Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note
four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine
specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and
seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--
"Jimmy writes a very dull letter."
At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner
with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it
very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his
dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep,
instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his
manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath
that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an
intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with
rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in
time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or
breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.
"Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a
boiled egg and a bit of toast?" he asked himself as he entered the
breakfast-room.
Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper
English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed
high, and void of cap.
"You are very punctual," she said with a smile. "I was going to send up
to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew
told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy
has run away and left us together, I find."
"Yes, Jimmy has run away," Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the
full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy
face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the
plot.
"I hope you will not be bored," Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down
together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to
dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. "But, indeed, I
think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country."
Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly
astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.
"You don't agree with me?" she asked.
"I cannot disagree, at least," he said; "because, to tell the truth, I
am always in towns."
"Probably you are happy there then," she rejoined, with a briskness that
was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the
geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.
But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this
utterly erroneous belief.
"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."
Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly
acute, scrutiny.
"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not
suffered enough."
"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with
a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."
"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done.
I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take
an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a
pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so.
There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a
day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a
quarter of the different departments."
"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments
till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"
"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It
is a most delightful time."
Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and
more surprised.
"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.
"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."
"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try
everything, of course. That is one's duty."
"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss
Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as
well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have
thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of
facts."
"Such as what books?"
"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But
it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the
moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"
"They ignore nothing."
"Not even duty?"
"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."
Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon.
She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to
the egg.
"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is
called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive
me--sometimes the young devil of the day."
"I am decadent, Miss Haddon," Claude said with a gentle pride that was
not wholly ungraceful.
The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy
interest.
"How exciting," she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with
a completely natural air. "You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy
isn't one, is he?"
"Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for
lunch."
"Do tell me--how does one do it?"
She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown
in one of her own orchards.
Claude raised his dark eyebrows.
"I beg your pardon?"
"How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all,
about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and
draw, and smoke, and think, and--and eat--"
She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.
"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great
silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will
you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me,
teach me to be a decadent."
"But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and
stopped just in time. "I mean--er--"
He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the
boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for
an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to
be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.
"Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.
"Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully.