2

The Florentine

1.

Mr Hubert Ervine accomplished the five miles from Oxford to Lyndon in a disordered frame of mind. Elation and misgiving possessed him alternately. It seemed to him, as his car spun over the long flat road, that he was arriving too quickly. He would be at Lyndon, confronted with his fate, before he should be ready for it.

He strove to become a deliberate and composed individual, summoning to his aid his entire stock of self-esteem, which was not small. His mission was certainly delicate. He hoped to find Miss Martin at Lyndon, and he intended to propose marriage to her in the course of his fortnight there. Nor did he expect her to deny him. They had met many times in London during the winter and she had always been kind. He rather thought that she would have him, if her relations did not dissuade her.

It was these Clewers, with their strange, complicated family ties, who made him uneasy. He was afraid they might not like him. They might not provide him with the field in which he could most happily display himself before the admiring eyes of his lady. He liked opportunities for being clever. No piece of cultural gymnastic could frighten him. He could discuss Chaucer before breakfast, and improvise operatic charades in the afternoon, and hold his own in that kind of brilliant conversation which is apt to spring up about midnight. He could write witty parodies, imitate most literary styles, and was personally acquainted with a sufficient number of live artists to pass in most places as a critic of their works.

All this, however, might not impress the Clewers. He did not suppose that they were very intellectual. His few encounters with them had only led him to reflect upon the strangeness of discovering the so different Lois in such a gallery. The promise of her intelligence was admirable, but he was blest if he knew where it came from. Lyndon, though so near to Oxford, was not an academic centre. It was known that a man stood or fell there according to his power to divert and entertain the lady of the house, and the most learned dons had to leave their erudition behind them if they wanted to be invited a second time.

Hubert admired young Lady Clewer immensely, of course, but he was decidedly afraid of her. He knew that he must go warily in any attempt to display himself. She would listen readily enough to interesting conversation and could discuss anything with anybody provided that she was amused. She was very far from being a fool. But she was known to have a positive horror of persons who tended to become instructive. Moreover, she never saw him at his best. Like most men, he was a little in love with her, and that upset him.

He was seized with a tremor of panic as his car turned off the high road, with its flanking hedges and telegraph poles, through lodge gates into Lyndon Park. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt shy and he did not like it at all. He tried to key himself into the temper of a bold and daring raider snatching a bride from a hostile stronghold. This descent upon Lyndon ought to have a sort of ‘Young Lochinvar’ swoop in it. But the illusion was destroyed by his slow and spasmodic progress down the park. The swoop was barred by innumerable gates, for Sir John, who bred pedigree cattle, had divided the park into a series of fields. At each gate the car stopped and Hubert began to grow impatient. Eager now to have arrived, he sat well forward as the car slid along as though his urgent attitude might increase their pace. The road lay slightly downhill, for Lyndon, like many houses of its period, was built in a hole. The park was really a long, tree-studded slope, ending in water meadows.

In the last field he perceived the approach of two young women, and identified one of them with a start of pleasure. It was not too much to believe that she had come to meet him. As for her companion, a slender person in white, she was probably his hostess. He was only a little in love with Lady Clewer. As the car drew nearer he set up a delighted grin while he was yet some way off, but, realizing how foolish this must appear by the time he reached them, he banished it from his features and only allowed it to light up again when the car stopped beside them. Out he bounded in a torrent of polite greetings and shook their self-possessed hands. The car, with his luggage, slipped off again towards the cluster of trees which hid Lyndon, and he was left in the midst of solitary pastures with his two companions.

The insignificant other was not Lady Clewer, he discovered, but one Cynthia, a half-sister. He knew her by sight, having admired her beauty from a barge at the ‘Eights,’ but he had never been formally introduced. She was, apparently, not out, since her hair still hung down her back. She greeted him with a demureness suitable to her situation, flashed one disturbing look out of her dark eyes and immediately veiled them with the longest lashes he had ever seen. In a becoming silence she walked home upon his left hand.

All his attention was given to Lois, who was looking brilliant and happy in her yellow dress. She was obviously delighted to see him; friendliness beamed in her little blue eyes and bade him welcome. Walking in that green field he thought her like some sturdy, shining spring flower—a marsh marigold perhaps.

‘Nobody else is staying with us,’ she said, ‘except a cousin of Mother’s, Sir Thomas Bragge. He’s come to advise her about some investments or something. He’s rather an awful old gentleman, but quite harmless really. He has made a lot of money, I forget how, and is going to build a house. He’ll tell you about it. Then a cousin of Agatha’s, a brilliant young doctor, is expected shortly on a rest cure from overwork.’

Hubert, who was on the look out for possible rivals, felt a little apprehensive. His spirits, which had soared when he heard Sir Thomas called an awful old gentleman, came to the ground at the mention of the brilliant young doctor. But he reflected that the fellow might possibly be married. Doctors often marry young and married men often overwork.

‘Then,’ said Lois, ‘there is John’s brother, James. Have you met him?’

‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t with you in town, was he?’

‘No. He was in Paris. He’s just come back. He’s been there for three years. He’s an artist, you know.’

‘No. No, I didn’t know. An artist?’

Hubert had some difficulty in digesting the idea of an artist among the Clewers.

‘Yes. And I’m anxious to know what you think of his work. I rather like some of it. But of course,’ she added modestly, ‘I’m no judge.’

His gallantry did not prompt him to contradict her. As a disciple she was exquisite, but as a judge … no! Later on, perhaps, when she should be a little more matured, he might temper this decision. But at present her enthusiasms were too indiscriminate, though she evinced a tendency to draw back and modify her opinions in deference to his experience which pleased and touched him.

They passed through the last gate and proceeded up the avenue of elms leading to the house. Lyndon, architectural and complacent, gleamed whitely amid the sombre green of ilex and cedar. Its classical façade stretched in ample wings to East and West. The grounds, originally laid out by the famous ‘Capability Brown,’ and improved upon by successive generations of landscape gardeners, were admirably in keeping with the dwelling-house they guarded. They maintained its note of assured artificiality: they belonged to an age when gentlemen of property owned the earth and could do what they liked with it—an age which had not read Wordsworth and which took for granted that Nature could be improved upon. The measured, decorative mind of man was everywhere apparent. Upon the knolls in the shrubberies were to be found pensive little temples to Friendship and Solitude. A long stone terrace ran the whole length of the south side of the house. This bordered on a vast lawn leading to sloping rose gardens which descended to the Holmbrook, a tributary of the Isis.

Lois led Hubert round to the lawn where the party was gathered for tea. They walked slowly, conversing volubly as was their habit. Already he was beginning to draw comparisons between the candid loquacity of Miss Martin and the provocative silence of Miss Clewer. This Cynthia was a piece of goods! Despite his preoccupation with her sister he had been made aware of it. He could not quite make out how she had done it, for she had said nothing during the whole of her short walk with them. He rather wanted to hear her speak. It would perhaps be polite to address a remark to her.

‘Do you know, when I first saw you, I thought you were Lady Clewer.’

He had not meant to say this. But there was something about the girl that provoked one to personalities,

‘Oh, Agatha? She would never walk as far as this. She never goes anywhere except in a car, you know.’

There was an undercurrent of contempt in her voice and he surmised that she disliked her sister-in-law. Nor could he be surprised when he caught sight of his hostess in the distance and felt anew all the shock of her beauty. She sat under an enormous cedar tree in the middle of the lawn, presiding over her guests with unhurried grace, and as he approached he knew that she must be a galling chaperon for Cynthia. Lois suffered less. She had vitality, the charm of eager interests and a lively mind. Even at Lady Clewer’s side she must have her appeal. She could never be completely overlooked. Hubert, for instance, preferred her infinitely. But the unfortunate Cynthia was doomed to a perpetual eclipse, since she was of the same type as her senior and not nearly so effective. Both were sirens—lovely, indolent and exotic; both had achieved that air of expensive fragility which is beauty’s most precious setting. But Lady Clewer with her cool, witty assurance, her youthful maturity, possessed unfair advantages. As a married woman she could wear richer clothing. She, too, was clad in white this afternoon, but of some clear, silky-soft material, matching her pearls and bestowed about her with a sort of subtle amplitude, while Cynthia had to put up with the harsh, maidenly lines of starched piqué.

The guests under the tree were mostly very young men who had come out from Oxford for tennis, and games were still in progress on the raised courts at either side of the lawn. Also there was Sir Thomas Bragge, an important and rubicund-looking person. Lois had called him old but he really was not: it was his grossness which had created the illusion of age in her fastidious mind. Certainly he was awful. He sat sunk deeply in a deck chair at Lady Clewer’s right hand, his portly stomach bulging gently upward and heaving with his occasional rumbling guffaws. Never for a moment did he remove from his hostess a gaze of unqualified admiration, devouring her with small, unabashed eyes.

Behind her chair, dominating the background, hovered the master of the house. He was pleasant and attentive, more silent than most of the throng, but obviously the host.

