Mise à Jour Microsoft Solitaire Collection
Padre Harmon
Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team ( ) from scanned images of public domain material generously made available by the Google Books Library Project ( )
It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is abreakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts;it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices withstained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in oldFrench, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heronresting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovelygarden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned thegardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arborsand fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those ofHaddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there arebeds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of theStuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are hugeold trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are thewoods and grassy lawns of the home park.
Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good-looking face, a littlespoilt by a permanent expression of irritability and impatience, whichis due to the state of his liver; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouthis querulous; nature meant him for a very amiable man, but thedinner-table has interfered with, and in a measure upset, the goodintentions of nature: it very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is bybirth a Fitz-Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a stillpretty woman of thirty-five or -six, inclined to an embonpoint whichis the despair of herself and her maids; she has small features, a gayexpression, and very intelligent eyes; she does not look at all a greatlady, but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers those merriermoments in life in which it is not necessary. She and Lord Usk, thenLord Surrenden, were greatly in love when they married; sixteen yearshave gone by since then, and it now seems very odd to each of them thatthey should ever have been so. They are not, however, bad friends, andhave even at the bottom of their hearts a lasting regard for each other.This is saying much, as times go. When they are alone they quarrelconsiderably; but then they are so seldom alone. They both consider thisdisputatiousness the inevitable result of their respective relations.They have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, and two youngand handsome daughters. The eldest son, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in thenames of Victor Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as Boom.
They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is oldChelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashionedJacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent fromflowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter ofmany papers on the floor.
There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels thatthose fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright andeconomy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest toan American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer,pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of hisfriends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread ofthe ensuing fifteen days without sport.
His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not muchlike his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and LadyWaverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped,annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has boughtAchnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands,represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desiredspot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a foolas to sell it?
When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxfordfrom Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and muchinclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all thesetastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and nowhe never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, Englishhabit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There isnothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he fallsfoul of his wife's list of people she has invited, which is lying,temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled inpencil on a sheet of note-paper.
"Of course there isn't," says Lady Usk, looking up from a Societynewspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not,and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yetfrom some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its veryblunders.
He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty he likes to faire lamorale pour les autres. When we are compelled to relinquish cakes andale ourselves, we begin honestly to believe them indigestible foreverybody; why should they be sold, or be made, at all?
"It does matter," he repeats. "Your people are too larky, much toolarky. You grow worse every year. You don't care a straw what's saidabout 'em so long as they please you, and you let 'em carry on tillthere's the devil to pay."
"One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you I don't like yourpeople. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else; and it'snever respectable. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to hisJill, 'We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and they do. I say it'sindecent."
"Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it allgoes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents,christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's allnonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot;Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which itdescribes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear andmake them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, andtheir whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they hadtortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs hadjewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, thoughyou talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!"
"I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honestwoman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you'dgo and stay in somebody else's house: you always spoil things here."
"If one waited for somebody not talked about, one would have an emptyhouse or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven't you ever seenthat advertisement about matches which will only light on their ownboxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matcheswithout the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won't getanything out of either."
"There's only one thing worse than inviting people without the peoplethey care about; it is to invite them with the people they're tired of:I did that once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and Gervasetogether, and then found that they had broken with each other two monthsbefore. That is the sort of blunder I do hate to make!"
"What an increase to the responsibilities of a hostess! She must knowall the ins and outs of her acquaintances' unlawful affections as aPrussian officer knows the French by-roads! How simple an affair it usedto be when the Victorian reign was young, and Lord and Lady So-and-Soand Mr. and Mrs. Nobody all came to stay for a week in twos and twos asinevitably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs!"
"Of course it would. You don't want anybody with you who has heard allyour best stories a thousand times, and knows what your doctor has toldyou not to eat; I don't want anybody who has seen how I look when I'mill, and knows where my false hair is put on. It is quite natural. Bythe way, Boom says Ovid's ladies had perukes, too, as one of them puther wig on upside down before him, and it chilled his feelings towardsher; it would chill most people's. I wonder if they made them well inthose days, and what they cost."
"My dear George, I wish you would mind your own business, to use a veryvulgar expression. Do I ever say anything when you talk nonsense in theLords, and when you give your political picnics and shout yourselfhoarse to the farmers who go away and vote against your man? Do I eversay anything when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign a headfor their corn, and stalk stags which cost you eighty pounds each fortheir keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand ayear for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when youthink that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will beeither grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off theirrents? You know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to ruinyourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seembest to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house-parties andchoose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What! are you goneaway? How exactly like a man, to go away when he gets the worst of theargument!"
Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is agentleman: he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he willalways stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays inthe room a moment longer he will swear: that allusion to the Scotchstags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. WhenAchnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with whatstags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and thekeepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and therehad always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had nevercared as much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as Achnalorrieis irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and theugly house on the stony strathside, and the blinding rains, and thedriving snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross asbest they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole thingsworth living for: and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit himwith the cost of each stag!
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