HONOURS
The difference between Colonel Eldridge's room at the Hall and his brother's at the Grange was a good deal more than the difference between a room in an old house and one devoted to like uses in a new. Indeed if you had averaged the age of their contents, the room at the Grange would have shown the earlier date. It had been one of the latest additions, when furniture and decoration had become a source of keen interest to its owner, and there had been no lack of money to carry out his tastes.
There was no bright Turkey carpet or American desk here, as in Sir William's room in London. He wrote his letters at a Queen Anne Bureau, bought at Christie's for a sum that would have paid for everything in his brother's room and left a substantial amount over. There was no insistent colour, to detract from the rich subdued values of this and other fine pieces of furniture. A few pictures of the early Dutch school, which Sir William particularly affected, hung upon the walls, panelled in dark oak. The electric light glowed and sparkled from a lustre chandelier of Waterford glass. The few ornaments admitted were also mostly of old glass, and as many of them as were suitable held flowers. There was a beautiful soft-hued Persian carpet, and curtains of heavy brocade of no determinate hue. Only the books in the glass-fronted Sheraton bookcase were mostly new, many of them in rich bindings; and the easy chairs and sofa were of the latest word in comfort.
The room was a success from first to last, and Sir William felt it to be so every time he entered it. And yet he still gained, whenever he went into his brother's room at the Hall, a sense of satisfaction for which he would perhaps have exchanged the different sort of pleasure that he took in his own creation. That room, with its old-fashioned furniture of no special value; its faded and threadbare carpet, and shabby easy chairs; the untidy books on the shelves; the paintings, prints and photographs that crowded the walls; the medley of ornaments and knicknacks on the mantelpiece and side-tables; the gun-cases, cartridge-cases, game-bags, golf-clubs, and all the litter of a sportsman's room; the very smell of it, compounded of tobacco smoke and leather, slightly musty paper, and slightly damp dog, with a reminder of ripe apples mysteriously underlying it all—it meant quiet and ease and a thousand associations of indoor and outdoor life, hardly any of which were represented in the room that was his. He had even been slightly ashamed of his room when he had first shown it to his brother, who had said: "It's very fine. I've never seen a finer, for a fellow who can live up to it. It wouldn't do for me, because I couldn't keep that old shooting-jacket of mine hanging up behind the door." That was it, Sir William decided afterwards. It was really a room for a man who liked to live in a drawing-room, and he didn't want, himself, to live always in a drawing-room, even a man's drawing-room. Still, he liked to have beautiful things about him, and with that taste you had to discriminate. You couldn't get the two kinds of attraction into the same room. He had the one, and must do without the other.
It was this room that Norman entered when he returned from the Hall. He had none of the doubts about it that his father sometimes expressed. His appreciations were finer than his father's. Sir William had to possess a treasure of art for it to give him the acme of pleasure. Norman loved it for itself, and he loved the beautiful things in this room. His appreciation of it even affected him now, as he went in, though he was thinking of something else. His mother, in her evening gown, sitting near a great bowl of flowers, seemed to him to add to its value; his father, standing over her, in the light tweed suit in which he had been travelling, seemed slightly out of place. It was a room in which, if you occupied it in the evening, you ought to be dressed for the evening.
This impression, however, was momentary, for a stronger one immediately took its place. He had expected to see his father considerably disturbed, and his mother disturbed too, but by this time less so than his sharp eyes had made her out to be when she had said good-bye to his aunt and cousins. For she was a queller of disturbance, in herself and others, and might by this be expected to have made her mark upon his father, though not perhaps to the extent of quieting him altogether.
But there were no signs of disturbance upon their faces at all, nor in their manner. His father was leaning up against the mantelpiece, talking with some show of excitement, certainly, but with a smile upon his face; and she was looking up at him, not smiling, but with interest and sympathy.
Sir William turned round, as he came into the room. "Ah, Norman!" he said. "Here you are! I've been waiting for you. You come into this little affair, as well as mother and me. You'll want to hear all about it."
Norman sat himself down, with his hands in his pockets. "I always want to hear all about everything," he said.
His father laughed. "It's rather exciting," he said. "I really hadn't been expecting anything of the sort. They've offered me a peerage."