Lois and Hubert crossed the brilliant turf a little nervously and advanced into the middle of the group. The guest was greeted with a cordiality which cheered him. Lady Clewer gave him an unmistakably kind glance; it told him that she was his ally and his heart warmed to her. Sympathy, he instantly decided, was the secret of her charm. Her beauty was but the symbol of a generous temper and she deserved all the homage she got. With new courage he turned to greet the formidable dowager who was approaching briskly from the house with the air of having concluded competently some very important business. She ran her sharp eyes critically over the company, and he found himself beginning to wilt again under her appraising looks. He doubted whether she would ever think him good enough for Lois and began feverishly to rehearse to himself a statement of his income. This reassured him, for he really had quite a lot of money. He was able to control his surprise when the dowager said, in her heavy, uncoloured voice:

‘I have a favour to ask of you, Mr Ervine.’

He almost bounded from his chair in his eagerness to serve her, but he was a little dashed when he heard what the favour was. It appeared that Lyndon possessed a Village Reading Union, patronized by the aristocracy; an institution whereby culture was administered in small doses to deserving rustics and contingents of the Lyndon housemaids.

‘We meet on Friday evenings,’ said the lady, fixing him with an uncompromising regard. ‘And, whenever we can, we get kind people to read us papers on literary subjects. Now I’m sure you …’

‘Oh, well,’ he murmured, ‘literature isn’t my …’

‘It’s Modern Art, your subject, isn’t it?’ said she wisely.

All the young men in white flannels left off eating their tea to look at the fellow whose subject was Modern Art. Or so it seemed to him. In desperation he threw an appealing glance at James, the artist, who should surely have helped him out. But no assistance was coming from that quarter. James was not going to talk. Seated on the edge of the group, as it were, he was eating up his tea with a quick despatch and paying no attention to the conversation. Hubert was disgusted and decided that James was probably a cubist. Anyhow, he was a very ugly brute.

‘I’m afraid,’ said his tormentor, ‘that Modern Art wouldn’t be quite suitable … just a little beyond us at present. It’s only simple village folk, Mr Ervine. No! But I was wondering if you could manage to give us a paper on Dante. That would be a splendid subject!’

‘Dante! But, my dear lady, I know nothing about him.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you do! All people interested in art must. Such a subject for great pictures … Burne-Jones, you know … and all those. And you’ve lived in Italy so much. I’m sure you could tell us a great deal which we do not know.’

Hubert wondered if he looked as ill as he felt. In a sickish voice he protested. He said he knew nothing about Italy before the Renaissance. He offered to lecture upon modern Italian novels if she liked. But Lady Clewer, who was a little suspicious of all continental novels, stuck to Dante. She would have nothing else. She bore him down and he dropped the subject until he could argue it out in a less public place. He was deeply disturbed and felt that she must have done it on purpose. She could have hit upon no surer means of making a fool of him and his intellect, which was very hard when he could be clever in so many ways. He wondered miserably whether he could entreat Lois not to come and listen to him, supposing he was forced to read this wretched paper. He looked at her and caught a glance of amused sympathy. Directing her regard to her mother, she assumed for an instant an expression of despair. This confidential by-play relieved him and he began to hope that he might carry the thing off creditably.

The meal drew to an end and some of the players returned to the courts. James, the artist, having finished his substantial tea, brought his cup and plate and placed them on the tray in front of his sister-in-law. She greeted this ceremony with a smile and a murmur of thanks.

‘Are you going to work, this lovely evening?’ she asked with some commiseration.

He nodded and shambled off towards the house.

‘He works too hard,’ she said, turning to Hubert. ‘I’ve never seen anyone work so. He uses an attic with a large north window and he simply lives up there. He should take more exercise. But Lady Clewer,’ with a nod at the dowager, ‘finds a good many energetic little things for him to do.’

‘What’s his line?’ asked Hubert. ‘In Paris, wasn’t he? Who did he work with?’

Lady Clewer considered for a moment and then recollected a name which galvanized Hubert slightly.

‘Oh! … He can draw then …’ he stated thoughtfully.

‘Can he?’

Lady Clewer looked amused.

‘Who? James?’ cried the dowager, who had been busy telling Sir Thomas that he must lecture on Blake at her Reading Union. ‘Oh, yes! James can draw. He could draw when he was quite little, couldn’t you, James? Where is he? Has he gone? How tiresome! I wanted him to take a note down to the village for me. And now he will be up all those stairs. Miss Barrington, kindly run up to his studio and tell him to come and speak to me, please. In my sitting-room.’

She hastened into the house, driving her secretary before her. Sir Thomas turned to his hostess with renewed gusto. Hubert felt a faint distaste at seeing them side by side. So fair a nymph and so foul a satyr were too striking an essay in contrast. These blatant tributes of admiration should have sickened her, but they obviously did not. She looked at Sir Thomas with palpable amusement, as though she perceived in his regard something to which she was but too well accustomed, and which, in him, diverted her by its obviousness. The same amusement was reflected upon the face of her husband as he strolled away towards the house a moment later. Hubert surmised that the possessor of such a wife must get used to a good deal.

‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ‘I’d put my foot down if any man looked at my wife like that. But I suppose Clewer knows his own business.’

A short sojourn in that household proved to him that Clewer knew his own business perfectly well. That very evening he routed Sir Thomas completely in the matter of a canoe. The night was exceptionally warm and after dinner it was agreed that a turn on the river would be pleasant. Lady Clewer and Sir Thomas led the way to the lowest terrace of the rose garden, where a small landing-stage had been put up. A punt and a canoe strained gently at their moorings and Sir Thomas, with crackling shirt-front and many stertorous breathings, stooped at once to the latter and began to pile it with gay cushions. The proceeding took some time since the current continually carried the frail craft beyond his reach. Lady Clewer, on the landing-stage, watched in brooding silence the last streaks of sunset smouldering on the edge of the water meadow. At length her cavalier, having prepared a resting-place for her, straightened himself for the delicate, delicious business of placing her in the canoe. There was no lady. Her husband, joining them, had with silent determination handed her into the punt, upon the deck of which he now stood, arrogantly wielding a pole. Sir Thomas made a chagrined attempt to plant himself upon the cushions at her side but was frustrated by the dowager.

Marian was not intending to accompany them, as she had important letters to write. But she had pursued them thus far expressly, so Hubert believed, to wreck his chances of an interview with Lois. She drove’ Sir Thomas back to the canoe and gave him Cynthia by way of consolation. Lois and Hubert were put into the punt and the party pushed off into midstream, leaving the matron upon the rose terrace. Her voice boomed down the dusky reaches after them, warning them not to stay out if the dew was heavy.

They slipped between green banks, sniffing the new-mown hay in wide, silent fields. Far ahead the canoe, with its ill-assorted freight, disappeared into the gloaming beneath some tall trees which overhung the stream. Wild roses, close to the water’s edge, splashed the darkness like little moons, their faint sweetness lost in the rich savour of Sir John’s cigar. Lady Clewer talked to Hubert in a voice pitched low to match the space and leisure of the night.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘we have something rather terrible to break to you. I’m afraid it will be a shock. You will have to lecture on Dante at the Village Room next Friday, for it has been already billed.’

‘What! Since tea?’

‘No! The bills were up before you came.’

‘It’s a little way she has,’ observed Lois. ‘I expect she’ll make Mr Blair give a lecture.’

‘If she’ll let him lecture on neurosis I’m sure he won’t mind, for he can talk of nothing else.’

‘Oh … is he a nerve specialist?’ asked Hubert.

‘More or less; though he seems to dabble in diseases of the brain. I can never remember quite what his official line is. It’s all so modern.’

‘Quite young, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes. Young as they go, I suppose.’

‘Very young to have got so far as he has, Agatha,’ put in Sir John.

‘Married?’ asked Hubert carelessly.

The lady started slightly and paused a second before saying: ‘No. Not married.’

They fell silent, pushing through a reedy backwater, while far off, across the flat, mysterious fields, the bells of Oxford rang down the evening. When at last they returned to the landing-stage, they found the dowager wandering impatiently in the gathering night.

‘I came to call Cynthia,’ she cried. ‘There’s a heavy dew and she has only that thin muslin. Where is she? What? Somewhere in the canoe with Sir Thomas? How tiresome of them to be so late!’

‘Poor Cynthia,’ whispered Lois to Hubert, as they walked up through the garden. ‘How awful to spend this heavenly evening alone in a canoe with Sir Thomas!’

2.

Hubert’s execution on the pianoforte was energetic and skilful. He could go on playing, rapidly and accurately, for a long time. Lois, as she listened to him, was glad that he had not heard her Sussex Cycle. She knew now that he would see through it. He would be very polite and tell her that her work was effective, and adjective which, three weeks ago, she would have accepted as a compliment. But she had learnt a good deal lately. Beholding her compositions with new eyes she blushed for them. She had become aware that the few really great works of art in the world are all relentlessly professional, and the others are scarcely worth mention.

In the past week she had begun to grasp in detail her new friend’s attitude towards the arts. She thought it austere yet fascinating. Despite her mother’s vigilance they had enjoyed several long and enchanting conversations and she found herself adopting many of his views. He was so delightfully arrogant in the laws he laid down; she longed to be able to speak with that assurance, that air of initiation. He had confessed to her the history of his own inner life, and how, in his fear of producing work which might be second-rate, he had decided that it would be better to do none at all. Rather than betray himself as the gifted amateur, he preferred to remain the mere critic, the friend of great men. His attitude struck her as very noble. Also it possessed undoubted compensations.

