4

The Braxhall Frescoes

1.

Sir Thomas Bragge set his house upon a hill. It was built, regardless of expense, upon the most prominent site in all Berkshire. Its uncounted windows, flashing in the sun, were visible in every direction for many miles. Locally it was known as ‘Bragge’s Barracks.’

It marked, monumentally, the excessive prosperity of Sir Thomas during the war with Germany. His income had, in five too short years, increased tenfold, and his notion of a suitable house kept pace with it. He looked back now with contempt at the mere bungalow, the country cottage, which he had designed for himself in the spring of 1914, and was profoundly thankful that it had never been built. He could not have lived in it with dignity after he became a millionaire. When he thought of this escape it was to agree weightily with his mother-in-law’s theory that this terrible war had been sent to us for our good.

Upon another point he frequently found matter for self-congratulation. His house, if built before the war, might have been commandeered for public purposes. He would have been obliged, perhaps, to offer it as a hospital, since even financial success has its drawbacks. Public opinion, which he never flouted, might have driven him to such a display of patriotism, but he would have detested the depreciation of his property. Lyndon, so he understood, had suffered considerable damage. All the paint had been kicked off the kitchen wainscot, and the carved banisters at the head of the long gallery had been knocked to bits by careless men bringing down a coffin. At least, he had heard as much from Lady Bragge; he himself had visited the place but once during its transformation and had been sadly scandalized at its altered appearance. It had scarcely seemed to be the same house; so much of its indefinable, leisurely charm was gone with its decorative mistress. Devoted wholly to practical and unlovely ends, it had taken on a new aspect of bare austerity. He could not recognize it as the shrine of ease whence he had plucked his Cynthia.

His mother-in-law, brisk and competent in her red commandant’s uniform, had been, of course, in her element. He had no fault to find with her activities. But it had given him a disagreeable shock to discover pretty little Mrs Ervine, dishevelled and slightly perspiring, in the scullery. She was, he considered, a great deal too good looking and too gently nurtured for that kind of heavy work. He was sorry for Ervine, who would find his wife very much gone off when he came home on leave. It had been a great relief to him that his Cynthia had shown no aspirations towards the canteen or the operating theatre, but was content to organize Charity Matinees and make bandages twice a week in the most beautiful of veils. As for young Lady Clewer, he had nothing but applause for her promptitude in absconding from Lyndon. She was most wise to hand over the whole concern to his cousin Marian, for the duration of the war. The mere surrender of her house testified sufficiently to her public spirit, and it had been done with consummate tact, for Marian was born to be a commandant. And in London there had been plenty for Agatha to do. She had presided over countless committees, her beautiful eyes had wrought havoc for some months in the Intelligence Department of the War Office, and she had even worked in a canteen for a week or two. On the wings of Peace she had returned to Lyndon, and Sir Thomas could once more visit the place without shock to his sensibilities.

He could, with reason, call himself happy. The war, bereaving in some way the huge majority of his acquaintance, had brought nothing but blessings to him. His relations had all done their duty and were little the worse for it. John Clewer had contracted a strained heart, the result of gas poisoning, and his brother James had a permanently stiff leg, but that was really all. Not many families could be said to have escaped so lightly. The House of Bragge, unpolluted by the assaults of war, rose swiftly upon the conclusion of that Peace for which they had all worked so hard. It was the consecration and embodiment of the new order, and Sir Thomas loved every stone of it.

Braxhall, for so he had called it, stood at the head of a wide, well-wooded valley. Its gardens and pleasure-grounds extended down a steep hill for nearly half a mile, towards an excellent trout stream which wound through green fields. The house itself was finished with all the speed possible to a wealthy builder, but the setting, which had to be wrought out of the bare hillside, took some time in the making. Already, however, rustic bridges spanned the trout stream, rustic summer-houses dotted the bleakness of the slope, and geraniums flamed in stone vases along the numerous terraces. Wooden and iron pergolas marked the spots where Sir Thomas intended to have rose avenues; a paved formal garden with a fountain and orange trees in green tubs had been sunk in a sheltered spot to the west of the house, while the hill was crowned with a wonderful sparkling array of glass-houses.

The interior was not completely arranged when the proprietors first came into residence. The principal suites of rooms had been furnished, but the chief glory of Braxhall, an enormous banqueting hall, was not, as yet, in use. This was to be the family dining-room; upon a raised dais at the further end Sir Thomas and his lady intended to eat their lunches and their dinners. Its unusual largeness gave them no qualms; the pride of possession would enable them to hold their own against its proportions and the rich amplitude of its mural frescoes. Sir Thomas calculated that in another six months his house would be in perfect running order. In three years he could begin to take a pride in his garden, which now demanded so much from the eye of faith. In three years, therefore, he, who had already so far outspanned his goal, would have nothing left to wish for. Nothing save, perhaps, a doctor who would keep off the topic of strokes.

With his lovely wife upon his arm he was inspecting his domain one fine morning, absorbing at every pore the concrete pleasures of ownership. Cynthia was more languid in her appreciations, but she was probably enjoying herself or she would not have consented to come upon such a tour at all. They paused before the level flats, newly sown, which were to become croquet lawns and tennis courts.

‘Now, that’s a good bit of work!’ exulted Sir Thomas.

‘It’s very slow, isn’t it?’ observed his wife.

‘Slow! D’you call it slow? What! I’d like to see it done quicker. I’d-like-to-see-it. There’s not a man in England who’d have got that job through so quickly. But I’m not so bad at getting a thing done quickly when I want it. I said to Harvey I wanted the best man I could get. He said: “If you want the thing well done, Sir Thomas, Jacobs is your man. He’ll grow you a perfect lawn in half the time anybody else would, on this side the Atlantic,” he said. “Get him to do it and you’ll see the grass grow. Of course, he’ll cost you a pretty penny, but I take it, Sir Thomas, that you won’t mind that?” “No,” I said, “No! You’re right, Mr Harvey. I don’t mind. Get the thing done! Get a good man and damn the expense. But I must have something for my money. When I buy, I buy in the best market.” “Well,” he said …’

‘It looks very ugly now,’ interrupted Cynthia, who had heard this saga before.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Sir Thomas argued. ‘It’s a good bit of work, Cynthie. And a good bit of work is never ugly to my mind.’

This aesthetic flight was lost on Cynthia. She sighed:

‘Lyndon has spoilt me a little for lawns, I suppose.’

Though revelling daily and hourly in the countless things which Sir Thomas provided for her, she was obliged occasionally to bait him a little with reminders of those possessions which no money can buy. Sir Thomas, remembering the Lyndon turf, the fruit of several centuries of patient husbandry, grew a shade more purple.

‘Lawns aren’t everything,’ he contested, a little sulkily. ‘If I’d wanted nothing but a lawn I’d have bought that place, Aldstone Priory. But you said you didn’t like it. And you were quite right, I’m sure. By the time we’d put in central heating, and a few bathrooms, there wouldn’t have been a decent room in the house.’

‘I know,’ said Cynthia placatingly. ‘Let’s go and look at the peach house.’

This was a line in which Lyndon could not compete. There were no glass-houses upon any private property in Great Britain which could compare with those of Braxhall. After an exhaustive tour, Sir Thomas suggested that it must be fully lunch-time, but was reminded that they could not eat until Lois and her mother had arrived.

‘Well, I hope they’ll come soon,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’

They wandered round to the uppermost of the garden terraces, and looked down the valley. Upon the road, some three miles off, two cars were seen approaching. These, as they drew nearer, proved to be Braxhall belongings. The foremost, a pale blue limousine, was always sent to the station to meet visitors, while the other, if necessary, brought maids and luggage.

‘That’s them,’ observed Lady Bragge.

Sir Thomas cheered up.

‘Just time for us to have a cocktail before lunch,’ he said. ‘It takes seven minutes to climb the road hill.’

Cynthia nodded and they retired indoors for refreshment.

Ten minutes later the bustle of arrival filled the marble spaciousness of the entrance hall. Marian Clewer, active and handsome in her tussore silk dust-coat, paused in the great doorway, glancing about her with appreciation. She loved coming to see Cynthia and could never visit Braxhall without a sense that all her toil as a mother had not been wasted. Lois, who followed her, cast glances which were less complacent and more critical. With a thrill of inward repulsion she beheld Cynthia and Sir Thomas descending the shallow stairs side by side. They evoked in her mind a medley of exotic images: a magnolia and a peony … a satyr and a naiad … a silver moon and a rubicund sun. She could never see them together without an invasion of contrasting ideas.

They were very pleased to see Marian; her admiration for all their possessions endeared her to them. To Lois they were cordial, as befits kindred, but their geniality had a note of reserve in it. Despite their saving insensibility, they had perceived that Braxhall did not impress her as it should, and they distrusted her accordingly.

Marian kissed her younger daughter gravely and tenderly, and, in a lower voice than usual, asked dear Tom after his gout. Cynthia was immediately aware of something odd in her manner; a little of her customary elasticity was gone. There was a hint of forced cheerfulness, of inner trouble bravely endured.

‘Something’s upsetting Mother,’ she told Sir Thomas, when she had sent her guests upstairs. ‘Did you notice?’

‘No! I noticed nothing. She seemed quite cheerful, I thought.’

‘Not a bit of it! That’s her smiling-but-resigned face. I know it.’

‘I wonder!’ exclaimed Sir Thomas in alarm. ‘I wonder if she got rid of those rubber shares when I told her to. I do hope …’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think it’s anything like that,’ said Cynthia decidedly. ‘I can’t imagine Mother losing money!’

‘Well, I’m sure I hope not,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘You must try and get it out of her.’

‘Oh, she’ll cough it up fast enough. She’s just longing to, I expect. But she wants to prepare us first by this graveside sort of cheerfulness …’

‘Well, pump her at the first opportunity.’

When Marian and Lois reappeared they all took lunch in the panelled room used as a dining-room until the banquet hall should be ready.

‘I’m dying to see the frescoes,’ exclaimed Lois as she helped herself to stuffed olives. ‘Are they very lovely, Cynthia?’

Cynthia was silent for a few seconds. Then she said: ‘Well … I wouldn’t call them lovely myself. I think they are perfectly hideous.’

Sir Thomas looked unhappy, and protested:

‘Martineau saw the south wall when he was over here in the spring. And he said that they were the finest bit of work, of the kind, ever done in England.’

‘If only they stand the climate!’ observed Lois. ‘Hubert says …’

‘They’ll stand it all right,’ pronounced Sir Thomas. ‘You must remember this new central dry-heating I’ve put in. It’s guaranteed to remedy the defects of a damp climate. When you step into that hall, you step into the Sunny South. It might be Italy. If no mural frescoes ever stood the climate before, you’ve got to remember that there’s been no hall built exactly to suit them, like mine is. Of course, it’s cost me …’

‘If it’s never been done before, how do you know all this?’ asked Cynthia derisively.

‘Now, Cynthie! You know that when I once tried to explain the apparatus to you you went to sleep. You don’t want me to begin all over again?’

‘Mercy, no! I only mean that you’re trusting pretty much to the shop, or wherever it is you got it from, and they may be doing you.’

‘Oh, indeed! They’d be sharp customers if they could do that. No! I’ve been into the thing, I tell you, and …’

‘What is the subject?’ interrupted Marian.

‘The Rape of the Sabines,’ replied her daughter.

‘The …?’

‘The Rape of the Sabines.’

‘Oh, surely not?’ exclaimed Lois.

‘You’re making a mistake, Cynthie,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘It’s a Bacchanal. You’ve mixed it up with those tapestries we got.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Cynthia, ‘it’s all the same thing really. A lot of people prancing about with nothing on. I’m sure I wouldn’t know what it was meant for.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought a classical subject would suit James,’ said Lois. ‘What does he know about Bacchus?’

‘Well, I don’t want to criticize,’ said Marian, who liked nothing better. ‘And I do think it’s very nice of you and Tom, Cynthia dear, to give James this work. He must need it with all those little children. But I can’t help feeling it’s a pity, in your lovely dining-hall. I think you should have got somebody really first class.’

‘But, Mother,’ protested Lois, ‘you don’t understand. It’s not because they want to be nice to James that Tom and Cynthia are having the frescoes. At least …’—realizing the painful candour of her statement—‘of course, it’s very nice for him. But, really and truly, Hubert says there is no one to touch him in these large decorative pieces….’

‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ said Marian. ‘I don’t see what Hubert has to go upon. James never painted any frescoes anywhere before that I’ve heard of. Sherry, please!’

‘Ervine knows what he’s talking about,’ asserted Sir Thomas. ‘If he says James Clewer is the best man, I’m content to take it that he is. Where I’m not qualified to judge, I’m content to take the opinion of an expert.’

‘But Hubert used not to admire James’s work,’ argued Marian.

‘James has improved a lot lately,’ explained Lois. ‘Besides, all the canons of artistic taste have changed so much lately. It’s the war, you know,’ she added vaguely. ‘Hubert says his experiences in the army have influenced his ideas of art a lot. He says he feels he needs something much more dynamic than he did before the war.’

This sounded so impressive that everyone was silenced, and Marian concurred gravely with:

‘Of course, the war has changed us all very much.’

The Bragges and their guests, munching their turbot, reflected for a while upon the extent to which they had been changed by the war. Marian at length observed that even poor James was a good deal altered. Perhaps she meant that he was more dynamic, but she said:

‘He’s improved a lot in looks. They made him hold himself so much better in the army.’

James had joined the army with characteristic suddenness, while his relations were still very busy discussing some light form of war work which he could do. No feat of the imagination could transform him into a British officer, and yet, what else could he be? John and Hubert were already in training camps, and these deliberations had been carried on mainly by the Ladies of Lyndon. It was in the summer of 1914, before the rush for munition-making, and there really seemed nothing for it but to put him into the Red Cross as an orderly. Marian thought that he could carry stretchers, but Lois, who had got a First Aid Certificate and knew all about such things, maintained that he could not.

Finally there came Dolly’s letter to Agatha with the news that James had enlisted in the Wessex Fusiliers, along with several Kell cousins. While he was at the Front Dolly let her house and went to live with her aunt in Devonshire, so that Lyndon had seen very little of her. Lois caught sight of her, briefly, in London about eighteen months later. She was standing upon a pile of milk cans in Victoria Station, a child in her arms, waving good-bye to a trainful of shouting, cheering men. Lois learnt that James was in the train, returning after six days’ leave. She realized that she had seen the trio entering the station some minutes before, and, though finding their appearance vaguely familiar, had failed to identify them. There were so many families who looked like that. It struck her that the singularity of these relations of hers lay in their absolute ordinariness, their embodiment of a type. James, in his greatcoat and with his bulky kit on his back, was no longer conspicuously uncouth. He looked like every soldier who ever returned to battle, and Dolly, his wife, in her undemonstrative fortitude, was like all the women who saw their men go.

As she had nothing better to do, Lois took Dolly to a neighbouring tea-shop, where they ate tepid poached eggs and tried to be civil to each other. But they could not honestly feel that they had got very far. Young Henry, James’s son, did not interest Lois. He was rather plebeian looking, with scanty ginger hair; much too like all soldiers’ babies, she thought. There had been, subsequently, two others, a girl and a boy, also red-haired. Kell was evidently a dominant type.

When James was invalided out of the army with a permanently crippled leg, he returned with Dolly to their cottage in Oxfordshire, and began to paint harder than ever. Nobody paid much attention to him until the echoes of war had subsided a little. Then it appeared that he was being talked about. Hubert went to a small exhibition of his work in some obscure place or other, and came home much disturbed. Hubert and Lois began to speak a little carefully of James. Before long they had almost managed to forget that they had ever spoken otherwise.

Cynthia and Sir Thomas completed this renovation of the family attitude when they offered to James the work of decorating their banqueting hall. They did this upon Hubert’s recommendation. Having approved of the initial design they had departed for a long tour in the Riviera, leaving the artist to perform the work. He had lodged, in the greatest luxury, in the furnished part of Braxhall during the whole period, waited upon by an army of servants, and with permission to get down any number of models, if he wanted them, and quarter them upon Sir Thomas as long as he pleased. Even a car had been left for him.

