‘And yet,’ Nora said, ‘Mr Hawthorn told me your father’s place in Lincolnshire is so very lovely. He thinks it’s the finest country-seat he’s ever seen anywhere in England.’
‘Yes, it is pretty, certainly,’ Harry Noel admitted with a depreciating wave of his delicate right hand—‘very pretty, and very well kept up, one must allow, as places go nowadays. I took Hawthorn down there one summer vac., when we two were at Cambridge together, and he was quite delighted with it; and really, it is a very nice place, too, though it is in Lincolnshire. The house is old, you know, really old—not Elizabethan, but early Tudor, Henry the Seventh, or something thereabouts: all battlements and corner turrets, and roses and portcullises on all the shields, and a fine old portico, added by Inigo Jones, I believe, and out of keeping, of course, with the rest of the front, but still, very fine and dignified in its own way, for all that, in spite of what the architects (awful prigs) say to the contrary. And then there’s a splendid avenue of Spanish chestnuts, considered to be the oldest in all England, you know (though, to be sure, they’ve got the oldest Spanish chestnuts in the whole country at every house in all Lincolnshire that I’ve ever been to). And the lawn’s pretty, very pretty; a fine stretch of sward, with good parterres of these ugly, modern, jam-tart flowers, leading down to about the best sheet of water in the whole county, with lots of swans on it.—Yes,’ he added reflectively, contrasting the picture in his own mind with the one then actually before him, ‘the Hall’s not a bad sort of place in its own way—far from it.’
‘And Mr Hawthorn told me,’ Nora put in, ‘that you’d got such splendid conservatories and gardens too.’
‘Well, we have: there’s no denying it. They’re certainly good in their way, too, very good conservatories. You see, my dear mother’s very fond of flowers: it’s a perfect passion with her: brought it over from Barbadoes, I fancy. She was one of the very first people who went in for growing orchids on the large scale in England. Her orchid-houses are really awfully beautiful. We never have anything but orchids on the table for dinner—in the way of flowers, I mean—we don’t dine off a lily, of course, as they say the æsthetes do. And my mother’s never so proud as when anybody praises and admires her masdevallias or her thingumbobianas—I’m sorry to say I don’t myself know the names of half of them. She’s a dear, sweet, old lady, my mother, Miss Dupuy; I’m sure you couldn’t fail to like my dear mother.’
‘She’s a Barbadian too, you told us,’ Nora said reflectively. ‘How curious that she too should be a West Indian!’
Harry half sighed. He misunderstood entirely the train of thought that was passing that moment through Nora’s mind. He believed she saw in it a certain rapprochement between them two, a natural fitness of things to bring them together. ‘Yes,’ he said, with more tenderness in his tone than was often his wont, ‘my mother’s a Barbadian, Miss Dupuy: such a grand, noble-looking, commanding woman—not old yet; she never will be old, in fact; she’s too handsome for that; but so graceful and beautiful, and wonderfully winning as well, in all her pretty, dainty, old coffee-coloured laces.’ And he pulled from his pocket a little miniature, which he always wore next to his heart. He wore another one beside it, too, but that one he didn’t show her just then: it was her own face, done on ivory by a well-known artist, from a photograph which he had begged or borrowed from Marian Hawthorn’s album twelve months before in London.
‘She’s a beautiful old lady, certainly,’ Nora answered, gazing in some surprise at Lady Noel’s clear-cut and haughty, high-born-looking features. She couldn’t for the moment exactly remember where she had seen some others so very like them; and then, as Harry’s evil genius would unluckily have it, she suddenly recollected with a start of recognition: she had seen them just the evening before on the lawn in front of her: they answered precisely, in a lighter tint, to the features and expression of Isaac Pourtalès!
‘How proud she must be to be the mistress of such a place as Noel Hall!’ she said musingly, after a short pause, pursuing in her own mind to herself her own private line of reflection. It seemed to her as if the heiress of the Barbadian brown people must needs find herself immensely lifted up in the world by becoming the lady of such a splendid mansion as Harry had just half unconsciously described to her.
But Harry himself, to whom, of course, Lady Noel had been Lady Noel, and nothing else, as long as ever he could remember her, again misunderstood entirely the course of Nora’s thoughts, and took her naive expression of surprise as a happy omen for his own suit. ‘She thinks,’ he thought to himself quietly, ‘that it must be not such a very bad position after all to be mistress of the finest estate in Lincolnshire! But I don’t want her to marry me for that. O no, not for that! that would be miserable! I want her to marry me for my very self, or else for nothing.’ So he merely added aloud, in an unconcerned tone: ‘Yes; she’s very fond of the place and of the gardens; and as she’s a West Indian by birth, I’m sure you’d like her very much, Miss Dupuy, if you were ever to meet her.’
Nora coloured. ‘I should like to see some of these fine English places very much,’ she said, half timidly, trying with awkward abruptness to break the current of the conversation. ‘I never had the chance, when I was last in England. My aunt, you know, knew only very quiet people in London, and we never visited at any of the great country-houses.’