Beyond the window she could hear fragments of a prolonged conversation. Agatha was sitting on the terrace with that disagreeable cousin of hers. Lois and Hubert did not like Mr Blair. They thought him a dreary fellow, and his reputed brilliance in medicine did not excuse his lack of humour. He trod heavily on their witty conversation; indeed, he could scarcely open his mouth without saying something which contravened the taste of the house. He was serious, to the point of ill-temper, when they jested, and then he was unjustifiably flippant. His ill-judged sarcasms looked very shabby beside the agreeable audacities which flowed so easily from Hubert. Nobody had any patience with him but Agatha who was, after all, his cousin. And it had been her mother who had sent him there.

Mrs Cocks, now a widow, was enjoying a popularity as conspicuous as ever. Her activities were innumerable and so were her friends. These she was in the habit of sending to Lyndon whenever they were recovering from an illness. The place, she said, was as good as a hydro; John and Agatha were so lazy themselves that they required almost nothing from their guests. The cooking was perfect and nobody need come down before lunch-time. Meeting Gerald one day in town she had been shocked at his look of fatigue. Under cross-examination he had admitted to sleeplessness and overwork. Forthwith she had proffered an invitation to Oxfordshire on her daughter’s behalf. Despite his earnest protests she had insisted upon his going, and, once planted at Lyndon, he seemed too much exhausted to go away, though he liked little that he found there. Hubert was especially uncongenial to him, and all the while, as he talked to Agatha, he was frowning irritably because of the din in the drawing-room. At last he broke off to exclaim:

‘Isn’t that fellow playing much too fast?’

‘He always does,’ replied Agatha. ‘He belongs to that generation. Mrs Gordon Glewer, John’s great-aunt, explained it to me once. Have you met her?’

‘No. But I’ve heard her quoted.’

‘One does, doesn’t one? Well, she says that about twenty years ago there was a great reaction against young ladies’ drawing-room music. It was felt to be amateurish and inefficient. All the clever young men took to playing very fast, just to show that they could do it. Nowadays there is no particular merit in pace, as people don’t usually play at all unless they can do it well. So the most modern performers try to go more or less by what the composers obviously intended. But there is still a school which believes that there is something intrinsically a little vicious in Largos and Andantes.’

She laughed as Hubert galloped with evident embarrassment through the pathos of a slow movement and crashed joyfully into a finale conveniently marked Presto. But her cousin did not laugh: his scowl of annoyance deepened. He was sitting well forward in his deck chair, ignoring the cushions which stretched away untenanted behind him. His attitude irritated her; she thought that no one else at Lyndon would so use a chair meant for relaxation. John and Hubert could lounge very effectively, giving an attractive picture of muscularity in repose. Sir Thomas would sag heavily, straining to their utmost the frail canvas and tintacks. But Gerald did not seem to know how to take his ease and had sometimes a very lofty air towards the comfort of other people. She had once asked him, teasingly, if he never leant back in his chair; he had laughed and adopted an easier posture, but, a moment later, she was aware that he surveyed her own graceful lassitude with a detached severity.

This detachment was beginning to alarm her. She had observed it on the rare occasions when they met in town, but she had never thought that it meant very much. At Lyndon, however, it became uncomfortably obvious that he belonged to another world, and it did not please her that he made no attempt to adjust himself. She was disappointed in him. He looked unkempt and he said the wrong things. Four years had changed him unbelievably. He had lost his vitality and wit. He was becoming intolerant and dogmatic. She missed the personable, audacious companion of her childish escapades. And she was sure that he criticized her.

She knew that his hateful, mysterious work, the career to which he had prematurely sacrificed his youth, had done all this to him. She had asked him about it, anxious to discover something of the grim world which had absorbed him and made him a stranger. And he began to tell her, with a growing eagerness, of his work in a Parisian clinic. She thought it all rather horrible, shivering at the images he conjured up—the whitewashed walls, the smell of antiseptics, the bleak exposure of human agony, the alien standards of relentless toil. Yet these things were his life, just as Lyndon was hers, so she must listen.

Hubert ran down at last and the piano in the drawing-room was silent. Lyndon was hushed save for the perpetual humming of mowing machines on distant lawns. The musician and his lady came out on to the terrace. They both seemed to be very pleased with themselves and Hubert was humming:

‘Non mi dir
Bell’ idol mio
Che son io
Crudel con te.’

Lois hoped, with a faint suggestion of superiority, that the music had not disturbed anyone.

‘Not at all,’ rejoined Agatha sweetly. ‘We liked listening. But we were wondering why Mr Ervine always plays so fast.’

‘Do I play fast?’ parried Hubert, looking pleased.

‘It seemed to us that we had never heard that Beethoven played so fast before.’

‘Most people play it too slowly,’ he stated.

‘Yes? I wonder why that is?’

‘Of course, it’s a matter of taste,’ Lois told them.

‘Why yes, I thought it might be that,’ considered Agatha.

Hubert looked unhappy and she instantly said something which restored his equanimity, for it gave him an opportunity of displaying his knowledge of the moderns. He took her lead and they began a discussion which made Lois a little jealous. It was unfair that Agatha should be able to talk so well about things of which she really knew nothing at all. It was not as if she even pretended to knowledge or to any settled standards of taste. Her levity was shocking; she admitted to ignorances which would have covered Lois with mortification, and dismissed an acknowledged masterpiece airily as being too long and apt to bore her. Yet Hubert did not crush her, or lay down the law, he merely exerted himself to be amusing. It was strange how beauty could make a man forget himself. But perhaps he was secretly so contemptuous that he did not think her worth snubbing. Lois, remembering how didactic he could be in other company, trusted that this was so.

Gerald also was puzzled. He perceived that his cousin was talking with unexpected ability and it occurred to him that she might be wasting a very exceptional brain in this futile life of hers. Ervine was evidently the sort of man she liked, since she was so ready to use her wits when she talked to him. She was looking animated and amused. She did not see what a mountebank the fellow really was. Strange creature!

Agatha thought that the silent pair must be brought back into the conversation and turned to Lois, saying:

‘Has Mr Ervine heard you sing that religious song you have? You know! The one about the procession.’

Lois was alarmed, wondering which of the songs she would rather not sing to Hubert was about to be disinterred. Agatha, however, recollected the name and it was quite a safe one. Hubert leapt at it delightedly and began to hum:

‘La foule autour d’un chêne antique
S’incline, en adorant.’

‘Wonderful, that octave descent!’ he told them. ‘Have you ever heard Mass in a Breton church? Have you seen the wave that goes over the people when the Host is raised? Like the wind over a sea of corn…. It’s thrilling. He’s got it exactly. That’s devotional, if ever music was.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ put in Gerald, seizing his opportunity. ‘I don’t agree with you at all. When first I heard that thing it struck me as being absolutely false. Music can’t be devotional unless it’s written devotionally. That fellow isn’t on his knees himself. He’s outside the thing, thinking how effective it all is. It may be a magnificent song, but it’s too self-conscious to be devotional. It doesn’t in the least remind me of Mass in a Breton church; at least, I’m sure it wouldn’t if I’d ever heard Mass in a Breton church. But it does convey an excellent impression of you, Ervine, being thrilled at the simple faith of the peasant.’

‘It’s always interesting,’ said Hubert in a nasty voice, ‘to entrap the scientific mind into an opinion on the arts. You especially, Blair, are generally so cautious. You stray so rarely beyond the fields of medical science and social economics. It’s a treat to hear you give yourself away.’

‘I expect he includes music in social economics,’ said Agatha, who was entertained by the antagonism between the men. ‘They are so amazingly elastic, you know. They can be made to include almost anything.’

‘Not music,’ Hubert assured her. ‘Dear lady, music at least has nothing economic about it. We may thank Heaven for that!’

Agatha frowned, not at Hubert’s piety, but because she did not like people who said ‘dear lady.’ She was quite pleased with Gerald for replying contentiously:

‘Yes it has. All art is founded upon economics.’

Hubert groaned.

‘But it is,’ persisted Gerald. ‘Every opinion you express betrays your social status. Your tastes are all acquired tastes; and acquired tastes are the mark of the man of leisure.’

‘Well, there’s something in that,’ agreed Hubert.

‘And what’s an acquired taste but a piece of conspicuous waste? Waste of time. Proof that the acquirer has time to waste. Proof that he needn’t work. Why do Chinese grandees let their finger-nails grow? Why do they crush their wives’ feet? Same reason.’

Hubert remained contemptuously silent, but Lois contributed a remark. She thought it was time she spoke, so she hazarded:

‘Taste isn’t always confined to the leisured classes, surely. What about … er … Robert Burns, for instance?’

‘Do you think his taste was always very good?’ asked Gerald.

‘Well, then … genius …’ she amended.

‘Not at all the same thing,’ Hubert told her.

