“About the fat getting into the fire? Yes,” said Will.
“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,” she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs. Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So, after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced, Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened, to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath, faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.”
“My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling, you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.”
“Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah, “is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse, and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I won’t.”
“The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in the stables.”
“Apropos of the house, that brings me to another point,” said she. “The County feels very strongly that I ought to put the house in repair—that dear old wonderful, rambling, crumbling house. They take it as the final crushing evidence of my depravity, that I prefer to leave it in its present condition of picturesque decay. I’m sure you agree with me, that it would be high treason to allow a carpenter or mason to lay a hand on it. By-the-bye, I hope you have no conscientious scruples against speaking French; for Madame Dornaye only knows two words of English, and those she mispronounces. There she is—yes, that little black and grey thing, in the frock. She’s come to meet me, because we had a bet. You owe me five shillings,” she called out to Madame Dornaye, as Will helped her from the carriage. “You see, I’ve brought him.”
Madame Dornaye, who had a pair of humorous old French eyes, responded, blinking them, “Oh, before I pay you, I shall have to be convinced that it is really he.”
“I’m afraid it’s really he,” laughed Will; “but rather than let so immaterial a detail cost you five shillings, I’m prepared to maintain with my dying breath that there’s no such person.”
“Don’t mind him,” interposed Johannah. “He’s trying to flatter you up, because he wants you to call him Jean mon fils, as if his name weren’t common William.” Then, to him, “Go,” she said, with an imperious gesture, “go and find a vehicle with a good tired horse.”
And when the vehicle with the good tired horse had brought them to their destination, and they stood before the hall-door of Silver Towers, Johannah looked up at the escutcheon carved in the pale-grey stone above it, and said pensively, “On a field argent, a heart gules, crowned with an imperial crown or; and the motto, ’Qu’il régne!’ If, when you got my first letter, Cousin Will, if you’d remembered the arms of our family, and the motto—if you had ’let it reign’—I should have been spared the trouble and expense of a journey to town to-day.”