Chapter IV: The Braxhall Frescoes (1)

I

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 depredation 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 toward the canteen or the operating theatre, but was content to organize Charity Matinées 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, toward 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 summerhouses 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 farther 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 æsthetic 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, Cynthia! 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 great-coat 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 to-night.”

“And, by the way,” put in Sir Thomas, “I’ve invited that cousin of the Cockses’ 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 to-morrow, 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 Bainses 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 farther 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. Any one 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 to-day 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, Cynthia, 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 in 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 Mme. 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 to-morrow; I must say good-bye to them before I go to Scotland. Will you come?”

“I positively must write letters the whole of to-morrow,” 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 horsehair 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 to-day. 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 afterward, 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.