The municipal museum in Ghost Street was rarely, if ever, thronged, especially after noon.
‘You can have the key,’ the wife of the custodian said, ‘if you want it. But there’s nothing whatever inside.’
And the assertion, sometimes, would spare her husband the weariness of struggling into a pair of black and silver trousers, and vague historic tunic, that was practically a tea. For in Ashringford, the Corporation, like a diver in a tank, was continually plunging back into the past.
‘Since it pleases visitors to catch a last glimpse of this vanishing England,’ the Mayor had said, ‘and if Stratford can; why … !’
And after the customary skirmishing of the Board, and reconciliatory garden-party, a theatrical tailor had been beckoned to, from Covent Garden, who had measured half the town.
And now, beneath the great horse-chestnut trees, where stood ‘the Fountain’, round which, of a summer morning, the ‘native’ women clustered, chatting charmingly, as they sold each other flowers, or posing, whenever they should be invited, to anxious artists for a shilling an hour, an enchanted American, leaning, observant, from a window of the Cresswell Arms, might almost fancy that, what with the determined duennas thronging to the Cathedral, and darting chambermaids holding long obtrusive envelopes, and tripping shepherdesses and dainty goose-girls, and occasionally, even, some pale, ring-eyed-powdered-nervous Margaret, with empty pitcher, and white-stockinged feet, it was still the threshold of the thirteenth century.
‘There’s nothing in the museum, whatever,’ the woman repeated. ‘Nothing at all.’ And she added almost desperately: ‘It’s where they keep the rubbish.’
But Mrs Shamefoot was not accustomed to be baulked.
‘There’re the sepulchral urns, and the tear bottles, at any rate,’ she said, ‘and there’s a good skeleton, I believe?’
‘Yes, marm. There is that.’
‘Well, then! …’ And pushing apart the light gilt gates, she swept inside. And even if it were only for the fascinating fanlight on the stairs, she was glad that she had come.
And there was also a mirror! The unexpected shock of the thing brought a flush of pleasure to her cheek. She had hardly hoped to find so much.
‘Marvellous woman,’ she exclaimed, going up to it, with an amicable nod, ‘where’ve you been?’
She was looking bewitching beyond measure, she believed, bound in black ribands, with a knot like a pure white butterfly under her chin.
And to her astonishment, there were mirrors, or their equivalents, upon most of the walls.
‘That habit of putting glass over an oil painting,’ she murmured, ‘makes always such a good reflection, particularly when the picture’s dark. Many’s the time I’ve run into the National Gallery on my way to the Savoy and tidied myself before the Virgin of the Rocks …’
And selecting a somewhat spindle-legged settee she glanced yearningly around.
It was the room of the Blueharnis Bequest.
In a place of prominence, unmistakable, was the Dehell portrait of the donor, leaning against a door, in full uniform, the arms folded, the eyes fixed, dangling a sword.
What could have happened?
Anxiously, for a clue, she scanned the pendant of his wife, a billowy, balloon-like creature, leading by a chain of frail convolvulus a prancing warhorse. But the mystery still remained.
Near by, upon a screen (being stored for her), was the Miss Millicent Mutton of Maclise. Here, in a party pinafore, Mrs Henedge was seen riding recklessly upon a goat clasping a panier of peaches and roses while smiling down at an angelic little boy who, with a thistle and a tambourine, was urging the nanny on.
Eventually, authorities affirmed, the canvas would find its way to the South Kensington Museum, where (besides being near to dear Father … and to old Father … and the Oratory), there was a room waiting ready to receive it where it would be perfectly happy and at home.
And as one work will beget another, Mrs Pontypool, not to be outdone, had contributed an ancestral portrait of a lady, reclining upon a canopy, plainly prostrate, beneath the hot furnaces, and the fiery skies, of Manchester …
But, for the most part, as was but fitting for a Cathedral town, the mildly Satanic school of Heironymus Bosch was chiefly to the fore.
Yet, whimsically wistful, an elderly frame in curtains was waiting to be found. Leisurely, Mrs Shamefoot rose.
