The home to which Lady Gurtner had returned, enveloped in sables and good humour and joy of life after her tea and her tact with Robin, had come into her husband’s hands some six years before over a foreclosed mortgage. It was red-brick, Jacobean in structure, with the mellow seal of three hundred years imprinted on its walls and gardens. It seemed to have grown out of the ample and secure soil in serene dignity and fitness, and it was as hard to imagine that once it rose in layers of new brick and mortar, as it would be to unthink the great elm avenue that led up to its plain, comely front, and see again the little saplings from which those leafy towers had expanded. The same air of robust and undecayed antiquity pervaded its gardens: the lawns were clad in the luxuriant velvet that age, instead of thinning, had but thickened to a closer pile; the decades but strengthened the yew hedges to a compacter resilience, and the deep, spacious flower-borders, that lay like some medieval illumination round the black lines of text, glowed with the mellow traditions of the soil.
Even where Lady Gurtner had planted, the habit of the sweet old garden mollified the harshness of new designs, and the sunk rose-garden, with its paths of old paving-stone, might almost have been part of the original scheme. A lead balustrade (a “literary coping,” as it was aptly described by Mrs. Pounce) ran along the top of the house: Nisi Dominus custodiat domum seemed to be the guarantee of its secular stability. Above all, the exterior of the house and its ancient gardens were completely and unmistakably English. Statelier châteaux than it might have grown in France, a more decorative formality might have sprung from Italian soil, a more bepinnacled schloss have crowned a German hill, but none of those would have been more instinct with their legitimate pedigree than this serene and English domain.
Inside, the house had not fared so well: when Sir Hermann exercised his right to possession, it tottered for repairs, and repairs had been given it as by the hand of some ruthless surgeon intent on expensive operations. The mouldering panels of the hall had been stripped away, and cedar-wood, as smart as Solomon’s temple, had taken their place. Just as silver was “nothing accounted of” in his days, so here, rich and rare were the golden emblazonings that ran round cornice and panel and pilaster. The chimney-piece was of rose-coloured marble, the floor was of marble also, and looked like a petrified Aubusson carpet with the Gurtner arms (leaving room for an eventual coronet above them) planted, florid and dominant, in the centre. Two Italian bridal cassoni served no longer to contain the embroideries and dresses of the bride, but to support on their carved lids the hats and coats of visitors. Rafters painted in the Venetian manner—for this was the Italian hall—supported the ceiling, and set into the centre was an immense oval of ground glass, framed in gilt, from behind which, at fall of day, a few million power electric lights shed a diffused radiance. Besides the fireplace there were, for purposes of heating, three stacks of water-pipes resembling sofas set into embrasures in the wall: to Sir Hermann it was a never-failing source of amusement to get an unwary visitor to sit down on one of them, and observe his subsequent swift uprising as the unusual warmth amazed him....
Altogether, the Italian hall looked like a vestibule in a Turkish bath for millionaires, and for all the splendour of its appurtenances it suited the old house about as well as if a set of dazzling false teeth, taken haphazard from the case of an advertising dentist in the street, had been forced and hammered into its protesting mouth, after the extraction of the stumps of its panelling and oak-flooring.
The Genoese brocade curtains which separated the outer hall from the inner hall, out of which opened the dining-room and drawing-rooms, and from which aspired the new German staircase of iron scroll-work and marble steps, were of far too magnificent a solidity to belly in draughts, and the cedar-wood doors that drew out from their resting-places in the walls were seldom used. One end of this inner hall was taken up by an immense organ case brought from Nuremberg, the pipes of which came right up to the ceiling; indeed, some of them had been cut to admit their insertion. The rash visitor, with knowledge of organs, might have lamented the loss of tone which this would imply, but he would speedily be relieved of his melancholy, for Sir Hermann would take him round the end of the organ, where once a blower supplied it with the inspiration for its many-throated singing, and show him that the case alone and the front pipes remained, and that the whole interior of the organ was but an electric lift, which would save him the necessity of mounting those slippery German stairs. But as if to perpetuate the memory of the old “house of sounds,” as if indeed to materialize its ghost, Aline had hit on a very quaint and pretty notion, and the mechanism of the lift was so arranged that all the time during which it was in motion, a colossal musical box, embedded in the perforated roof, played old German chorales.
Sir Hermann never entered the lift without thinking how dichterlich was this contrivance, and sometimes he was moved to hum an approximate solo to the tinkling accompaniment of the ceiling of the lift. The walls of this inner hall were decorated with the heads of stags and bisons and antelopes, the spoils of some unknown hunter. They had been left in the house by the former owners, and, in Sir Hermann’s opinion, gave a sporting touch to the inner hall, a characteristically English note. A trophy of blunderbusses and other antique fire-arms endorsed this pleasant impression.
Three velvety drawing-rooms lay en suite down the length of the house. Here the German taste had been permitted to assert its legitimate claim, and the general effect was that of saloon carriages, station waiting-rooms decorated for the arrival of royal visitors, and wedding-cakes. The dining-room reverted to the ancestral atmosphere again, for Sir Hermann had collected together half a dozen Romneys and Reynoldses; and side by side at one end of the room hung portraits of himself and his wife by Laszlo. The rest of the house consisted mainly of bedrooms with bathrooms attached.
Aline Gurtner found to her great pleasure when she arrived at Ashmore that her husband had not yet started for town, but had waited to dine with her, and drive up afterwards. He and the three children met her half-way up the avenue, and she got out, and put her lovely new muff, in the manner of a bearskin, on to Hermann’s head.
“Look, Kinder,” she said. “Daddy has become a great Guardsman.”
“O-oh! Daddy’s a soldier,” said Freddy excitedly. “Let’s all march and kill the French. Ein, zwei, drei....”