AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH
The next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar. He looked about him with quiet interest. He had now and then passed a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect than a mere appeal to the material side of his nature. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.
The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets and tinted walls formed a harmony of soft coloring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. A row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room. Looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad graveled terrace, which was evidently raked smooth every day, and a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed stood upon its pillared wall. From the middle of the terrace a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond the lawn clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.
It all impressed him curiously—the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives of the cultured English people, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and would have seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. Wyllard could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honor, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Radcliffe, with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments, might have stepped down from some old picture. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met in Western Canada hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who also could stand fast by a point of honor. Though the fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.
He recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.
“You are interested in all you see?” she asked frankly.
“Yes,” said Wyllard. “In fact, I’d like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I’d begin at the pictures and work right around.”
Mrs. Radcliffe’s smile suggested that she was not displeased.
“But you have been in London?”
“I have,” said Wyllard. “I had one or two letters to persons there, and they did all they could to entertain me. Still, their places were different; they hadn’t the—charm—of yours. It’s something which I think could exist only in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I’ve never been accustomed to.”