*chapter Xv*
*IN ENGLAND*
Captain and Mrs. Brentham arrived in London from East Africa at the end of May, 1889. You must picture Brentham with a reserve of savings of about five hundred pounds lying to his credit at Cocks’s, and a salary at the rate of seven hundred a year which will go on till some time in October. After much consideration and discussion during the voyage they have taken a furnished flat on the eighth floor of Hankey’s Mansions, St. James’s Park, as having a better address—“being close to the Government offices and the clubs, don’t you know, and of course if you have the lift going night and day it don’t matter whether you’re on the first or the eighth floor, to say nothing of the view.” Lucy had timidly suggested Pardew’s Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street as being very cheap for relations of Aunt Ellen, but Roger with that wistful snobbishness of his class decided it would be rather a come-down to hail from the West Central part of London when you were wishing to impress the Foreign Office favourably; so Hankey’s it was, with lots of sunlight, superb views over the Park and the barrack ground with its military challenges and cries.
Mr. Molyneux’s room at the Foreign Office.
“Ah, Brentham! Thought you’d soon be turning up. Dewburn’s been writing to me about you… Have a cigar? There are the matches. Well. Horrid thing to say, when a man’s only just arrived, but you’ve stirred up a reg’lar hornet’s nest among the unco’ guid. This confounded Nonconformist Conscience that Stead’s invented or created. There’s an obvious reference to you in the last Review of Reviews and Labby’s put a very caustic article in last week’s Truth, trying to get at the Government’s East African policy through you. All this has mightily upset the Old Man—“
Roger endeavours to give a lucid and not too lengthy account of the whole sequence of events which led up to his marriage at Unguja; expresses the most justly-felt wrath against the mosquitoes of the Press; offers to horsewhip them or have them up before a court of law…
Molyneux: “My dear fellow, what are you talking about? You’d simply do for yourself and have to quit the career. First place, horsewhipping’s out of date—dam’ low, in any case—in the second, there’s nothing libellous in what they’ve written—only general application, don’t you know. If you took any action on it you’d just dot the i’s and cross the t’s and get laughed at. And as to what they say in Parliament, can’t call them into court over that. No. Best leave it alone. Most unfortunate. Dare say not a bit your fault. Still I think you might have been a trifle more prudent, not—so to speak—have run your head into the noose. Quite agree with Dewburn you’ve done the right thing in marrying her…
“Well: so much for that. Now how about this missing cipher? Not sure that don’t upset us a bit more than your carryings-on with missionary ladies…”
Roger: “But I didn’t carry on—I—I—really must protest against these assumptions—“
Molyneux: “All right. Keep your hair on… Don’t get into a wax… I’m only talkin’ for your own good… But tell us about this cipher.”
Roger (still with an angry flush): “What can I tell? I arrive at Medina and am told all in a hurry to re-organize the Consulate there. There was no one but an Indian clerk in charge. I simply take him over. I put my cipher in the safe, but I had to leave the key with the clerk when at very short notice I started for up-country to warn these confounded missionaries… Wish to God I’d paid no heed to your instructions” (“I say, old chap, draw it mild … and mind what you’re doin’ with that cigar-ash.” Roger strides to the fireplace and throws away the cigar into it.) “I wish to God,” he continues, “I’d left ’em alone to stand the racket if the Arabs did come. However, what I mean to say is, I only set out to do what I was told to do and couldn’t foresee how long it would take. I didn’t get back to my Consulate till last April. How can I tell what happened to the clerk or the cipher or the money? I paid up the deficit… How do I know what those Bazzards were up to? Mrs. Bazzard—“
Molyneux (his manner has insensibly become stiffer and more ceremonious): “I think we’ll leave the Bazzards out of it. At any rate they aren’t here to defend themselves. We must refer the whole matter to Dewburn for inquiry. Meantime here you are on leave and I dare say badly wanting a rest. My advice is: go down to the country… Your father lives in the country, doesn’t he?” (Roger nods.) “Well, go down and rusticate a bit and take Mrs. Brentham with you. In a week or two the newspapers and the Nonconformist Conscience will be in full cry after something else. As to whether you should go back, we must leave that to the Old Man. He may think a change of scene advisable. Any use asking you to a bachelor dinner? My wife’s out of town just now.”