She saw that it was not, but was uncertain whether genius or taste were the nicer quality to possess. Gerald continued to dogmatize about the leisured classes:

‘Taste is merely a laborious form of auto-suggestion, upon which only an idle man can embark. But, like a public school education, it gives you a certain cachet by reason of its very uselessness. Look at it like this. The leisured class was originally released from the necessity of earning its own bread in order that it might preserve the State in safety. As things become more civilized this work gets handed over to paid officials and then the mere possession of leisure comes to be the mark of the aristocrat. People invent all these ways of showing they are leisured … sport and culture and so on. Complete bureaucracy and the golden age of art generally arrive together. A really useful aristocracy doesn’t have time for culture. It’s too busy doing its job; governing the herd and fighting the foe, and all that sort of thing. Its pleasures are simple and it shares them with the masses. The Norman knight, even the hunting squire in the eighteenth century, was not so far removed in culture from the hind at the plough as Clewer is from one of his farm labourers.’

John put his head out of the window behind them and said: ‘I don’t agree.’

He had been sitting in the smoking-room with Sir Thomas, but, catching the drift of Gerald’s remarks, he now came and balanced on the low window-sill, explaining:

‘I’m not an aristocrat who has left off being really useful. I spent most of today in a stuffy court-house fining people for riding their bicycles on the pavement, don’t you know. And what do I get for it? Somebody has to do it. But why should I?’

‘Now, Clewer! Do you really think that bullying people two days a week can be called a life work?’

‘That’s not all,’ said John modestly. ‘Agatha’s mother says I’m going into Parliament some day. Of course,’ he added with British haste, ‘I don’t pretend to artistic tastes and so on. But I know what I like, and I don’t deny that having decent things about the place,’ he glanced over his perfect lawns and then at his wife, … ‘pictures and things, you know … it does make a difference to me. And my point is that these chaps owe it to us for all we do for them.’

Agatha laughed, as she always did when her husband referred to the proletariat as ‘these chaps.’ But she grew grave when she heard Gerald say:

‘Well, I admit that you are more useful than Ervine here, and consequently you make fewer claims to culture. It only bears out what I say. That’s why the women of the leisured class go in for art more, on the whole, than the men do.’

‘Oh, the women,’ she murmured. ‘We are perfect monuments of conspicuous waste, I suppose.’

‘Of course you are. The ideal of beauty set up before the women of a leisured class is almost always incompatible with usefulness. They must look incapable of hard work; their dress must hamper them; their health is often injured; their duties as mothers are set aside. They are to be decorative luxuries, unfitted for any uses save one, and they must look it. Simply because that’s a standard of appearance which can’t be attained by the working classes. Women like …’

His eye wandered round the company and he looked a little disconcerted for a moment. Then he boldly continued:

‘Such women … women of the odalisque type, are symbols of an assured, unearned income. A piece of blatant waste, like a scratch handicap….’

He broke off and met the glance of his cousin. She sat there, looking so like and yet so unlike his lost love that he was silenced. He could scarcely believe that this was not she but the husk of her, the beautiful tomb, the unhappy, corruptible flesh which had once clothed an ardent spirit. He had to remind himself that the soul was gone, dead and buried beneath the gorgeousness of Lyndon.

She had listened to his strictures upon her and her kind without modifying her languorous pose. With a gentle mockery she looked him over and then gave him that quick, soft smile which was her last weapon. Her husband marked it and grinned.

‘I know that in theory beauty and utility should go together,’ she said mildly. ‘But practically I have never found that they do. Do you really find most idle women plain, Gerald?’

Very few men could have continued to say that they did, but he was obdurate. He considered the question, staring at his boots, and then said:

‘I see a good many in a professional way. They are not beautiful. They are generally appalling.’

‘But,’ she took him up with more energy, ‘you don’t see anything to admire in these wretched, squalid women one sees in slums and places, surely? You don’t call them beautiful?’

‘An overworked woman is a shocking sight,’ he agreed. ‘Though not as bad as one who does no work at all. Our society is made up of extremes. We have lost all standards of how a woman should look.’

‘A beautiful woman,’ observed Hubert, ‘is a work of art in herself. But then we have learnt that Blair has no use for works of art.’

‘I never said that,’ exclaimed Gerald. ‘Works of art are all right. So are artists. But I don’t include them in the leisured class. The man of leisure is an amateur. When he leaves off being that, he leaves off being a man of leisure. His art isn’t an exploit, it’s a profession.’

‘Quite,’ said Hubert. ‘I agree. But the cultured amateur forms the cream of the artist’s public.’

‘I doubt it. He’s a drone, and inclined to demand work which only drones can appreciate. Work which is an acquired taste …’

The sight of James Clewer wandering round the corner of the house reminded them that at Lyndon they were not all drones. They had an artist with them. Agatha called to him and he joined them with an expression of vague dissatisfaction.

‘What were you looking for, James?’

‘Oh … for Dolly….’

‘Dolly? What Dolly?’

‘Dolly Kell.’

‘Kell! Kell, the housemaid? What did you want?’

‘Some bits of rag to clean my brushes.’

‘I’ll tell her to bring some up to you. Listen! Do our standards of taste make any difference to the pictures you paint?’

‘What?’

James looked terribly startled.

‘We are discussing taste. You know I saying one picture is second-rate and another decorative, and so on. You must have heard it done. Do you see any point in it?’

‘I know what you mean. In Paris they used to talk a lot about those things. The ones who drew worst talked most. I didn’t listen.’

‘Then it makes no difference to you what we think of art?’

‘No! Why should it?’

‘We are the cream of your public.’

James looked horrified. He cast a scared glance round the group and withdrew hastily. John, who was afraid they would begin discussing art again, looked at his watch and mentioned that the first gong had gone some time ago. They dispersed, leaving the issue undecided. Twenty minutes later John opened the door between his room and Agatha’s, and finding that her maid had gone, he left it ajar so that he could talk to her while he finished dressing.

‘Not a bad sort, Ervine,’ he called through. ‘I quite like him, in spite of his parlour tricks. Hope he and Lois make a match of it.’

‘They seem to be very well suited,’ replied Agatha. ‘Do you know at all what Lady Clewer thinks of it? It struck me that she is taking pains to keep them apart.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing. It doesn’t mean disapproval. She thinks it puts a girl’s price up to keep her well chaperoned. I think I agree.’

‘You would.’

‘And in any case, I happen to know that Mamma was getting rather worried about Lois and James. Thought they saw too much of each other. Rather late in the day, what?’

‘It’s perfect nonsense.’

‘’Course it is. James is more presentable than he was, and that’s all you can say for him. Lois wouldn’t look at him and I can’t say I see much sign of his looking at Lois. But Mamma’s anxious. It’s natural in a mother to get worried, I suppose. They all do.’

Agatha said nothing. She had never, consciously, been a mother. Her child, though born alive, had not survived long enough to engage her attention. By the time she had recovered from the anaesthetic sufficiently to ask for it her brief maternity was already over.

John continued, after a pause:

‘No, what really does annoy me about James is the impossible way he goes chasing round after that housemaid. You never saw that scene the other day. She was polishing the floor in the library when we all went up to find some book or other. The poor girl was trying to melt away quietly, as she certainly should have done; but not a bit of it! James rushes up to her, greets her effusively as his dear Dolly, and inquires after her aunt’s bronchitis. ’Pon my word, I thought he meant to kiss her!’

‘Well, but isn’t she a very old friend of his? I’m sure Lady Clewer told me that her aunt was housekeeper here and ran the place when your mother died.’

‘Old Mrs Kell, do you mean?’

‘Yes. She’s Kell’s aunt by marriage, and she’s practically brought her up. I believe the child had a mother, but couldn’t live at home because of a very unsatisfactory stepfather who ultimately went off his head or something. I know Lady Clewer told me some very tragic story when first I engaged the girl. She seems to have stayed here a good deal with her aunt, when she was little. You must have been away at school, so you don’t remember. But, being much of an age with James, she used to play with him. So he really has some reason for asking after her aunt’s bronchitis.’

‘It’s not that I object to, it’s his manner of doing it. She didn’t like it at all, poor girl. She’s well trained enough, and she hadn’t an idea what to make of him. She was very stiff and “Thank you, sir, I’m sure” with him. And then he gapes at her as if she’d slapped his face and asks if anything is the matter. And it isn’t as if these scenes only took place in the bosom of the family. Blair and Bragge were there, and what they made of it I don’t know. I don’t take to Blair, by the way, Agatha. Talks too much, doesn’t he? I was expecting you to shut him up. You don’t generally tolerate people who preach.’

‘He doesn’t generally talk as much as that. I egged him on today.’

‘I didn’t think much of his views either. Practically Socialism, don’t you know. Bad taste to force it on people.’

‘His general turn of mind is affected a good deal by living in France so much, I think.’

‘What? The way he talks about women do you mean?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she said with some irritation. ‘I’m sure I don’t know where he got his views from, and I don’t agree with them. I mean that his manner, the way he discusses things, puts us out. It mayn’t be French particularly; he may have picked it up in America. Only he takes exactly the same tone about everything, even when he’s serious. English people put on a special manner to show when they are serious; they either become solemn or excessively flippant. And anyhow they don’t like discussing really important things. They seem to think that there is something belittling in conversation. They don’t regard it as continentals do.’

‘Awful beasts, the French,’ asserted John cheerfully. ‘They made me sick. Agatha! If you can’t fix these studs, I shall have to ring for Peters.’

She strolled in, cool and elegant, and arranged his difficulties for him. As she did so he heard her murmur.

‘Passionate … discursive … and unsentimental….’