The work was finished and James gone before the owners returned from the Continent. It was to celebrate the opening of the hall for practical uses that Lois and Marian had been invited to Braxhall. They were the first of a family house-party collected for the occasion. A great luncheon, to which half the County had been invited, was to take place the following Thursday, when the hall was to be used for the first time and the frescoes generally exhibited. Reflecting upon this party, Marian asked anxiously whether James was to be present.

‘No,’ said Cynthia. ‘He can’t come, or won’t come, I don’t know which, unless Dolly comes too. And Dolly can’t come without the baby, for a very pressing reason.’

Marian raised her eyebrows delicately.

‘How like Dolly!’ commented Lois.

‘I always did think her rather like a cow,’ said Cynthia.

‘Still, you know,’ said the hospitable owner of Braxhall, ‘they could all come if they liked.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Cynthia distastefully. ‘They look so like a family party at the Zoo.’

Lois agreed. It was more than possible that the guests on Thursday might find the frescoes a little hard to swallow. To meet the artist and family, as well, might amaze them beyond recovery. It was really better that James should lurk mysteriously in the background. Lois had already begun to talk a little romantically about him and to hint at a ‘Bohemian marriage.’ She did not state, in so many words, that Mrs James Clewer had been a very capable housemaid, but people gathered that she had been beneath her husband in station. It was supposed that she might have been a model or a chorus girl. Lois did not enlarge upon Dolly’s extreme respectability.

‘Then who else is coming to stay here?’ inquired Marian.

‘John and Agatha and Mrs Cocks come tonight.’

‘And, by the way,’ put in Sir Thomas, ‘I’ve invited that cousin of the Cocks’s, that doctor, what’s his name? … The shell-shock man … Blair! I met him yesterday, coming out of the club, and told him about the frescoes. He seemed interested; said he’d always been interested in James and his work. So I told him to come here, and he’s coming tomorrow, Cynthie. That’s all right, isn’t it? I told him that the longer he stops the better pleased we shall be. There’s plenty of room here, luckily.’

He paused, uneasily, for the three women had exchanged glances. They sat stubbornly silent, and he asked again:

‘That’s all right, isn’t it? A cousin of Agatha’s, and a good man at his job. Peterson was talking about him the other day. He says that there isn’t a man in Harley Street …’

‘Oh, yes, I daresay he’s an excellent doctor,’ said Cynthia coldly.

Marian irradiated discretion and changed the subject. But it would have been obvious to the veriest dolt that she had been touched in a tender spot. She began to inquire after the garden with a slight accentuation of the gently martyred air which she had displayed on entering the house. She was, obviously, hiding a wounded heart. Sir Thomas, baffled as only a man among discreet women can be baffled, raised an eyebrow at his wife. But Cynthia would not look at him. Inspired by his bad angel, he followed up his first blunder by another and a worse.

‘And how’s John been keeping these days?’ he asked. ‘Heart not giving him much trouble, I hope?’

This was, it appeared, a perfectly disastrous inquiry. Marian turned pale, Lois crimson, and even Cynthia left off crumbling her bread and coloured a little.

‘You ain’t still anxious about it?’ demanded Sir Thomas. ‘You should make him see a specialist, a really crack man….’

‘He has seen a specialist,’ said Marian with reproving dignity.

‘Yes,’ persisted Sir Thomas. ‘But has he seen a good one?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Because you ought to be careful what you are doing, you know. Can’t play fast and loose with that sort of thing. I heard of a chap the other day, young Baines, son of my friend Baines, up in Liverpool. He got gassed, just like John, suffered with his heart, and what’s more he died of it. These poison cases are no joke, let me tell you.’

Marian glanced appealingly at Cynthia as if demanding how much longer they were going to have to endure this sort of thing. Cynthia said:

‘Hush, Tom. We all know that,’

‘Well, the Baines’s didn’t. I mean they didn’t wake up to the seriousness of the thing until the poor chap collapsed. Of course, their doctor must have been grossly careless, but there it is. And you know, Marian, all these Talbots have rocky constitutions….’

‘Thank you,’ replied Marian, who had been sitting with compressed lips. ‘You need not instruct me as to John’s health. I happen to have brought him up.’

‘If you’ve finished your dessert,’ said Cynthia, ‘perhaps you’d like to come down to the hall and look at the dadoes … I mean the frescoes. I’ll have coffee brought there.’

They passed through the entrance hall and proceeded down a corridor paved in black and white marble and panelled by long looking-glasses. Folding doors upon the right led into the hall, and opposite them hung a large portrait of Lady Bragge. It had been painted very recently by a fashionable artist who could be trusted to do credit to Cynthia’s gown. She wore her pearls, with a voluminous wrap of rose-pink brocade, slipping off her milky shoulders, and she carried an ostrich fan.

As the guests passed through the doors into the hall, Sir Thomas dropped behind and whispered to his wife:

‘What was the matter at lunch? What did I say wrong, eh?’

Cynthia shrugged her shoulders and replied coldly:

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

She walked into the hall and left him to his perplexities.

They entered under a minstrels’ gallery, hung with purple velvet, and passed solemnly over the polished floor into the centre of the chamber. A row of windows in the north wall gave a fine view of the Berkshire Downs. Upon the wall opposite the frescoes unfolded themselves in three tremendous panels, so complex, so strangely glowing, so crowded with swift life, as to smite the perceptions with a sense of absolute shock. Behind the dais at the further end, where the banqueting table was set, a fourth and still more violent panel suffered slightly from the oblique light, but became clearer as they approached the dais step.

They all looked at the paintings for a very short time, and then hastily removed their eyes and concentrated their attention upon the furniture and fittings of the room. Even Lois had not the courage to study the Bacchanal for long. There was something in the piece which abashed her profoundly, but whether it was the incongruity of these shameless gods of an older world in so modern a shrine as Braxhall she could not tell. Anyhow, she was not equal to looking at them under the pained eye of her mother, and she decided to come again when she could be by herself.

The furniture was scanty. Upon the dais stood the table, its sable surface still innocent of the goblets and trophies which Sir Thomas meant to put there. High carved chairs with cushioned seats stood round it. But the rest of the hall was splendidly bare. Electric candelabra hung at intervals from the richly moulded ceiling, and the windows were draped, like the gallery, in purple velvet, blazoned with armorial devices in gold thread. This gave the place something of the solemnity of a ritualistic church in Lent. A gilded grating, about a foot high, skirted the base of the walls round the entire room: this was part of Sir Thomas’s dry-heating apparatus, whereby warm-air shafts were run up behind the walls on which the frescoes were painted.

‘We mean to keep it empty, like this,’ explained Cynthia. ‘The table on the dais will seat as many as we shall want in any ordinary way. We can put up trestle tables in the rest of the hall on special occasions like Thursday. But generally we shall keep the floor clear for dancing.’

‘We’ve a first-rate Victrola up in the minstrels’ gallery,’ added Sir Thomas.

Lois glanced up and saw the top of it just visible over the purple hangings. In the effort to stifle a sudden paroxysm of laughter, she moved to one of the long windows and looked out on Berkshire. Sir Thomas sighed, his eyes following her wistfully. He said with regret:

‘I wanted stained glass, but Clewer wouldn’t have it.’

‘We got a killing letter from Dolly when we were at Monte Carlo,’ said Cynthia. ‘She said she felt she ought to let us know that James was home again, because a man had come here to see about the windows. Whereupon James threw up the work and went home to Bramfield, saying he couldn’t paint frescoes in rooms with stained-glass windows.’

‘I’d half a mind to tell him he needn’t come back,’ observed Sir Thomas. ‘I wanted those windows. I’d an idea that I’d like a series, allegorical, you know, showing the advances science has made during the reign of Queen Victoria. Railroad, and telegraph, and photography, and so on. But, as he was obdurate, I had to give it up. I was determined to have the frescoes, so I had to let him have his way. Anyone can have stained glass.’

‘That wasn’t the only thing he was tiresome about,’ said Cynthia. ‘He would put that wall into three panels when we wanted two.’

‘Yes, we wanted two, with a plain division in between for Cynthia’s portrait to hang on – that picture that’s hanging outside the door. I had it specially painted to hang in this hall. But no! He wouldn’t hear of it! Said he wouldn’t leave any space for the portrait anywhere.’

‘It really might have been his house from the way he talked,’ continued Cynthia. ‘He had the portrait moved out of the corridor while he was here, so that he shouldn’t have to see it when he came in and out of the hall. He said something or other very violent about it … I forget what.’

‘Jealous! That’s what it was,’ chuckled Sir Thomas. ‘All these artists, y’know! They all hate each other like poison.’

‘It’s a great pity to have that lovely picture hanging outside in the dark corridor,’ said Marian regretfully. ‘But there isn’t room left for it here that I can see, not in a good light. He’s filled up every inch of space. But couldn’t you bring it in and put it on an easel, just at the corner of the dais? I think pictures look rather nice on easels like that. You could drape it or ornament it in some way.’

‘Oh, no, Mother! That would be quite impossible,’ expostulated Lois. ‘It would be absolutely out of keeping with the frescoes and the whole hall. It would look very foolish.’

‘Well, perhaps …’ said Marian. ‘But it seems a great pity. How stupid of James not to have left any room for it! That’s just the reason why it’s nice to employ relations, that you can ask them for those little accommodations which you wouldn’t demand of strangers.’

She glanced once more, disapprovingly, at the riotous walls, with revolt in her honest soul. She could not bear the frescoes; upon no panel could she rest her eyes without meeting something which made her feel uncomfortable. Nor was it the prevailing nudity which overset her, but a kind of elusive familiarity which pervaded all these fleeing nymphs and pursuing satyrs. They were very much more convincing than any Bacchantes she had ever encountered before and their orgy was therefore more embarrassing. They discomposed her as much as if they had been personal acquaintances.

Cynthia was faintly aware of this too, but it did not distress her. On the contrary she felt that the whole thing was rather daring, and, in her indolent way, she liked to be daring. She savoured in advance the faces of the County dames when asked to sit beneath these unhallowed walls. Though persistently disclaiming any interest in the paintings, she secretly found them diverting.

Sir Thomas was bewildered by a number of sensations, but clung with determination to the most gratifying. He had a unique dining-room. Already in his mind’s eye he saw Braxhall and its frescoes as one of the glories of England, a Mecca for American tourists. Of course, he thought the paintings very indecent, but he understood that this did not signify if the subject were classical. He had been similarly scandalized by Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus,’ when he first met it, and had lived to learn that there was nothing the matter with it. He was always seeing it in the most chaste interiors.

Lois was flustered. She contemplated these flaming manifestations of the mind of James, and admitted to herself, in a spasm of honesty, that she did not know what to make of them. She could not really tell whether they were good or bad until she had heard what Hubert had to say. Hubert had been away on a fishing holiday in Norway, and was not expected at Braxhall until the evening before the party.

The clock in the tower above the hall struck four and they were all amazed. Luncheon at Braxhall was always a lengthy meal, and today they had been late. In half an hour tea would be administered to them among the orchids in the drawing-room. For this occasion a change of dress was necessary and they all dispersed.

Later in the evening Sir Thomas sought his lady in her bower and testily began:

‘Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me what was the matter with your mother at lunch. You’ve been sitting with her long enough to find out, I should hope. Is there anything serious wrong with Clewer’s heart?’

Cynthia, who was rubbing orange stick on her nails, replied: ‘Yes. A good deal is wrong according to Mother. She seems to be quite upset about it. He may die at any moment, or something like that. Anyhow the specialist took a very gloomy view of him. But mind you don’t talk about it, for nobody is supposed to know.’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Sir Thomas in deep concern. ‘You don’t say so! Is it his heart?’

‘Yes, I think so. It leaks or does something. I’ve really forgotten what. But you’d better ask Mother, if you want to know. She’s bursting with details. I never can remember that sort of thing.’

‘But can nothing be done?’

‘Well, of course he ought to be taking great care of himself. Only she says he won’t. Can you reach me those little curved scissors on the end of the dressing-table? Only you must be careful not to show you know about it when he comes. He hates any fuss. He only told Mother in the deepest secrecy because he wanted her to help him put his affairs in order.’

‘Dear! Dear!’ murmured Sir Thomas, appalled by the practical bearings of this detail. ‘That sounds bad.’

‘I don’t know if it’s true, but Mother says that the specialist thinks he can’t last more than a few months in any case. But she’s apt to exaggerate. Of course, she went off and told everybody she could think of, by way of keeping it a secret. Lois and Hubert have heard all about it. But that’s neither here nor there. John mustn’t know that we know.’

‘Can’t last more than a few months!’ cried Sir Thomas. ‘Is that a certainty, Cynthie, or is it merely a scare? He looks ill, but not as ill as that. How much chance is there of his improving? Is it the effect of the gas poisoning?’

‘I really don’t know. You know what Mother is like; she’s very mysterious and won’t tell you anything until you’ve asked a lot of questions, and then she pours it all out. It always annoys me so much that I don’t ask.’

‘Well! Well! What specialist did he see?’

Cynthia reflected and then said:

‘Mother did tell me, but I’ve forgotten. She said he was a very good man.’

‘Perhaps it’s just a scare,’ said Sir Thomas hopefully.

‘It might be,’ replied his wife, without emotion. ‘You never know. But Mother seems to take it pretty seriously.’

‘You’re a cold-blooded little woman, Cynthie! You don’t seem a bit upset about it.’

‘I am very much upset. I think it’s most harrowing and all that.’

‘Rough on his wife,’ he continued after a pause. ‘How worried …’

Cynthia laughed.

‘She doesn’t know anything about it, my dear Tom.’

‘She doesn’t know?’

‘No, indeed. And she mustn’t be told, what’s more. John is quite determined about it. You should hear Mother on the subject! He says that nothing will induce him to trade on his wife’s pity.’

‘What the deuce does he mean by that?’

‘How should I know? Only … if they don’t get on well …’

‘Oh! Don’t they get on well?’

‘Mother seems to think they don’t. And, by the way, you have dropped a brick about asking that Mr Blair down here.’

‘Blair? Oh, yes! Now what’s the matter with him?’

‘You’re generally more up in the family gossip.’

‘Family gossip? What family gossip? Oh, there’s nothing in that old tale about him and Agatha, surely?’

‘I’m only going by what Mother says. I’ve not seen them together personally; at least, not for ages. So I can’t pretend to have an opinion. But she got the wind up that time in the middle of the war when he was back in town after he’d had pneumonia or something. She says that he and Agatha were never to be seen apart, and people began to think there was too much of it altogether, considering John was away, don’t you know.’

‘But nobody seriously suggested that there was anything in it, did they?’

‘Don’t ask me what people suggested. You know perfectly well what they’d be most likely to suggest. Anyhow, Mother was greatly relieved when he went off to the Balkans, and she says she’s noticed that they seemed to be avoiding each other when he came back. She thinks it’s a good thing and is very furious that he is coming down here.’

‘But … Cynthie … you don’t think …?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. I’m not in their confidence.’

‘But they are bound to meet sometimes,’ he argued. ‘And I should have thought this was as safe a place as any, with your mother and hers in charge, so to speak.’

‘Oh, I don’t object to his coming. It’s Mother who’s afraid he’ll break up the happy home. I’m sure I don’t mind one way or the other. Though he’ll be a boring guest. I never could see anything in him myself.’

Sir Thomas thought it out and then said decisively: ‘She’s got too much sense. She’ll never compromise herself. Not she!’

‘I’ve always thought her too good to be true,’ said Cynthia, ‘but I’m inclined to think she’ll manage her affairs quietly.’

‘Still, I don’t want any scandals, open or otherwise, in this house.’

‘You can’t help it very well, now he’s accepted your invitation. I expect it will be all right. I’m sure I hope so.’