Roger (very unwisely, scenting in this a reluctance to ask Lucy too): “No, thank you. I think I’ll take your advice and go off to the country. Ungrateful sort of country—I mean the nation—mine is! Here I’ve made most important discoveries I’ve had no time to report on, I’ve … I’ve …” (Feelings too much for him. Takes his hat and stick, bows to Molyneux and leaves his room.) In all this he has acted most foolishly. If he’d gone to Molyneux’s—to “Good old Spavins’s”—as the clerks called him in the room opposite—bachelor dinner, had told a few good stories and hunting adventures, Molyneux, who really had his kindly side like most men, would have forgotten the old grudge about his intrusive appointment, have taken a much more charitable view about the lost cipher and the hasty marriage and have written a memo for Lord Wiltshire’s eye which would have suggested a year’s employment at home and a fresh start in East Africa. Mrs. Molyneux would have called on Mrs. Brentham at Hankey’s and Mrs. Brentham would have been pronounced by Molyneux “a dam’ good-lookin’ wench—don’t wonder she turned his head a bit—there can’t have been much to look at in East Africa”—and Brentham’s difficulties were over; and the whole fate of East Africa might have been a little different. As it was, he wrote some such memo as this for the information of the Under-Secretary of State: “Saw Brentham to-day—from Zangia Consulate, East Africa. Looks rather fagged. Evidently had a rough time. But very angry when asked to explain the awkward circumstances of his very protracted journey through the interior with the lady who is now his wife. He protested with much heat against the attacks of the Press and the attitude of the Missionary Societies. I dare say he is a maligned man, but I should also say he is what we call in diplomacy ‘un mauvais coucheur.’ Difficult to get on with, quarrelsome with colleagues. He could throw no light on the loss of his cipher. Did not seem to realize what trouble and expense it has caused. He has six months’ leave of absence due. Suggest when that is coming to an end he be offered some Consular post in Norway or Algeria.”
Roger called at 6A, Carlton House Terrace, but was told by the man-servant opening the door that Lady Silchester and the little Lord Silchester were still in the country, at Engledene, and that it was improbable her Ladyship would be in town again until the autumn, being in deep mourning. Roger scribbled on his card (which would be sent on with other cards of calling and polite inquiries):
“So much want to see you. Starting to-morrow for Church Farm, Aldermaston.—ROGER.”
Roger delivered his blushing wife, rather overdressed (for he had insisted on a fashionable outfit), to her parents at Aldermaston; he shook hands heartily with his father-in-law to whom he took an immediate liking, kissed his mother-in-law (to her confusion) and his sisters-in-law, and then let his father-in-law drive him over to the nearest station from which he could get a train to Basingstoke (for Farleigh), promising to return in four days after he had seen his father, sister, and brothers, one of them at Portsmouth. When he did get back to Church Farm, Lucy was in bed, ill, and his father and mother-in-law were looking grave and preoccupied. They were also—as country people are—a little tiresomely reticent. What had happened? This, as he afterwards pieced it together.