‘What’s that?’

With an arm behind her shoulders he detained her.

‘I was trying to sum up in my own mind the characteristics of the best of the French nation. But they are rather fox, goose, and cabbage qualities to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Really, John, take care, or you’ll have powder coming off on your sleeve.’

‘You can put on some more in a minute when I’ve finished. Tell me, is that chap … Blair … what is it … passionate, discursive …’

‘And unsentimental. He might be. I don’t know him as well as I used.’

John reflected upon the first of these qualifications and said:

‘Well, now, I should have called him rather a St Thingummy. You know, the fellow who threw the inkpot at the lady. What are you laughing at? He is. I saw a beautiful woman smile at him this afternoon and he didn’t so much as blink.’

‘He didn’t see,’ she said quickly.

‘Oh, didn’t he? I’m inclined to think that he did. But I expect he thinks it’s an insult to argue with a woman as if she was one. He’s that sort.’

‘What! You think it was on purpose?’

‘Of course it was. The man’s not an absolute fool.’

‘He thought it would be rather degrading to lower the conversation to the level of gallantry.’

‘He’s that sort, I tell you. A cold-blooded fish.’

‘But it would have been, wouldn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Rather degrading?’

‘I don’t know.’ He released her as the gong rang. ‘The whole discussion bored me personally. Does my sleeve really need brushing?’

3.

Upon the following morning, John and Sir Thomas departed with some ceremony for the Cheltenham races. The car which was to take them was a large one, but when they had packed themselves into it, with their greatcoats, and their road maps and their glasses, they filled it completely. The other guests, gathered on the steps, called injunctions as to the money they wished these emissaries to make for them. John replied briefly that he would put nothing on for anybody but himself; Sir Thomas, however, agreed with leering alacrity to make a little for Cynthia.

As the chauffeur was climbing into his place, the lady of the house appeared among the group upon the steps and informed the world that it was going to be a wet day. It had been bright too early, said she. Everyone was surprised to see her, for she seldom rose before lunch-time and her statement that it had been bright too early was greeted with some mockery upon this account.

The car hummed up the avenue and several large raindrops spotted the whiteness of the steps in answer to her prophecy. A sudden wind blew all the leaves silver against a leaden sky, and the party fled into the hall for shelter. Agatha then explained the reason of her early appearance. She was due to lunch with her mother on the other side of Oxfordshire and would be starting immediately. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll get away until terribly late,’ she said. ‘My mother will have a hundred things to talk about. I’m rather afraid,’ turning to Hubert, ‘that I may be a little late for your lecture. It’s at six, isn’t it? But you’ll forgive me? I’ll get away as soon as ever I can. I’ll come home through the village and run straight in to the Institute. Then I can hear as much as possible.’

Hubert, who had been looking very miserable since breakfast, assured her with perfect sincerity that he would not mind in the least if she missed his lecture altogether. Looking round cautiously to see that the dowager was not in hearing, he said:

‘I’m afraid I’m no democrat. I have no desire to lift the masses.’

‘A genuine democrat hasn’t,’ rejoined Gerald instantly. ‘He thinks they are all right as they are.’

With an imploring look, Hubert drew Agatha aside:

‘Can you tell me,’ he asked nervously, ‘if there are any books on Dante in this house?’

‘Oh, there must be, Let’s go and look in the library.’

She took him upstairs. The library was a long, beautiful room with six windows looking out over the park. It was seldom used by the household. Miss Barrington worked there occasionally, and Kell, the third housemaid, expended much labour upon the polished floor.

The chill severity of the place abashed Hubert. Its classic simplicity made him feel slightly uncomfortable. Its long array of solid, calf-bound books seemed to cheapen his ‘two-pence coloured’ culture and put him out of humour with the showy little lecture which he was composing. It was as if the presiding spirits of the place, the scholars and the polished stylists of the eighteenth century, were frowning on him from the lofty cases where their busts ruled the solitude. He moved his eye quickly from Voltaire to Johnson, and from Johnson to Swift, and turned to examine the view from one of the windows. Even Agatha shivered a little at the frigid atmosphere of the place with its composite smell of erudite vellum and furniture polish.

‘I’ll have a fire lighted,’ she said. ‘It’s quite cold. Then you can write your lecture up here in peace and quietness. But first we will find Miss Barrington and ask her about books on Dante.’

She rang the bell.

‘This is an admirable room, isn’t it?’ said Hubert.

‘Yes, but I’m a little afraid of it. The sight of so much learning makes me feel that my own knowledge is very meretricious. Don’t you agree that it ought to be rather void of furniture, like this? When I first came here it was quite full of chesterfields; Lady Clewer is very fond of them and in a room of this size she was really able to have as many as she wanted. But I insisted on moving them out. Oh, Kell! Will you light the fire, please? And will you ask Miss Barrington if she will be so good as to come here for a moment?’

Miss Barrington, when she came, was most helpful. There was a very fine edition of Dante, she said. Hubert’s face fell, and she hastened to add that there were several translations, including Carlyle. There were also Boccaccio’s Commentaries, Il Duca di Sermoneta, and several other heavy-looking tomes. The lecturer regarded them dubiously.

‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘My lecture is at six this evening. I haven’t got very long. And to tell you the truth, I’ve written absolutely nothing yet. I know nothing about the fellow, you see. Really nothing! You haven’t by any chance some quite small handbook which epitomizes the whole thing?’

Agatha had seated herself in a tall, straight-backed chair. She looked at him with severity.

‘Oh, no,’ she protested.

‘I’m afraid it will have to be.’

‘But not from you!’

‘The second-rate at second-hand? Dear lady, what else am I to do in the time? I put it to you! I didn’t ask to give this lecture, did I? The whole thing is abhorrent to me.’

‘I have a little book,’ suggested Miss Barrington doubtfully. ‘An Oxford Extension book. It’s called The Florentine and His Age. It’s about two hundred pages. Would that be any use?’

‘The very thing,’ cried Hubert in relief. ‘Will you lend it to me, Miss Barrington?’

‘I lent it to Kell, one of the housemaids, who is going to the lecture. She told me she knew nothing about Dante. Kell! Have you finished that book I lent you?’

Kell was on her knees lighting the fire. She now rose to her feet and approached them. She was a pretty girl with a round freckled face, apricot-coloured hair and tawny eyes. Her neck was as white as milk. She surveyed Miss Barrington with sedate respect.

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

‘Have you finished that book on Dante?’

‘Not quite, ma’am.’

‘Will you bring it here? Mr Ervine wants to look at it.’

If this demand surprised Kell she did not show it. She departed and Miss Barrington explained:

‘You see, Mr Ervine, all the Lyndon servants belong to the Reading Union. Lady Clewer likes it.’

This was a new aspect of Agatha and Hubert gaped. But she laughed and set him right:

‘Not me. John’s stepmother. She is down here so much that she supervises parish work and all that sort of thing. She really likes it and it’s a great relief to me, for I would hate it.’

‘Of course,’ said Miss Barrington, ‘all the maids cannot go to all the meetings. They take it in turns. This time it happened to be Kell who is going, so I lent her the book. She is a very intelligent girl.’

‘She is the friend of James’s youth that he was looking for yesterday,’ added Agatha. ‘I’d like to know what she thinks of Dante.’

Kell returned with the book, which she had neatly wrapped in a cover of brown paper. The fire was lighted and Hubert was left to himself.

The hall was full of Marian superintending the disposition of some flowers in pots. She was rather annoyed with a gardener, and was so occupied in scolding him that Agatha was able to carry on a significant conversation almost at her elbow.

‘Lois! Will you tie my veil for me?’

Lois, who had been reading the Tatler with a very disconsolate expression, came sulkily to her side and helped to dispose of the masses of grey tulle which were to protect her head in the landaulette.

‘I can’t think, Agatha, what you want to wear a veil in a closed car for.’

Agatha’s voice grew softer.

‘Poor Mr Ervine is in the library. I’m afraid he’s rather stuck in his lecture. He might like help … books and things. I wish you would look in some time this morning and see if he has all he wants.’

Lois bloomed once more. She had begun to think that he must have gone for a walk.

‘Oh, all right. I certainly will if you want me to.’

On these occasions one remembered with pleasure that Agatha was really the mistress of Lyndon.

Hubert listened to the departing landaulette with a hopeless heart. He had not written a word. He sat with his head buried in his hands while the rain beat a tattoo upon the window-pane. Presently Lois put her head timidly round the door.

‘How are you getting on?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Oh, dear! I am sorry!’ She came nearer. ‘Have you got all the books you want?’

‘Far too many. That’s the trouble.’

He pointed to the pile of library books on the table and waved the little atrocity in his hand.

‘If Miss Barrington hadn’t taken it upon herself to prime my audience with this little handbook, I could have copied out a chunk of it and given it as my lecture. But the third housemaid has heard it all already. She’d spot it if I tried.’

‘Would it be any easier if you dictated to me?’

Hubert thought that it would. He might manage to sparkle a little for her; her admiration for everything he said was rather stimulating. She seized a pad and a pen, expectantly. After a moment’s creative abstraction he began:

‘The advent of a great poet….’

He caught the eye of Voltaire.

‘Come away,’ it said. ‘You and your great poets!’

Hubert coughed and tried again in another vein.

‘“The man who has seen Hell!” That is what they called him, those thirteenth-century citizens of wherever it was (leave a blank space, we can look it up in a minute), as they watched that sinister figure shouldering its way through their crowded market-places. “The man who has seen Hell!” Not, mark you, the man who has seen Heaven, although the Divine Comedy includes a book called the Paradiso. Why is this? Why is it that in both contemporary and subsequent opinion the Inferno is incomparably the greatest book of the three? For us in these latter days it has, of course, lost something of its piquancy. We have forgotten what a Chronique Scandaleuse it was. But if a man of genius were to arise in our midst today and versify, say the eternal tortures of Manning and Gladstone, were he to limn for us a picture of Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, a second Paolo and Francesca, blown upon the gales of Hell, we might recapture the old thrill….’

He paused to draw breath and Lois diffidently protested: ‘I don’t know if this is quite what Mother wants. It’s for poor people, you know. I don’t think she wants anything amusing.’

‘Oh, all right. Tear it up.’

‘You don’t mind my saying so, do you?’

‘Oh, no. Indeed not. I’m most anxious to please your mother. You can have no idea how anxious.’

Lois flushed and fidgeted with the ring at the end of her pencil. Hubert began again:

‘Lasciate ogni speranza. …’

‘They won’t understand Italian. You must translate it.’

‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,’ said the lecturer peevishly, adding, a moment later, ‘no, don’t put it. I don’t think I will begin that way. I was going to say that this was the artist’s comment on the condition of the mind prior to creation. But I forget why.’

‘Really nobody very clever is coming,’ she assured him. ‘It’s a much simpler affair than you think. Why can’t you just say where he was born, and all that; and then say what he wrote. That is the sort of thing Mother wants.’

‘Dante,’ dictated Hubert…. ‘No … put Dante Alighieri … was born in … in … I say … was he born in Florence, or did he go there after he was born? Would you mind looking it up in that little book?’

Lois studied The Florentine and His Age.

‘It doesn’t put,’ she said at last.

‘Oh, Lord! What’s a book like that for, if it doesn’t give you the facts?’

‘That’s the gong for lunch.’

Hubert jumped up with alacrity.

‘Shall we go on after lunch?’ he said. ‘I may feel brighter after food.’

‘Of course we will,’ said the obliging Lois, ‘if you feel it’s any use to you.’

Marian’s face was greatly troubled when she joined them at lunch.

‘This rain is terrible,’ she complained. ‘It’s so awkward, Mr Ervine. They’ve just sent in to say that the big station car is out of order and can’t possibly be put right before Monday. It’s most tiresome. Because, of course, we all meant to drive to your lecture in it. The Village Room is quite two miles off, across the park, and if this rain goes on it will be much too wet to walk.’

‘It’s extraordinary how these things are always happening,’ said Lois. ‘We have four cars, and yet I do believe that we are more often held up for want of transport than many people who have only a motor bicycle and a sidecar.’

‘Well, you see, John and Thomas have the limousine, and Agatha the landaulette. There is the little two-seater, of course, which will take you down to the village, Mr Ervine. But I’m very much afraid that the rest of us will be deprived of hearing your lecture unless it clears up. I’m so sorry! But it’s really too wet to walk. I catch cold so easily, and so do the girls.’

‘Perhaps, as it’s such a bad day, I might postpone it,’ suggested Hubert hopefully.

‘Oh, no! Please don’t do that! All the folk from the village will be there, Mr Ervine. And they would be so disappointed; some of them have to walk several miles. Poor things! Their lives are so dull and it is such a treat for them! No, don’t put it off. Only it’s so disappointing for us. But perhaps you will read it to us later.’

‘Oh, no! I couldn’t inflict it on anybody twice.’

‘James will go, of course. Won’t you, James? He doesn’t mind the rain a scrap. And Miss Barrington. You mustn’t think that everyone from Lyndon is deserting you. And then Agatha will be dropping in on her way home.’

‘But will Miss Barrington walk?’ asked Hubert doubtfully. ‘Let me walk with you, Clewer, and Miss Barrington can go in the two-seater.’

‘Oh, but that’s quite unnecessary,’ protested Miss Barrington, casting a nervous glance at her employer. ‘I don’t mind the rain. I like a little turn in the fresh air.’

‘Yes, she likes it,’ asserted Marian, but was interrupted by a very tactless explosion of sneezing on the part of her secretary.

She waited in heavy patience until Miss Barrington had done.

‘I say! You have got a cold!’ observed Gerald.

‘Oh, no! Not at all. It’s nearly gone now.’

‘Do go in the car and let me walk!’ urged Hubert.

‘I think fresh air does a cold good,’ observed Marian judicially. ‘I always go out for a cold myself. And I have a few notes to be left in the village. I think Miss Barrington had better walk. Mr Blair, will you care to go? Lady Clewer would have room for you in the landaulette on the way home, I’m sure, so there would only be the walk one way.’

‘Yes, I’d like to come,’ agreed Gerald.

‘There, you see, Mr Ervine! Three people are going from Lyndon in spite of the rain. You mustn’t think we have all deserted you.’

‘Dolly Kell is going, so it’s four really,’ observed James.

‘Hush, James!’ remarked his stepmother mechanically.

A silence fell upon the lunchers while they devoured roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Hubert eyed Gerald.

‘You’d really better not come, Blair,’ he said. ‘You’ll be bored stiff, you know.’

‘But I want to come. I know nothing at all about Dante. I’ll hold an umbrella over Miss Barrington.’

Hubert sighed and wished the affair well over. But he could not quarrel with an occasion which was to secure him an afternoon alone with Lois. When they emerged from the library at tea-time the lecture was written and neatly fastened together with a paper clip.

4.

‘Sooner you than me,’ said Clara, the scullery-maid, as she peered out into the rain. ‘It’s a good thing your boots is thick.’

‘I’m glad to get the chance of a walk,’ said Dolly Kell. ‘I’m not afraid of a bit of rain.’

‘This isn’t a bit of rain; it’s a flood. It’s terrible. There won’t be many there, I shouldn’t think. I wouldn’t go, not if I was you, Dolly.’

‘Oh, I got to. Old Lady Clewer would see if I wasn’t there. She’s so sharp. Everyone from the house is going.’

‘Yes. I seen Mr James waiting by the yard gate.’ Clara popped her head out of the scullery window for a moment. ‘He’s there still. I wonder who he’s waiting for, don’t you?’

‘Not knowing, can’t say.’ Dolly was not deceived by Clara’s innocent curiosity. ‘I’ve got something better to wonder at. I’d get on with my vegetables if I was you.’

She buttoned up the last button of her mackintosh and moved down the passage.

‘Oh! Ain’t you going out through the yard?’

‘Never you mind what way I’m going out.’

A little side door at the end of the old schoolroom passage led into the shrubbery. Through this Dolly slipped, holding her skirts well away from the splashings of soaked bushes. As she picked her way into the avenue she was glad of the prudence which had prompted her to spend her last quarter’s wages on new boots and an umbrella instead of a summer costume. The drive was deep in puddles and the rain pattered everywhere. It fell in great splashes from the trees and dimpled the flowing gutters.

She thought with compunction of poor Mr James waiting in the downpour by the yard gate. Her evasion seemed to be a little heartless. It would have been kinder, after all, to have gone out by the yard. But then she must have rebuffed his offers of escort under the inquisitive eye of Clara, who would have seen it all from the scullery window. She had not the courage.

This affair of Mr James was very worrying to Dolly. It was worse than any of the ‘social puzzles’ in Home Words. She did not know how she ought to act. They had been, of course, playmates and equals, but that was a long time ago. On her return to Lyndon as third housemaid she knew that things ought to be very different. He was a young gentleman now, and it was her business to remind him of the fact should he show signs of forgetting it.

She had grown up in the creed that Mr James was ‘put upon.’ Her aunt, Mrs Job Kell, had never liked the second Lady Clewer and her interfering ways. The dislike was mutual, for Marian had been quick to divine the element of contempt which lay behind the old housekeeper’s civility. She had pensioned her off at the first opportunity, feeling that old retainers are sometimes better at a distance.

Their hottest battles had been fought over James. Mrs Kell, who had mothered him from birth, was enraged by Marian’s unfavourable comments on his person and intelligence.

‘Soft-headed,’ she would say to Dolly. ‘She’s soft-headed herself. You mark my words, if anything ails that boy it’s too much brains, not too little. Didn’t I rear him from a babby? I ought to know. He was always as sharp as they’re made. A regular old-fashioned child if ever there was one; ever so knowing. You remember him yourself. The funny little dear!’

Dolly remembered a sturdy, ugly child some months older than herself. A lonely, secretive boy he had been, but excellent company when he had got over his shyness. They had played endless, mysterious games in the gardens at Lyndon. They had kept house in the old brick potting shed, cooking elaborate meals in Dolly’s little saucepans and rearing a large family of dolls. With these, James, as a father, was allowed very little say though he sometimes took the stick to them when they got beyond petticoat government. The household reflected Clewer luxuries and the artless simplicity of the four-room cottage. Dolly, having despatched the children to school, would scrub out the ‘liberry’ and announce:

‘Now I’ll have a good cup of tea and a lay down.’

