In front of the house an Italian garden, with balustrades of very doubtful marble, leads down by successive terraces and broad flights of steps to an artificial octagonal pool, formed by carefully destroying the whole natural beauty of the wild and rocky little English glen beneath. To feed it by fitting a conduit, the moss-grown boulders that strew the bed of the torrent above and below have been carefully removed, and the unwilling stream, as it runs into the pool, has been coerced into a long straight channel, bordered on either side by bedded turf, and planed off at measured intervals so as to produce a series of eminently regular and classical cascades. Even Lord Exmoor himself, who was a hunting man, without any pretence to that stupid rubbish about taste, did not care for the hopeless exterior of Dunbude Castle: he frankly admitted that the place was altogether too doosid artificial for the line of country. If they’d only left it alone, he said, in its own native condition, it would have been really pretty; but as they’d doctored it and spoilt it, why, there was nothing on earth to be done but just put up with it and whistle over it. What with the hounds, and the mortgages, and the settlements, and the red deer, and Goodwood, the estate couldn’t possibly afford any money for making alterations down in the gardens.
The dog-cart was in waiting at the station to carry Ernest up to the castle; and as he reached the front door, Lady Hilda Tregellis strolled up the broad flight of steps from the garden to meet him. Lady Hilda was tall and decidedly handsome, as Ernest had rightly told Edie, but not pretty, and she was also just twenty. There was a free, careless, bold look in her face, that showed her at once a girl of spirit; indeed, if she had not been born a Tregellis, it was quite clear that she would have been predestined to turn out a strong-minded woman. There was nothing particularly delicate in Lady Hilda’s features; they were well-modelled, but neither regular nor cold, nor with that peculiar stamp of artificial breeding which is so often found in the faces of English ladies. On the contrary, she looked like a perfectly self-confident handsome actress, too self-confident to be self-conscious, and accustomed to admiration wherever she turned. As Ernest jumped down from the dog-cart she advanced quickly to shake hands with him, and look him over critically from head to foot like a schoolboy taking stock of a new fellow.
‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr. Le Breton,’ she said, with an open smile upon her frank face. ‘I was dreadfully afraid you wouldn’t care for our proposition. Dunbude’s the dullest hole in England, and we want somebody here to brighten it up, sadly. Did you ever see such an ugly monstrosity before, anywhere?’
‘The country about’s lovely,’ Ernest answered, ‘but the house itself is certainly rather ugly.’
‘Ugly! It’s hideous. And it’s as dull as it’s big,’ said Hilda vehemently. ‘You can’t think what a time we have of it here half the year! I’m always longing for the season to come. Papa fills the house here with hunting men and shooting men—people without two ideas in their heads, you know, just like himself; and even THEY go out all day, and leave us women from morning till night to the society of their wives and daughters, who are exactly like them. Mr. Walsh—that’s Lynmouth’s last tutor—he was a perfect stick, a Cambridge man; Cambridge men always ARE sticks, I believe; you’re Oxford, of course, aren’t you? I thought so. Still, even Mr. Walsh was a little society, for I assure you, if it hadn’t been for him, I should never have seen anybody, to talk to, from year’s end to year’s end. So when Mr. Walsh was going to leave us, I said to mamma, “Why not ask one of the Mr. Le Bretons?” I wanted to have somebody sensible here, and so I got her to let me write to your brother Ronald about the tutorship. Did he send you the letter? I hope you didn’t think it was mine. Mamma dictated it, for I don’t write such formal letters as that on my own account, I can tell you. I hate conventionality of any sort. At Dunbude we’re all conventional, except me; but I won’t be. Come up into the billiard-room, here, and sit down awhile; William will see about your portmanteau and things. Papa’s out, of course, and so’s Lynmouth; and mamma’s somewhere or other, I don’t know where; and so there’s nobody in particular at home for you to report yourself to. You may as well come in here while I ring for them to get you some lunch ready. Nobody ever gets anything ready beforehand in this house. We lunched ourselves an hour ago.’
Ernest smiled at her volubility, and followed her quickly into the big bare billiard-room. He walked over to the fire and began to warm himself, while Hilda took down a cue and made stray shots in extraordinary angles at impossible cannons, all the time, as she went on talking to him. ‘Was it very cold on the way down?’ she asked.
‘Yes, fairly. I’m not sorry to see the fire again. Why, you’re quite an accomplished player.’
‘There’s nothing else to do at Dunbude, that’s why. I practise about half my lifetime. So I wrote to your brother Ronald, as I was telling you, from mamma’s dictation; and when I heard you were really coming, I was quite delighted about it. Do you remember, I met you twice last year, once at the Dolburys’, and once somewhere else; and I thought you’d be a very good sort of person for Dunbude, you know, and about as much use to Lynmouth as anybody could be, which isn’t saying much, of course, for he’s a dreadful pickle. I insisted on putting in my letter that he was a dreadful pickle (that’s a good stroke off the red; just enough side on), though mamma didn’t want me to; because I thought you ought to know about it beforehand. But you remember him at Marlborough, of course; he was only a little fellow then, but still a pickle. He always was and he always will be. He’s out shooting, now, with papa; and you’ll never get him to settle down to anything, as long as there’s a snipe or a plover banging about on the moor anywhere. He’s quite incorrigible. Do you play at all? Won’t you take a cue till your lunch’s ready?’
‘No, I don’t play,’ Ernest answered, half hesitating, ‘or at least very little.’
‘Oh, then you’ll learn here, because you’ll find nothing else to do. Do you shoot?’