When Mrs. Baines had received Ann Anderson’s letter—written, as you will remember, about November 30, but not posted from Unguja till early in January—she had a knock-down blow. It is true the Mission on the receipt of a telegram from Callaway had warned her to expect serious news from Hangodi, but she had not paid much attention, so convinced was she that God must avert all harm from a son of hers. But the letter—from Ann, too, whom she would have welcomed as a daughter-in-law—was convincing, and for the first few hours after she had read it twice through, she locked herself into their joint bedroom to Mr. Baines’s great discomfiture—he might wash and sleep where he liked. She had shouted at him through the keyhole, in a hoarse, strangled voice he hardly recognized as hers, that his son John was dead, killed by the “A-rabs,” no doubt with that slut of a Lucy’s full approval; and left to digest this dreadful news as best he might. Eliza, touched to great pity and a sympathetic sobbing over the fate of Master John, made him up a sort of a shakedown bedroom arrangement in the “libery,” where he did his accounts…
Mrs. Baines did not emerge from her fastness for a day and a half. When she did come out she was composed, but with such an awful look in her eyes that no one dared offer sympathy or proffer advice. She gave her orders in as few words as possible. She set to work to confection the deepest mourning and pulled the blinds down, and down they had to remain a full week. During that week by the aid of candle-light she wrote a good many letters—for her. Eliza, who had to post them, for Mrs. Baines shrank from encountering friends or acquaintances till the week was up, noticed that some of them bore quite grand addresses: the member for Reading, the Marquis of Wiltshire, the Editor of the Review of Reviews…
How did Mrs. Baines know so soon that Lucy and Roger had returned to England and come down to see the Joslings at Church Farm? Why, because the miller of Aldermaston saw the Brenthams arrive at Aldermaston station and witnessed the greeting of Farmer Josling—such a fine upstanding man—and his son-in-law—just such another, only rather sallow-like and thin; and the miller told old Mrs. Bunsby of the general shop at Theale; and Mrs. Bunsby, wanting badly a supply of ginger beer, for the weather was getting warm and Oxford undergraduates sometimes pushed their walking tours as far as the Kennet Valley—Mrs. Bunsby walked over to John Baines & Co. that very afternoon to give an order for four dozen and mentioned the fact of “pore Master John’s widow” having come back to her home “with a noo ‘usband.”
The assistant who registered the order for delivery in their next round, after Mrs. Bunsby left slipped into Mr. Baines’s “libery,” and half-whispered the news of Lucy’s return. When, soon afterwards, Mrs. Baines came into the dining-room to preside over the tea table, he—(he looked very aged—my astral body floating over the scene felt a twinge of pity for him; in his own dull way he had been fond and proud of his only son and worked to provide him with a competency—some day)—he, with some preparatory clearing of the throat, said: “Er … Hrhm… Er … Lucy’s back, I hear…”
“Indeed?” replied his wife swiftly. “Where? Bridewell? That’s where she ought to be…”
“I dare say, my dear, but she’s at Church Farm, her parents’, you know… P’raps she could tell you something about John?…”
“P’raps she could. But I won’t have her name mentioned in this house. Do you understand?”
Mr. Baines did, and took this intimation as final.
The next day was Sunday. Mrs. Baines spent much of the day (as she had decided she could not go to chapel) communing in prayer with her Maker in the bedroom fastness. Some of the prayers heard by the frightened Eliza through the keyhole sounded more like objurgations, and the Scripture readings were the minatory passage directed by the Minor Prophets against harlots and light women.
After two days of Aldermaston Lucy had quite recovered her spirits—she had felt rather depressed at Hankey’s Mansions and not at all lightened at heart by her week of shopping under Aunt Pardew’s furtive guidance and rather checked congratulations. On the Monday morning she was standing with her parents and Clara in front of the beautiful old farm house, inhaling the scents of May, revelling with the eye over the landscape beauty she had so often recalled to herself in Africa. Farmer Josling had repeatedly given expression to the pleasure he had derived from the looks, manner, and hand-grip of his son-in-law, and Mrs. Josling still blushed and laughed at the remembrance of his having kissed her cheek. They could not help the gratification of feeling that their daughter’s second marriage was into a social stratum worthy of her looks, her superior education and their hopes for her…
Clara, walking away to glance at the bee-hives, called back to the group, “Here’s Mrs. Baines coming up from the road.”