‘I’m not surprised at him, not at all. Poor chap! He isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last, not by a long chalk. But she’s always been so uncommonly discreet. He’ll be the first …’

He paused. Cynthia said nothing but looked disagreeable. ‘How do you know?’ she inquired at last.

‘Oh, well, I should imagine so,’ he replied lamely.

2.

‘My dear, what a place!’ commented Mrs Cocks. ‘Did you ever see anything like it?’

She turned from her sitting-room window to a renewed contemplation of the magnificence within.

‘Yes,’ said Agatha. ‘It’s rather like the home of a rich man on the films. There is the same prevalence of orchids and little statuettes.’

‘I never go to the horrid things, so the comparison doesn’t strike me.’

‘You should see my lodging! John and I have a bridal suite, the grandest you ever saw. All done in lavender silk with great bunches of lilac and lilies of the valley. The bed in my room is as large as Dolly’s parlour at Bramfield. I’m sure it is. Louis Quatorze, so Cynthia tells me. They were spacious days. Four people could easily sleep in it without discommoding each other.’

‘They often did,’ said Mrs Cocks in an interested voice. ‘This notion that even two are something of a crowd is quite a modern idea. I was reading the life of Mdme de Montespan the other day and it struck me forcibly what much more sociable habits they had. You should read that book, Agatha; it would amuse you. Tell me, have you pictures of highland cattle in your sitting-room?’

‘No. We have a Greuze and two Brangwyns. The highland cattle are only temporary. The furniture shop supplies them with the suite and they are put up until Sir Thomas has collected some genuine works of art to replace them. Your rooms can’t be quite finished yet.’

‘Oh, I see! Well, I’m glad they begin with creature comforts. I can do very well with the cattle, and I appreciate all this luxury.’

‘Do you? It surfeits me. I shall return to Lyndon singing “Be it never so humble …”’

‘Ah! You care very much for Lyndon, don’t you?’ said Mrs Cocks quickly.

Lately she had felt in need of reassurance concerning her daughter’s happiness. She liked to hear Agatha speak of her possessions with an inflection of pride or joy. Agatha nodded an assent and stared out of the window, her fingers drumming restlessly on the sill. Mrs Cocks remarked with irritation that her hands were growing a little thin.

‘Yes,’ agreed Agatha. ‘My wedding ring has had to be made smaller.’

After a pause she added:

‘I do love Lyndon. Living in this house makes me realize how much I love it. When I’m at Lyndon I have a feeling sometimes that it doesn’t matter what follies we perpetrate because it will survive us. It was made by more sensible people than we are. And sensible people will live there again some day.’

‘Dolly and James, or their descendants, will live there some day,’ said Mrs Cocks significantly.

‘Well, they are the most sensible people I know,’ returned Agatha. ‘By the way, I’m going over to see them tomorrow.; I must say good-bye to them before I go to Scotland. Will you come?’

‘I positively must write letters the whole of tomorrow,’ said Mrs Cocks, shaking her head. ‘Otherwise I should love to see their household. I can’t picture it at all.’

‘Oh, it’s funny, but exactly what you would expect. Dolly has a girl in to help her with the Monday washing, and does all the rest of the housework herself. And there is an army hut in the garden, with glass panels in the roof, which James uses as a studio. Dolly tells me she’s only been inside it once in three months, and that was when she thought Henry had swallowed a button and wanted the doctor fetched in a hurry.’

‘But what does he do when he isn’t painting?’

‘Oh, he digs in the garden in the evening, in his shirt-sleeves, and he gets a bath on Saturday night, so I understand. And on Sunday he puts on his best suit and takes Dolly to chapel.’

‘Aren’t you touching it up a little, Agatha?’

‘Indeed I’m not. Come and see for yourself. And he never paints on Saturday afternoons, or Sundays, or bank holidays.’

‘Then the ménage is entirely run by Dolly?’

‘Absolutely. The house is Dolly’s house. He has accepted her ideas of domesticity en bloc. I gather that the only thing they ever fell out over was a dispute about a hat. She wanted him to go to chapel in a bowler, like any other Christian, and he flatly refused. He said a bowler hurt his head. They became very acrimonious about it until Dolly realized that no bowler on earth would fit so large a skull. So she got him a Trilby hat, which perches very oddly on the top of his head, and all was peace.’

‘But one would have thought that his artistic temperament must have rebelled in some way against this life. It’s so humdrum!’

‘It seems to suit him. They’ve got the usual little sitting-room with lace curtains, and an aspidistra and a horse-hair couch, and “The Soul’s Awakening,” and a plush tablecloth, and china children in gilt swings on the mantelpiece. I don’t think he regards them as ornaments at all. He simply sees the whole as an expression of Dolly. And, as he’s devoted to her, he doesn’t object to it.’

‘I don’t understand it.’

‘I do and I don’t. I can see how harassed he’d have been with a wife who had any pretensions to taste; who went in for peasant pottery and Russian linen and expected him to react. But still, I get puzzled. I haven’t looked properly at those frescoes in the hall yet, because Lois would keep talking about El Greco, and I had to attend to her. But when I think of them, and then think of James sitting in his parlour with such visions in his head, I just gasp! He must be so absolutely independent of externals. Accidental surroundings, I mean, like wall-papers. But I suppose that his upbringing partially explains it. Lyndon was so uncongenial to him that the whole of his essential character was developed in spite of his education and not because of it. His abnormal contra-suggestibility is the result of his attempts to protect himself.’

Mrs Cocks recognized an exotic word and knew at once where it had come from. She looked at her daughter long and critically. In that lovely person and countenance she perceived sufficient cause for uneasiness. A shade less beautiful than formerly did Agatha appear. There was a certain sharpening of feature: the eyes were shadowed. Something of the bloom had gone. Agatha had never, at any time, advertised happiness in her carriage. But she had been serene and now was untranquil. Sombre sometimes, and then feverishly animated, she had lost her poise. And she was growing thin. To her mother’s anxious heart these portents boded the premature decay of a youth which had bloomed too early.

‘Malt and cod-liver oil,’ she muttered from the depths of her reflection.

Agatha laughed, divining the chain of thought which led to such a remark.

‘What! In the middle of the summer? And at my age?’

‘Your age! It’s nothing. You’re a baby still. However, I don’t think this is a very healthy place, although it stands so high. It must be enervating or something, for nobody here looks well. John especially.’

Agatha’s face hardened.

‘John is quite well, I think,’ she observed.

‘Well, I’m glad you think so, for he doesn’t look it. But they all seem to be out of sorts. Cynthia blooms, of course, but poor old Sir Thomas is dreadfully melancholy at times. He struck me as being in very low spirits indeed at lunch today. Did you notice those enormous sighs he kept heaving? I was quite sorry for him. And as for Lois, she looks terribly pinched and haggard.’

‘I don’t think she has been very well just lately,’ observed Agatha with a sigh.

‘Hasn’t she? Well, and isn’t that very unusual with her? And Marian is the worst of the lot! What on earth is the matter with her? Why does she persist in looking as if she were bearing up only for our sakes?’

‘I don’t know at all. I think she’s annoyed about Gerald coming.’

‘Gerald? Gerald Blair? He’s not coming here, surely?’

‘Yes. He’s coming this evening in time for dinner, I believe.’

Mrs Cocks could not conceal her dismay.

‘What for?’ she said.

‘You’d better ask Sir Thomas. He asked him. To see the frescoes, I suppose. How long is it till tea? I think I’ll explore these woods a little. I feel stifled in this house….’

A few minutes later Mrs Cocks watched her running down the terraces into the valley. She crossed the stream by a wooden footbridge and paused long upon it, regarding the slow, innocent flowing of the water. Then she wandered on and was lost among the trees, walking with the listless impatience of a mind in conflict.

Mrs Cocks turned from the window and paced the room, possessed by many perfectly reasonable fears. Her anxiety was no longer to be stifled. She was convinced that she had already ignored these symptoms of nervous upheaval longer than was safe. She could not continue to tell herself that all this was merely the result of the war, of four years’ protracted strain. It might be true, but it was not to the point. As she watched that restless figure walking among the trees, she had realized fully that the issue now lay, not with causes, but with possible consequences.

Two days at Braxhall had been sufficient to show her that the young Clewers were at odds with one another and with life. It was obvious, moreover, that the trouble had been going on for some time and was working to a cumulative crisis. Agatha could scarcely speak to or of her husband save with a kind of suppressed exasperation, while John was uniformly morose. Under these conditions the advent of Gerald Blair must be regarded as an appalling catastrophe. Nothing could have been more unlucky.

Mrs Cocks had stoutly refused to listen to those veiled fears which Marian would have imparted to her two years ago, before Gerald removed himself to the Balkans. As Agatha’s mother she was bound to declare that there was nothing in it. But she knew in her heart that there was plenty of cause for alarm. No one could have been more deeply disturbed than she: no one had been more inclined to fear that these two were on the verge of loving each other again. She was forced, for her peace of mind, to look upon the affair as a proof of Agatha’s levity rather than as a symbol of constancy. Ignoring the possible effects of her own strategical error in sending him down to Lyndon in the spring before the war, she told herself that Agatha, in her husband’s absence, was finding entertainment in the revival of an old flame. Agatha was not, evidently, framed by nature to be a grass widow, but she would settle down when John came back.

John’s demobilization, however, had worked no miracles, And Mrs Cocks was beginning to gauge, for the first time, the strength of Gerald’s ‘upsetting ideas.’ He had really succeeded in imbuing Agatha, to a certain degree, with views which, for want of a better word, she was forced to call socialism. She had traced to his disturbing influence a volcanic notion which had seized Agatha in the spring of 1918. This had been the wish to do some very hard work. Agatha, whose war activities had always been of the lightest, insisted suddenly upon a twelve-hour day in a canteen, a phase which had lasted nearly three weeks and which had only ended with the inevitable physical collapse.

And now, as the mother paused, uncertain as to her wisest course, but determined that someone must be spoken to and something must be done, Marian Clewer knocked at her door and invaded her with that air of forced cheerfulness which was beginning to exasperate everyone in the house. Mrs Cocks purposely ignored it, a fatal mistake, for a very few sympathetic leads from her would have drawn from Marian the whole tale of her anxiety about John. And, as she herself said afterwards, of course, if she had known that …!

‘Well, Marian,’ she began brightly. ‘This is the first time I’ve really seen you since we arrived. What a magnificent place it is!’

Praise of Braxhall brought a real gleam of pleasure to Marian’s brow, as she seated herself a little heavily by the window. She looked round her with contentment.

‘It is a very lovely place, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It makes me very happy, every time I come here, to see Cynthia so comfortably settled. It’s a wonderful thing, Ellen, to feel that one’s daughters are absolutely happy in their marriages. Of course, it’s given to few.’

‘It is,’ agreed Ellen, scenting an attack. ‘By the way, how is Lois? I don’t think she’s looking quite up to the mark.’

Marian beamed triumphantly as she acquainted Mrs Cocks with the nature of Lois’s indisposition.

‘Of course, nobody knows of it yet,’ she said. ‘Lois and Hubert are quite delighted. And so am I. At our age there is a great satisfaction in being a grandmother, isn’t there?’

‘Of course, you don’t count James’s children,’ parried Mrs Cocks at once.

‘Well, no. A stepson isn’t quite the same thing. Besides … one’s daughters …’

‘If Cynthia ever has a family, there will be plenty of room for them in this house,’ observed Mrs Cocks, who knew very well that Cynthia would have nothing of the kind.

Marian ignored this thrust and continued:

‘I’m so especially glad for Lois because there is no doubt that she and Hubert do have their little differences.’

‘No doubt at all,’ said Mrs Cocks promptly.

‘Though, of course, they mean absolutely nothing. An ideally devoted couple! Still you know that sort of thing, trivial things in themselves, of course … in time are apt to become serious. And children smooth them out so. They take a young couple out of themselves. I was very sorry that Lois didn’t begin much sooner. I think it’s the greatest pity … however …’

‘When do you expect …?’ interrupted Mrs Cocks.

‘Next March.’

‘I’m very glad; especially when you are all so pleased.’

‘I have, I suppose, a great deal to be thankful for. Though of course I have troubles…. Still it would be terrible to feel that either of my daughters was unhappily married. I can imagine nothing more frightful for any mother. Where is Agatha, did you say?’

‘Gone for a walk, I believe.’

‘She does not look well. I was quite shocked when I saw her; really, I hardly like to say it, but she is losing her looks rather, poor girl.’

‘Oh, she needs a change. London gets stuffy. Scotland will set her up.’

‘Yes, yes! It will be a good thing to get her right away up to Scotland. Ellen, I’m most distressed that Mr Blair is coming here. Believe me, I knew nothing about the invitation until it was too late. I would certainly have stopped it if I could. But Tom, ignorant of the particular reasons against it, invited him without telling us.’

‘I don’t think you need worry about that. I don’t think I know of any particular reasons against it,’ replied Mrs Cocks stiffly.

‘Don’t you really?’ asked Marian. ‘Personally—of course I’m given to plain speaking—personally I think it’s the greatest pity Agatha should see much of him while she is in this unsettled state.’

‘I don’t think you need trouble about Agatha. It is quite natural that she should be very much attached to Gerald, though I know I have never succeeded in explaining this to you. They are cousins and were brought up together. Practically brother and sister.’

‘But there was never anything more? No engagement of any kind?’

‘There was certainly no serious engagement. There was the usual kind of boy and girl flirtation, perhaps. But you must know, with daughters of your own, how ephemeral such things are.’

‘I’m glad to say that I’ve had nothing of the kind to deal with in the case of my own daughters.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs Cocks. ‘Oh, well perhaps not. No!’

Her smile infuriated Marian, who added: ‘But then, they both have great natural discretion.’

‘So has Agatha,’ returned Mrs Cocks hotly. ‘But with anyone so attractive there are bound to be these little episodes. One gets to take them for granted. After all, Marian, even if he is still rather obviously épris, he isn’t the only one, is he?’

‘Perhaps not. But still I think it’s a pity he should be coming here just when poor John …’

She checked herself, but Mrs Cocks took her up:

‘Poor John! I don’t understand this “poor John” attitude which you have all adopted. You seem determined to make a martyr of him: to suggest that Agatha doesn’t treat him properly.’

‘Agatha makes no secret of the fact that she doesn’t care a rap for him.’

‘Has she said so to you?’

‘No! Of course not. But her manner to him …’

‘She has never been demonstrative in public. I should be sorry if she was.’

‘But it isn’t only in public.’

‘How do you know? Don’t you think that you are drawing upon your imagination?’

‘No, I’m not. She has been quite changed towards him ever since he was demobilized. She can hardly be called a wife at all.’

And Marian supplied details which, if true, left little doubt as to the gravity of the young couple’s estrangement.

‘How do you know all this?’ demanded Mrs Cocks. ‘You only can know from one source. John has obviously been complaining to you. If he does that, instead of managing his matrimonial affairs for himself, I can quite understand Agatha’s feelings.’

Marian began to be aware of her own rashness, for her statements had no positive foundation. They were based upon assumption only—inferences drawn from a few bitter remarks made by John when he was arranging with her for the disposition of his affairs. She began to think that she ought to go and see Cynthia about the table decorations for Thursday.

‘Then Agatha has said nothing to you?’ she parried feebly, as she got to her feet.

‘Agatha is too loyal,’ said Mrs Cocks grimly. ‘She would never complain of her husband.’

Marian, having eased her bosom of some of her furniture, departed. She left a sadly discomposed mother. Mrs Cocks was aghast, furious, and convinced that instant action was imperative. All her vague anxiety had been turned into indignation: she felt that John was unpardonable. Previously she had been inclined to pity him, though not very much. So great was her estimation of Agatha’s attractions that she could not really think of him but as an uncommonly lucky man—nearly as lucky as her own husband had been. Still it must have been a little trying to return from the Front to a lady in so irritable a temper. But this whining to his stepmother put him out of court. No high-handedness on Agatha’s part could justify it. He must be made to feel that wives are not kept thus.

