“You mustn’t go round by the trains,” said Mr. Ansell. “It means changing at Salisbury. By the road it’s no great way. Stewart shall drive you over Salisbury Plain, and fetch you too.”
“There’s too much snow,” said Ansell.
“Then the girls shall take you in their sledge.”
“That I will,” said Maud, who was not unwilling to see the inside of Cadover. But Rickie went round by the trains.
“We have all missed you,” said Ansell, when he returned. “There is a general feeling that you are no nuisance, and had better stop till the end of the vac.”
This he could not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—“as a REAL guest,” Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word “real” twice. And after Christmas he must go to the Pembrokes.
“These are no reasons. The only real reason for doing a thing is because you want to do it. I think the talk about ‘engagements’ is cant.”
“I think perhaps it is,” said Rickie. But he went. Never had the turkey been so athletic, or the plum-pudding tied into its cloth so tightly. Yet he knew that both these symbols of hilarity had cost money, and it went to his heart when Mr. Silt said in a hungry voice, “Have you thought at all of what you want to be? No? Well, why should you? You have no need to be anything.” And at dessert: “I wonder who Cadover goes to? I expect money will follow money. It always does.” It was with a guilty feeling of relief that he left for the Pembrokes’.
The Pembrokes lived in an adjacent suburb, or rather “sububurb,”—the tract called Sawston, celebrated for its public school. Their style of life, however, was not particularly suburban. Their house was small and its name was Shelthorpe, but it had an air about it which suggested a certain amount of money and a certain amount of taste. There were decent water-colours in the drawing-room. Madonnas of acknowledged merit hung upon the stairs. A replica of the Hermes of Praxiteles—of course only the bust—stood in the hall with a real palm behind it. Agnes, in her slap-dash way, was a good housekeeper, and kept the pretty things well dusted. It was she who insisted on the strip of brown holland that led diagonally from the front door to the door of Herbert’s study: boys’ grubby feet should not go treading on her Indian square. It was she who always cleaned the picture-frames and washed the bust and the leaves of the palm. In short, if a house could speak—and sometimes it does speak more clearly than the people who live in it—the house of the Pembrokes would have said, “I am not quite like other houses, yet I am perfectly comfortable. I contain works of art and a microscope and books. But I do not live for any of these things or suffer them to disarrange me. I live for myself and for the greater houses that shall come after me. Yet in me neither the cry of money nor the cry for money shall ever be heard.”
Mr. Pembroke was at the station. He did better as a host than as a guest, and welcomed the young man with real friendliness.