Instinctively the parents withdrew into the porch of the house, leaving their daughter to meet Mrs. Baines for the first few minutes alone, with no other listeners to the sad story she had to tell. Lucy, like the bird fascinated by the snake, remained where she was, her fingers playing with a pansy she had just picked. Mrs. Baines, all in black, with black plumes to a large bonnet and black gloves, walked slowly and consideringly up to the spell-bound Lucy. When she was close to her she said: “What … have … you done … with … my … son?…”
“Oh! I … I … haven’t you heard?” stammered Lucy.
“I have heard … and I’ve guessed much more than I’ve heard… You … you harlot—you adulteress—you—you strumpet!” roared Mrs. Baines, who had been cooking her vengeance and rehearsing this scene with a dictionary, during the last twenty-four hours. And forthwith before Lucy could reply or any one intervene she had dealt her two terrific boxes on the ears, first on one side and then on the other.
Lucy fell on to the pansy bed, temporarily stunned. Mr. Josling, scarcely able at first to believe ears and eyes, rushed out with a roar like a bull, picked up Mrs. Baines round her iron stays, as though she weighed no more than a wisp, ran round to the other side of the house where there was a great horse trough full of water, and soused in this the head and huge plumed bonnet of the angry woman. And again, giving her time to catch her breath, he plunged her head and bonnet beneath the water. Then, standing her on her feet, he said, “There! that’ll cool your hot blood. That is some return for your half-killing my daughter—you blasted she-tiger, you … Be off! Or I’ll set the dogs on you… I’ll…”
“Father, dear,” said Clara, crying for pity and rage over the hapless Lucy, yet careful of appearances: “Father dear, don’t shout so! For goodness’ sake, let the old witch go, and don’t attract everybody’s attention. What ever will the neighbours think! Here!” she said, thrusting on Mrs. Baines the umbrella she had brought and dropped on the garden path at the moment of the assault, “be off with you, you wicked old woman. It’s a mercy father ain’t killed you, he’s that strong. And if you’ve done any real harm to my sister, we’ll soon let you know and have you up before the courts, you wicked old snivelling psalm-singin’ Methody!”
Mrs. Baines said nothing to this counter-attack. She drained the water from her plumes with her fingers, put her flopping bonnet as straight as was possible, pressed the water from her shoulders, and made some attempt to wipe her face with a handkerchief; and then, summoning all her strength and resolution (for in reality she was much shaken and near collapse), she walked firmly past them, uttering never a word, walked slowly down the garden path, turned to the right and contrived not to halt on her way back to the station till she was well out of their sight. They were a little over-awed by her dignity.
It was decided—and Lucy when she could speak implored them to adopt this negative course—not to write to Roger, and as far as possible not to talk of this painful scene to any neighbour. But to keep it from country gossip was an impossibility. This, that, or the other farm servant had seen it, from the rafters of a barn in repair, from the stables, from the dairy window; and so the treatment old Mrs. Baines had served out to her former daughter-in-law became noised abroad, penetrated from the kitchen and still-room of Engledene House to its mistress’s dressing-room. A vague rumour of it even reached the African Department of the Foreign Office and Molyneux publicly shrugged his shoulders in Sir Mulberry Hawk’s room. The Carnarvons at Highclere heard a perversion of it—rather a humorous one—from one of their farmer tenants, and reconsidered their idea of asking Brentham and Mrs. Brentham over to a week-end party to relate some of their extraordinary experiences. The Vicar of Farleigh Wallop realized that something of the kind had occurred to interrupt his musings on the arrangements of the streets in Calleva Atrebatum, and when he drove over with Maud to make the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law—now convalescent and thankful to find the drum of the worst smacked ear had not been split—he was merely coldly polite and expressed very little interest in missionary questions. Indeed he took no interest in Christian Missions after 700 A.D. Up to that time he reckoned—more or less—they had been spreading the ideas of Imperial Rome, of Roman civilization.
