AT TWILIGHT
There is a delicious snugness, a charming lack of formality, about the
ceremony of afternoon tea in an English country-house—it is much too
indefinite a rite to dignify it by the name of meal—which makes it the
most pleasant reunion of the day. For English country-house parties
consist, for the most part, of a succession of meals to which the
guests flock the more congenially as, in the interval, they have
contrived to avoid one another’s companionship.
And so, scarcely had the last reverberation of Bude’s measured gonging
died away than the French window leading from the lounge-hall on to the
terrace was pushed open and two of Hartley Parrish’s guests emerged
from the falling darkness without into the pleasant comfort of the
firelit room.
They were an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with
short bristly grey hair and a short bristly grey moustache to match.
His stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough
tweed, which he wore with gaiters extending half-way up his short,
stout calves. As he came in, he slung off the heavy tweed
shooting-cloak he had been wearing and placed it with his Homburg hat
on a chair.
This was Dr. Romain, whose name thus written seems indecently naked
without the string of complementary initials indicative of the honours
and degrees which years of bacteriological research had heaped upon
him. His companion was a tall, slim, fair-haired young man, about as
good a specimen of the young Englishman turned out by the English
public school as one could find. He was extremely good-looking with a
proud eye and finely chiselled features, but the suggestion of youth in
his face and figure was countered by a certain poise, a kind of latent
seriousness which contrasted strangely with the general cheery
_insouciance_ of his type.
A soldier would have spotted the symptoms at once, “Five years of war!”
would have been his verdict—that long and strange entry into life of so
many thousands of England’s manhood which impressed the stamp of
premature seriousness on all those who came through. And Captain Sir
Horace Trevert, Bart., D.S.O., had gone from his famous school straight
into a famous regiment, had won his decoration before he was
twenty-one, and been twice wounded into the bargain.
“Where’s everybody?” queried the doctor, rubbing his hands at the
blazing log-fire.
“Robin and Mary went off to play billiards,” said the young man, “and I
left old Parrish after lunch settling down for an afternoon’s work in
the library ...”
He crossed the room to the fire and stood with his back to the flame.
“What a worker that man is!” ejaculated the doctor. “He had one of his
secretaries down this morning with a car full of portfolios,
blue-prints, specifications, and God knows what else. Parrish polished
the whole lot off and packed the fellow back to London before mid-day.
Some of Hornaway’s people who were waiting went in next, and he was
through with them by lunch-time!”
Trevert wagged his head in admiration.
“And he told me he wanted to have a quiet week-end!” he said. “That’s
why he has no secretary living in the house.”
“A quiet week-end!” repeated Romain drily. “Ye gods!”
“He’s a marvel for work,” said the young man.
“He certainly is,” replied the doctor. “He’s done wonders with
Hornaway’s. When he took the place over at the beginning of the war,
they were telling me, it was a little potty concern making toy air guns
or lead soldiers or something of the sort. And they never stop coining
money now, it seems. Parrish must be worth millions ...”
“Lucky devil!” said Trevert genially.
“Ah!” observed the doctor sententiously, “but he’s had to work for it,
mark you! He’s had the most extraordinary life, they tell me. He was at
one period of his career a bartender on the Rand, a man was saying at
the club the other day. But most of his life he’s lived in Canada, I
gather. He was telling us the other evening, before you and Mary came
down, that he was once a brakeman on the Canadian Pacific Railway. He
said he invested all his savings in books on engineering and read them
in his brakeman’s van on his trips across the Dominion. Ah! he’s a fine
fellow!”
He lowered his voice discreetly.
“And a devilish good match, eh, Horace?”
The young man flushed slightly.
“Yes,” he said unwillingly.
“A dam’ good match for somebody,” urged the doctor with a malicious
twinkle in his eye.
“Here, Doc,” said Horace, suddenly turning on him, “you stick to your
bugs and germs. What do you know about matchmaking, anyway?”
Dr. Romain chuckled.
“We bacteriologists are trained observers. One learns a lot watching
the life and habits of the bacillus, Horace, my boy. And between
ourselves, Parrish would be a lucky fellow if ...”
Trevert turned to him. His face was quite serious, and there was a
little touch of hauteur in his voice. He was the 17th Baronet.
“My dear Doc,” he said, “aren’t you going a bit fast? Parrish is a very
good chap, but one knows nothing about him ...”
Sagely the doctor nodded his grizzled head.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “He appears to have no relatives and nobody
over here seems to have heard of him before the war. A man was saying
at the Athenaeum the other day ...”
Trevert touched his elbow. Bude had appeared, portly, imperturbable,
bearing a silver tray set out with the appliances for tea.
“Bude,” cried Trevert, “don’t tell me there are no tea-cakes again!”
“On the contrairey, sir,” answered the butler in the richly sonorous
voice pitched a little below the normal register which he employed
abovestairs, “the cook has had her attention drawn to it. There are
tea-cakes, sir!”
With a certain dramatic effect—for Bude was a trifle theatrical in
everything he did—he whipped the cover off a dish and displayed a
smoking pile of deliciously browned scones.
“Bude,” said Trevert, “when I’m a Field Marshal, I’ll see you get the
O.B.E. for this!”
