"This man might come home to lodgings in Chelsea," said Jack Vandeleur, touching himself lightly on the breast, with a grim laugh. "It's a glorious old place, and you needn't apologize for being proud of it. And now we've come back, I hope you are going to be jolly, for you've been uncommonly glum while we've been away. The house looks cheerful, doesn't it? I should think it must be full of company."
"Not likely," answered Leonard. "Christabel never cared about having people. We should have lived like hermits if she had had her way."
"Then if the house isn't full of people, all I can say is there's a good deal of candlelight going to waste," said Captain Vandeleur.
They were driving up to the porch by this time; the door stood wide open; servants were on the watch for them. The hall was all aglow with light and fire; people were moving about near the hearth. It was a relief to Leonard to see this life and brightness. He had feared to find a dark and silent house—a melancholy welcome—all things still in mourning for the untimely dead.
A ripple of laughter floated from the hall as Leonard drew up his horses, and two tall slim figures with fluffy heads, short-waisted gowns, and big sashes, came skipping down the broad shallow steps.
"My sisters, by Jove," cried Jack, delighted. "How awfully jolly of Mrs. Tregonell to invite them."
Leonard's only salutation to the damsels was a friendly nod. He brushed by them as they grouped themselves about their brother—like a new edition of Laocoon without the snakes, or the three Graces without the grace—and hurried into the hall, eager to be face to face with his wife. She came forward to meet him, looking her loveliest, dressed as he had never seen her dressed before, with a style, a chic, and a daring more appropriate to the Théâtre Français than to a Cornish squire's house. She who, even in the height of the London season, had been simplicity itself, recalling to those who most admired her, the picture of that chaste and unworldly maiden who dwelt beside the Dove, now wore an elaborate costume of brown velvet and satin, in which a Louis Quinze velvet coat, with large cut-steel buttons and Mechlin jabot, was the most striking feature. Her fair, soft hair was now fluffy, and stood up in an infinity of frizzy curls from the broad white forehead. Diamond solitaires flashed in her ears, her hands glittered with the rainbow light of old family rings, which in days gone by she had been wont to leave in the repose of an iron safe. The whole woman was changed. She came to meet her husband with a Society smile; shook hands with him as if he had been a commonplace visitor—he was too startled to note the death-like coldness of that slender hand—and welcomed him with a conventional inquiry about his passage from Buenos Ayres.
He stood transfixed—overwhelmed by surprise. The room was full of people. There was Mrs. Fairfax Torrington, liveliest and most essentially modern of well-preserved widows, always dans le mouvement, as she said of herself; and there, lolling against the high oak chimney-piece, with an air of fatuous delight in his own attractiveness, was that Baron de Cazalet—pseudo artist, poet, and littérateur, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement—æsthetic, cynical, agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic—always blowing the last fashionable bubble, and making his bubbles bigger and brighter than other people's—a man who prided himself upon his "intensity" in every pursuit—from love-making to gourmandize. There, again, marked out from the rest by a thoroughly prosaic air, which, in these days of artistic sensationalism is in itself a distinction—pale, placid, taking his ease in a low basket chair, with his languid hand on Randie's black muzzle—sat Mr. FitzJesse, the journalist, proprietor and editor of The Sling, a fashionable weekly—the man who was always smiting the Goliahs of pretence and dishonesty with a pen that was sharper than any stone that ever David slung against the foe. He was such an amiable-looking man—had such a power of obliterating every token of intellectual force and fire from the calm surface of his countenance, that people, seeing him for the first time, were apt to stare at him in blank wonder at his innocent aspect. Was this the wielder of that scathing pen—was this the man who wrote not with ink but with aqua fortis? Even his placid matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little disappointing. It was only by gentlest degrees that the iron hand of satire made itself felt under the velvet glove of conventional good manners. Leonard had met Mr. FitzJesse in London, at the clubs and elsewhere, and had felt that vague awe which the provincial feels for the embodied spirit of metropolitan intellect in the shape of a famous journalist. It was needful to be civil to such men, in order to be let down gently in their papers. One never knew when some rash unpremeditated act might furnish matter for a paragraph which would mean social annihilation.
There were other guests grouped about the fireplace—little Monty, the useful and good-humoured country-house hack; Colonel Blathwayt, of the Kildare Cavalry, a noted amateur actor, reciter, waltzer, spirit-rapper, invaluable in a house full of people—a tall, slim-waisted man, who rode nine stone, and at forty contrived to look seven-and-twenty; the Rev. St. Bernard Faddie, an Anglican curate, who carried Ritualism to the extremest limit consistent with the retention of his stipend as a minister of the Church of England, and who was always at loggerheads with some of his parishioners. There were Mr. and Mrs. St. Aubyn and their two daughters—county people, with loud voices, horsey, and doggy, and horticultural—always talking garden, when they were not talking stable or kennel. These were neighbours for whom Christabel had cared very little in the past. Leonard was considerably astonished at finding them domiciled at Mount Royal.
"And you had a nice passage," said his wife, smiling at her lord. "Will you have some tea?"