CHAPTER VI
Kingston Darnley, as usual, was late for breakfast. He had loitered pleasantly over his toilet, relieving the repellent prose of the process by frequent intervals of poetic rest at the open window. The little old diamond-paned casement of his dressing-room was open, and the crooked oak-panelled apartment was flooded with morning sunlight. Very far below, against the feet of the cliff beneath, the blue and gold of the clear water came lapping in friendship, and its lazy utterance rose faint and thin to the listener through the virginal clarity of the air. The day was not yet old enough for the haze and stress of heat: all was still clean and fresh from the cool sweetness of the night and the unclouded dawn. To the uttermost horizon spread the level floor of the sea, a glory of scent and colour, gleaming, vital, incredibly buoyant and young for all its uncounted æons of life. Again and again Kingston stayed to dally with the enormous loveliness of life, leaning from the window whence he might have dropped a pebble straight into the purple ripples a hundred feet and more below, where they played leisurely at hide-and-seek among the rocks under the cliff.
It was indeed a morning to be up and alive—a morning to be naked in the naked embrace of the world. As the hours go by, the world, no less than man, puts on its clothes. Clouds and shadows and haze come up to cover the strong free limbs of the earth. It is only in the short space after sunrise in some still morning that the world stands out pure and glorious in its nudity—vivid, stainless, triumphant as the white flawlessness of the young Apollo newly risen out of the dark, formless void. The upspringing day is our emblem of youth fresh from slumber—beautiful, ardent, splendid in the clear glory of his build—before he makes haste to hide himself in the sombre, ugly trappings of convention. Kingston was in no haste to take that leap of many centuries that separates man, as Nature set him forth, from the clothed, shapeless dummy that man has made himself.
From the adjoining room his wife recalled him again and again to the flight of time. She was never to be distracted from her duties by any beauty or ugliness of the outer world. Had the Last Day dawned in fire, Gundred would have duly finished having her hair done before confronting it. There is a time for everything, she says, and all reasonable people know that the time for looking at landscapes is after lunch, while taking one’s afternoon drive, before going home to tea and the second post. Then, at the proper moment, ecstasies are allowable, and even suitable. But every minute of the day has its task, and nothing can be plainer than that dressing-time is the time to dress. Kingston, however, whistled idly at his desultory work, and dawdled as if the whole forthcoming week were vacant. He loved the young tenderness of the sunlight, and drew great breaths of life at the open window. Overhead, and far away to the right, stretched along the cliff a mighty, menacing shaft of darkness, the shadow of the huge Castle behind. But this little old wing, on its spur of rock, jutted so boldly out from the main mass of the building that all here was radiance. Gundred, too, enjoyed the sun, but did not allow his ardours to distract her from her duties. She had the white blinds pulled down, and her toilet was cheered merely by a subdued consciousness of the warmth outside. Then, when all was carefully and properly accomplished, she made her way down twisting steps, and along a strip of corridor, to the end of the wing, where the last two rooms on this ground-floor were portioned off as dining-room and sitting-room. The whole arrangement was quaint enough to please her, but neither so inconvenient nor so unusual as to offend her sense of what was becoming. It was better than living, sitting and dining, in the grim, mouldering halls of the Drum Tower, or in the bald, chintz-hung rooms of the modern wings.
The unexpected booming of the gong roused Kingston to a sense of time. With an effort he tore himself from his ecstatic contemplation, and compressed the remainder of his toilet into half a dozen crowded moments. Then, flurried, and filled with the feeling that he ought to be apologetic, he hurried towards the dining-room.
He found his wife seated at the breakfast-table, decapitating a boiled egg with her usual crisp neatness, which always suggested that she was doing the egg a favour in making it an example of exactly how an egg should be eaten. She was a lesson to the world. And he felt that she knew it.
She, for her part, noticed immediately that his tie was under one ear, that it was exceedingly ill-knotted, and that it was the wrong sort of tie for that particular collar.
‘I thought I would begin, darling,’ said Gundred. ‘I did not know when you would appear. Such a lovely morning—yes?’
Here, also, she had shown her appreciation of its loveliness by having all the blinds drawn down. A muffled white radiance was all that she allowed to reach her from outside.