Resolved to lose no time she set off at once in search of him and had the good fortune to locate him alone in the billiard-room. Closing the door firmly behind her and seating herself with decision, she opened fire:

‘Now, John! What’s all this trouble between you and Agatha?’

‘Why should you think that there is trouble between us?’ inquired John.

He stood stolidly before her, so still and unblinking that she began to wish he would fidget.

His question disconcerted her. She could not say: ‘Because your stepmother said so,’ without betraying Marian’s confidence. She was too loyal to her own sex to acquaint any man upon earth with the indiscretion of another woman. She replied:

‘Well, it’s obvious.’

‘I suppose it is,’ he said slowly. ‘But Agatha has said nothing to you herself?’

‘Nothing. I think she would think it disloyal.’

She hoped this indirect shaft would go home. But John was reflecting deeply with bent brows. At last he said:

‘Well, I haven’t an idea what the trouble is. Agatha is the only person who does know, I should think.’

His eyes were feverish and weary, and it struck her that he was a very bad colour. He certainly looked ill, but an aggrieved note in his voice hardened her heart against him. She saw quite clearly now that his calm assumption of possession must be shaken. He must be made to see that he stood in danger of losing Agatha altogether; and if the idea was unpleasant to him, it was no more than he deserved. Anger blinded her to the perils of the course she had chosen. She had really persuaded herself that a little jealousy would be very good for him—would wake him up to the fact that he had a wife worth fighting for.

‘Well of course,’ she began, ‘though she’s said nothing to me, I have formed my own opinions and I think I’d better tell you what they are. I feel that a great deal is at stake for you and Agatha just now; the whole happiness of your after lives perhaps. No! Don’t interrupt me, but listen! You must put up with a little plain speaking, my dear boy. I think you and Agatha have got to the critical phase when—how shall I put it?—the … the honeymoon stage of married life is over. The only strange thing is that it should have lasted so long. Very few couples, I should imagine, preserve their first ardour for eight years. But you’ve been exceptionally lucky.’

‘I don’t quite see what you are driving at. I haven’t changed. I love her as much as ever I did.’

‘Quite so! And you think that is a sufficiently good reason why she shouldn’t change either. That is so like a man! I believe you all regard a woman’s passion as something like electric light, to be switched on and off as you want it. Don’t you think that you’ve been taking her a little too much for granted? Because nothing, let me tell you, is more fatal where a woman of her temperament is concerned. I know, because she is very like me. You must never let her feel that you don’t regard her as a prize and a privilege. For goodness’ sake, sit down! It bothers me to see you standing like that.’

He fetched a chair and carefully sat down opposite her. She continued deliberately:

‘I expect you know that you won her from another man.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, hasn’t she told you? Funny girl! It’s quite true. There was a schoolroom attachment which gave me a good deal of uneasiness at one time. Of course, she forgot it all very comfortably when she met you. But I mention it now because I think you should realize, with a girl like Agatha, that these old flames are always just a little dangerous. Especially in a matrimonial cross-roads like that which you are facing now. Unless you can manage to keep your hold on her …’

‘I like this! You talk as if marriage has no obligations, Mrs Cocks. I’ve been a perfectly good husband to Agatha, and I’ll thank her …’

‘Technically, John, she’ll always be a perfectly good wife to you: you know that quite well. I’m not discussing her principles. But the heart, you see, cannot be bound. No person on earth can undertake to stay in love. If you want her to do that you must rely upon yourself and not upon the obligations of the marriage service. I’m saying all this because, as he is unfortunately coming here …’

‘He! Who?’

John’s face was grey.

‘Gerald Blair. That’s the man I’m talking about.’

‘Blair! Blair! What has he to do with all this?’

‘Nothing. Except that, as I say, you won her from him once. He is, I think, beginning to interest her slightly again. And I want to point out to you that it is probably your fault. You haven’t been taking sufficient pains to interest her yourself. When you marry a woman like Agatha you must live up to her. My dear boy, don’t go that colour! There’s nothing serious in this affair. D’you think I’d have spoken of it if there was? To you, of all people? No! I only regard it as a symptom that she feels you have been taking her too much for granted.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ he said, staring at her sombrely.

‘Oh, my good John! Nothing has been “going on.”’

‘Blair!’ he said again. ‘Blair!’

Mrs Cocks began to wonder if this were not altogether too much of a good thing.

‘You say they were engaged?’

‘Wanted to be engaged. It all blew over completely. Only lately …’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not lately. Longer ago than lately…. I’m beginning to see it now…. Yes, of course….’

‘There I’m sure you are wrong. It’s only since the war….’

‘No. It was before the war. There was that time he came down to Lyndon. I remember….’

‘You are making too much of it,’ began Mrs Cocks anxiously. ‘There could have been nothing then, I’m certain.’

‘She had a photograph….’

‘What photograph?’

‘Of herself and Blair. In a tin locket. Taken at a fair or something, she said.’

‘Oh, that fair! I remember! But she was hardly out of her cradle then. Only sixteen or thereabouts. I packed her off to school.’

‘She kept the photograph.’

‘Sentimental creature!’

‘She isn’t sentimental. I’d think nothing of it if she was.’

Mrs Cocks pulled herself together.

‘All this is nonsense, John. There could have been nothing that time before the war. She was on perfectly good terms with you, wasn’t she?’

‘She seemed to be.’

‘If I’d thought you were going to take it this way I would never have spoken. I thought you had more sense of proportion.’

‘I’ve been blind! … Blair! And that’s why, oh God damn it all, that’s why she’s always sneering at me for being too rich!’

‘Too rich?’ echoed Mrs Cocks blankly.

‘Yes, too rich. She’s got very socialist lately, don’t you notice?’

‘Well, she has said some very strange things. But I thought it was this house which had got on her nerves. I never could see that she objected specially to spending money on herself.’

‘Nor I. But I couldn’t remember where I’d heard these views before. I’ve got it now.’

‘Yes, he has strange ideas. And she has always been influenced by them to a certain extent. After he went to the Balkans, that time when they had been seeing a good deal of each other …’

‘What time?’

‘Oh, that time in the war, after he had had pneumonia. You remember, surely?’

‘I don’t. I was at the Front, unfortunately.’

In the ensuing pause Mrs Cocks began to grow desperate.

‘Well,’ said John, ‘when he went to the Balkans, what did she do?’

‘Oh, nothing. Only worked in a canteen: but I felt he put her up to it. It’s no use your looking like that, John. I merely wanted to show you the sort of thing that is liable to happen if you let Agatha get out of hand. If you insist upon taking it au grand sérieux you’ll simply make trouble. And, above all, try to remember that nothing is more likely to exasperate her than the idea that she is being discussed and criticized. Family criticism is a deadly thing.’

‘I agree with you.’

‘Make love to her, as you used to do, and she’ll forget all about him. In a year’s time you will laugh at all this.’

John did laugh, a little unpleasantly, and she began to feel that nothing she could say further would improve matters.

‘That was tea, that gong,’ she observed. ‘Are you coming?’

‘No. I think I’ll go fishing.’

‘John, you realize that if I thought there was the slightest danger of her caring seriously for Gerald I would never have spoken to you?’

‘Yes, I see that. I quite believe you think there’s nothing in it. But it’s opened my eyes to some things that have puzzled me. You can’t live with a woman, and be fond of her, and not know when she’s got something on her mind. It’s my belief that she’s loved that fellow all along. Except for a very short time when I swept her off her feet.’

‘I’m sure you are mistaken. And even if it were true, John, it’s no use putting it into words like that. It’s a great pity. She’s married to you and must make the best of it.’

‘She is and she must.’

He held the door open for her, and she gave up the attempt to reason with him. She was uneasy and almost sorry she had spoken. She had wished to bait him a little; to brace him up by suggesting that he had a rival. She had not supposed that he could be capable of any desperate jealousy; his self-confidence was too genuine for that. But she thought that a small attack upon his complacency would be good for him. He must be made to realize his own extreme good fortune in being ‘most damned in a fair woman.’ For Mrs Cocks held the views of a lady who is beautiful, gently nurtured, bred to claim homage as her due, heiress of all the achievements of civilization and profoundly ignorant of its basic brutalities.

A few phrases, caught as she crossed the ante-room, restored her belief in herself. Through the open door came the emphatic voice of Lois:

‘… and if it’s only half as pronounced as it was in London, two years ago, it’s enough to kill poor John outright.’

Lois and Cynthia fell suddenly silent at her entrance, and as she sipped her tea she felt that she had, on the whole, done very wisely. It was true that John had taken her words far more seriously than she had intended, but if the whole family were discussing the affair like this it was obvious that he must hear of it sooner or later, and she was glad that she had got in her say first. Braxhall, as she saw it, contained a good deal of inflammable material. She had little doubt of her daughter’s ultimate discretion and had genuinely persuaded herself that the affair was, for Agatha, a mild sentimental adventure. But she was deeply alarmed at the possibilities of family gossip in such a house.

Reviewing her three young people, as she grasped them, she thought that they should not be hard to manage. Here was John, aggrieved and resentful, his petulance continually inflamed by the ardent sympathy of his stepmother. Agatha was obviously more than a little bored and ready to grasp at an occasion for emotional entertainment. Gerald, she supposed, was like nothing so much as a fluttering moth, drifting helplessly back to his candle, despite the counsels of prudence. Altogether the situation, spiced by the malice and inaccuracy of the other ladies, had the makings of a very fine explosion. There would certainly be wigs on the green if a woman of tact and determination had not, by heaven’s grace, been upon the spot.

She was right, as far as she went, but she had the misfortune to gauge the emotions of her protagonists at far too low a point of intensity, misled by the understatements of modern speech. Disturbances which she beheld as embryonic had already reached the most sinister proportions; her trio were rushing together, doomed to inevitable impact. She knew nothing of the misgivings, the sense of inward betrayal, with which Gerald Blair had accepted Sir Thomas’s invitation. She could not guess his resolution, faithfully kept since his return from the Balkans, to see his cousin no more; or how that resolve had been overthrown by a chance report that Lady Clewer was looking miserably ill and unhappy, an idea which gave him such anguish that he was constrained at last to end it by coming to see for himself,

Likewise she underrated the effect of her bracing counsels upon her son-in-law who was, at that moment, lashing the trout stream in a mood which rang all the changes upon despair and fury. Of the three, indeed, Agatha was the least discomposed and the least deserving of compassion. She was still able to disguise to herself the nature of her own feelings. For her the mere prospect of seeing her cousin again, after a long separation, had so much of pleasure in it that she was able to postpone the thought of ultimate issues. She knew that he had avoided her since his return to England; she believed that she knew why. She had applauded his wisdom and grieved over its cruelty. Now that he had inexplicably changed his mind she was able to stifle apprehension in her gladness that he had done so. She walked about the woods until she was tired and then returned to Braxhall. Finding that the hour was still early, she lay down with a book upon a sofa near the window. There, half hidden in a haze of cigarette smoke, she was found by her husband on his return to the house.

John, during the interval by the river, had become an angry man. In the first shocked perception of the truth he had been too much stunned for emotion. He had stated the facts with a sorrowful calm, seeing them too clearly to be resentful. But this spasm of insight was short-lived. An accurate realization of any truth is generally followed by a mood of bitter rebellion against it, and in such a mood he sought his wife. She roused herself to greet him with that conscientious friendliness of tone, that manufactured interest in his affairs, which so deeply exasperated him.

‘Well, what have you been doing?’

‘Fishing.’

‘Did you catch anything?’

‘No.’

‘How tiresome for you,’ she murmured, and waited a moment.

As he did not seem to be inclined to talk she returned to her book. At the end of a couple of minutes, aware that he had not moved, she glanced up at him again. He was looking at her with some earnestness. She asked:

‘Did you want anything?’

‘No.’

‘Is anything the matter?’

‘No.’

‘Sure it isn’t the Scotch express?’

She referred to a difference of opinion which had occupied them earlier in the day, concerning the time and route of their journey North. She felt that she had been obstinate and was sorry for it. Half consciously she gave him that swift, upward smile with which she had been wont to reduce him. It reached him now, in his trouble, like a mirage, a hint of unsubstantial bliss. He was consumed by his need of her, by the impossible hope that she would love him again and help him to escape from all this grief and fury, the uneasy, insecure present, and the implacable menace of the future. He fell on his knees at her side and would have taken her in his arms, but she recoiled.

‘I only wanted to make it up,’ he pleaded almost humbly.

‘I know. You have only one way of making up our disagreements and I find it monotonous.’

The heavy fog of rancour, which had momentarily lifted, clouded his mind again. He turned from her and stood looking out of the window. It was as though he had met the full shock of his own doom for the first time—had received his first inkling of life’s impermanence. A man of sufficient courage and small imagination, he had taken the doctors’ verdict with equanimity. The thought of death was very disagreeable to him but it had no appalling significance. He had seen it often enough, and had faced it continually, as a matter of course, for four years. He did not wish to leave a world which he found very pleasant, but he was protected by that providential egoism which shields most normal people. He had no real conception of the universe going on without him. His agony at the thought of relinquishing his wife had been tempered by his inability to imagine her continued existence after his own dissolution.

But now the merciful veil was torn from his understanding and he was learning the vanity of all property. A sense of possession had informed his entire attitude towards his surroundings; his love for Agatha was permeated by it. And this sense was outraged by the realities forced upon him. He grasped his limitations, knew that he would lie forgotten, senseless clay, while she, the living woman now before him, would pass into the possession of another man. It was one thing to know that she might marry again; it was another to imagine her married to Blair. His spirit could not submit to such a possibility, and yet he knew that he was helpless.

A car was climbing the long hill, and the sound of its approach floated distinctly through the open window. Agatha heard it and was transformed, glowing warmly, for she knew that it brought her cousin. It was an instant’s self-betrayal, but it revealed her to John, who had turned sharply and marked the fleeting radiance. He left her immediately, unable to trust himself in speech.

She dressed for dinner hastily and went down to the marble corridor leading to the hall. Gerald was there and she watched him for a moment unperceived, as she stood at the turn of the stairs. He looked very uneasy, as though he had arrived by mistake into this sanctuary of the sleek, the idle and the luxurious. His bearing was that of a stranger in a strange land, and he was having a look at Cynthia’s portrait with a public gallery expression on his face.

She decided that she would take him with her to see Dolly and James. He would like their household. It would be nice to take someone there who found it as admirable as she did. In another second she would call to him, and see him start, and turn and smile at her.

‘Did you arrive in your evening clothes?’ she said.

He did not start as much as she had expected, having braced himself for this encounter so tremendously that nothing could quite take him by surprise. But he was a little pallid as he came towards her.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. But I changed in record time. I thought it was later than it is.’

They sat down together on a carved settle and plunged into the instant, eager conversation of their youth. She tried to describe to him the frescoes in the hall. The effort overset them both and their mirth, floating upwards, greeted the other inmates of Braxhall as they descended the stairs in procession.

3.

She took him over to Bramfield the next day. Dolly heard the car turn into the lane and was at the gate to welcome them. She was not much changed since the days of her Clewer servitude. Her figure was broader, perhaps, but her hair still shone with its old flame and her freckled face was comelier than ever. Henry and little Agatha clung to her skirts, while in her arms she held Jimmy, her youngest.

‘Well, Agatha,’ she cried, as she kissed her sister-in-law, ‘you are a stranger! I thought you were never coming to see us again. But you’ve been busy, I expect. Sonny! Kiss your Auntie, you bad boy! It’s funny how he hates it: thinks he’s too old. How do you do, Mr Blair? I’m very pleased to see you. You will be staying at Braxhall, I suppose?’

‘I was wondering if you’d remember me,’ said Gerald as he shook hands.

‘I should think I did,’ Dolly assured him. ‘You came to that lecture Mr Ervine didn’t give, in the Lyndon Reading Room. I remember. Shake hands with Mr Blair, children.’

She took them up the garden path, pausing to allow them to admire the lilies and hollyhocks in the small beds.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘they are a sight. We got second prize at Bramfield show last year, in the cottage garden competition. I always said we might of got first, if James hadn’t spent so much time on the vegetable marrows. He was quite gone on them, and couldn’t attend to nothing else.’