Roger, however, though he commented little on the episode of the assault, and felt in every way the least said, soonest mended, borrowed his father-in-law’s riding-horse and rode early one morning over to Tilehurst. He entered the factory, of design, just as Mr. Baines was about to take his seat in the office and run his eyes over the day’s orders. “Oh, don’t be alarmed!” he said to Mr. Baines, who was instinctively about to withdraw, guessing his visitor’s identity. “I’m not a violent heathen like your wife. Sit down and let us talk this over like sensible men.”
He then put the matter very plainly before Mr. Baines.
Mrs. Baines, summoned by half-fearful, half-exultant Eliza, had “locked herself in her bedroom, she ‘ave an’ ast me to go for the police!”
“Then you, too,” said Roger to the startled Eliza, “remain and hear what I have to say. Since your termagant of a mistress refuses to come, you shall repeat my words to her. You are, from what my wife tells me, an old and trusted servant of the family” (Eliza bridled and pleated the hem of her apron). “When she returns to sanity, you may get a chance of saying a word to your mistress in season, even if her husband has not the courage to do so. Tell her then, if she ever annoys or slanders or upsets my wife in any way I will leave no stone unturned to punish her. And if she appears at Church Farm or anywhere else again with the intention of assaulting my wife I will knock her on the head like the mad dog she is. Now you can leave us. But I trust also to you as an honourable woman and one who was sincerely fond of poor John Baines, who ought never to be connected with these hateful sayings and doings, not to chatter about this business outside this house.”
And Eliza did not. She was much impressed by Brentham’s appeal. The interview with John’s father even ended in a kind of reconciliation. He heard from Brentham for the first time the whole story, so far as it was known, of the circumstances which led up to the attack on the station, John’s death, and Lucy’s journey to the coast; of how her baby had died and how ill she had been; of the Stotts, and of Ann Jamblin’s obstinacy. Roger purposely prolonged the interview. It was doing the miserable father good, and was keeping Mrs. Baines a prisoner in her bedroom just when she wanted to be busy at house-work.
Maud on her return from visiting the Joslings tightened her lips and “went for” her father as he had never been truth-told before; so Mrs. Baines, if she did harm to Lucy’s good name and gave her nervous system a nasty shock, also provoked good in other directions. A disturbance of the kind seldom fails to clear the air and create a fresher atmosphere. Maud reproached her father bitterly with his incivility to his eldest son’s wife; with his general indifference to the well-being of his children, his selfish absorption in his archaeological work, his unfairness to them in lavishing on it funds which should have been their patrimony. She even issued a sort of ultimatum: the subsidies to the Silchester Excavation fund must cease; the curate at Farleigh must be given his conge and the Vicar—still able-bodied—carry out his own Church duties: or she would go away and earn her own living as a secretary or something or other. And she was at once, and on his authority, to ask Lucy to stay—with Roger, of course—for at least a month. He gave in. Maud had deeper plans hidden under this surface wrath. Roger was in difficulties with the Foreign Office, she guessed. He had resigned from the Indian Army. He might at any time have to forge a new career for himself and would want a little capital to start with. She reckoned that her father having originally been a well-to-do man and her mother having come to him with a substantial dowry, there ought to be a least twelve thousand pounds to be divided between the four of them. If that left her father almost entirely dependent on his income—about five hundred a year—from the twin benefices of Farleigh and Cliddesden, that would serve him right. He had no business to squander his children’s money—as it really was—on a work of excavation which the County or the Nation should finance.
A little repentant and more than a little rheumatic—(besides, Roman Silchester was turning out so distressingly Christian and so little Pompeian and Pagan)—he agreed at any rate to look into the matter. The letter was sent to Lucy, and she came, now quite restored to health. She found in Maud the selfless friend and good adviser she had long needed. All she begged and prayed of Roger was that he might leave her at Farleigh for a time and not frighten her and upset her nerves by requiring of her the going out into smart Society, where she was ever on the twitter for fear of being questioned as to her birth and bringing-up and the circumstances of her life in Africa.