That something, singularly wicked, was concealed beneath the hangings, she had no doubt.
And indeed it was ‘Le thé à l’Anglaise, chez Lucrezia Borgia’, in which an elegant and radiant Lucrezia, tea-pot in hand, was seen admiring the indisposition of her guests like a naughty child.
A glass of flowers by Fantin brought her to herself.
‘If I could feel it were all arranged!’ she murmured. ‘Unless this window-quibbling ceases, I’ll soon be in my grave. And Soco, I’m confident, could not be counted upon, even for the simplest cross. He’d marry again. The brute!’
She looked out across a half-wild garden to the Asz. Beyond the broad bridges, the peaked hayricks, sprinkling the hills, stood sharp, like pyramids, against the sky. There was something monstrous and disquieting in their shapes that thrilled her. To be an Independent upon some promontory, she mused, above the sea; a land-mark; perhaps, a shrine! …
White birds, like drifting pearls, would weave their way about her, examining her with their desolate empty eyes.
Or to be a lighthouse; looped in lights!
Although to search out some poor face, when it the least expected it would be carrying ill-nature, perhaps, to a rather far extreme. Better some idle tower. But in England, towers so seldom mellowed rightly. They were too rain-washed, weather-beaten, wind-kissed, rugged; they turned tragic and outlived themselves; they became such hags of things; they grew dowdy and wore snapdragons; objects for picnics; rendezvous of lovers, haunts of vice …; they were made a convenience of by owls; they were scarred by names; choked by refuse, and in the end, they got ghoulish and took to too much ivy, and came toppling down.
She stood repressed.
Over the darkly gleaming water of the Asz a boat passed by with cordings like the strings of some melancholy instrument. From the deserted garden below an odour of burning leaves loitered up to her. The long pink Infidels flared stiffly from the shade.
‘Heigh-ho,’ she yawned, ‘one can’t play fast and loose for ever …’ And she turned away, dolefully, through the damp deserted rooms.
A piece of tessellated pavement, a sandaled foot, detained her. ‘Street!’ she murmured, stooping down, enthralled.
The frou-frou of the custodian’s skirts disturbed her.
‘Such a mixture of everything as there is; a country Cluny!’
‘I daresay, marm. I’ve never been round the worruld; I’ve lived in Ashringford, man, and boy, these sixty years.’
‘Indeed; that’s why you look so young!’
‘I beg your pardon, marm?’
‘I say, that’s why you look so young!’
And startled by his historic attire, she trailed slowly towards the door, gazing back at him across her shoulder, with one arm stretched before, the other lingering behind, in the attitude of a nymph evading a satyr upon a Kylix.
It was a relief to hear voices! Chatting beneath an immaterial study of the sunset breeze, she beheld the ample form of Sumph.
‘And in Act IV,’ she was saying, ‘the husband pretends to go away. But, of course, he doesn’t! He goes only a little distance … And the “curtain” should be beautiful! Lovely it ought to be. The birds all singing as if their last hour had come. And Miss Compostella and Mr Chalmers—’
‘Is your mistress anywhere about?’ Mrs Shamefoot interrupted her.
Sumph smiled.
‘Why, no,’ she said, ‘she’s not. I’m here with Mrs Henedge’s maid; just taking a look round.’
‘Really? …’
‘Whenever I’m able I like to encourage anything that’s Art.’
‘And how do you like Ashringford?’
‘I like it. It puts me in mind of the town Dick Whittington came to when all the bells were ringing.’
‘You’ve been up the tower!’
‘It didn’t seem worth while. They told us beforehand we could never see back there … But we watched them pull the bells. Quite a receipt of their own they seemed to have. Such swingings and pausings and noddings and rushings. You should have seen the dowdies run! And in such bonnets. As Thérèse remarked, it was an education in botany.’
‘Oh-h-h!’
There came a cry.
Mrs Henedge’s maid was before the Borgia thé.
Nodding sympathetically to Sumph, Mrs Shamefoot disappeared.