‘And they didn’t count?’

‘Not as flowers, they didn’t. They are vegetables, you see, Mr Blair. We had one was the biggest in three parishes. I told James about a young fellow I knew that grew a prize marrow and carved a verse of a hymn on the rind. “God moves in a mysterious way,” it said. And when the marrow grew, it grew. James would have it that he must put something on ours. So he drew out a picture; Jonah sitting under a gourd, like in the Bible. But as the marrow got bigger it went sort of crooked, and spoilt it. He was vexed about it.’

‘How is he?’ asked Agatha.

‘Very well, thank you. Though his leg pains him now and again. He’s apt to get rheumatism into it. He’s working now, so I won’t call him, if you don’t mind. But he’ll be in for tea and he’ll be ever so glad you’ve come. If I’d known, Agatha, I’d have made drop scones. And I’d have put Sissy into that frock you sent her. I do think it’s lovely. I don’t know wherever you got that nice embroidery. I never saw anything like it before.’

‘I got it at the Russian shop in the Brompton Road.’

‘Oh, Russia! I expect they do lovely work there. But tell me, do you think it’s all true what it says in the papers about these Russians?’

‘It can’t all be true,’ began Gerald at once.

‘That’s what I say. It sounds awful! James read me a bit out of John Bull last Sunday that said there wasn’t a house left standing, not a man, woman nor child left living, where the Red Armies had been. And then we read some more in the Daily Herald, only this time it was about the White Army. And James said: “Well, but isn’t that the other side?” And I told him you can’t believe everything you see in the papers.’

‘It’s very difficult,’ agreed Agatha thoughtfully. ‘It’s broadminded of you, Dolly, to take John Bull and the Daily Herald. We only take The Times.’

‘Well, we don’t get time to read the paper every day. But we do a bit on Sunday. Come into the parlour, won’t you? I do believe you’ve not been here, Agatha, since we bought the gramophone.’

‘No, I haven’t. Dolly, how exciting! What did you do that for?’

‘James got it for my birthday. That is it.’

‘But it’s a beauty! These cabinet ones are so much the nicest.’

‘It’s second-hand,’ said Dolly. ‘We couldn’t have got such a good one new. But James got this off a friend that was short of money and wanted to get rid of it. It’s as good as new.’

Agatha felt vaguely surprised at the idea of James having a friend. But, when she thought it over, she could see no reason why he shouldn’t.

‘Those cheap ones,’ continued Dolly, ‘well, they wouldn’t do at all. We didn’t like all that sort of scraping they made; you can’t seem to hear the music. But this is just what we wanted. I’d play it to you now, only James isn’t here. I expect he’ll turn it on after tea.’

‘Oh, I do hope he will. What records have you got?’

‘Not many yet. We haven’t had it so very long. We’ve got a lot out of the “Messiah.” That’s my favourite piece. I sung in it once in our chapel choir at home. It’s grand! But I expect you’ve heard it often. Then we’ve got a thing, I think it’s called “Chaconne,” that James likes. He heard it in Paris. And we have some comics for the children. And I got “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ when I was over in Oxford once. I think it’s a very pretty song, but James regularly has his knife into it and broke it by accident. At least, he said it was. Sissy, lovey, just look into the kitchen and see if the kettle’s boiling!’

Dolly spread an elaborately embroidered linen cloth, with a crochet border, over the plush table cover and fetched out the Spode tea-things which she had inherited from her grandmother. Sissy and Sonny were invested with bibs and mouthed their grace with some promptings.

‘You’ll have eggs with your teas,’ pursued the hostess, ‘after this long drive? James always gets eggs when he’s been working all afternoon. Oh, yes, you must! How many would you like? Mr Blair could do with two, surely?’

She was very much put out at their refusal, but relented when they described to her the meal which they would have to eat on returning to Braxhall.

‘Not really?’ she exclaimed. ‘Then I don’t wonder you won’t eat much tea. And I expect you ate enough lunch to feed a poor family for a week, didn’t you? But …! D’you mean to say they eat all that?’

‘Eating’s nothing,’ said Gerald. ‘You should see what they drink!’

‘Oh, it is wasteful! I do think it’s shocking! Now at Lyndon sometimes I used to be surprised at all the food that got eat up in the dining-room. But that wasn’t nothing to this; and it was before the war too. But these new gentlemen, like Sir Thomas, they don’t seem to mind what they do. I don’t like all that waste. I wonder now how much butcher’s meat goes into the housekeeper’s room?’

Agatha was unable to enlighten her on this point and a moment later she laughed at herself for the question.

‘It was a silly thing to ask, for I don’t believe, Agatha, that you know that much about your own house.’

Gerald was intrigued by the manner of the two women towards each other. It was not quite what he had expected. He had gathered that the family thought Agatha too friendly with Dolly. But he had never been able to imagine them on terms of perfect familiarity. He had always pictured Agatha as the more assured of the two, smoothing, in her tactful way, the small difficulties of intercourse. He saw now, however, that Dolly dominated the alliance. He perceived in her manner, moreover, a hint of mocking tenderness, a very guarded gesture of compassion. It was possible to believe that she pitied Agatha for some reason, and it occurred to him that she would not readily sympathize with purely imaginary ills. He wondered if Agatha had confided to her simple bosom some of the hidden disquiet of which he was now so poignantly aware. He hoped that this was so. She could not have a better confidante. Since he himself could not inquire into the trouble, since it would be dangerous for him to try, he was glad that she had Dolly. But he would have thought that the spectacle of so much conjugal serenity, such maternal complacence, must be torture to a woman like Agatha, tardily reaping the bitter fruits of her mistaken marriage. Her fortitude in enduring it indicated a generosity of temper which rejoiced his loving heart.

The voice of James could be heard halloing through the house for his tea. His wife called to him:

‘It’s here! We’ve got company.’ To the guests she explained: ‘We generally get it in the kitchen when we are alone.’

The master of the house joined them. He was paler and a good deal fatter than of old, and he walked with a decided limp. His large face creased into joyful smiles when he saw his sister-in-law, and he greeted her affectionately.

‘You remember Mr Blair, James?’ prompted Dolly.

‘Of course I do. You are Agatha’s friend, aren’t you? It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, though. Where have you come from?’

‘I’m staying at Braxhall,’ said Gerald.

James looked very much surprised.

‘What for?’ he demanded.

‘He has come down for the fresco lunch,’ explained Agatha. ‘And I want to know why you aren’t all coming. You certainly should, you know.’

A peculiar expression eclipsed the candid sweetness of James’s smile. For a second he looked positively venomous, Then he became merely sulky.

‘I’m never going near that place again,’ he averred.

‘But I thought the frescoes looked very nice,’ persisted Agatha.

He regarded her closely and in some astonishment.

‘Have you seen them?’ he asked.

‘Well, I’ve only had one little peep. I haven’t looked at them properly yet.’

‘No?’ said James.

Then he turned to Gerald and demanded:

‘You seen ’em?’

‘Not yet.’

James assented as though he had been quite sure of the answer. Dolly, meanwhile, had been looking uneasy and now introduced a change of subject:

‘They’ve been looking at the gramophone, but we haven’t played it yet. Henry! Don’t get putting your fingers in the jam! Now, if you do it again you’ll get a good smack.’

James’s face cleared instantly.

‘Oh, have you? Wouldn’t you like to hear it? Shall I play it to you now?’

He put on a record of Mdme Clara Butt singing ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ to which they all listened reverently while they ate their bread and radishes. Upon the faces of Dolly and James was written a complete, uncritical joy in their new possession. It was obvious that they loved an excuse for playing their gramophone.

‘It’s almost as good as real, isn’t it?’ said Dolly.

Even Gerald, who hated gramophones, had to admit that this was the least offensive that he had ever heard.

‘Now we’ll have the “Chaconne,”’ breathed James.

He had stopped smiling and a slight quiver ran all through his large body. The others fell silent and in the hush of the small room Agatha felt an instant’s pang of unreasoned fear of him. He fetched the record and put it into place with the soft, mysterious gestures of a priest at the altar.

Dolly and Agatha listened with the religious expression of women who are making a genuine effort of intelligence. Dolly plaited her cotton skirt into creased folds between a work-stained thumb and finger. Agatha sat very still. Everything in the little parlour was like a dream, unsubstantial as the thick yellow splashes of sunlight which dappled the geraniums in the window and fell in sleepy pools on the carpet. In the middle of its warm illusion the motionless solidity of James seemed to melt, his brooding impassivity to shiver and break, until the vibrant air was alive with his thoughts. As for Gerald, he was a thin flame burning somewhere in the shadows of the room.

When the concert was over James was instructed to take Mr Blair out to the bench by the porch for a smoke. Dolly and Agatha retired upstairs to the privacy of the conjugal bedroom, where Jimmy got his tea and Agatha powdered her nose. The two women lingered some time, discussing the technical side of the child’s arrival.

‘I was laid up longer than the other two times,’ said Dolly. ‘I wasn’t back to work not inside three weeks. I don’t know what Auntie wouldn’t have said to me. She’s always on to me for turning into a lady. Mrs Hickman, the woman that came in to do for me, was a low sort of person. The dirt! You’d be surprised; just in that little time! “Well,” I said, when I came down, “the first thing I do is to have a good clean round.” I was glad James was away at Braxhall most of the time doing those frescoes. It would have been very uncomfortable for him, not getting his meals nice like he’s used to.’

‘Have you seen the frescoes, Dolly?’

‘No, I haven’t! Not yet! And between you and I, Agatha, I’m worried about them. He’s been so funny. To begin with he was quite all right, just like he always is over his things, you know. Quite taken up with them. But then Sir Thomas kept writing and going on at him, saying they wanted stained-glass windows, and this and the other, and I don’t know what all. Until he got quite disgusted. And I got afraid, really I did! For you know he’s dreadful when he does lose his temper, which isn’t often, thank goodness!’

‘I rather gathered that the Bragges had been a little trying.’

‘That’s right. And it isn’t only this. That Cynthia, you know, well I suppose I shouldn’t talk back at her as she’s James’s sister, but first and last she’s been very nasty to us. Very nasty she’s been, just in little ways. But she was never kind to James: he hasn’t told me the half, I’m sure, but he remembers it all. He remembers too much, as I often tell him. Because most of it happened when they was only children, and I don’t like holding things up against people. It’s not Christian. Quiet now, Jimmy, you greedy boy! You’ve had quite enough for one while.’

‘Let me have him for a bit.’

Agatha took the child while Dolly buttoned up her frock and put a few pins into her hair. The room was very small and almost filled by the double bed and the baby’s cradle squeezed against the wall. James’s Sunday clothes, newly brushed, hung over the foot-rail of the bed, and Dolly now folded them neatly and put them away in the bottom drawer of a little wardrobe. Agatha tried to imagine herself and John submitting to the enforced propinquities of such a marriage chamber and felt dismayed at the idea. It showed her how slender was the bond between them. Their union would have been quite unendurable if they had been forced to live as Dolly and James lived, as the majority of the human race have to live, without the means for privacy.

Her mood of the moment was such that she was inclined to view her own advantages over Dolly in the light of a calamity. She envied a simplicity of existence which, at another time, might have struck her as wanting in refinement. Seeing all things from her cousin’s standpoint, and exaggerating, if possible, his distrust of those civilized amenities which depend upon a large income, she found the Bramfield household an admirable institution. She saw in the undecorated austerity before her a symbol of that marriage which endures against accident, against shock and change, because illusion has no part in its foundation. Such a companionship she had once desired for herself: she believed that it would mitigate the unbearable solitude of her spirit. But she and John could never compass it. She had forfeited such hopes for ever and ever when she became his wife.

‘Do you know that a million married people are now living apart?’ she asked Dolly suddenly.

‘What’s that?’

‘A million married people are at this moment living apart in England alone. And, dear knows how many more don’t want to.’

‘Well, I never!’ Dolly was shocked. ‘Is that really true? Isn’t it awful? The papers is full of these divorces nowadays.’

‘What’s the cause of it all, do you think? Why are there so many more unhappy marriages than there used to be?’

‘I don’t think there are any more than there used to be, I don’t. Only people won’t put up with things, not like they used to. It’s the same all round. Look at the way people used to have to work before there was any Unions. Twelve hours a day, even for little children! It was awful! Auntie used to tell me about when her mother was a young woman, away up in Leeds; and you couldn’t believe that such things could have happened. People must have taken things a sight more quietly than they do now.’

‘Then you think there were always unhappy marriages, but people didn’t rebel against them.’

‘Yes, I think so. My mother! When I think of what she had to bear! No woman wouldn’t stand it nowadays.’

‘But isn’t it a good thing, don’t you think? Why should people endure misery if they can escape from it? When a person rebels, it’s progress really.’

‘Well, I don’t know, Agatha. I see what you mean and I’m sure you are right in a way. Only I get thinking sometimes…. It seems a pity…. Sort of like this. The way we go on now, people act silly and then find out new ways so as not to suffer for it. They don’t study not to be silly. That isn’t going to make the world any better, not in the long run.’

‘But is anything likely to make the world better in the long run?’

‘Godly living will,’ said Dolly firmly, ‘and nothing will do instead of that, not if it’s ever so.’

‘Oh, Dolly! But what is godly living?’

‘I should have thought you’d know that as well as I do. It’s obeying what our conscience tells us.’

‘But if you’ve made a mistake so that you can’t … you can’t … if you have got yourself all into the wrong atmosphere…. What I mean is, you can’t be godly or anything else genuine if you are absolutely out of harmony with your life. Listen! Suppose a woman was married to a man who wasn’t unkind or unfaithful or anything, but she just found she didn’t love him, and felt that her life with him was absolutely at variance with her conscience … and … and there was another man … whom she ought to have married, who had the same ideals, with whom she could lead a better life? Which do you think she ought to do, stay with her husband, or go to this other man?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Dolly, looking embarrassed. ‘How d’you mean, lead a better life?’

‘Well, if the other man had … say, a religion that she believed in and that her husband couldn’t ever, ever understand. After all, it says in the Bible “leave all and follow Me.” I don’t want to be blasphemous, but couldn’t it be a sort of … call?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure. I never heard of anyone getting a call that way, though I’ve heard plenty of people telling about their religious experiences.’

‘But it might be.’

‘Well, I suppose it might. Only it seems a funny idea. I think anybody’d have a hard job to persuade themselves that it was right. Why, supposing she had little children to care for?’

‘Oh … I mean a woman without children.’

‘Did you? But then there’d be her husband. What would he do? He’d have to get another woman to look after him most likely. And she wouldn’t be his wife, not unless he had enough money to divorce the first one. And then they’d be living in sin.’

‘I … meant … fairly well off people, who could afford divorce.’

‘Oh, I see,’ cried Dolly enlightened. ‘You mean a lady, not any sort of woman?’

‘Y—yes. I suppose I do naturally think of a lady when I think of an imaginary case.’

‘Well, you see, I naturally don’t.’

‘Is there so much difference?’ said Agatha wonderingly. ‘But if it was any woman, Dolly? Would you condemn her if she left her husband and went to a man she loved better?’

‘I couldn’t say unless I knew her. I would if I thought she was light. But it isn’t only that kind that do such things.’

Through the window the smell of lilies was blown in from the garden and the voices of Gerald and James murmured on in intermittent conversation. The noise of the car in the lane reminded Agatha that she must get home early. She began to tie her veils.

On the way home she said to Gerald:

‘Dolly thinks that our much-vaunted civilization is too much occupied with palliatives. She’s very strong upon the folly of substitutes for godly living, as she calls it. She thinks we concern ourselves too much with averting the consequences of our own acts instead of eradicating folly and vice themselves.’

‘Dolly’s views,’ said he, ‘are so sound that they are apt to be a little obvious. What desperate remedy was she referring to in particular?’

‘It was divorce,’ said Agatha, after a moment’s pause. ‘We were discussing unhappy marriages and whether there were more now than formerly.’

