‘And when are we to expect that sacrosanct person, your cousin?’ inquired Kingston, who knew nothing of that calm loyalty which people of Gundred’s sort display towards even the most despised and detested of their relations when they come up for discussion in the presence of anyone unconnected with ‘the family.’
‘Isabel? Ring, dear, for Murchison, and I will send a wire. She will have time to catch the midday train, and we shall have her here in good time to dress for dinner. But of course she won’t be able to see poor Uncle Henry.’
Kingston rang, feeling himself powerless to avert the coming of this discordant, pestilent alien, and Murchison was duly entrusted with the telegram. As soon as it had gone both Kingston and Gundred began to feel injured, and by common consent forbore to say another word about Isabel Darrell. Gundred felt herself aggrieved that her husband should so readily and with such apparent gladness have consented to the invasion of a stranger; Kingston felt himself aggrieved that Gundred should so gladly and with such apparent readiness have suggested the importation of a third person. Each thought the other bored with the honeymoon; neither was, but the one from offended pride, and the other from conscientious delicacy considered it a duty to make the pretence; and, each concealing his feeling strictly from the other, husband and wife drew deliberately apart to make room for the figure of Isabel Darrell between them.
The day drifted by in colourless talk, and the fine splendour of the morning grew clouded with a leaden haze. Kingston and Gundred sat out the hours in the small close garden that was shut in by the Castle. Their own little oaken wing jutted away ahead of them, but the line of the cliff, before it ran out in that unexpected spur, was enclosed by three old towers of the building, and here, in the square levelled space, looking straight over the boundless sea, with a battlemented wall of windows behind, and the Drum Tower glooming high over it in the background, had been made the only patch of garden that existed to give light and life to the grey mountain of masonry. The little flowery patch, gay with sweet-peas and roses, seemed as discordant with the Castle as a bow of ribbon on the brow of a precipice. It was frivolous, impertinent, saucy in its defiance of the stern greyness that it adorned. The only fit colours to relieve the sombre majesty of Brakelond were those of blood and fire, not those of grass and flowers. But the contradiction was so flagrant as to be fascinating, and the lovers took daily joy in this little impudent oasis.
However, their unuttered thoughts of the new-comer dominated every remark they made, and it was a relief when evening drew near, and each minute brought nearer and nearer the abrupt termination of their solitude. Isabel had telegraphed her joy at being permitted to come, and her intention to do so immediately. Orders were given to prepare for her, and she was expected to arrive in time to dress for dinner. When, therefore, the carriage returned empty from the station, six miles away, after having kept dinner waiting for half an hour, both Kingston and Gundred felt their grievances redoubled. Kingston saw how right he had been to detest the very notion of this disorderly stranger, and Gundred realized more than ever how slack and neglectful of her husband it had been not to forbid the importation of such a disconcerting element into their ordered tranquillity. Meanwhile a telegram arrived, explaining that Isabel had lost her train, had taken a ‘special,’ and hoped to arrive in an hour or so. Again the carriage was sent, and, after another tedious interval of expectation the lovers were told that its lights could be seen returning up the hill. To ease the arrival of a shy, desolate colonial Gundred decided to receive her in the great hall itself. Accordingly, at the news, Kingston and Gundred passed on through the dim, gaunt passages of outwork and bastion until they found themselves at last in the heart of the big Drum Tower. The hall was a vast flagged expanse, walled in by high, dusty glooms, into whose recesses no light of any feeble lamp or lantern could penetrate. Grime and weary antiquity seemed to permeate it, and the air was close and heavy with a scent of mouldered greatness. Kingston, as he went, began insensibly to play a game with himself. He picked out the names of four moods, to be repeated to himself, one for each flag on which he trod; and his fate, his whole attitude to Isabel was to be foretold by the paving-stone on which his foot should rest at the instant of the new-comer’s alighting. His fancy was taken from the game which children play with their cherry-stones, and the moods he chose were ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt.’ In turn he repeated them as he stepped from flag to flag, careful always never to set his foot on any boundary line. ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt,’ he murmured inwardly from stone to stone, while Gundred walked briskly at his side, her clear mind a hundred years removed from any such silly infantile fantasies. Now they were drawing near the huge, gaping doorway. There were not so many of the great squares left to tread, and the jingling approach of the carriage could be more and more clearly heard. Kingston’s heart began to beat with the artificial excitement of his game. ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt....’ The carriage had driven up.... ‘Love, Hate, Fear, Contempt....’ He lingered, hoping that the stranger would alight appropriately on the word ‘Contempt.’ In vain. There was some delay. Perforce he must advance to the three or four remaining flag-stones. Quickly, to get it over without danger, he hurried with a long stride on to the stone that meant ‘Love,’ eager to leap to the next. But the unconscious Isabel was quicker. As his foot was set on ‘Love,’ Isabel jumped untidily from the carriage. Kingston laughed internally. ‘So much for fate,’ he thought; then, calmed again, he advanced with Gundred to meet the stranger. In the flickering light, among the draughts that swirled in the high cavern of darkness, his first impression was of a limp, floppy hat, bulged, overtrodden boots, and a deplorable draggled tippet. Greetings were hurriedly exchanged, and Kingston felt justified of all his hostile forebodings. Awkward, shapeless, inopportune, tawdry,—‘Contempt’ or ‘Hate’ should certainly have been his footing with regard to Isabel Darrell.