These memories made her feel very kindly towards him. She was a good-natured girl, in spite of her sharp tongue, and hated giving real pain. She soon perceived that she was wounding him deeply; he would stare at her, when she snubbed him, with a startled grief in his eyes. As she grew to know the household better, and saw the scorn and derision in which he was held, she became very sorry for him and longed to unbend to his wistful advances. But this would have been to carry on with a gentleman of the house, a lapse unpardonable. Of course, he was quite different from any other gentleman she had ever met; he always had been. She had once said as much to her aunt, whereupon Mrs Kell had become very mysterious and refused to discuss the subject. She said she didn’t know but what it mightn’t be accounted for.

The road across the park led through an iron gate into the wet village street. The postman, one of Dolly’s admirers, was clearing the box at the corner.

‘Hullo, Dolly!’ he greeted her cheerfully. ‘Rainwater’s good for the complexion, so they say.’

She passed him with her round chin in the air.

‘You’ll catch plenty of it in your mouth that way, if you’re thirsty,’ he called after her.

She stalked on, her head held so high that she failed to perceive the approach of the grocer’s young man and almost collided with him. The postman guffawed rudely in the distance, but young Mr Hopkins, nothing daunted, fell into step beside her.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Kell,’ he ventured. ‘It’s a wet day.’

‘It is,’ she agreed.

‘You going a walk?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s a wet day for a walk, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you’ll be going a walk after chapel, Sunday?’

‘I may and I mayn’t. What of it?’

‘I was wondering,’ he said diffidently, ‘if you’ve not fixed up with any other chap, that is …’

‘Oh, I haven’t fixed up with anybody, thanks. And I’m not going to. I’d sooner walk by myself.’

‘Really now….’

‘I would. Till I can find a man that can talk sense, thank you, Mr Hopkins. I haven’t seen one yet.’

‘If you’d only let me come along I wouldn’t talk at all. Would that please you?’

‘It wouldn’t. I said a man that could talk sense, not anybody dumb!’

He looked a little dashed, but toiled by her side until they reached the Village Institute. Dolly turned in at the gate.

‘You going in there?’ he said, gaping.

‘Oh, no, of course not,’ snapped Dolly. ‘I’m only going to climb trees in the garden.’

‘You’re very clever, aren’t you?’

He was beginning to get riled.

‘Well, what do you want to ask such a silly question for? Was I going in. Couldn’t you see I was?’

‘What’s taking you in, anyway?’

‘Haven’t you eyes? It’s wrote large enough.’ She pointed to a bill on the paling executed in Miss Barrington’s best poster writing. It said:

CLEWER VILLAGE INSTITUTE
June Session, 1914.
On Friday next, at 6 p.m.
Mr HUBERT ERVINE will lecture on:
‘DANTE, THE GREAT ITALIAN POET.’
Free to all.                   Come early.

‘Dant the Eyetalian Poit!’ read Mr Hopkins. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘Well, you are a Mr Ignorance and no mistake. You didn’t ought to say Dant, Duurty! That’s the proper way to say it.’

Thus Dolly, who had heard all about Dunty from Miss Barrington.

‘Well, but what d’you want to bother your head about him for? That’s what I want to know.’

‘Curiosity killed the cat. Good-bye, Mr Hopkins.’

Too much incensed to answer, he strode on and left her.

The Clewer Village Institute was a dreary place. A lending library of an instructive nature, carefully chosen by Marian, lined the walls. All the books were uniformly clad in drab holland covers. The baize table near the stove was littered with old newspapers of a strictly Tory nature and some pamphlets issued by the Primrose League. Two Union Jacks, draped between the windows, testified to the patriotism of the village of Lyndon.

As Dolly shook out her mackintosh she wondered anxiously how long James would wait in the rain. She trusted that he would soon give her up. It was so very wet and he had not got on his Burberry. She wished she could have made him put it on without sacrificing any of her hard-won aloofness. The room was empty, but this did not surprise her, for she knew she was early. With the patience of a well-disciplined nature she settled herself to tranquil inactivity on a bench at the very back of the room. Divested of her mackintosh she was revealed, supple and sturdy, in a navy coat and skirt of indifferent fit. Her best black hat, abob with cherries, hid the apricot meshes of her hair.

She was flushed with the routing of Mr Hopkins, though the suppression of followers was an art in which she was much practised. She had many, but she detested them all and was determined never to marry. Her young intelligence had been dreadfully haunted by the shadow of that maniac stepfather who had made life so frightful for her mother. It was a memory which still terrified her and distorted her ideas; the risks of marriage, its possible disasters, seemed to her insurmountable. Nor was it likely that she would meet a man who could inspire her to face these difficulties; strength and weakness alike antagonized her, since the one stirred her to revolt against possible domination and the other roused her ridicule. An affectionate, intuitive creature, built for womanly ends, she was likely to remain single.

The rain drummed on the roof and the large clock over the door ticked loudly. She began to grow nervous, wishing that somebody else would turn up. Suddenly she had a perfect horrible apprehension. Suppose that she were all the audience! It might well be. She would never have come herself, on such a nasty evening, if she had not been obliged. But it would be awkward if she were the only one. Of course there would be the party from ‘the house.’ But Dolly knew that it was for herself and her likes that this lecture was given. It was meant to elevate her. She did not mind being elevated along with other proletarians, but she barred the notion of enduring it quite by herself. If nobody from the village put in an appearance she would have to sit marooned on the benches designed for the commonalty. A semicircle of her betters, installed in arm-chairs behind the lecturer’s back, would confront her for at least an hour. Every time she looked up she would face a battery of aristocratic eyes. She was a brave girl, but she quailed at the idea. She would have withdrawn had she dared; but, with old Lady Clewer coming, flight was impossible. Old Lady Clewer saw everything, except perhaps the way Miss Cynthia was carrying on with that Sir Thomas. But then Miss Cynthia was very deep.

She strained her ears to catch the approach of the station car which would bring the family. It was surely time they arrived. The clatter of boots and a great scraping in the porch relieved her. She was, it seemed, to have at least one companion.

But her heart sank again when James appeared.

‘Hello, Dolly!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you couldn’t be coming. I waited by the back gate for you.’

Dolly grew pink.

‘I went out by the shrubberies, sir,’ she observed.

‘Well, why didn’t you tell me?’ he persisted. ‘I wanted to walk with you.’

‘I’m sure I’m very sorry, sir.’

‘But why didn’t you? Are you angry about anything? What is the matter with you? Why are you so different? Because if you are angry I wish you’d tell me why,’ he complained.

After all there was no great need to be shy of him, for she had known him all her life. Now that they were alone together she had much better speak plainly to him.

‘I’m not angry. It’s only this. Now we are grown up it’s quite different to being little. We can’t be friends like we used to be. Our stations in life is so different.’

‘I don’t mind about our stations in life.’

‘Ah, but I do. A girl like me can’t be friends with a gentleman without people thinking things.’

‘They always do,’ he argued. ‘It’s no use to worry about what people think. I never do. I used to. But when I saw that they’d really rather think wrong than right I gave it up.’

‘Yes. You can. But I can’t. I got my living to earn.’

He digested this and grew grave.

‘It’s very hard, that is,’ he said at last.

‘It can’t be helped,’ quoth Dolly. ‘We didn’t make the world. If we had, it would have been different, I daresay.’

‘It would,’ agreed James feelingly.

Dolly remembered with dismay that she had not called him ‘sir’ for at least two minutes. This was always happening to her. Also she was inclined to relapse, insensibly, from the refined grammar and diction with which she usually addressed her employers. It seemed more natural, somehow, to converse with him in the rough and ready speech of her own caste.

‘This sort of thing is maddening,’ he declared. ‘I like you better than anyone I know. I always have. I don’t suppose I shall ever find anyone I like better. It isn’t only the people here … I used to think that it would be different if I got away and went to Paris. But it wasn’t. Paris was all right for working in. I learnt a lot. But I felt just as out of it there as here. I never knew what to say to them. And they all laughed at me, like they do here. Even the ones who liked my work did.’

‘Well, you know, sir, you act a bit queer sometimes,’

‘I can’t help it. Do you see anything very serious the matter with me, Dolly?’

‘I don’t see there’s much wrong with you, I don’t. And Auntie doesn’t neither.’

‘But you are the only ones. And isn’t it hard …?’

‘Everyone has their troubles,’ interrupted Dolly.

‘I know. But why? I don’t want my station in life. Who gave it to me, anyway?’

‘Almighty God,’ she told him austerely.

‘Well, I suppose so,’ he assented.

She was overjoyed to hear at least two people in the porch, but wished that he would move from his pleading posture at her side. The newcomers turned out to be Mr Blair and Jimmy Pyewacket, the boy who weeded the garden. She was distressed to think that Mr Blair was a visitor at the house, but consoled herself with the reflection that he was a born gentleman and wouldn’t get thinking things, even if James’s attitude did look a little odd. This was a great compliment to Mr Blair, for Dolly’s standards were cruelly high, and very few of the Lyndon guests were allowed by her to be born gentlemen.

James, with the air of a man of the world, immediately effected an introduction.

‘Miss Kell, Mr Blair. But you ought to know her, for she brings your shaving water in the morning, doesn’t she?’

