He was in Charles Street by afternoon teatime, sitting in the cosy drawing-room with his mother and sister, being petted and made much of in a manner calculated to stimulate any young man’s self-love. His mother adored him, and he had been away from her nearly half a year. His sister was seven years his junior, a pretty, frivolous young creature, whose mind rarely dwelt upon any more serious question than the fashion of her next ball-dress or how she should wear her hair, or the newest toy on her silver table. Yet she, too, adored Jack Vansittart in her pretty frivolous way, and had not yet begun to adore anybody else.
The room was full of flowers and old china, and little tables crowded with silver, and enamels, and Dresden boxes, and ivory paper-knives; and there were books in every available corner; an old room with panelled walls and a low ceiling, in a somewhat shabby old house which had belonged to Mrs. Vansittart’s grandfather, an East India director, in the days when the Pagoda tree was still worth shaking. The furniture was seventy years old, a quaint mixture of old-fashioned English things, before the influence of Sheraton and Chippendale had died out, and Indian things, really and intensely Indian, bought in the East, long before Oriental goods began to be manufactured wholesale for English buyers. Bombay blackwood, with its clumsy bulkiness enriched by elaborate carving, ivories, screens of black and gold, rainbow-hued embroideries which time had scarcely faded, porcelain jars and enamelled vases, relieved the stern simplicity of rosewood and pale chintz. A few choice water-colours on the walls, and an abundance of flowers harmonized everything, and made Mrs. Vansittart’s drawing-room a fitting nest for a very elegant woman and her very pretty daughter.
The London house was Mrs. Vansittart’s own property; the house in Hampshire belonged to her son, and she spoke of herself and her daughter laughingly as caretakers.
“When you marry,” said Maud, tossing up her pretty head, with pale gold hair crisped and curled in the prevailing fashion, “mother and I will have to budge. Whatever slut you may choose to fall in love with will be mistress of Merewood.”
“Why must you needs suppose I may fall in love with a slut?”
“Oh, by the doctrine of opposites. You are one of those orderly, superior persons who are foredoomed to admire some wild girl of the woods, some harum-scarum minx, with fine eyes and half an inch of mud on the edge of her gown.”
“However fine the eyes were, I think the half-inch of mud would be a warning that I could hardly ignore. But I do not claim to be either orderly or superior. My father’s Irish blood has infused a spice of disorder into my Anglo-Saxon character.”
And now on this bright April afternoon Jack Vansittart was being petted and fed by these two loving women, who could not do too much to prove their devotion to him after the long severance. They had only given him time to wash his hands and brush the Kentish dust and chalk out of his hair and clothes before he sat down between them to a cup of tea. He had to assure them that he had lunched heartily at Calais, and wanted nothing but tea, or else a substantial meal would have been set out in the dining-room below.
“And you have come straight through from Marseilles?” said Mrs. Vansittart. “What a terrible journey!”
“Hot and dusty, mother; not very appalling to a traveller. But you are such a stay-at-home.”