The look of the old manoir was cheery; its atmosphere was sun-warmed. And still the prospect of his approaching ordeal chilled Geoffrey’s courage. The thought of standing before Miss Bartrand on approval caused him to pass a bad five minutes, as he paused in the drawing-room, whether Sylvestre had ushered him, for her coming.
Could the initial letters of his terrible pupil’s character be deciphered, as one constantly hears it asserted of women, through the outward and visible presence of the house she inhabited?
The Tintajeux drawing-room was over-vast for its height. It opened towards the south, upon the cedar-shaded lawn; it communicated through a double row of fluted pillars with a smaller apartment towards the west. The uncarpeted floors were of oak, black from age, fragrantly and honestly beeswaxed, as floors used to be when Sylvestre was a boy. Nothing like your gray-headed butler for keeping up conservative habits of industry among the servants of a younger generation! Over the chimneypiece and doors were half moons, those graceful ‘lunettes’ of a hundred years ago, carved in bas-relief and tinted in flesh colour. The lace window draperies, looking as though they must fall to pieces at a touch, were relieved by an occasional fold of rich-hued crimson silk. Venetian mirrors hung at all available points along the tarnished white and gold walls. On either side the mantelpiece were miniatures of eighteenth-century Bartrands in velvets and brocades, no prefiguring of destiny looking out from their unconcerned, half-closed patrician eyes. In the centre stood a grand buhl clock, its design a band of Cupids hurling down rose leaves on some unseen object (the guillotine, perhaps) behind the dial.
In each of the deeply bowed windows stood a Petit Trianon gilt basket. They were full of odorous roses, pressed close together, as cunningly set roses ought to be, and showing no green between their damask and pink and faintly yellow petals.
As Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s eyes took in one after another of these details, the room seemed to him a piece of special pleading for the whole past Bartrand race. He stood here in a world that knew no better! He was amidst the shades of a generation which had heroically paid the price of its misdeeds. And the fancy, true or false, predisposed him towards the present owners of Tintajeux. They had at least, he felt, the fascination of a pathetic background. Rare charm to an imaginative man whose business has led him among the dusty tracks of our modern, low-horizoned English life!
Moving to a window, Geff looked forth across lawn, garden, orchard, upon as fair a sweep of sapphire as ever gladdened human eyes; for here in the heart of the Channel you got beyond the North Sea’s yellowish green, and have real deep ocean blue. In the foreground, so near indeed that Geff instinctively stepped back within shelter of the window’s embrasure, a clerically-dressed tall man was slowly pacing to and fro on the grass. Somewhat rakishly placed on one side his head was a black velvet skull-cap. An after-dinner glow shone on Andros Bartrand’s bronzed four-score-year-old face; between his lips was a cigar. A couple of excellently-bred brindled terriers slunk at his heels.
‘Ho, Œdipus,
Why thus delay our going?’
Taking his cigar from his mouth, the Seigneur of Tintajeux recited a passage from Sophocles in the Oxford Greek accents of sixty years ago, looking about him with the leisurely physical enjoyment of the moment that was more common, probably, at the time of his own youth—a time when Göthe still walked upon the face of the earth—than it is now.
Something towering, individual, audacious, was in the old figure. Geff watched the Reverend Andros with admiration. A man so richly vitalised that he could smoke an after-dinner cigar, declaim Greek verse for his own pleasure at eighty—a man who had so proved himself superior to the common shocks and reverses of human life—should be one worth knowing, even though his fine moral equipoise must perforce be studied in the murky and dubious atmosphere engendered by a girl’s temper.