His triumphant glance told Dolly that he believed himself to have done exactly the right thing upon this occasion. Let her retract her statement that he acted a bit queer!

Mr Blair was looking a little puzzled and she set them right.

‘Not me, sir. Mr Peters waits on gentlemen staying in the house.’

‘That explains it,’ said Mr Blair. ‘I though you must have changed very much since this morning. Are we all the audience?’

Dolly looked round for Jimmy Pyewacket and saw him edging away towards the door. She made a dash at him and detained him.

‘Now then, young Jimmy! You don’t! Do stay, there’s a little love! I don’t want to have to sit on these benches all by myself.’

‘These gents’ll sit with you,’ said Jimmy, poised for flight.

‘No they won’t. They have to sit on the platform with the family.’

‘Shall we?’ exclaimed the gents, and Mr Blair added: ‘We won’t. We’d much rather sit on the benches. What’s the point of sitting behind the lecturer’s back?’

‘There won’t be any family,’ observed James. ‘We are all that’s coming. So we can sit where we like, I should think.’

‘Nobody coming!’ cried Dolly. ‘Not Lady Clewer nor Miss Lois?’

‘Not they. It’s raining and their car is out of order.’

Dolly cursed her fate. If she had only known this she would have absconded herself.

‘You mustn’t go, you know,’ went on Mr Blair, attacking Jimmy in his turn. ‘Think of the wretched lecturer! Four are better than three.’

‘It’s so cold,’ objected Jimmy, shivering at the damp odour of the place. ‘The stove ought to of been lighted.’

‘It’s laid,’ said James, inspecting it. ‘Shall I light it?’

‘Will you stay if we do?’ pleaded Mr Blair of Jimmy, who nodded graciously.

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t,’ Dolly encouraged them.

So they lit the stove and the four students of Dante gathered round the crackling sticks. Dolly could not digest the idea that no one else was coming from the house.

‘But isn’t Miss Barrington coming?’ she asked. ‘She always does.’

‘He,’ James indicated Mr Blair, ‘wouldn’t let her. She has a very sneezy cold. And when we were all in the hall after tea he told her to go to bed. You should have heard him, Dolly! It was like Mamma and God and a magistrate all at once. She went rather quickly!’

‘My most effective professional manner,’ murmured Mr Blair. ‘She wasn’t fit to be up at all.’

There was a great snorting and tooting outside as a little car bustled up to the gate. The lecturer, nervously grasping a roll of MS., sidled into the room. He glanced around, prepared for the beefy stare of innumerable rustics, all the simple village folk who would be so disappointed if he did not brighten their lives. He beheld empty benches. The group round the stove rose to receive him in sympathetic solemnity.

‘I’m afraid most of your audience has been frightened by the weather,’ observed Gerald Blair.

Jimmy Pyewacket said hopefully:

‘The rain’s stopping. P’raps some more will come.’

Hubert clutched at this.

‘Yes, they might,’ he said. ‘Shall we wait a bit in case they do?’

There was a pause and Dolly said encouragingly:

‘Just as you like, sir.’

So they all sat down again and the warming stove drew clouds of steam from their wet boots. A few minutes of uneasy silence passed. At last Hubert thought fit to ask Dolly if she liked poetry.

‘Some poetry I like,’ she said. ‘There was one piece I read. I saw it on the pictures first and it was beautiful. So I read the book. “Evangeline” it was called. All about the olden times.’

‘Ah … Longfellow!’

‘That’s right.’

‘You like his works, then?’

‘Yes, sir. I think it’s beautiful.’

‘And what,’ asked Hubert, ‘do you think of Dante?’

Dolly was nonplussed and said she didn’t know much about him.

‘But you read that little book … er … The Florentine and His Age?’

‘Pat and his Ape!’ muttered James, with such concentration of scorn that Dolly stifled a giggle.

‘I read a bit of it, sir,’ she replied.

‘And what did you make of it?’

‘It was a very nice book I’m sure,’ she said politely.

She had no wish to hear more of Dante. What she had read in The Florentine and His Age had been quite enough. The fellow was, apparently, a foreigner, an idolatrous Roman Catholic, a blasphemer and a bad husband. A shiftless creature, moreover, incapable of supporting himself and very rude about the steep stairs of the kind gentleman who patronized him. His picture in the frontispiece had not been pretty. And his poem, all about Hell, revolted her. Her stepfather, whose mania had a religious turn in it, had talked a good deal about Hell, with all the gusto of a cruel and perverted imagination. She thought the Florentine must have been a little like him.

A few minutes elapsed and nobody could think of anything further to say. At length another car was heard to arrive. Agatha, sumptuous in furs and veils, slipped noiselessly through the door as though desirous not to disturb a lecture which she imagined to be in full swing. She also looked at the empty benches with a surprised air and then at the people round the stove. Taking them in she became mirthful.

‘Now, Mr Ervine,’ she commanded, when she had heard the facts. ‘Tell the truth! You’d much rather not read that lecture at all, wouldn’t you?’

‘Much rather,’ said Hubert earnestly.

‘Well?’ she looked round her with a question in her eye. ‘What about it? Shall we let him off?’

Everyone fidgeted. At length someone mentioned the dowager.

‘We won’t tell,’ laughed the mistress of Lyndon. ‘Burn it, and we’ll all vow it was the best lecture we ever heard.’

With jubilant thankfulness Hubert thrust his lecture into the stove. He sent a benediction with it, however, for it had secured him an afternoon with his love. Agatha sat down in one of the most comfortable of the arm-chairs and stretched a silken ankle towards the blazing manuscript. ‘We must wait here for a bit,’ she said, ‘to give him time to deliver his lecture. What shall we do? I wish we could roast chestnuts.’

‘I got pea-nuts,’ volunteered Jimmy, producing a dirty paper bag.

‘What are pea-nuts?’ asked Lady Clewer, peering. ‘Can one roast them? Are they nice?’

Jimmy said that they were very nice and was commanded to superintend the roasting. Agatha looked round the room.

‘This is fun,’ she said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve enjoyed myself in this place. What shall we play at? Consequences? No!’ She glanced at Hubert. ‘It’s a risky game. Too risky. Shall we tell ghost stories?’

‘Ah! Ghost stories!’ said Hubert at once. ‘That reminds me of something I heard in Morocco….’

If ghost stories were to be told, he had better demonstrate how it should be done. He had a horror of the amateur narrator. As a matter of fact he was really rather good at it and enthralled them for half an hour with one startling anecdote after another. Jimmy’s eyes opened wider and wider and he edged closer to Dolly’s protecting skirts. And she, as the rainy dusk drew in, thought nervously of the lonely walk through the park. It would be very difficult to refuse James’s company.

At last Agatha decided that enough time had elapsed and they might return in safety. Jimmy scooted off into the twilight as though all the demons of Morocco were at his heels. The others paused uncertainly in the porch until Agatha declared that nobody must walk home in this rain. The little two-seater was nowhere in sight but she insisted that they could all pack somehow into the landaulette. Hubert was put in front with the chauffeur and the four others climbed in behind. The roof was too low for anyone to stand in comfort and the only way for them all to get in was for the men to sit with the ladies perched on their knees. Dolly would have preferred Mr Blair’s knee, but she was given to James. She vaguely understood why Mr Ervine had been put in front; he would not have supported this intimacy at all well. As it was, she felt that the barriers raised against James were sensibly weakened by this enforced proximity. The car, turning into the drive, swayed them all backwards and forwards so that she nearly fell off his knee. He put an arm about her to keep her steady. She looked at his hand as it lay in her lap. It was a broad, muscular hand, not over clean, and stained with paint; a working hand, like her own. Behind her shoulder, through the thin cloth of her coat, she could feel the strong beating of his heart. Consciously she checked an impulse of tenderness and comprehension. She tried to sit on his knee in a distant and respectful manner. Lady Clewer might think it very forward in her to allow him to put his arm round her waist. She glanced nervously at the others.

She need not have disturbed herself. Lady Clewer was secure in the arm of her cousin. She also was staring pensively at the hand of the man who held her. Dolly was struck for the first time by her employer’s youthfulness; not more than twenty-one, so they said. You’d never think it, she had such a stately way with her. But it wasn’t really very stately for a married lady to sit in the lap of a strange gentleman, cousin or no cousin. And she was looking as if she enjoyed it too.

Arrived at Lyndon, Dolly ran round to the back door and upstairs to change her dress. Later in the evening she was sent with a tray of invalid delicacies to Miss Barrington, whose cold was very much worse. In the sick-room she encountered the dowager, who was determined that her secretary should be competently nursed.

‘Well, Kell,’ said she, ‘and how did you enjoy the lecture?’

‘Very much indeed, thank you, my lady,’ replied Dolly, mindful of instructions.

‘And was Mr Ervine very interesting?’

‘Oh, very, my lady. We all got so scared.’

‘Scared?’ said Marian. ‘Scared?’

Dolly recollected herself and became very much confused.

‘The Idferdo!’ croaked Miss Barrington from the bed. ‘D’you bead that the descriptiod of the dabbed alarbed you, Kell?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Dolly, when she had identified the ‘dabbed.’

Being a truthful girl she blushed as she said it.