Roger rather ruefully consented. Maud would gradually cure her of her nerves and her rusticity. Meantime he would now tackle Sibyl. Sibyl had taken no notice of his card and call; but about three weeks afterwards had written to Maud, picturing herself as having now emerged from a swoon of grief and being ready to see Roger for a few minutes if he would promise to move gently and speak in a level voice, as the least thing upset her. Pressed to be more definite, she consented to see him—and him only—at Engledene on a certain Wednesday afternoon at three o’clock.
He found her in a little boudoir, which was draped with pleated lavender-mauve cashmere and shaded to a dim light. She was dressed in black, not having as yet the hardihood to discard widows’ weeds, still less some diaphanous, filmy coiffe, some ghost of a widow’s cap. Queen Victoria was still a great power in Society and kept Peeresses in order. If you were too daring you might be banned at Court and then where would your social and political influence be?
“Wheel up, or better still lift up—I can’t bear the slightest jar, just now—that small armchair, Roger—the purple velvet one—and put it near enough for me to hear and speak without effort; but not too near, because I notice you have a very powerful aura. I’ve only just learnt about auras, and I realize now what a difference they make!…”
“All right,” said Roger, obeying these instructions, “but what’s an aura? Is it the smell of my Harris tweeds, or do you doubt my having had a bath this morning?”
“Don’t be so perfectly horrid … and coarse… You never used to be coarse, whatever you were—I suppose it comes from marrying a farmer’s daughter; but for the matter of that, what am I? My poor dear dad is trying hard to be a farmer after spending his best years in the Army. I didn’t mean anything much about your ‘aura,’ except, I suppose, that as I’m only recently widowed all my relations with men-visitors should be a little frigid. But I’m simply talking nonsense to gain time, to remember what I wanted to say to you.” (A pause.) … “Roger! Your dreadful letter from that Gouging place, coming just on top of poor Francis’s death, knocked me over. The doctors put it all down to Francis, of course … I don’t deny that his death did upset me… But I’d been expecting that any time within the last six months… The doctors told me definitely last winter his heart was very unsound and that he must not over-exert himself in any way or be contraried or argued with… That was why I gave up the orange-velvet curtains and general redecoration of the dining-room at 6A, Carlton House Terrace—which is dingy beyond belief. I shall do it now… It’s too early for tea … won’t you smoke?” (Roger: “Thank you.”) “Well, there’s everything on that little table… No. Not those ones; they’ve got the wee-est flavour of opium… Obliged to do something for my nerves… Well, now, about your Gouging letter… I mean about your marriage… My dear Roger! What a gaffe! I mean, how could you?”
“Could I what?”
“Ruin your hopes and mine?”
“Well, I did hope to marry Lucy … for at least six months before the knot was tied… Ever since her husband’s death. So my hopes were fulfilled. And as to you, I never prevented you from marrying Lord S. So where the ruin comes in, I can’t see.”
“Oh,” wailed Sibyl, “why beat about the bush? You must have known that I always hoped if anything happened to poor Francis—and anything might well have done so—after all, you or I might be in a railway accident or break our necks out hunting. In such case you must have known I counted on you … I mean, on our being happy at last… Don’t interrupt! … And just think! Francis loved me awfully. I really was perfectly sweet to him and did my duty to him in every way. His gratitude for that boy … for a direct heir! … Well, after Clithy was born he made his will! … Don’t be silly … and don’t joke about things I regard almost as sacred… I mean Francis re-made his will; and left me sole guardian of the boy and sole trustee, sole everything; and mistress for my life of Engledene, and of 6A, till Clithy came of age … and a jointure of L10,000 a year to keep them up. Clithy has also the Silchester house which is let and which I intend to keep let till he comes of age, the moors in Scotland and the shooting lodge. Of course he has the reversionary rights of everything after my death. And equally of course he has fifteen thousand a year, which I control till he is twenty-one or until he marries…
“Just think what I could have done for you, out of all this—if you’d waited! If only you’d waited!…” (buries her face in the mauve silk cushions and cries a little or pretends to). (Roger fidgets on his chair. An exquisite little purple Sevres clock on the white mantelpiece ticks … ticks … ticks.)