CHAPTER VII
It was not till the three had arrived in the oaken parlour of the old chapel wing that Kingston could pause to take stock of the new-comer, and revise his first impression. Revise it? It needed only to be amplified, many new details to be added to the first rough sketch of his dislike, fresh lines and shades to be stippled in on the displeasing portrait.
Gundred was one of the comparatively few Englishwomen whose hat always looks as if it had grown with her hair, and forms an integral part of her head as Nature made it. Isabel, on the other hand, was one of the vast majority whose hat sits on their hair awkwardly, like a stranger, with no suggestion of anything more than an accidental and reluctant relationship painfully achieved with pins. And it was a bad hat, too—formless, flabby, large and slatternly in its lines. It made no pretence at being straight, but flapped and floundered distressingly as she walked. Clearly Isabel was one of those women who can never keep a hat straight. Regiments of daggers and skewers cannot prevent them from giving the impression of living perpetually in a gale. Their headgear is aimless, uncongenial, offering a perpetual suggestion of irrelevance. And, as the hat is symptomatic of the woman, the rest of Isabel fulfilled the dire promise of her headgear—immense, shapeless, foolishly waved and undulated, of limp, coarse black straw, with the big bow of cheap satin that did not seem to belong to it, but to be stuck on casually with one of the protrusive, jetty pins that ironically pretended to keep it fixed, and, with it, sagged from side to side in a futile and disconsolately impudent manner. Isabel, throughout, was flimsy, loose, and flaccid in design. Nothing about her seemed to be in any relationship to herself or to any other detail of her dress: her attire was a mere careless aggregation of unsuitable elements, as depressing in its feeble slovenliness as a party of ill-assorted people. Her gown dragged and trailed around her here and there, suggesting that she daily tied it on anew with tapes, and secured the more salient points with safety-pins. It was not a gown—no homogeneous creation of any sane mind. It had none of a real gown’s individuality; it was a mere haphazard covering. Then her boots: again, as she sat in the settle, the lamplight caught their toes: they were both wrinkled and bulgy, an ingenious prodigy of the incorrect. As Kingston watched them in the little oaken room, the lamplight seemed to concentrate its efforts on their shapeless points: they held his gaze as if by mesmerism, and seemed to swell monstrously and waver gigantic in the gloom, till the world was swallowed up in those amorphous lumps.
It was some time before Kingston could turn his attention from the clothes to the woman that they so disastrously symbolized. Here, too, he met at every point with a violation of all his favourite canons. Isabel Darrell was evidently as untidy as her garments. Her figure was long and elastic. Only a certain arrogant untidiness of carriage could save her from the reproach of lankiness. She walked with a free unconventional swing from the hips, with a sort of bounding spring that might have been more pleasantly noteworthy had it not set her hat mopping and mowing afresh at every step. At every step it jauntily jumped, up and down, and from right to left, until the attention was concentrated on its antics rather than on any beauties that might have been found in the gait which compelled them. Very different indeed was the barbaric looseness of Isabel’s movement from the neat and civilized precision of Gundred’s every motion. That she wore no stays was very evident, and the flapping freedom of her legs suggested that her nature had been built for breeches rather than for petticoats.