Gerald looked straight in front of him and said in a detached, discursive tone:

‘Nobody but the parties themselves can say what constitutes a happy or an unhappy marriage. Evils which to one section of society, or one generation, seem quite unbearable are beside the point to another. I remember seeing that so strongly once when I was reading some letters written by an old boy in the seventeenth century (I rather think it was Halifax) to his daughter. He was obviously devoted to her; and his advice about bearing ill-treatment from a husband comes as something of a shock. I don’t think it referred to any special husband: I mean I don’t think she was even grown up at the time. It was just on general principle. He counsels the child as to the best way to endure brutality, drunkenness, and flagrant infidelity as if they were inevitable, as they probably were in those days. But he was a sane man, and very fond of the girl, and one gets the impression that he quite expected her to be happy and prosperous, as I’ve no doubt she was.’

‘It’s very odd,’ said Agatha. ‘I suppose it all depends upon what one expects to get. In a way marriages of convenience must be much more likely to be happy than marriages for love, because they are based on less extravagant expectations. Either way it’s a toss up.’

‘It’s ultimately based, I fancy, upon the question of common ideals; unity of outlook. Whether the pair concerned have the same conception of their environment, the same purpose in life. The usual considerations determining a love match don’t necessarily ensure that, any more than would the business propositions behind a marriage of convenience. Look at our present host and hostess! They are, to me, as good an example of a happy marriage in one way as Dolly and James are in another. I can imagine either making another partner miserable. But together they are complete, and Braxhall is a wonderful expression of their joint outlook.’

Agatha was silent, her mind busy with unspoken applications. She was dismayed by the unconcealed bitterness of his tone towards Braxhall for she felt that Lyndon fell under the same condemnation. The Bragges merely proclaimed blatantly an ideal of life which, in her own household, was discreetly and beautifully intimated. So, in the light of their earlier encounters, did she interpret all his scornful remarks. But she did him an injustice. He was long past criticizing anything that was hers.

He changed the subject, feeling, with an obscure sense of self-preservation, that matrimony, happy or otherwise, was no safe topic for himself and Agatha. He said that he was intrigued by James and the frescoes.

‘I don’t understand him. There must be something behind it which nobody can have understood. He spoke in such an odd way when I was sitting in the garden with him. I shall go and have a look at the things as soon as I get back.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He seemed almost apologetic about them. And yet defiant. He said that he considered they were as good work as ever he’d done, and that Sir Thomas could always whitewash the wall if he didn’t like it, but that he, James, wouldn’t alter them for anybody.’

‘Of course, they are all rather … bacchanalian, but I don’t think the Bragges seem to mind.’

The car swung into the long road leading up the Braxhall valley. Beside them the stream wound through the fields, and ‘Bragge’s Barracks’ frowned upon them from the heights. Agatha realized with a pang that her afternoon of happiness and freedom was nearly over; she was returning to a prison, and would soon be plunged afresh into that abyss of irritation, suspicion, veiled criticism, secret conclaves, tactful hints and plain speaking. The clarity of mood, the singleness of mind, which she could only achieve in Gerald’s company must inevitably be shattered. She had looked forward to taking him to Bramfield; she knew that he would like Dolly and James, and she revelled in the sense of companionship, of comprehension, which had been theirs since childhood. In her exaltation she could believe that they were both entire strangers to Braxhall, travellers from another world, gayer, simpler and more vital.

Anxious to prolong her reprieve, she suggested that they should walk up through the gardens.

‘We can cross by the footbridge,’ she said, ‘and send the car up by the road. There is plenty of time. It’s not six yet.’

He acquiesced and they stopped the car. A steep stile took them into a square field peppered with mushrooms. Gerald, the glare of the collector in his eye, immediately began to pick these, swearing mildly at deceptive puff-balls. She watched him, still possessed by the conviction, common to all lovers, that she had discovered the secret of the universe. Her amusement was tender and beguiling.

‘You are one of those people who can’t pass a mushroom. I know! My mother is like that. She will walk ten miles carrying one.’

‘Still,’ he protested, ‘even one is nice in a stew….’

‘They will be excellent in our hash tonight, I’ve no doubt. What will you do with them? Which chef will you give them to?’

‘It’s sheer waste to leave them.’

They crossed the little footbridge into the garden. Gerald held his hat full of mushrooms in both hands, very carefully, like a chalice. The silence and the sun absorbed and enfolded them; the extreme degree of isolation in which they walked was intensified by the fact that they were visible from every window on the south side of Braxhall. They ascended towards that observant, many-eyed façade as adventurers approach a hostile stronghold.

Slower and slower grew their pace as they mounted from terrace to terrace; longer each pause as they turned to look down the valley. Nothing stirred in the picture below them; not a cow or a sheep moved in the unbroken green of the fields and the heavy foliage on the opposite hillside was as massive, in the strong sunlight, as a tapestried picture.

‘How warm and tame these woods look!’ said Agatha suddenly. ‘You would never think that at night they are full of lost souls.’

‘Oh, those owls! Did you hear them?’

‘They went on all night. They were worst about half-past two.’

‘I know.’

Each had a vision of the other lying awake in those long haunted hours when the valley echoed to strange cries and a low mist from the stream lay over the fields. They resumed their climbing and did not pause again until they had reached the topmost terrace of all and stood close beneath the walls of Braxhall. Then Gerald spoke impulsively, in obedience to a decision which he had just reached:

‘I suppose lunch tomorrow will be over by three o’clock? I must get away by the three-forty.’

‘Oh, Gerald! You aren’t going? Not tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’ He spoke a little unsteadily this time and did not look at her. ‘I think I ought to be getting back.’

She stared at him, an icy terror spreading over her, so that she shivered in spite of the strong sun.

‘I really oughtn’t to be away at all, just now,’ he added. ‘But I wanted to see … to see those frescoes, you know.’

He regarded his mushrooms unhappily. He had made up his mind that another night of listening to the Braxhall owls would be as much as he could bear. To himself he repeated in mental reiteration:

‘Too risky! Altogether too risky!’

They moved on into the house. When they reached the marble corridor she had collected herself sufficiently to remark: ‘Oh, yes. I suppose you oughtn’t to leave your work for long.’

He nodded and began to mount the wide, shallow stairs. She watched him until he had turned the corner. He was still carrying his hat reverently, like a chalice.

4.

He was scarcely out of sight before Lois came hurriedly through the folding doors of the banqueting hall. She advanced in the greatest agitation, calling softly to her sister-in-law. The pallor of her tear-stained cheeks roused Agatha, for a moment, from the stupor of misery which had overtaken her.

‘What is it? What is the matter?’ she cried.

Lois sank on to the bench beside her and began in a low voice:

‘Oh, Agatha! It’s so dreadful! Listen! Hubert is come … and …’

She paused to give a loud sob.

‘Dearest Lois! Tell me what it is. What can have …’

‘Can you come into the hall for a minute? No, wait! I’d better tell you first what has happened.’

‘Have you had bad news?’ asked Agatha, wondering if Hubert had been speculating.

‘No! No! He came, and I took him to see the frescoes. Oh, dear! Oh, Agatha, did you see anything wrong with them?’

‘My dear, I know absolutely nothing about pictures.’

‘But you don’t need to, to see this. How can we have been so blind? It’s incredible! I saw it directly he pointed it out to me. And you can’t think how angry he is. He says I am absolutely incapable of looking observantly at anything….’

‘But what is it? What is wrong with them?’

‘Oh, it’s perfectly wicked of James. It really is. He’s put in Tom and Cynthia.’

‘Put in?’

‘Into the fresco. They are quite unmistakable. Hubert says he doesn’t know when he’s seen anything more savage. He saw it the moment …’

‘Oh, it can’t be. I don’t believe it. I saw the frescoes myself. Where are they?’

‘In the centre panel, over the dais. Don’t you remember those people reclining at a sort of banquet … absolutely gorging….’

Agatha reorganized her memory and recalled with a shock of alarm an incredibly aldermanic figure, which she had set down for Silenus, taking his ease, if she remembered correctly, in the arms of a slender, blonde hussy…. A horrible doubt was born in her mind.

‘Let me look!’ she cried, and then asked: ‘Who is in the hall?’

‘Only Hubert. He’s the only person that knows, so far, except John. John saw it at once when we told him, and he just wants to murder James. And he said we’d better find you and consult what’s best to be done. So we both went to look for you. I don’t know where he’s gone; up to your room, I expect. I … I don’t think he knew you had gone out with Mr Blair. But I happened to look out of the window and saw you coming up the hill. So I ran out to stop you.’

‘I see,’ said Agatha, too much preoccupied to notice that Lois was blushing. ‘Let’s go into the hall.’

She followed Lois through the big doors. They discovered Hubert, in a transport of fury, pacing up and down and viewing the unspeakable paintings from every part of the room. Agatha looked at the panel over the dais and turned pale. It was quite undeniable that the central figures of the piece were more than reminiscent of Sir Thomas and Lady Bragge.

She looked for a long time in shocked silence and then said faintly:

‘I suppose it’s having no clothes on that makes one slow to recognize them.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Hubert grimly. ‘But I found no difficulty in seeing it the moment I came into the room.’

‘But then, you know, the first time I saw it they were both here, with their clothes and everything … it distracted one’s attention a certain amount.’

‘I see it more strongly every minute,’ broke in Lois. ‘I’ve seen Cynthia look like that a dozen times, when she is a little anxious what Sir Thomas will say next. Late on in dinner, you know, when he’s rather …’

‘I’ll go down to Bramfield tomorrow and kill James,’ said Hubert.

Agatha was looking intently at the piece and now asked: ‘What are all those people doing on that little hill behind the group? What are they building?’

‘A temple?’ suggested Hubert uncertainly.

‘It’s Braxhall,’ she vowed. ‘It’s this house as you see it from the valley.’

‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But it doesn’t signify. It isn’t nearly so obvious as these people in the foreground. Among all these bosky hillocks and leafy groves it will pass unnoticed very probably. The other can’t.’

‘I don’t think there are any other portraits,’ said Lois, who had been looking anxiously at the other panels. ‘Not of people we know, anyhow. That’s some comfort.’

‘I shall go round and kill him,’ repeated Hubert with gathering venom.

‘I wish you would,’ muttered Lois.

‘When you think it was on my recommendation … Of course, I ought to have known that he wasn’t to be trusted. I knew he was getting riled with the way Sir Thomas went on, and I half suspected that he had some dirty trick up his sleeve. But I depended on Lois to let me know if anything was wrong. I ought to have known that she is about as much use as a sick headache. I ought to have known, after all these years….’

‘But Lois wasn’t the only one,’ interrupted Agatha. ‘We’ve all been blind. Look at John! And my mother, and Lady Clewer, and the Bragges themselves! You are the first person to notice it, Hubert, as far as I know.’

‘Well, I can’t understand it! You simply can’t have looked at the thing.’

‘No. I don’t think we did. That’s it. At least it is in my case. There is always something in James’s work which makes me very reluctant to look at it. I couldn’t say why.’

‘Of course,’ said Hubert bitterly, ‘anybody could be excused for not recognizing their own portraits; and I suppose that the rest of you were so steeped in the Bragge atmosphere, don’t you know….’

He broke off with a shrug. He could not forgive them for not having warned him. His taunt was directed at his wife but it stung Agatha intolerably. Convinced that her cousin was fleeing from Braxhall because he could endure it no longer, she resented any implication which would put her in such a galley. It was an insult to say that she was steeped in Bragge atmosphere. Confronted with this epitome of it, she found it all as detestable as anybody could. Neither James nor Gerald could hate it worse.

‘But what about the party?’ Lois was saying. ‘That’s what we wanted to consult you about. What are we to do? Can it be put off? What shall we say to the Bragges?’

‘Couldn’t we persuade them to have lunch in the panelled room?’

‘It wouldn’t hold half the people. Besides, the whole thing is got up especially to exhibit the frescoes.’

‘Well,’ said Agatha, thinking swiftly, ‘we must let things take their chance. I would suggest that we say nothing to anyone. Not till after the party. It can’t be put off now.’

‘But supposing people see …’ began Lois.

‘Can’t we trust that the majority of the guests will be as unobservant as we have been? I don’t see why not. They won’t expect it, you know; and most people don’t see things they don’t expect. And they will all be eating lovely food; food good enough to absorb their attention completely. Besides, a lot of them will have their backs to that particular panel.’

‘I shall give myself away,’ said Lois. ‘I shall blush whenever I look at the thing.’

‘If ever I do anything for that fellow again,’ said Hubert, ‘I’ll be boiled alive!’

‘And for relations too!’ cried Lois. ‘It’s simply disgusting! When we have all been so …’

She was disconcerted by something in the faces of the other two, and did not attempt to specify what his family had always been to James. Instead she added:

‘I’m sure we all recognize, now, that he is justified in his claims as an artist.’

‘I never heard him make any,’ murmured Agatha.

Hubert was studying the fresco again and now commented: ‘I always did think that Sir Thomas looked like a satyr. I remember it struck me the first time I saw them sitting together under a tree. A satyr and a nymph! Oh, yes … but it wasn’t Cynthia though, it was you, Agatha.’

‘Cynthia or me!’ thought Agatha. ‘It doesn’t matter which. We are both the same type to James … and Gerald.’

‘But even if we get through this awful lunch safely,’ demanded Lois tearfully. ‘… What then?’

‘We’ll have to see,’ said Hubert. ‘I think I agree with Agatha. Since we can’t postpone the lunch we must go through with it, and in that case the fewer people who know the truth the better. Your mother doesn’t know, Lois?’

‘No. And what she’ll say when she finds out, I don’t know. She will make James sorry.’

‘What about your mother?’ went on Hubert, turning to Agatha. ‘Should we tell her? Would she help us to carry things off?’

‘Heavens, no! On no account! She’s the very last person to tell. Though she’s generally so quick that I can’t think why she needs telling. But she would be so frightfully amused—you must forgive me for saying so, Lois. It wouldn’t be safe. She wouldn’t be able to help telling people, or at least prompting them to guess.’

‘Oh well, then, in that case …’

‘We must try to keep her very busy and animated all through lunch so that she simply doesn’t look at the thing….’

The dismayed trio stared at the thing and wondered how anyone could possibly be prevented from looking. They started guiltily as John flung open the door at the end of the hall and slammed it behind him. He joined them without a glance at the frescoes and addressed himself to his wife.

‘I didn’t know you had gone for a walk. I was looking for you.’

‘I went over to Bramfield to see Dolly and James,’ she replied in some surprise.

His face, at the mention of James, grew a shade blacker. ‘Oh, yes? I thought I saw you walking across the valley field just now.’

‘We got out of the car by the footbridge and walked up the garden.’

‘I know. I saw you from the staircase window.’

Hubert and Lois looked at each other, and Lois broke in:

‘I found Agatha in the hall, John, and brought her in here. I didn’t know you were still looking for her.’

‘I wasn’t. I was coming down to fetch her when I met Sir Thomas, who began to talk about his peach house. I couldn’t get away.’

‘About these frescoes …’ began Hubert timidly.

‘Eh? The frescoes?’ asked John vaguely. Then he recollected himself and exclaimed: ‘Oh, damn the frescoes. Do what you like about it. They are no business of mine.’

And he turned again upon his wife a regard which said that here was a business which touched him too nearly. Hubert seized Lois by the arm and almost ran her out of the hall.

‘Well, but,’ she whispered as soon as the door had closed behind them, ‘Agatha shouldn’t walk about in front of the windows with Mr Blair just when poor John is so ill.’

‘She doesn’t know he’s ill,’ returned Hubert violently. ‘It’s … it’s unfair not to tell her. It’s …’

‘Hush! Somebody will hear. Wasn’t it awful? I never saw anybody look so angry. His face was quite blue. It must be very bad for him.’

‘It’s not our business,’ said Hubert firmly.

They stole away.

John, left alone with his wife, turned upon her furiously. ‘You went to see Dolly and James, did you? Well, you won’t go again.’