Roger: “Look here, Sibyl. You’re altogether on the wrong tack, believe me. You might have married me in ‘86. I was quite ready then and fancied myself in love with you. But if you had we mightn’t have got on. My seven hundred a year would have been nowhere to give you surroundings like this…” (And he looks round the boudoir “done” in white, lavender, mauve and purple, with its exquisite bits of furniture, its velvet-covered armchair and Charles II day-bed, and pillow covers of mauve silk; and looked also at the sinuous figure of the woman coiled on the day-bed in her filmy black dress, with her face half buried in the silk cushions, and one disconsolate arm lying listlessly along her side, and at the magnificent rings of emeralds and diamonds on the pink fingers.) “You were quite right: you could never have stood the strain of Africa. I’ll tell you by and bye some of the things Lucy and I went through.” (At this hint of comradeship with Lucy, the little black velvet shoes gave angry thumps on the frame of the day-bed.) “I know,” continues Roger, “you used to throw out mysterious hints after you were married that I might wait till some far-off date when you were free; I mean after Lord Silchester was dead. But what decent man would have taken you at your word? Why, Silchester might well be alive now. He did not die of old age…”
Sibyl (in a muffled voice): “N-no; he … he … didn’t. He—overrated his strength. He—he—oh, how can I tell you? He was so anxious to play a great part in public affairs … but he had lost all his energy…” (Sitting up with flushed cheeks—damnably good-looking, Roger feels.) “Well! What can I do for you? You’ve failed me. But I suppose you’ve come here to ask me to help you in some way. Men don’t generally waste their time on afternoon calls without a motive. What is it? I’ve got no influence anywhere since Francis died” (a sob). “So it’s no good asking me to write to Lord Wiltshire or to Spavins. I hear you are out of favour at the F.O. It’s not my fault, is it? It’s all due to your gallivanting after missionaries’ wives…” (Roger looks sullen.) … “Heigh ho! I expect with all this crying and tousling among cushions, to hide I was crying from your cynical eyes, I’d better go into my room and bathe my face before the butler brings in the tea… There! you can pull up two of the blinds—when I am gone—my eyes are so red—and you can look at some of my new books till I come in to make the tea. You mustn’t dream of going before we’ve had tea and finished our talk.”
“I suppose,” said Sibyl a quarter of an hour later when they were discussing tea and tea-cake and pate-de-foie sandwiches and assorted cakelets, “what you really came to ask was would I present this Lucy-pucy of yours at Court. But, my dear, I shall be in mourning for a year, and the Queen—“
“Lord no! Such a thing never entered my head. It would scare Lucy into fits. I hope before next season comes round I shall be back in Africa—or somewhere. So far as I connected Lucy with this visit I might have intended to ask you to let me bring her here one day, and for you to be kind to her … not frighten her, as you very well could do, pretending all the time to be her best friend…”
Sibyl: “Well: I’ll tell you what you shall do. You must remember I’m in mourning, of course… We always have to think of what the servants will say… And—ah! Did I tell you? Aunt Christabel is here. I sent her out the longest drive I could think of, so that we might have our afternoon alone; still, she’s staying here till I emerge from the deepest of my mourning… By the bye she’s horrified at your marriage, just as she used to be horrified at the idea of your marrying me… Well, bring your Lucy over one day at the end of July and I’ll just have a look at her. And then, in the autumn—say October—you and she, and of course if you like to have them, Maurice and Geoffrey too, could come here for the shooting. Of course I shan’t have a regular party; but somebody must come and shoot the pheasants. The Queen couldn’t object to that. I’ve asked a man—I did before Francis’s death—to come. You might like to meet him: a Sir Willowby Patterne… Dare say you’ve heard of him?”
