"Yes, perhaps it was a mistake to settle so definitely in Spaborough," he admitted to his wife. "But it's too late to begin building now. You and the girls won't want to keep up an establishment when I'm gone. Extraordinary thing that Ellen"—Ellen was his only sister—"should have six boys. However," he went on hurriedly, "we mustn't grumble."
The result of having no heir was that Sir Hector had to make the most of his title in his own lifetime, and he used to carry it about with him everywhere as a miner carries his gold. Journeys which a long and successful life should have made arduous at fifty-eight were now sweetened by his being able to register himself in hotel books as Hector Grant, Bart. Once a malevolent wit added an S to the Bart, in allusion to the hospital that produced him, and Sir Hector, gloating over the hotel book next morning, was so much shocked that he insisted upon the abbreviation Bt. ever afterwards. It was the second time that verbal ingenuity had made free with his titles. For his voluntary services to his country during the Boer war as consulting physician—people used to say that he had been called in to pronounce upon the sanity of the British generals on active service—he was made a Companion of the Bath, and when soon after appeared Traumatic Neuroses. By Hector Grant, C.B., one reviewer suggested that the initials should be put the other way round, so old and out of date were the distinguished doctor's theories.
In appearance Sir Hector was extremely tall, extremely thin, extremely fair, with prominent bright blue eyes and a nodulous complexion. His manner, except with his wife and daughters, was masterful. Old maids spoke of his magnetism: women confided to him their love affairs: girls disliked him. It would be unjust to dispose of his success as lightly as the frivolous and malicious critic mentioned just now. He was not old-fashioned; he did keep abreast of all the Teutonic excursions into the vast hinterland of insanity; even at this period he was clicking his tongue in disapproval of the first stammerings of Freud. He was sensitive to the popular myth that alienists end by going mad themselves, and with that suggestion in view he was on his guard against the least eccentricity in himself or his family. Mens sana in corpore sano, he boasted that he had never worn an overcoat in his life.
He was once approached by the proprietors of a famous whisky for permission to put his portrait if not on the bottle at least on the invoice. Although he felt bound to refuse, the compliment to his typically Caledonian appearance pleased him, and now on his holiday, in a suit of homespun with an old cap stuck over with flies, Sir Hector regretted that the necessity for keeping one hand in his patients' pockets prevented his setting more than one foot upon his native heath, and even that one foot only figuratively.
Lady Grant, who had been the only daughter of a retired paper-maker and had brought her husband some two thousand pounds a year, was at fifty a tall fair woman with cheeks that formerly might not unludicrously have been compared to carnations, but which now with their network of little crimson lines were more like picotees. She was one of those women whom it is impossible to imagine with nothing on. Inasmuch as she changed her clothes three times a day, went to bed at night, got up in the morning, and in fact behaved as a woman of flesh and blood does behave, it was obvious that she and her clothes were not really one and indivisible. Yet so solid and coherent were they that if one of her dresses had hurried downstairs after her to say that she had put on the wrong one, it might not have surprised an onlooker with any effect of strangeness. At fifty her best feature was her nose, which of all features is least able to call attention to itself. Women with pretty complexions, women with shapely ankles, women with beautiful hair, women with liquid or luminous eyes, women with exquisite ears, women with lovely mouths, women with good figures, women with snowy arms, women with slim hands, women with graceful necks, all these have a property that bears a steady interest in becoming gestures. Powder-puffs, petticoats, combs, ear-rings, and a hundred other excuses are not wanting; but the only way of calling attention to a nose, at any rate in civilized society, is by blowing it, which, however delicate the laced handkerchief, is never a gesture that adds to the pleasure of the company. Lady Grant could do nothing with her magnificent nose except bring it into profile, and this gave her face a haughty and inattentive expression that made people think that she was unsympathetic. Enthusiasm cannot display itself nasally except among rabbits, and of course elephants. Lady Grant, resembling neither a rabbit nor an elephant, became more impassive than ever at those critical moments which, had she been endowed with good eyes, might have changed her whole character. As it was, her nose just overweighted her face, not with the effect of caricature that a toucan's nose produces, but with the stolidity and complacency of a grosbeak's. She was, for instance, as much gratified to be the wife of a baronet as her husband was to be a baronet itself; that intractable feature of hers turned all the simple pleasure into pompousness. It is true that by calling attention to her daughters' noses she was sometimes able to extract a compliment to her own; but at best this was a vicarious satisfaction, and when one day a stupid woman responded by suggesting that Pamela and Lettice had noses like their father, Lady Grant had to deny herself even this demand on the flattery of her friends, because Sir Hector's nose was hideous, really hideous.
Lady Grant had grumbled a good deal about her niece's arrival; actually she was looking forward to it. Several people had told her how splendid it was of her, and how like her it was to be so ready, and what a wonderful thing it would be for the niece. In fact in the ever-widening circle of her aunt's acquaintance Jasmine had already reached the dimensions of a large charitable organization. For some time Lady Grant had been protecting a poor cousin of her own, a Miss Edith Crossfield, who was so obviously an object for charity that the glory of being kind to her was rather dimmed. Miss Crossfield was so poor and so humble and so worthy that her ladyship would have had to own a heart as impassive as her nose not to have protected her. At first it had been interesting to impress poor Edith; but as time went on poor Edith proved so willing to be impressed by the least action of dear May that it became no longer very interesting to impress her. Moreover, now that she was the wife of a baronet, Lady Grant was not sure that it reflected creditably upon her to have such a poor relation. There was no romance in Edith; to speak bluntly, even harshly, she gave the show away. No, Edith must find herself lodgings somewhere in a nice unfashionable seaside town and be content with a pension. Sholto's existence in Sirene, his romantic and unfortunate marriage, his career as a painter, his death in the Bay of Salerno, such a history added to the family past, and if poor Jasmine would be more expensive than poor Edith, she would be more useful to her aunt, and more useful to darling Lettice and Pamela.
Lady Grant's daughters were tall blondes in their mid-twenties who had always hated each other, and whose hatred had never been relieved by being able to disparage each other's appearance, owing to their both looking exactly alike. They too, perhaps, were fairly pleased at the notion of Jasmine's arrival, because Cousin Edith was no use at all as a contrast to themselves; she merely lay untidily about the house like a duster left behind by a careless maid. Pamela and Lettice wanted to get married well and quickly; but since either was afraid of the other's getting married first, it began to seem as if neither of them would get married at all. Their passion was golf, and it was a pity that the pre-matrimonial methods of savages were not in vogue on the Spaborough links; Lettice and Pamela would have willingly been hit on the head by a suitor's golf club if they could have found themselves married on returning to consciousness. Such was the family to whose bosom Jasmine was being jogged along through the lamp-lit dusk of Spaborough.
It may be easily imagined that Lady Grant, after taking the trouble to send Nuckett with the car to meet her niece's arrival at Spaborough, was not pleased to find that she had driven up to Strathspey House behind an orange postilion.
"Didn't you see Nuckett?" she asked of Jasmine, whose attempt to kiss her aunt had been rather like biting hard on a soft pink sweet and finding nougat or some such adamantine substance within. Jasmine, wondering who Nuckett might be, assured her aunt that she had not seen him.
"Which means that he will wait down there for the 9.38. Hector!" she called to her husband, who was at that moment bending down to salute his niece, "Nuckett will be waiting at the station for the 9.38. What can we do about it?"