‘John! What is the matter with you? You’ve no business to lose your temper like this. What do you mean? I shall certainly go if I please.’

‘I won’t have it. I forbid you to go there again. You are not to see James any more, or his wife. You must drop them, see? It’s the encouragement you give them that lets us in for this sort of thing.’

He waved a hand at the frescoes.

‘But I’m very fond of him,’ she protested vaguely, still at a loss.

‘You are fonder than is prudent of several of your relations, aren’t you?’

She started, stared, and grew very pale. He was, indeed, appalled at what he had said, and repented instantly. He had been stung beyond endurance by the sight of that slow, intimate ascent through the Braxhall gardens. He was determined to end, one way or the other, a situation which was becoming intolerable. The irrevocable words now lay between them like a flung gauntlet. Nothing could unsay them; but Agatha, after a moment’s consideration, made a visible attempt to ignore them.

‘We’ll discuss James later …’ she said. ‘The business before us now is the frightful party tomorrow….’

But he thought that he might as well go on as he had begun. ‘The party tomorrow won’t concern us,’ he told her, ‘because we shall not be here.’

‘John?’

‘We leave here first thing tomorrow morning.’

Her eyes questioned him and he flung the reason at her. ‘I won’t have you driving about the country with that … that fellow. You will leave Braxhall tomorrow and I won’t have you seeing him again.’

‘Do you mean Gerald Blair?’

‘I do.’

She considered this for a moment and then asked:

‘And what makes you take this line? What cause have I ever given you? What have I done?’

‘You’ve lost your head over him. It’s perfectly obvious to anyone. And it’s enough. I’m not taking any risks.’

She opened her lips for a denial which would not come. Instead she cried out:

‘Risks! What risks? Do you want to insult me?’

‘This sort of thing has got to stop,’ he said doggedly.

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Your whole behaviour. I tell you I’m tired of it. You treat me like a discarded lover.’

‘Do I? Do I? Well, so you are!’ she cried, her voice rising.

Disgusted at her loss of self-command and the vulgarity of such a scene, she added in a lower voice:

‘You are. You’ve never been anything more. Never a real husband. Not more than Tom is to Cynthia. Our relationship may be legal, but it isn’t marriage. Nothing can make it that.’

‘Really? And what is it then?’

‘It’s been my fault,’ she conceded earnestly. ‘I ought never to have married you. We have no ideals in common. I’ve never been a real wife to you. Nothing more than a mistress; nothing more….’

‘It’s a pity you feel like that,’ he said bitterly. ‘But I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with it.’

Then he burst out again:

‘Oh, hell, Agatha! Can’t you speak the truth? Can’t you think straight? You married me and you’ve got tired of me. And you’ve invented all this humbug about common ideals to justify your infidelity. That’s the long and short of it.’

At the word infidelity she swung round, her conscious innocence flaming in her face.

‘Never for a moment …’ she began, and then broke off. ‘But it’s horrible to have to make denials—to exculpate oneself! If you can believe …’

Tears, the first he had ever seen her shed, choked her speech. Smarting under a sense of undeserved insult, she stood before him weeping silently. He beheld her beauty and her grief with a fierce throb of satisfaction. To make her suffer was at least a reassertion of power. He became dominant and calm.

‘We go tomorrow,’ he repeated.

She answered, very low:

‘We needn’t … for the reason you mention…. He is going away immediately after lunch.’

A spasm of anguish shook her and he heard himself saying coldly:

‘Oh, I see. Is that why you are crying?’

His heart had begun to do strange things and it occurred to him that this interview, if prolonged, might prove fatal to him. He had no wish to die at Braxhall. Glancing at her from the door, before he left her, he saw that she had not moved. She was still standing on the dais step, both hands pressed to her bosom, while the fresco panel flamed above her stricken head.

Gerald, upon reaching his room, had, in a thunderclap of energy, sat down and written the opening pages of a paper upon ‘The Experiments at Nancy’ which had been simmering in his brain for some time. He was wonderfully relieved by his sudden decision to quit Braxhall upon the morrow, and to see his cousin no more. Anguish it might be, but it was at least a termination of the conflict. He was able, for the first time in many weeks, to lose himself in his work. He wrote, absorbed, for nearly an hour, and then, pausing for an instant’s relaxation, recalled idly the mysterious utterances of James about the fresco. He remembered that he had meant to visit the hall immediately upon his return, and accordingly he set off, descending by a small staircase, close to his room, which gave him access to a door opening immediately on to the dais. He was, therefore, precipitated within a few feet of Agatha before either was aware of the other.

She was seated upon one of the chairs set round the dais. Her elbows were on the table and her face in her hands. Her whole attitude bespoke an abandonment of grief. She had evidently failed to hear his approach over the thick dais carpet.

He stood poised for flight. Prudence inwardly counselled a prompt withdrawal; passion impelled him forward. Lingering, he was lost, for she raised her head and saw him. She betrayed no surprise, but fixed upon him a regard of infinite sadness, and sat motionless in her chair, the slow tears still rolling down her cheeks.

He was inured to women’s tears; he had seen too many of them. But all his experience had never shown him a creature who could weep so beautifully. No sobs shook her; she was composed, mistress of herself, save for these silent, persistent signals of woe. He had, among his patients, a reputation for complete immunity; no nervous collapse could soften or alarm him in Harley Street. Had she brought her tears there it is possible that he might have checked the flood with a few bracing words and a glass of water. But affection had undone him, as it has betrayed better men, and, instead of resorting to professional advice, he was moved, he hardly knew how, to fling himself at her feet, to call her by every endearing name which occurred to him, and finally, with a sense of foundering rectitude, to clasp her to his heart and entreat her to tell him her trouble.

Of the subsequent conversation neither retained any very clear impression. It was an affair of mutual declarations, and in a very short time they arrived at the conclusion that a further separation would be impossible to them. They must defy all the forces which had divided them ten years earlier, and this must be done at once. Agatha’s misery appeared to both of them as something no longer to be borne, and they believed that their immediate union would be almost certain to abate it.

‘We must get married,’ Gerald stated. ‘We ought, of course, to have got married ten years ago. We’ll go abroad somewhere until Clewer divorces you, and then we will be married.’

‘But do you think that will be right?’ demanded Agatha hopefully.

He looked surprised, and a little put out.

‘Right? What do you mean exactly? I think it’s the wisest thing we can do under the circumstances. And anyhow we are going to do it.’

‘I mean, can you do it with an absolutely free conscience?’

‘N—no, not exactly. I couldn’t say that.’

Agatha did not like this at all.

‘You can’t do what you think wrong,’ she said doubtfully.

‘Oh, yes I can,’ he assured her.

‘But it must be right,’ she argued. ‘We were meant for each other. It was my marriage that was wrong.’

He agreed, but said that he would, he thought, condemn behaviour like theirs in anyone else. He reminded her, a little shamefacedly, that he had accepted John’s hospitality and was returning it by stealing his wife. But she insisted that they were justified. He thought it rather tactless of her thus to harp upon the most painful element in their situation. He had overlooked, for a moment, a woman’s capacity for sanctifying her passions by an ideal. She had succeeded in persuading herself that flight from her husband was the only remedy for an enormous wrong, the only means whereby she could release her better self for a life of austere endeavour. Her natural aptitude for symbolism had led her to perceive a deep significance in the events of the afternoon. The impression of the fresco was strong upon her, and she believed that in renouncing her married life, with all its luxuries, she was pledging herself to a very noble path. She could only repeat, rather resentfully:

‘It seems right to me.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing,’ remarked her lover.

He took a short turn down the hall and returned to the dais step, looking up at her.

‘I don’t want you to deceive yourself,’ he said anxiously. ‘I don’t want you to be rushed into any course which you might afterwards regret. I should be a scoundrel if I took advantage of what appears to be a slight confusion in your mind. I wish I knew what to do!’

‘I thought we’d settled what to do.’

‘Yes, but I want you to be quite sure. Think it over! Don’t decide now. Tell me tomorrow. Remember I’m ready to take your word as final. I’ll take you off at any moment if you like, or I’ll go away and never see you again if you’d rather. But it must be either one way or the other. I’m not going on like this: it’s unendurable. Think it over and tell me.’

She realised that the abruptness of his speech was calculated. He was deliberately trying not to appeal to her emotions, but to summon to their aid those rational faculties still left to them. He tried to leave her without further speech, but she called him back.

‘Gerald! Are you quite sure that you want me to come? You aren’t being a good Samaritan, are you?’

‘Want you? Of course I want you! I always have. But that isn’t the point. I’ve done without you up till now, and I can doubtless go on doing without you, if I have to. But I won’t stand seeing you unhappy like this. It’s more than anyone could bear, loving you at I do.’

‘But you could get on without me if you had to?’

‘Why … yes … I suppose so….’

‘Then I’ve no business to come. My justification …’

‘Oh, Agatha dearest, can’t you think straight? …’

At this point Mrs Cocks burst in through the door at the end of the hall. She glanced at the cousins, her eyes sparkling with instant displeasure.

‘Agatha!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you know that it is five minutes to eight? Are you never going to dress this evening? I’ve been waiting for you, upstairs, for at least three-quarters of an hour.’

‘Is it really so late, Mother?’

‘Yes! Yes! Hurry, child! Hurry, Gerald!’

She swept them from the hall and carried her daughter upstairs. Dismissing the maid, she declared that she would supervise the hasty toilet herself.

‘Pauline would be much quicker,’ maintained Agatha.

‘Perhaps. But I want to do some plain speaking which can’t be accomplished before Pauline. What were you and Gerald quarrelling about when I came in?’

‘We weren’t quarrelling,’ said Agatha after reflection.

‘Weren’t you. You looked as if you were; you were looking defensive and he reproachful. And, by the way, may I ask if you and he have been in that hall ever since you came in this afternoon?’

‘Oh, no! I was there with Lois and Hubert. And then John. Gerald had only just come.’

‘Oh, really? That’s not as bad as I thought. Still you know, Agatha, when I saw you coming up through the garden …’

‘Good heavens!’ cried Agatha impatiently, ‘how many more? Did everybody in the house see me coming up through the garden?’

‘I expect so. That’s where you are so silly, dear.’

‘I never knew it was such a monstrous thing to do.’

‘Now you are being even sillier. Tell me, who else has seen you?’

‘Oh … Lois and Hubert … and John….’

‘John! What did John say?’

Agatha made no reply, but dabbed powder on to her nose with shaking fingers.

‘You’ve put on too much,’ observed her mother critically, and she fetched a damp sponge and removed it all. ‘Now begin again. Tell me … is John annoyed? Have you quarrelled with him?’

‘He blames me,’ began Agatha, and stopped with a gasp.

‘What for?’

‘For the same reason that Gerald blames me.’

‘Oh!’ Mrs Cocks was at a loss. ‘But I thought you said you had not quarrelled with Gerald.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘But you have quarrelled with John?’

‘Yes. They both want to know if I can’t think straight.’

‘What shoes will you wear? Is John jealous?’

Agatha was silent.

‘It’s only natural,’ continued her mother, as she folded up discarded garments. ‘You can’t have it both ways. I’ve never seen a more devoted husband. You wouldn’t like it if he got tired of you?’

‘I shouldn’t mind.’

‘Well, of course, if that’s your line, I don’t blame him if he does resent it a little. In fact, I think he’d be justified in consoling himself elsewhere. Do consider the possible consequences of such behaviour, child. With a man like John you can’t afford to run risks.’

‘Thank you, Mother, I’d rather not discuss it.’

‘Try to look at things a little more from his point of view. What, after all, did he marry you for?’

‘Oh, please, Mother, would you mind going? Will you please leave me alone? I want to be by myself. I … I won’t come down to dinner, I think.’

‘Good heavens! Child! Are you ill? Don’t go that colour! Sit down and let me get you some sal volatile.’

‘No. I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right. I only want to be by myself.’

‘But if you are too ill to come down to dinner, you are too ill to be left alone. I shall stay with you and make it clear that you are really unwell. I’m not going to have Marian saying that you are sulking after a scene with John. Are you sure you can’t come down? It would look much better if you could.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Agatha, whose colour was returning. ‘I will come. Could you find my Spanish comb? And I’ll have that black lace shawl. It’s somewhere in the wardrobe.’

‘You are still very white. I should put on just a very little touch, if I were you. You don’t want to go down looking conspicuously pale. Of course, John is such a paragon of a husband….’

The gong, heralding another of the endless Braxhall meals, reminded Mrs Cocks of the need for haste. She turned to the wardrobe without another word.

5.

Towards four o’clock upon the following afternoon Lois stood on the topmost garden terrace, watching a car which sped along the valley road. It contained the last of the guests who had lunched at Braxhall. She stood attentive until it had turned the corner and then heaved a great sigh of relief.

Hubert had been instructed to take Mrs Cocks to some retired place and keep her there. He had evidently done his duty, for nothing had been seen of the pair of them for above an hour and a half. Lois thought he should be released and set off in search of him. She found them in the sunk garden: they were sitting upon a stone bench by the fountain, absorbed in animated conversation. Hubert, though sprightly, was, to the practised eye of his wife, at the point of exhaustion; but his companion was enjoying herself vivaciously.

‘The guests have all gone,’ said Lois, joining them.

‘Gone? No! It must be very early!’ cried Mrs Cocks. ‘Nearly four? I couldn’t have believed it! I’m afraid I’ve been very uncivil; I do hope Cynthia won’t think so. I never meant to stay here so long. But your husband has been telling me such killing stories, Lois.’

‘Cynthia has gone up to rest, and Sir Thomas is having a cocktail somewhere. I heard him calling for it.’

‘But are they all gone? How annoying! There are several people I particularly wanted to talk to. Why were you so amusing, Mr Ervine?’

Hubert, who had been amusing because told to be so by Lois, said that he was very sorry for it.

‘I wanted to find out how many people have noticed that the Bragges have set up a portrait gallery. Most original, I call it. I hear that you all discovered it yesterday, and I think it most unkind of you not to point it out to me.’

‘Dear lady,’ began Hubert, ‘we meant for the best.’

‘Oh, I know you did. And you were perfectly right. But you see I never noticed it until the middle of lunch. I pointed it out at once to Mr Chaytor, who was sitting next to me. But he was very crushing. He merely said that he had already observed a resemblance, and changed the subject. I think he was rather scandalized. And the man on my other side was deaf. I was longing to find someone to laugh with about it. Do you really mean to say that the Bragges don’t know?’

‘Not yet,’ sighed Lois. ‘But they’ll have to be told, I suppose.’

‘James is really a wag. When will you tell them?’

‘Oh, Mrs Cocks,’ interrupted Lois, ‘Agatha was looking for you everywhere. She wanted to see you before she went. She told me to tell you she’d left a note for you in your sitting-room on the mantelpiece.’

‘Went? Went where?’

‘Away from here. Back to London, I suppose. She went by the three-forty.’

‘But they aren’t going till Saturday. We all go up to Scotland together.’

‘Oh, John hasn’t gone. Only Agatha. She went in a great hurry just after lunch. She didn’t even have time to say good-bye to Cynthia. I met her on the stairs taking leave of Sir Thomas, and she told me she had to run because her car was round, and asked me to give you her message about the note.’

‘This is very strange!’ exclaimed Mrs Cocks jumping up. ‘I can’t understand this. I must find John.’

She hurried off towards the house, and Lois sank upon the stone bench beside her husband and felt in his pocket for a cigarette. He lighted it for her, and another for himself, remarking as he threw away the match:

‘I suppose we can now say “Nunc Dimittis” and what not.’

‘You did nobly, dear! I felt that our only hope was to keep her away from people. When I glanced across the table and saw by her expression that she had seen, I thought all was lost. But your skill in keeping her in seclusion has saved the day. What did you tell her stories about?’

