Before she could find a reply he had harked back to the Orange Room.
"You have not seen it since the decorations began? Then I have a mind to run and ask your brother to forbid your coming—to command you to wait until Wednesday. We are in a horrible mess, I warn you, and smell of turpentine most potently. But we shall be ready for the ball, and then—! It will be prodigious. You do not know that we have a genius at work on the painting?"
"My brother tells me the designs are extraordinarily clever."
"They are more than clever, you will allow. The artist I discovered myself—a young man named Charles Raoul. He comes from the South, a little below Avignon, and of good family—in some respects." The General paused and took snuff. "He enlisted at eighteen and has seen service; he tells me he was wounded at Austerlitz. Unhappily he was shipped, about two years ago, on board the Thétis frigate, with a detachment and stores for Martinique. The Thétis had scarcely left L'Orient before she fell in with one of your frigates, whose name escapes me; and here he is in Axcester. He has rich relatives, but for some reason or other they decline to support him; and yet he seems a gentleman. He picks up a few shillings by painting portraits; but you English are shy of sitting—I wonder why? And we—well, I suppose we prefer to wait till our faces grow happier."
Dorothea had it on the tip of her tongue to ask how the General had discovered this genius; but the ring in his voice gave her pause. Twice in the course of their short walk he had shown feeling; and she wondered at it, having hitherto regarded him as a cynical old fellow with a wit which cracked himself and the world like two dry nuts for the jest of their shrivelled kernels. She did not, know that a kind word of hers had unlocked his heart; and before she could recall her question they had reached the stable-yard of "The Dogs." And after stabling Mercury it was but a step across to the inn.
The "Dogs Inn" took its name from two stone greyhounds beside its porch— supporters of the arms of that old family from which the Westcotes had purchased Bayfield; and the Orange Room from a tradition that William of Orange had spent a night there on his march from Torbay. There may have been truth in the tradition; the room at any rate preserved in it window-hangings of orange-yellow, and a deep fringe of the same hue festooning the musicians' gallery. While serving Axcester for ball, rout, and general assembly-room, it had been admittedly dismal—its slate-coloured walls scarred and patched with new plaster, and relieved only by a gigantic painting of the Royal Arms on panel in a blackened frame; its ceiling garnished with four pendants in plaster, like bride- cake ornaments inverted.
To-day, as she stepped across the threshold, Dorothea hesitated between stopping her ears and rubbing her eyes. The place was a Babel. Frenchmen in white paper caps and stained linen blouses were laughing, plying their brushes, mixing paints, shifting ladders, and jabbering all the while at the pitch of their voices. For a moment the din bewildered her; the ferment had no more meaning, no more method, than a schoolboy's game. But her eyes, passing over the chaos of paint-pots, brushes, and step-ladders, told her the place had been transformed. The ceiling between the four pendants had become a blue heaven with filmy clouds, and Cupids scattering roses before a train of doves and a recumbent goddess, whom a little Italian, perched on a scaffolding and whistling shrilly, was varnishing for dear life. Around the walls— sky-blue also—trellises of vines and pink roses clambered around the old panels. The energy of the workmen had passed into their paintings, or perhaps Dorothea's head swam; at any rate, the cupids and doves seemed to be whirling across the ceiling, the vines, and roses mounting towards it, and pushing out shoots and tendrils while they climbed.
But the panels themselves! They were nine in all: three down the long black wall, two narrower ones at the far end, four between the orange- curtained windows looking on the street. (The fourth wall had no panel, being covered, by the musicians' gallery and the pillars supporting it.) In each, framed by the vines and roses, glowed a scene of classical or pseudo-classical splendour; golden sunsets, pale yellow skies, landscapes cleverly imitated from recollections of Claude Lorraine, dotted with temples and small figures in flowing drapery, with here and there a glimpse of naked limbs. Here were Bacchus and Ariadne, with a company of dancing revellers; Apollo and Marsyas; the Rape of Helen; Dido welcoming Aeneas. . . . Dorothea (albeit she had often glanced into the copy of M. Lempriere's Classical Dictionary in her brother's library, and, besides, had picked up something of Greek and Roman mythology in helping Narcissus) did not at once discriminate the subjects of these panels, but her eyes rested on them with a pleasant sense of recognition, and were still resting on them when she heard General Rochambeau say:
"Ah, there is my genius! You must let me present him, Mademoiselle.
He will amuse you. Hi, there! Raoul!"
A young man, standing amid a group of workmen and criticising one of the panels between the curtains, turned sharply. Almost before Dorothea was aware, he had doffed his paper cap and the General was introducing him.