"Yes, it's rather decent," Edred allowed. "We've got a swannery at the back of our garden, and that's rather decent too. They get awfully waxy sometimes. The swans, I mean," he supplemented. And in such surroundings, Jasmine felt, even swans had no business to lose their tempers.
The Deanery itself was externally the gravest and most impressive of the many grave and impressive houses round the Close. Beheld thus it presented such an imperturbable perfection of appearance that before he knocked upon its door or rang its bright brass bell, the most self-satisfied visitor would always accord it the respect of a momentary pause. But when the door was opened—and it was opened by a butler with all the outward and visible signs of what a decanal butler ought to be—that air of prosperous comfort, of dignity and solid charm, vanished. It was not that the entrance-hall was ill-equipped. Everything was there that one could have expected to find in a Dean's hall; but everything had an indescribably battered look, the irreverent mark that an invading army passing through Silchester might have left upon the Deanery, had some of the soldiers been billeted there. It was haunted by a sense of everything's having served some other purpose from that for which it was originally intended, and the farther one penetrated into the house the more evident were the ravages of whatever ruinous influence had been at work. Even Jasmine with her slight experience of English houses was taken aback by the contradiction between the exterior and the interior of the Deanery. She was used to entering Italian palaces and finding interiors as bare and comfortless as a barrack; but in them the discomfort and bareness had always been due to the inadequate means of their owners. It was certainly not poverty that caused the contradiction at the Deanery. The solution of the puzzle burst upon her when with a simultaneous onrush her cousins, each shouting at the top of his voice 'Bags I telling the mater Jasmine is here,' stormed the staircase like troops. The butler, listening to their yells dying away along the landing above, paused for a moment from the gracious pomp of his ministrations and observed to Jasmine: "Very high-spirited young gentlemen."
"But is the pony quite safe?" she asked, looking back to where the governess-cart with her trunk still inside was waiting driverless outside the door.
"Yes, miss, she's not a very high-spirited animal, and she's usually very quiet after the young gentlemen have driven her."
Again the yells resounded, this time with increasing volume as the three boys drew nearer, leaping, sliding, rolling, and cannoning down the staircase abreast. Jasmine received a thump from Edred, who was the first to reach her, a thump that was evidently the sign of victory, because the other two immediately resigned her to his escort for the necessary presentation to her aunt, while they went out to attend to the pony.
Aunt Ellen's room had escaped the pillaged appearance which upstairs at the Deanery was even more conspicuous than below; it was crowded with religious pictures in religious Oxford frames, religious Gothic furniture, and religious books. Apart from the fruit of her own religious tastes, Aunt Ellen had directly inherited from the Bishop of Clapham his religious equipment (accoutrements would be too highly coloured a word for the relics of that broad-minded prelate); and perhaps because she was fond of her episcopal father she had hesitated to sacrifice his memory, together with her husband and the rest of the household, upon the common altar of those six household gods, her sons. At any rate, when she carefully explained to her niece that the room was a sanctuary not so much for her own use as for old time's sake, Jasmine accepted its survival as due to some sentimental reason. But if Aunt Ellen's room had escaped, Aunt Ellen herself had certainly not. The weather-beaten gauntness of Uncle Eneas and Uncle Hector was in Aunt Ellen much exaggerated, although an aquiline nose preserved her from being what she otherwise certainly would have been, a grotesque of English womanhood, or rather, what English people would like to consider a grotesque of English womanhood; Jasmine, however, with many years' experience of English tourists landing at Sirene after a rough voyage across the Bay of Naples, considered Aunt Ellen to be typically English. She had acquired that masculine look which falls to so many women who have produced a number of sons. When Jasmine knew her better she found that her religious views and emotions resembled the religious views and emotions that are so widely spread among men of action, such as sea captains and Indian colonels. Her ignorance of anything except the gentlemanly religion of the professional classes was unlimited; her prejudice was unbounded. Jasmine soon discovered that the main reason why she had not been invited to the Deanery before was her aunt's fear of introducing a papist into the household. It was this, apparently, that weighed much more with her than the accounts she had received from Lady Grant of their niece's behaviour. True, she informed Jasmine that she had been anxious to correct the looseness of her moral tone. But how could she compete with priest-craft? She actually asked her niece this! Her religious apprehensions were only overcome by the menace of waking up one morning to find Jasmine the sole heiress of Uncle Matthew's fortune, which, as she wrote to her sister-in-law, without presuming to impugn the disposition of God, would be entirely unjust. It was not that she dreaded a direct competition with her own boys, because, proud though she was of them and of herself for having produced them, she never deceived herself into supposing that a personal encounter between them and their uncle would be anything but fatal, not merely to their chances of ultimate wealth, but also to her own. On her own chances she did build. She could not believe that her uncle (painfully without belief in a future state as he was) would ignore the rights of a niece married to the Dean of Silchester. After all, a Dean was something more than a religious figure; he was a worldly figure. Aunt Ellen was sharply aware of the might of a Dean, because that might was mainly exercised by her, the Dean himself by now taking not the least interest in anything except the history of England before the Conquest. Jasmine had derived an entirely false impression of her aunt from her letters, which, filled as they were with religious sentimentality, suggested that Aunt Ellen was softer than the rest of the family, that perhaps she was even like her own beloved father. She found, however, that except where her sons were concerned Aunt Ellen was hard, fierce, martial, and domineering. All her affection she had kept for her sons, all her duty for God. Jasmine was not so much discouraged as she might have been by her aunt's personality, because she found at any rate her three youngest cousins a great improvement on Lettice and Pamela, and if the three eldest ones turned out to be only half as amusing, she felt that she should not dislike her visit to the Deanery. Besides, she had the satisfaction of knowing that this was quite definitely only a visit, and that there was no proposal pending to attach her permanently to the household as a poor relation.
Jasmine did not discover all this about her aunt at their first meeting; the conversation then was crammed with the commonplace of family news; and how Aunt Ellen would have resented the notion that any news about the Grants could be described as commonplace! She might have gone on talking until tea-time if Edred's continuous kicking of the leg of her father's favourite table had not suggested a diversion in the form of Jasmine's long-delayed introduction to the Dean. She had hesitated to interfere directly with her son's harmless if rather irritating little pleasure; but the varnish was beginning to show signs of Edred's boots, and she announced that, although Uncle Arnold was working, he would no doubt in the circumstances forgive them for disturbing him.
Jasmine smiled pleasantly at the implied compliment, not realizing that the circumstances were the table's, not hers.
"I say, need I go?" asked Edred. He dreaded these visits to the study, because they sometimes ended in his being detained to copy out notes for his father.
"No, dear, you need not go."