‘Oh, the Jews mostly. We began with the frescoes, of course, and I propounded my theory that art is in for a golden age because all the profiteers are going to patronize it. This, I say, is due to the prevalence of Semitism. Formerly the Jews pretended not to be Jews and spent their money on baronial halls and portraits of Norman ancestors. Nowadays, when the whole world is run by ’em, nobody’s ashamed of being a Jew. They build their own houses, and don’t waste money on second-hand stuff. They patronize contemporary art. From that we got on to swapping stories about our Jewish acquaintances.’

‘But Sir Thomas isn’t a Jew.’

‘No. But he meekly follows the beaten track of the leading profiteers who mostly are. But tell me, how did this affair go as a whole? What was the impression you got? How many people would you say spotted it?’

‘Oh, a good many. But most of them were too well mannered to show it. They were too much shocked and embarrassed to be amused.’

‘Then on the whole it was better than it might have been?’

‘I don’t know! It was pretty grim, I hope I’ll never have to live through such another day.’

‘So do I.’

‘In the beginning I thought it was going off better than I could possibly have supposed. I was astonished.’

‘I know. When the thing was so blazingly obvious to me, I could not see how they could miss it. And when we got to the joints without a hitch, I began to be positively elated.’

‘There is a good deal in what Agatha says. I think his work repels most people. They have a sort of instinct not to look at it and they don’t.’

‘They certainly don’t. The lady on my right put up her lorgnettes and had a very brief squint and then put them down with a click, and said: “I hear Mr James Clewer is a great Socialist.” I thought that this was a new phase in Brother James, and said I didn’t know anything about his political opinions. And she said wasn’t it true that he had married a working-class woman and lived like an artisan? I said that I believed that it was. She said that was what she meant, and that she detested Socialists. I said I did too. Whereupon we talked Bolshevik atrocities, and I don’t think James or the frescoes were mentioned again.’

‘One of my neighbours asked me if Mr Blair was James,’ said Lois. ‘I said no, and asked him why he thought so. He said because he looked so miserable and out of it.’

‘Blair certainly looked sorry for himself. And so, by the way, did M. le Mari. But Agatha seems to thrive on it. I don’t know when I’ve seen her looking more magnificent.’

‘Perhaps she enjoys keeping two men miserable. She was in splendid spirits—so very animated. She was laughing and talking away all through lunch. Generally she leaves that to other people.’

‘Well, to do her justice, I think she was making a genuine effort to keep the family flag flying. She was the greatest support to us. No one in her vicinity had eyes or ears for the frescoes.’

‘That is so,’ admitted Lois. ‘Yes, I really thought we were safe until that awful moment when I caught sight of Mrs Cocks’s face. It was lucky that we had short-circuited her by putting her between the proper Mr Chaytor and the deaf Sir Nigel.’

‘I know. And almost immediately afterwards I became aware that a horrid silence was stealing over the nearest of the trestle tables. And there was Clewer, sitting perfectly mum, and not attempting to keep up the conversation. He was a broken reed!’

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever known him fail in his social duties.’

‘Yes. He’s pretty cut up about Agatha, I really believe. I suppose there was slaughter after we left them in the hall last night.’

‘How long ago it seems!’

‘Yes, we’ve lived through a lifetime of care and anxiety since, haven’t we? It was quite a game to watch it spreading. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grim. That look of incredulity dawning on one face after another! Still we got off better than I expected.’

‘Oh, but Sir Thomas’s speech was terrible! I thought it would be the last straw. The manners of the English are incredible, as you say. One can’t overstate their sense of decency. They just all looked a little uncomfortable, for the most part. Very few exceptions.’

‘And anyone would look uncomfortable at any of Sir Thomas’s speeches. His articulation was so uncommonly thick that I began to think of strokes, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, but when he proposed James’s health …!’

‘Still he was so maudlin and incoherent by that time that most people couldn’t have heard much of it.’

‘Well, one or two who had behaved beautifully up till then began to get a little hysterical. Is that Mother calling?’

Marian had come to the end of the terrace and was hailing them. Her tones were significant and peremptory. When they joined her she inquired in lowered accents:

‘Have you heard?’

Lois nodded.

‘It’s wicked! It’s monstrous!’ broke out Lady Clewer. ‘Such a thing has never happened in the family before.’

Lois and Hubert could well believe this.

‘We shall never be able to hold up our heads again.’

‘Very few people know as yet,’ consoled Hubert. ‘And perhaps something can be done?’

‘I should hope that very few people did know! May I ask how you did? Who told you?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ hesitated Lois, ‘we knew yesterday?’

‘Yesterday!’ shrieked Marian. ‘You knew yesterday?’

‘Yes, but we thought it would be better not to distress you by speaking of it until after the lunch party. We discussed it with Agatha….’

‘You discussed it with Agatha.’ Marian was so much taken aback that she could only whisper. ‘How could you discuss it with Agatha?’

‘Well, we thought she would be a good person to talk it over with.’

Marian stared at them with her mouth open. At last she managed to ask:

‘Did you begin on it, or did she?’

‘We did. And she advised us to say nothing about it until after lunch today.’

‘I’ll be bound she did. But I simply cannot understand such disloyalty in either of you. It was bare-faced connivance! You should have come to me at once. And think of poor Tom and Cynthia having such a thing happen in their house! It’s disgraceful! And now it’s probably too late to do anything, though Mrs Cocks is going off at once to see what she can do.’

‘Mrs Cocks!’ exclaimed the other two. And Lois added: ‘What can she do? Where is she going? Not to James, surely?’

‘To James? Of course not. Why should she? Lois! Hubert! You don’t mean to tell me that James has had any hand in this affair?’

Lois and Hubert looked at each other, and Hubert said cautiously:

‘Please, Lady Clewer, what are you talking about?’

‘Why … this step of Agatha’s! Don’t you know? She’s gone away … run away … with her cousin. With Mr Blair. She has left John.’

It was now their turn to be speechless.

‘She left a note, a wicked, cruel note, for John,’ went on Marian with rising indignation. ‘And one for her mother. Of all the horrible things…. But what were you saying about James?’

‘That’s nothing. Something quite different,’ said Hubert. ‘This frightful news … I can’t believe it. It can’t be true. There must be some mistake.’

‘I insist upon knowing at once,’ said Marian sharply. ‘Lois, I command you to tell me; what has James been doing?’

‘Oh, Mother! That can wait! Are you sure that this about Agatha isn’t all a frightful mistake? I knew they left by the same train; she made no secret of it. But that doesn’t prove …’

‘The note she left for John was perfectly unambiguous. He showed it to me.’

Lois, to her extreme surprise, burst into tears. She was fatigued and bewildered. Hubert and Marian, remembering her condition, became alarmed and consoling, blaming each other for having subjected her to the shock. She sobbed noisily upon Hubert’s shoulder for a few minutes, and then collected herself sufficiently to ask:

‘What did John say?’

‘He said nothing. He was so frightfully moved that he couldn’t speak. He just handed me the note and walked out of the room. He’d written on the back of it, “I shall make no attempt to follow her, I am going down to Lyndon tonight.” This was just after the last of the guests had gone.’

Lois collapsed again.

‘Oh … On …’ she wailed. ‘Why must all this happen?’

‘Lois, my darling, my precious, don’t. You’ll make yourself ill.’

‘Oh, Hubert! I can’t bear it! After this awful day with James’s horrible frescoes….’

‘James? Will you tell me what this business of James is, please? Hubert! You are evading me. I won’t have it!’

‘Oh, well, it’s got to be,’ sighed Hubert, and told her.

Her incredulity protected her for some time. Even after they had revisited the hall and inspected the paintings she insisted that they must have been changed since she last saw them. She maintained that she could not have failed to recognize them. When, after long argument, the truth assailed her, she became too deeply shocked for any demonstrations. Lois and Hubert waited for a torrent of vituperation, but she said nothing. In silence she left the hall and stumbled down the marble corridor into the drawing-room. They followed her, literally clinging to each other in terror of what she would say when she once began. She had sunk on to a chesterfield, and Hubert, really alarmed by her grey colour, went in search of restoratives. She had barely reached the point of interjections and gasps when Mrs Cocks, a Bradshaw in one hand and a fountain pen in the other, stormed into the room.

‘There’s this five-fifty-five,’ she began, and then exclaimed with some commiseration: ‘Good heavens, Marian! How ill you look!’

‘James … these frescoes … Tom … Cynthia,’ began Marian faintly.

‘Oh, the frescoes? Oh, yes! I’m very sorry for you all about that affair, indeed I am. But listen, Marian. Can I speak to you privately for a moment?’

‘You needn’t mind Hubert and Lois. They know all about Agatha going, if that is what you want to talk about.’

‘Oh, indeed? I’m very sorry for it. Of course,’ Mrs Cocks turned to them, ‘I know you will be discreet. It’s very important that this affair should go no further. I’m hoping to find Agatha in town this evening and to bring her back with me. I beseech you, Marian, to say nothing of it to anyone else. Is it necessary to tell the Bragges?’

‘They ought to know what has been going on in their house,’ began Marian firmly.

She was beginning to feel a little better.

‘At least say nothing till we have seen what can be done,’ entreated Mrs Cocks. ‘For John’s sake, I should have thought you’d wish to keep it quiet. Just listen! If I take this five-fifty-five, I get to London … let me see … I’ve lost the place. It’s quite tolerably early in the evening, anyhow. I shall go straight to Harley Street, and find out where he is staying. They know I’m his cousin, so they’ll probably give me his address if I’m a little pressing. Then …’

‘But I must go over to Bramfield immediately! Immediately!’ cried Marian starting up. ‘I must make James change that horrible thing. He must paint it out. He must do a new one. I’ll make him. It’s disgraceful. Hubert! can you order a car for me at once? …’

‘Oh, Marian, do listen to me for a moment! What do the frescoes matter, after all, compared with this? Could you see John for me and find out if he …’

But Marian burst out afresh:

‘Oh, why couldn’t you have told me yesterday? We could have hung a curtain over that back panel.’

‘Good God!’ cried Hubert in horror. ‘You couldn’t have done that. It’s the best panel of the lot. You can’t hide away work like that….’

‘Don’t speak in that cynical way, Hubert!’

‘I’m not being cynical, Lady Clewer. There are some things you can’t do, and …’

‘Can’t I? You wait and see what I can’t do! I tell you, if James won’t alter that horrid thing I shall strongly advise Tom and Cynthia to distemper it over.’

‘Well then, I wash my hands of it,’ said Hubert furiously.

‘It’s a pity you ever had anything to do with it, Hubert. It was you persuaded them to have James. I was always against it.’

‘Oh, Mother, how could Hubert know …?’

‘Marian, I don’t believe you want me to bring Agatha back. Can’t you see that my business is urgent? Urgent! It can’t wait; I’ve no time to lose. You can distribute the blame about the frescoes at your leisure after I’m gone. You have no sense of proportion.’

‘I’m sorry for you, Ellen. I pity you deeply. I see that it must be a great shock to you … for you never would see…. Of course, it’s less of a blow to the rest of us simply because we did recognize…. But what do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to speak to John and tell him I’ve gone after her. Tell him I’m convinced it’s all nothing: all a mistake. Do try to persuade him to be a little kind, if … when I bring her back with me. However much he feels he has been in the right, do beg him to be generous! I expect I shall take her back to South Kensington tonight, and tomorrow we will come back here.’

‘I will see him, Ellen, but I doubt if he will ever forgive her.’

‘But perhaps he may find that he has not so very much to forgive. Do entreat him to keep an open mind.’

‘Very well. But it’s no use your bringing her back here tomorrow. He is going down to Lyndon tonight, and I shall probably go with him.’

‘Oh? Then we’ll come to Lyndon.’

‘Oh!’ cried Marian wringing her hands. ‘When I think of my poor Cynthia! So horribly insulted! Other people have scandals and divorces … but this! It’s so unusual! Nobody … nobody ever had anything like this in their family. And Cynthia of all people! She deserves it so little. She has always been such a discreet child. Tom will be beside himself. Unless … unless I can make James alter the thing before they find out. Don’t tell them, any of you! Do be careful what you say to them.’

‘I will say nothing! Nothing!’ said Mrs Cocks, perceiving her advantage, ‘if you will promise not to speak of this exploit of Agatha’s until I have been to town. Please, Marian! Wait at least until tomorrow.’

‘If you like, Ellen. Though mind you, I don’t expect you will be able to do much. But I must go to Bramfield and see James. Then I’ll go to Lyndon. I needn’t tell Tom and Cynthia I’m going via Bramfield….’

‘And I must pack if I’m to catch the five-fifty-five….’

Both matrons hurried from the room, their excited voices dying away as they ascended the stairs. Hubert picked up the half-finished glass of brandy and water which he had fetched for Marian. He offered it to Lois and, when she resolutely refused it, drank it up himself.

‘Do you think,’ Lois whispered, ‘that Agatha really has …?’

‘I’m afraid it looks hatefully like it,’ he said gloomily.

‘It’s a pity she didn’t know how ill John really is.’

‘She ought to have been told.’

‘I don’t believe she’d have gone if she knew, do you?’

‘Oh, she couldn’t! A woman would have to be an absolute devil to be as heartless as that. And she has a kindly nature, I think.’

‘Yes, she is kind.’ Lois was still too much shocked to be conventional. ‘Poor Agatha! I’m very sorry for them all. Aren’t you, Hubert?’

Hubert was on the point of saying that he wasn’t particularly sorry for Gerald Blair. But he had the wit to refrain, and remarked instead:

‘Perhaps her mother will be able to bring her back. Look here, Lois! If she’s going to town tonight, and your mother and John are going to Lyndon, we shall be left alone with the Bragges. I bar that. I couldn’t stand another meal in that hall. We’ll go too.’

‘But, Hubert, where? We can’t go home tonight. They don’t expect us for one thing.’

‘We’ll stop somewhere in town tonight, and go home tomorrow. We’ll get that five-fifty-five Mrs Cocks goes by. Look sharp and see to our packing! We’ve just time. I’ll find Bragge and make our apologies.’

‘But it’s so rude.’

‘We’ve done enough for ’em for one day. I’m going, anyhow. If you like to stay by yourself you can.’

‘We’ll never have time.’

‘Yes we will if we are quick. Do run, Lois. Just get together our things for the night, and your woman can follow us with the rest of the luggage when she’s packed it. I’ll give you dinner in any pub you like and you can choose your show afterwards. I’ll take you to hear Wagner if you want. Only do hurry!’

Lois yielded and ran upstairs to harry her maid through a hasty packing. Hubert found Sir Thomas and manufactured a sufficiently credible excuse for their sudden departure. In a very short time Braxhall was emptied of its guests. The long table was removed from the dais in the hall and replaced by a smaller one, suitable for two diners. There, in spacious magnificence, Sir Thomas and his lady devoured their evening meal, solemnly, slowly, and for the most part in silence. Occasionally the owner of Braxhall broke into a monologue.

‘Odd thing they all had to hurry off like that. But they were very sorry to go. They said so. Hard luck on them, having to go. We shan’t have any bridge tonight. However! I think they enjoyed themselves. I-think-they-enjoyed-themselves. But we shan’t have any bridge tonight. No! No bridge! You and I will have to get out the cribbage board, Cynthie.’

Lady Bragge helped herself to iced asparagus.

‘Went off very well indeed, the lunch did. Very well! Quite a new thing in these parts, I should say. A unique experience for everybody there. That’s what it was. A unique experience. I never heard before of an American lunch in honour of a work of art. No more did anyone else, I’ll be bound. No! Quite a new thing. Pity James Clewer wasn’t there. He’d have enjoyed it. I like to see people enjoying themselves. But I proposed his health. I didn’t forget that. A good sort, James! I like him. I like him. Blood is thicker than water, when all’s said and done. I said so in my speech. A decent fellow. Weought-toamadeimcome….’

Tears stood in Sir Thomas’s eyes as he repeatedly averred how much he liked his brother-in-law.

Cynthia said nothing but went on eating her dinner. Occasionally she stared idly about her, at her food, at her husband, at the frescoes, with the same exquisite, enigmatic contempt.