“Etchingham is only three miles away.”
It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.
“I met your aunt yesterday,” Miss Churchill continued. She had met everybody yesterday.
“Yes,” I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner, nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged—but I knew that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.
“Has she found a companion to suit her yet?” I said, absent-mindedly. I was thinking of an old legend of my mother’s. Miss Churchill looked me in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform malice.
“Why, yes,” she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, “she has adopted a niece.”
The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. “Who starved her governess?” it had inquired.
My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the Hour—but an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was “one of us,” who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author’s bottle-holder.
A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It seemed to say: “Why any noisy vigour?” It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me—more real than the face of one’s nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before—as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.
He said, languidly—almost protestingly, “What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?”