The butler smiled a nicely regulated three-by-one smile, a little
deprecatory as was his wont. Then, like a tank taking a corner, he
wheeled majestically and turned to cross the lounge. To reach the green
baize door leading to the servants’ quarters he had to cross the outer
hall from which led corridors on the right and left. That on the right
led to the billiard-room; that on the left to the big drawing-room with
the library beyond.
As Bude reached the great screen of tooled Spanish leather which
separated a corner of the lounge from the outer hall, Robin Greve came
hastily through the glass door of the corridor leading from the
billiard-room. The butler with a pleasant smile drew back a little to
allow the young man to pass, thinking he was going into the lounge for
tea.
“Tea is ...” he began, but abruptly ended the sentence on catching
sight of the young man’s face. For Robin, habitually so self-possessed,
looked positively haggard. His face was set and there was a weary look
in his eyes. The young man appeared so utterly different from his
wonted self that Bude fairly stared at him.
But Robin, without paying the least attention either to the butler or
to the sound of voices in the lounge, strode across the outer hall and
disappeared through the glass door of the corridor leading to the great
drawing-room and the library.
Bude stood an instant gazing after him in perplexity, then moved across
the hall to the servants’ quarters.
In the meantime in the lounge the little doctor snapped the case of his
watch and opined that he wanted his tea.
“Where on earth has everybody got to? What’s become of Lady Margaret? I
haven’t seen her since lunch....”
That lady answered his question by appearing in person.
Lady Margaret was tall and hard and glittering. Like so many
Englishwomen of good family, she was so saturated with the traditions
of her class that her manner was almost indistinguishable from that of
a man. Well-mannered, broadminded, wholly cynical, and absolutely
fearless, she went through life exactly as though she were following a
path carefully taped out for her by a suitably instructed Providence.
Somewhere beneath the mask of smiling indifference she presented so
bravely to a difficult world, she had a heart, but so carefully did she
hide it that Horace had only discovered it on a certain grey November
morning when he had started out for the first time on active service.
For ever afterwards a certain weighing-machine at Waterloo Station, by
which he had had a startling vision of his mother standing with heaving
bosom and tear-stained face, possessed in his mind the attributes of
some secret and sacred shrine.
But now she was cool and well-gowned and self-contained as ever.
“What a perfectly dreadful day!” she exclaimed in her pleasant,
well-bred voice. “Horace, you must positively go and see Henry
What’s-his-name in the Foreign Office and get me a passport for Cannes.
The weather in England in the winter is incredibly exaggerated!”
“At least,” said the doctor, rubbing his back as he warmed himself at
the fire, “we have fuel in England. Give me England, climate and all,
but don’t take away my fire. The sun doesn’t shine on the Riviera at
night, you know!”
Lady Margaret busied herself at the tea-table with its fine Queen Anne
silver and dainty yellow cups. It was the custom at Harkings to serve
tea in the winter without other illumination than the light of the
great log-fire that spat and leaped in the open hearth. Beyond the
semi-circle of ruddy light the great lounge was all in darkness, and
beyond that again was the absolute stillness of the English country on
a winter’s evening.
And so with a gentle clatter of teacups and the accompaniment of
pleasantly modulated voices they sat and chatted—Lady Margaret, who was
always surprising in what she said, the doctor who was incredibly
opinionated, and young Trevert, who like all of the younger generation
was daringly flippant. He was airing his views on what he called “Boche
music” when he broke off and cried:
“Hullo, here’s Mary! Mary, you owe me half a crown. Bude has come up to
scratch and there are tea-cakes after ... but, I say, what on earth’s
the matter?”
The girl had come into the room and was standing in the centre of the
lounge in the ruddy glow of the fire. Her face was deathly pale and she
was shuddering violently. She held her little cambric handkerchief
crushed up into a ball to her lips. Her eyes were fixed, almost glazed,
like one who walks in a trance.
She stood like that for an instant surveying the group—Lady Margaret, a
silver tea-pot in one hand, looking at her with uplifted brows. Horace,
who in his amazement had taken a step forward, and the doctor at his
side scrutinizing her beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
“My dear Mary “—it was Lady Margaret’s smooth and pleasant voice which
broke the silence—“whatever is the matter? Have you seen a ghost!”
The girl swayed a little and opened her lips as if to speak. A log,
crashing from the fire into the grate, fell upon the silence of the
darkening room. It seemed to break the spell.
“Hartley!”
The name came hoarsely from the girl. Everybody, except Lady Margaret,
sprang to his feet It was the doctor who spoke first.
“Miss Mary,” he said, “you seem frightened, what ...”
His voice was very soothing.
Mary Trevert made a vague gesture towards the shadows about the
staircase.
“There ... in the library ... he’s got the door locked ... there was a
shot ...”
Then she suddenly screamed aloud.
In a stride both the doctor and her brother were by her side. But she
motioned them away.
“I’m frightened about Hartley,” she said in a low voice, “please go at
once and see what ... that shot ... and he doesn’t answer!”
“Come on, Doctor!”
Horace Trevert was halfway to the big screen separating the lounge from
the outer hall. As he passed the bell, he pressed it.
“Send Bude to us, Mother, when he comes, please!” he called as he and
the doctor hurried away.
Lady Margaret had risen and stood, one arm about her daughter, on the
Persian rug spread out before the cheerful fire. So the women stood in
the firelight in Hartley Parrish’s house, surrounded by all the
treasures which his wealth had bought, and listened to the footsteps
clattering away through the silence.