had so fostered and encouraged the attachment that it had died almost as quickly as, under the influence of amateur theatricals, it had arisen. For a family which, with the slight gap before mentioned, ran back to Alfred to have no grandson was a disgrace that Lady Bond did not wish to contemplate, and the disgrace was if possible made more acute by the fact that when her half-brother Lord Stoke died, her son, unless Lord Stoke had absent-mindedly married his cook, would also come into Rising Castle, though not into the title, which would become extinct.
The Laverings car, driving up the mile and a half of scented lime avenue, turned round with a swish of gravel in the large sweep and drew up before the majestic flight of stone steps on which so many guests at dinners and balls had got wet until Lord Bond’s father had built a little side entrance with a covered way for rainy weather. The immense pillars of the portico were golden in the afternoon light and to pass into the cool black and white marble front hall was to be dazzled by darkness. Tea was being served in the long inner hall. This uncomfortable room was the core on the four sides of which the gigantic suite of drawing-room, dining-room, saloons, octagon rooms, garden rooms, were built, and owing to its position was lighted from a lantern in the roof, except for such light as came through the great glass doors of the marble hall. On its gloomy walls, covered with a deep red paper of everlasting quality, the founder of the family had hung an enormous number of bad but highly varnished copies of second-rate Old Masters. The floor was encumbered by tables with gilt lions’ claws and inlaid marble tops, cassoni, copies of Canova and Gibson, screens of stamped leather, and two enormous globes, one terrestrial and one celestial.
The butler steered the Laverings party through the half-light to where Lady Bond in a useful coat and skirt and wearing a useful felt hat was installed on a sofa that had belonged to Pauline Borghese, pouring out tea. Miss Starter was the only other guest present. The company were accommodated with chairs of various degrees of discomfort and a couple of Chinese stools which the Prince Regent had given to young Ivanhoe Bond in very inadequate repayment for certain money lost at cards. Denis and Daphne politely sat on the stools, which were so low that they felt like children looking over the edge of the nursery table.
‘Spencer. Get some cushions for Miss Stonor and Mr Stonor,’ said Lady Bond.
The butler brought two massive cushions of faded red velvet trimmed with tarnished gold, insinuated them on to the stools and departed. Denis and Daphne sat down again and found themselves so high above the table that the rest of the company looked like dwarfs. Brother and sister began to laugh.
‘Those cushions,’ said Lady Bond, ‘were brought from Brussels by my husband’s great-grandfather. They always used to be on the sofa in the little yellow satin room, but I had them brought into the hall last year.’
This interesting piece of history was of a nature to kill conversation and everyone sat dumb, Lady Bond apparently not minding in the least, till Miss Starter said that there was a shop in Brussels where she had once got some very good charcoal biscuits.
‘I love charcoal biscuits,’ said Daphne. ‘When we had them for a dog of ours I always ate half the tin. I suppose one gets black all over inside if one eats enough.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Miss Starter, shocked, but on being pressed by Daphne for her reasons could not give any.
‘I expect your young people would like to see the house, Mrs Stonor,’ said Lady Bond. ‘When Bond and C.W. come in I will get C.W. to show them the rooms. He and Bond have been looking at the heifers. We expect to do well with our cows at the Skeynes Show. How are yours doing, Mrs Middleton?’
‘I believe they are all quite well,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Jack talks to Pucken about them every day, not that he really knows anything about them.’
‘Lily Langtry will be calving about then; it’s an awful shame,’ said Daphne. ‘She’d have loved to go to the Show, Pucken says. Is Mr Palmer
sending his Phaedra up, Lady Bond?’
‘She is calving too,’ said her ladyship, with some satisfaction. ‘But my brother, Stoke, will probably have a walkover. No one has a cowman to touch his. Lord Pomfret would give anything to get him.’
So happily did this conversation go on that Miss Starter was able to annex Mrs Stonor and tell her all about the use of bran as a corrective. Miss Starter, who was really Honourable, was the daughter of that Victorian statesman, littérateur and bearded impostor Lord Mickleham, whose photograph by Mrs Cameron, draped in a rug and wearing a kind of beefeater’s hat, is familiar to all students of the Mid-Victorian period. Lord Mickleham was the author of Cimabue: a Poetical Drama in Prologue, Five Acts and Epilogue, which was once performed by Irving and never again. As he had married three times his descendants consisted largely of nephews and nieces who were older than their uncles and aunts, thus causing much social perplexity, but the Honourable Juliana Starter, the youngest of his eighteen children, had the whole family at her finger tips and was always ready to explain it to anyone who wanted to know.
‘It was when I was In Waiting to Princess Louisa Christina,’ she said, ‘that Dr Williams, a very delightful man and quite in advance of his times, recommended bran to Her Highness.’
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