Years ago there had been an awkward time, when Robin was quite a small boy. Grote had wanted to take very extreme steps, most ill-advised steps in Lord Thorley’s opinion, with regard to it. He had interested himself in that, and eventually he had persuaded Grote to be reconciled with her again. No good could come of it, only harm all round, especially for the boy.... Naturally he had never spoken to Helen of what he had done on that occasion; probably to this day she was ignorant that it was he who had saved the situation. Besides Grote himself ... and then with a slight sense of disgust, as if he had seen an objectionable paragraph in a book, Lord Thorley turned over that page in his mind. All the rest, as far as he personally knew, was mere scandal and gossip. He had no means of judging its truth or falsity; he only knew that the subject-matter of it was unattractive to him, even positively distasteful.
It seemed that the bells in this house were answered with truly artistic deliberation, and going again to the side of the chimney-piece to repeat the summons, he observed that he had merely turned on the lights of the glass chandelier that hung in the centre of the room. He had been vaguely conscious of a good deal of sunlight about, and had even wondered where it came from.
“Dear me, dear me!” he said to himself, as he pressed the correct button. “I must really try to be a little more observant in practical affairs. Helen would never have done that. It is distinctly a waste of nervous force to attend too closely to trivial matters, but I suppose there is a compromise to be arrived at.”
CHAPTER IV
IT was not long after Lord Thorley had got clear of the house—it turned out on inquiry that he had driven down from London that morning, and thus he went forth in his own motor-car—that Lady Grote’s guests began to arrive, and for the next couple of hours she had to remain in the loggia, receiving them. There was a buffet set out against the wall, where they could get tea or hock-cup, and a variety of foods and fruits to refresh them after the strain of the half-hour’s journey from town, in the saloon carriage reserved for them on a couple of trains stopped for them at Grote, so that they should not have the inconvenience of travelling by the more leisurely services. There motor-cars had met them, with omnibuses for their servants and luggage, so that the journey even on this hot day could not be considered an intolerable ordeal, and they arrived very smart and talkative and hungry.
Week after week, on Saturday afternoon, from the beginning of May till the end of July, this crowd of those whose names were all for some reason or another much on the lips of the world in which she lived, descended on her like a flock of brilliantly plumaged birds, and made the social history of the current season. There was very little process of selection in her invitations, for with so numerous a party it really mattered little if it contained utterly incongruous elements, for all were fused by the agreeable fact that it was a cachet and a distinction to be here at all.
She made no rule of asking husbands and wives together, for with her usual commonsense she argued that they generally saw enough, if not too much, of each other already, and these parties were rather of the nature of a slipping of the domestic chain. Besides, it was easily possible in those free-and-easy days, which were characteristic of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, that a man admired somebody else beside his wife, and a woman looked not without favour on a man who had not the good fortune to be her husband. But never did she ask two men who admired the same woman to any very special degree, nor two women who happened to be setting their modish hats at the same man. She was much too good-natured to take pleasure in awkward situations, and it was the rarest thing in the world for her party not to split up into the most amicable groups and couples, which could be shaken together again into one shining piece of quicksilver by the arrival of mealtimes. No kind of precedence in the way of rank was observed, for she rightly considered that a stray duchess might easily bore or be bored by a stray duke, and boredom was not among the objects of her parties.
For herself she proposed to be taken in to dinner to-night by Kuhlmann, an immense tenor at the Covent Garden opera about whom all London raved. He had soft, purring manners, and at heart was about as civilized as the average wild-cat. There was no Frau Kuhlmann, as far as she was aware, but people said that there ought to have been a great many. He had sung the part of Walther last night at the opera, and Helen Grote, in spite of Lady Massingberd’s firm assertion that she did not know one note from another, had nearly fallen out of her box from sheer emotion in the Preislied.... And Grote should take in Gracie Massingberd, to show that his wife paid no attention to ridiculous things that people, she believed, were saying, and Mr. Boyton should take in the Duchess of Lindfield, because he adored duchesses, and she flattery, and Lord Thorley should take in Mrs. Trayle, who had written the mystical play that nobody understood, but everybody considered quite wonderful. Lord Thorley had been nine times to see it in the hope of understanding it; the seventh time he thought he had understood it, only to become aware at the eighth that he had done nothing of the sort. But perhaps the authoress could throw some light on it on behalf of so earnest an inquirer.
Then there was Mrs. Lockwater, who was asked here because she was simply the most beautiful creature ever seen, and so deserved her place. She seldom opened her mouth, but was an admirable listener, with a bad memory, so that it was perfectly safe to tell her anything. She would obviously fall to the arm of the great portrait-painter, Geoffrey Bellingham, who neither listened nor stopped talking in long, abstruse sentences, from which he could not always extricate himself. When this happened, he began again and put it all differently. These periods were packed full of wit and wisdom, if you only could extract it; but the style of his speech resembled that of refractory ore from which it was difficult to win the gold. All this was obvious, and for the rest she could easily see, between tea and dinner, who gravitated to whom.
It occasionally happened, though rarely, that some guest or other showed no signs of gravitating to anybody, in which case this most complete of hostesses singled him out, at whatever personal inconvenience, for her own especial attention. To-day there seemed to be no such present, and as the loggia filled up and emptied again, with fresh arrivals and previous arrivals who strolled out together after tea, some down to the river, some to the tennis-courts, there were no signs of detached units. Most of her guests, as was natural in the middle of the season among those who spend three months in an incessant interchange of meetings with others, were already acquainted, many were friends, and there were none who found themselves in any way on alien territory.