“Dearest, Mr. Boyton does not care for sport,” she said. “We will eat your partridges when you have killed them.”
For no very sound reason the “language of song” came as a slight shock to Helen Grote. She was perfectly well aware that the Gurtners spoke German to each other as often as English, but she did not expect to hear it just now. It rather altered the values of the setting. She covered it up, not too hurriedly, but did not fail to see the frown of admonition which Sir Hermann gave his wife.
“Yes, Mr. Boyton is one of those who does not want to kill something just because it is a fine day,” she said.
That would not do: there was the mention of killing again.
“And how are your partridges doing, Sir Hermann?” she added.
The two men presently strolled away, for though Mr. Boyton would not shoot, Sir Hermann was quite determined that he should appreciate the pursuits of an English country gentleman like himself to the extent at any rate of looking at his Jersey cows and poking a pig in the back, and when he was gone, Aline supposed that the embargo on war-talk was removed and began again.
“It seems so odd to me,” she said, “that any Englishman can bear to be doing nothing at a time like this. I am delighted that Mr. Boyton could come, of course, but I fully expected to find that he was immersed in work of some sort. Hermann has been splendid. He gave fifty thousand pounds only yesterday to the Red Cross, and his subscriptions to the county funds—well, there is simply no counting them. I tell him he will reduce us all to beggary, but he says, ‘Well, so much the better. Who wants to be rich, when there is so great a need for money?’ And he’s going to change our name to Gardner, which is so English, is it not, and so much better represents all we feel!”
Somehow to Helen Grote these very proper sentiments were worse than the war-talk she had come here to avoid. It was not exactly that she doubted the sincerity of Aline’s protestations, though she certainly protested rather too much; indeed she more felt the callousness of Aline, so largely German both by birth and association, being able to cut clean away from German sympathies. She could have understood her being torn in two by conflicting strains, she could have felt for her in a situation which surely must have been almost intolerable, but what she could not comprehend was the apparent absence of any such situation at all. She ought to have been miserable: instead she was a happy savage John Bull.
Aline’s big blue eyes filled with the tears that lay less deep even than her words.
“And to think how happy and secure we all felt such a few weeks ago,” she said. “Do you remember that little party I gave with the German and French Ambassadors and Princess Eleanor, when Saalfeld conducted and Kuhlmann sang? How little any of us dreamed of the trouble that was coming.”