“Why, naturally,” responded Lord Julius, with relieved cordiality. “And now please me—do it all handsomely to the end—come and shake hands again with Christian, both of you.”
The brothers stood for a hesitating instant, then turned toward the window and began a movement of reluctant assent.
To the surprise of all three, Christian forestalled their approach by wrenching open one half of the tall window, and putting a foot over the sill to the lawn outside.
“If you will excuse me,” he said, in his nervous, high voice, “I am taking a little walk.”
CHAPTER IV
Upon the garden side of Caermere is a very large conservatory, built nearly fifty years ago, at the close of the life of the last duchess. The poor lady left no other mark of her meek existence upon the buildings, and it was thought at the time that she would never have ventured upon even this, had it not been that every one was mad for the moment about the wonderful palace of glass reared in London for the First Exhibition.
In area and height, and in the spacious pretensions of its dome, the structure still suggests irresistibly the period of its inception. It is as ambitious as it is self-conscious; its shining respectability remains superior to all the wiles of climbers and creeping vines. The older servants cherish traditions of “Her Grace’s glass,” as it used to be called. She had the work begun on her fortieth birthday, and precisely a year later it happened that she was wheeled in from the big morning room, and left at her own desire to recline in solitude under the palms beneath the dome, and that when they went to her at last she was dead. The circumstance that Shakespeare is supposed also to have died on the anniversary of his birth, has somehow come to be an integral part of the story, as it is kept alive now in the humbler parts of the Caermere household, but the duchess had nothing else in common with the poet. The very face of her, in her maturer years, is but dimly remembered. The portrait in the library is of a young Lady Clarissa, with pale ringlets and a childishly sweet countenance, and clad in the formal quaintness of the last year of King George the Fourth. She became the duchess, but in turn the duchess, seemed to become somebody else. That was the way with the brides brought home to Caermere. The pictures in the library show them all girlish, and innocently pretty, and for the most part fair-haired. Happily there is no painted record of what they were like when, still in middle life, they bade a last goodbye to the dark-skinned, big-shouldered sons they had borne, and perhaps made a little moan that no daughters were ever given to mothers at Caermere, and turned their sad faces to the wall.
The crystal house had memories of another and more recent mistress, the countess. She had come six years after the other went, she had lived for twelve years—a silent, colorless, gently unhappy life—and then had faded away out of sight. It was this Lady Porlock who had caused the orchid houses to be built at the inner side of the conservatory, and it was in her time, too, that the gifted Cheltnam was fetched from her own father’s house in Berkshire to be head gardener at Caermere. Her fame is indeed irrevocably linked with his, for the tea-rose of his breeding, bearing her maiden-name of the Hon. Florence Denson, is scarcely less well known than this hybrid sweet-briar the Countess of Porlock.