Roger: “I’ve heard no good of him…”
“Oh, what tittle-tattlers and scandal-mongers you men are! I think he’s so amusing, and every one says he’s a splendid shot… However, we will make up just a tiny party and you and Lucy shall entertain for me. I shall purposely be very little seen and shall give out my cousins have come over to help me with my guests… And, Roger! If I am to help you you must help me. The doctor says I positively must take up my riding again unless I am to drift into being an invalid. Couldn’t you—sometimes—whilst you’re down in this part of the world—come over and ride with me? I can ‘mount’ you. You could ride poor Francis’s cob … not showy but very steady.”
“I will, when I come back from town,” said Roger, and took his departure, not at all dissatisfied with his afternoon.
Two days afterwards he thought it might be prudent to see how things were going at the Foreign Office. So he went up to town, changed into town togs at Hankey’s (where their flat was becoming a white elephant, owing to Lucy’s dislike to London, so he arranged to give it up), and betook himself to Downing Street, and asked to see Mr. Bennet Molyneux. “Mr. Bennet Molyneux,” he was presently told, “is very sorry, sir, but he is much engaged this morning; would you go into the Department and see one of the young gentlemen there?”
The Department was a large, long room with a cubby-hole at its further end for the accommodation of the senior clerk, a sort of school prefect who had to keep order among the high-spirited juniors and therefore required to work a little apart from them. When Brentham entered the main room, announced by the office messenger, he recognized two friends of yore and several new, ingenuous faces. There also emerged from the cubby hole a man whom he had known as a junior three years previously: an agreeable gentleman of agricultural and sporting tastes, who, because of his occasional remonstrances and enforcement of discipline, was known as “Snarley Yow or the Dog Fiend.” Then there were “Rosie” Walrond and Ted Parsons. (The others do not matter in this narrative: they merely served as chorus and acclaimers of the witticisms of the elder boys. They were all nice to look at, all well-mannered and all well-dressed.) “Rosie” Walrond was a young man—older than he looked—with wavy flaxen hair and mocking grey eyes, and an extremely cynical manner overlying an exceedingly kind heart.
Walrond: “Hullo! Here’s Brentham, the rescuer of beleaguered Gospellers. We’ve got a grudge against you. You came here months ago and were closeted with Spavins and never gave us a look-in. And we were dying to hear all about the elopement and its sequel. We were prepared to subscribe to a wedding present for a teller of good stories…”
Then he added: “D’you admire my grotto?”
Brentham, after the necessary greetings and introductions, strode up to “Rosie’s” desk. Its ledges and escarpments were piled with rock specimens on which tattered, brown, and half-decipherable labels had been pasted.
“My mineral specimens … from” (he checked himself) … “from East Africa! Then you never sent them on?”
“My dear chap! Where was I to send them to? The Consular Mail bags—two of them—arrived here all right, addressed to me, but nary a letter with them or any directions. Also two skulls which, as you see, decorate our mantelpiece, and which I am proposing to have mounted in silver at Snarley’s expense for our Departmental Dinner. Meantime, I have arranged my desk as a grotto, in spite of the office cleaner’s objections…”
Brentham: “I suppose the letter of directions went astray. I asked you to send the rocks to the School of Mines and the skulls to the Natural History Museum. However, I’ll take them all away presently in a cab.”
“But not the skulls, I beg, just as we were being initiated into Devil worship by Snarley, who has learnt the Black Mass…”
“Yes, the skulls, too. They’re most important—“
“But so are we,” said Parsons.
Then followed half an hour of chaff, out of which Roger gleaned no grain of information as to his own probable fate and was too diffident to ask outright if any decision as to his return had been arrived at. He accepted an invitation to dine with the Department at the Cheshire Cheese and meet Arthur Broadmead; then drove to the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, handed in his rocks and asked the Curator for a report on them, at his leisure. After that, Professor Flower and the skulls; which were those of two men of that Hamitic race colonizing the Happy Valley. He had found them lying about on the outskirts of a village and had received the careless permission of the villagers to take them away. They might serve to determine the relationships of this incongruous type.