Then followed half an hour of chaff, out of which Roger gleaned no grain of information as to his own probable fate and was too diffident to ask outright if any decision as to his return had been arrived at. He accepted an invitation to dine with the Department at the Cheshire Cheese and meet Arthur Broadmead; then drove to the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, handed in his rocks and asked the Curator for a report on them, at his leisure. After that, Professor Flower and the skulls; which were those of two men of that Hamitic race colonizing the Happy Valley. He had found them lying about on the outskirts of a village and had received the careless permission of the villagers to take them away. They might serve to determine the relationships of this incongruous type.
CHAPTER XVI
SIBYL AS SIREN
In August, 1889, Lucy conveyed to Roger her belief that she was going to have a child.
"But that is no reason you should not come down with me to Sibyl's place in Scotland. You can't be going to have a baby till—till well on in the winter, and meantime a stay in the Highlands will brace you up. Of course as Sibyl is in mourning she can only have a very small house party—just two or three men like myself to shoot the grouse, rabbits and stags. I don't suppose there will be any women there except her aunt and you." Lucy acquiesced unwillingly.
She was living once more with her parents, while Roger's plans were so unsettled. The rooms at Hankey's had been given up, and on his frequent journeys to London—mainly on Sibyl's business—he slept at Aunt Pardew's Hotel in Great Ormond Street, where they made him very comfortable. He had taken Lucy over to Engledene twice in July—once he had left her there a whole afternoon, tête-à-tête with the still languid young widow. On that occasion he had purposely ridden over to Tilehurst to see Mr. Baines with more news—sent on by Callaway from Unguja—about Ann Anderson and the restoration of Hangodi station, and what the Mission proposed to do in regard to a memorial grave-stone. It tickled his sense of humour that he should improve his acquaintance with John's father and thus allay any local feeling against Lucy: his visits there not only cheered the Aerated Waters' manufacturer, but they enraged Mrs. Baines.
She was obliged all the time to keep locked up in her bedroom, and this caused Eliza to get out of hand.
But so far, the hope of a friendship growing up between his wife and his one-time sweetheart had little encouragement from either. Sibyl, not wishing to fall out with Roger, declared she tried to like Lucy. Yet when other people were present she somehow brought out her rusticity and simplicity, or she adopted towards her a patronizing manner which was evident even to the not very acute senses of Roger's wife.
The visit to Glen Sporran Lodge did not improve their relations. Lucy in matters of dress was by no means without taste or discernment, but she was quite ignorant of the modernest modes. She had no idea that a stay in the Highlands—even in 1889—involved a special wardrobe: short, kilted skirts and high-buttoned leggings, boots, or spats for the day's adventures—going, to meet the guns, tramping over the moors, picnics when the wet weather permitted, and all the shifts for facing a good deal of rain without looking forlorn or ridiculous. Trailing skirts and wet weather were irreconcilable; so were yachting and a silk dress. Perpetual sitting indoors in a town dress, over a turf fire, and reading novels provoked sarcasms not only from Sibyl but from the tart tongue of Aunt Christabel; who wasn't at all inclined to spare Lucy.
What had that good-looking Roger with such a career before him had in his mind that he should throw himself away on this village schoolmistress? She did not care, either, for Sibyl's new infatuation for Roger; would have liked to keep them well apart. The distant cousinship was not through her or her sister, Mrs. Grayburn, but through Roger's mother and Colonel Grayburn. Sibyl, when her year of mourning was up, had much better marry again into the peerage; and if she wanted a smart man as Agent—for land-agents of the middle-class-bailiff type were "passés de mode" on all big estates ... well, there was Willowby, Willowby Patterne (a nephew-in-law of Aunt Christabel), who really might very well do for the post. Willowby had been very wild, had run through much of his own money and his unsuitable wife's—they were never asked out together. But he was a first-class shot, had been to Canada with the Duke of Ulster, knew a lot about blood-stock, had tried farming and ranching and would be quite all there helping Sibyl entertain her house parties and giving an eye to the manly education of James—Aunt Christabel did not countenance Sibyl's silly freak of imposing the name of "Clitheroe" on the little Lord Silchester.