“I mean the picture children of course, child. Leslie, Beppo, Collina, and the little Spencers. You interrupt me as callously as you do your poor Mother. My next novel shall be concerned with the amazing difference in the up-bringing of children, then and now. But how different it all is to Grosvenor Square!”
This caught Clare’s fancy. She loved people to criticise and draw comparisons. “O, what?” she said. “Is it different? Of course I know it is, but do tell me, don’t you like it? And did you like Grosvenor Square?”
“They knew how to live there,” said Mrs. Inchbald severely: “everything was in order, my dear. There was a butler, with all the punctuality of a heavenly body surrounded by his satellites, the footmen, who could be thoroughly depended on to keep up the fires....”
“Yes, even in the very warmest weather, Mother says. She doesn’t like footmen, you know, except in palaces; she’d rather men were soldiers, or ploughed fields. She doesn’t like to see them hand plates about, which women do far more prettily; besides, men stamp so, and blow down your back.”
“Perhaps the furniture,” continued Mrs. Inchbald, regardless of interruption, “perhaps the furniture was unsuited to child-life, holding the priceless china as it did ... the move was certainly courageous. But O, how we were loved!”
Something in Mrs. Inchbald’s voice made Clare listen. She liked her better now that her hard face softened so.
“Ah, that was something like belonging! it warmed us, my dear, it warmed us; that’s what made us alive. Do you think if your Grandpapa had never loved us in the way he did that we should be here walking and breathing—we, but semblances of human form dwelling in pigment and paste? It’s only love that can make alive, and he did it. Sometimes, after all the lights were out and the folks in bed, the door would open and he’d enter. I can see him in his dressing-gown and slippers, the light shining on the mahogany door; his clean white hair, and shrewd face. His hands so swift in movement, so beautifully kept, his beard trimmed so neatly. Did you ever see him untidy, I wonder, or harassed, or wasting time? Never—it all went so easily, he had the long-houred day of a busy man. Time to read aloud to others, time to look over his old French books, time to saunter out and play golf earnestly, and time, above all, to spend, upon us. How he loved us. We shall never have that again.”
“O yes you shall,” said Clare, for she was warm-hearted really, for all the Scotch pebble in her eyes on occasion—“O yes, you shall. Why—we all, all like you we are all going to learn about you, Mother says so; it is only Lady Crosbie who sometimes ... bores her, you know.”
This came out rushingly, and Clare would have withdrawn it, but the spoken word is like a sped arrow, there is no calling either back. Mrs. Inchbald changed completely. Her brown eyes twinkled comfortably, and she leaned in her eagerness, right out of her chair.
“You don’t say so? Well, I agree with her. I believe I shall get on with your Mother, after all, though she does let you all victimise her, and reads such dull books. But I shouldn’t have chosen the word bore exactly. I shouldn’t say Lady Crosbie ever bored people ... dear me, O no, she’s vastly entertaining, my dear, to those she thinks worth it....”