However, as the morning was wet, he did not mind so much that he was due at Pen-y-Gros Castle at noon. He put on his carefully brushed blue suit and the black silk tie that his mother had knitted for him recently with her own fair hands, and at twelve o’clock precisely he was seeking admittance at the gloomy portals. As he did so he looked in vain for signs of the Goose Girl and the Muffin Girl. He could not help speculating as to what the old heathen wanted him for. Nothing pleasant, he would take his oath. Doubtless the Goose had blabbed. If so, a warm quarter of an hour was before him. Yet he felt that he should not mind that particularly. After all, the old beldame was quite likely to receive as good as she gave.
John received him, and handed him over to Mr. Marchbanks himself, who said, “Will you kindly come this way, sir?” in the manner that he alone could say it.
Jim followed Mr. Marchbanks, after bestowing a somewhat contemptuous glance at a daub in the entrance-hall which purported to be the work of one Tintoret. A little further along, however, was a Cavalier by Vandyck, which was more to his taste. He glanced at the furniture also, which in its way was magnificent. It was of embossed Spanish leather. At the head of the wide stone-flagged staircase up which he was conducted, was a portière of Gobelin tapestry. Passing through this, he was taken along a corridor containing good pictures and bad, and mediæval weapons and suits of armor, until at last he found himself in an extremely cozy room containing seductive lounges and strewn with Turkish mats. And there, seated alone and singularly upright in a high-backed chair, with a perfectly revolting little dog sleeping at her footstool, was the old woman Jim Lascelles so cordially disliked.
Jim was a little surprised that the old woman deigned to offer not two fingers only, but the whole of her hand.
“What is in the wind, I wonder?” mused Jim, as he accepted it with his best bow.
“It is good of you to come, Mr. Lascelles,” said the old woman, by no means ungraciously. Remember there never was an old woman yet who could not contrive to be agreeable if she really made up her mind to be so. And Caroline Crewkerne was no exception to the universal rule. “Pray be seated,” said she.
Jim Lascelles took the chair that was farthest from her ladyship.
The old woman was very concise, matter-of-fact, and businesslike. She spoke slowly, she enunciated her words with beautiful clearness; in short, she was a model of what you would expect her to be. She was all compact of hard-headed, clear-cut, practical sagacity.
“I wish to speak to you upon an important subject,” she began. “It has come to my knowledge that you have been paying your addresses to my niece, Miss Perry.”
Jim Lascelles was prepared for the speech in its substance, but its calm, matter-of-fact, non-committal air was baffling to him.