At King’s Corner
“Ferguson wrote to me that you mean to return to your own race,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room. He was a small, wiry man, dark of complexion, with a sleek black head of hair in which there was not one visible thread of grey. His face too was hardly lined, so that it was not until one looked at his eyes that one got any impression of age. The eyes, however, betrayed him. Deeply sunken and with a queer set appearance, they were the eyes of an old, old man; and they provoked a guess that they had at one time gazed so desperately upon horrors that they could never again quite get free of what they had seen.
“Yes,” replied Paul. “Mr. Ferguson was not very sympathetic.”
“Then I think he was wrong,” said Colonel Vanderfelt heartily. “Philosophers and Labour leaders talk very placidly about throwing down the walls between nation and nation, as if it was an easy morning’s work. But the walls aren’t of our building. They are mother earth and climate and were there from the beginning of time. Some people can pass over them, of course—American women, especially. But very few men aren’t weaklings, I believe. To the men worth anything, their soil cries out louder and louder with each year that passes. A glass of port? Help yourself! A cigar? No? The cigarettes are in that Battersea box in front of you. It’s a fiction that tobacco spoils the flavour of port. Claret, yes! Port, not a bit.”
Colonel Vanderfelt took a cigar from a box upon a side table, lit it and resumed his seat. Paul brought him back to the subject of their talk.
“I am glad to hear you agree with me, Colonel Vanderfelt. I have been more and more convinced since I have sat in this room.”
Paul Ravenel looked about the dining room with its fastidious and sober elegance. Cream walls, upon which a few good prints were hung; a bright red screen drawn in front of the door; shapely old furniture with red upholstery, and heavy curtains of red brocaded silk at the one big bow window; a long, slender Sheraton sideboard against the wall; a fine Chippendale cabinet in a recess; and this round gleaming table of mahogany, with its candlesticks and salt-cellars of Battersea enamel, its silver equipment and its short tubby decanters with the blue tinge of old Waterford in the glass; in every aspect of the room grace was so wedded to homeliness, comfort to distinction that Paul could not but envy its possessors.
“I resume my race and with it of course my name,” he said, keenly watching Colonel Vanderfelt.
But Colonel Vanderfelt took his cigar from his lips only to ask a question.
“And then?” he enquired.