Though the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred to
cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her
own brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that
her husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in the
train a short walk would be pleasant, but, though she veiled it from
her conscious mind, another motive, sub-consciously engineered,
prompted her action. It would, of course, be universally known to all
her friends in Riseholme that she was arriving today by the 12.26, and
at that hour the village street would be sure to be full of them. They
would see the fly with luggage draw up at the door of The Hurst, and
nobody except her maid would get out.
That would be an interesting thing for them: it would cause one of
those little thrills of pleasant excitement and conjectural exercise
which supplied Riseholme with its emotional daily bread. They would all
wonder what had happened to her, whether she had been taken ill at the
very last moment before leaving town and with her well-known fortitude
and consideration for the feelings of others, had sent her maid on to
assure her husband that he need not be anxious. That would clearly be
Mrs Quantock's suggestion, for Mrs Quantock's mind, devoted as it was
now to the study of Christian Science, and the determination to deny
the existence of pain, disease and death as regards herself, was always
full of the gloomiest views as regards her friends, and on the
slightest excuse, pictured that they, poor blind things, were suffering
from false claims. Indeed, given that the fly had already arrived at
The Hurst, and that its arrival had at this moment been seen by or
reported to Daisy Quantock, the chances were vastly in favour of that
lady's having already started in to give Mrs Lucas absent treatment.
Very likely Georgie Pillson had also seen the anticlimax of the fly's
arrival, but he would hazard a much more probable though erroneous
solution of her absence. He would certainly guess that she had sent on
her maid with her luggage to the station in order to take a seat for
her, while she herself, oblivious of the passage of time, was spending
her last half hour in contemplation of the Italian masterpieces at the
National Gallery, or the Greek bronzes at the British Museum. Certainly
she would not be at the Royal Academy, for the culture of Riseholme,
led by herself, rejected as valueless all artistic efforts later than
the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a great deal of what went before.
Her husband with his firm grasp of the obvious, on the other hand,
would be disappointingly capable even before her maid confirmed his
conjecture, of concluding that she had merely walked from the station.
The motive, then, that made her send her cab on, though subconsciously
generated, soon penetrated into her consciousness, and these guesses at
what other people would think when they saw it arrive without her,
sprang from the dramatic element that formed so large a part of her
mentality, and made her always take, as by right divine, the leading
part in the histrionic entertainments with which the cultured of
Riseholme beguiled or rather strenuously occupied such moments as could
be spared from their studies of art and literature, and their social
engagements. Indeed she did not usually stop at taking the leading
part, but, if possible, doubled another character with it, as well as
being stage-manager and adapter, if not designer of scenery. Whatever
she did--and really she did an incredible deal--she did it with all the
might of her dramatic perception, did it in fact with such earnestness
that she had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all, she simply
contemplated herself and her own vigorous accomplishment. When she
played the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practice
every day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who
passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the
roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply Emmeline
Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach or dainty Scarletti, or noble
Beethoven. The latter perhaps was her favorite composer, and many were
the evenings when with lights quenched and only the soft effulgence of
the moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows, she sat with her
profile, cameo-like (or like perhaps to the head on a postage stamp)
against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and entranced herself and
her listeners, if there were people to dinner, with the exquisite
pathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Devotedly as she
worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, she
could never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movements
were on the same sublime level as the first, and besides they "went"
very much faster. But she had seriously thought, as she came down in
the train today and planned her fresh activities at home of trying to
master them, so that she could get through their intricacies with
tolerable accuracy. Until then, she would assuredly stop at the end of
the first movement in these moonlit seances, and say that the other two
were more like morning and afternoon. Then with a sigh she would softly
shut the piano lid, and perhaps wiping a little genuine moisture from
her eyes, would turn on the electric light and taking up a book from
the table, in which a paper-knife marked the extent of her penetration,
say:
"Georgie, you must really promise me to read this life of Antonino
Caporelli the moment I have finished it. I never understood the rise of
the Venetian School before. As I read I can smell the salt tide
creeping up over the lagoon, and see the campanile of dear Torcello."
And Georgie would put down the tambour on which he was working his copy
of an Italian cope and sigh too.
"You are too wonderful!" he would say. "How do you find time for
everything?"
She rejoined with the apophthegm that made the rounds of Riseholme next
day.
"My dear, it is just busy people that have time for everything."
It might be thought that even such activities as have here been
indicated would be enough to occupy anyone so busily that he would
positively not have time for more, but such was far from being the case
with Mrs Lucas. Just as the painter Rubens amused himself with being
the ambassador to the Court of St. James--a sufficient career in itself
for most busy men--so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her
pursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but a
monarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of
maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real
and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen
was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy
pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and
imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds. The
ruler of Riseholme, happier than he of Russia, had no need to fear the
finger of Bolshevism writing on the wall, for there was not in the
whole of that vat which seethed so pleasantly with culture, one bubble
of revolutionary ferment. Here there was neither poverty nor discontent
nor muttered menace of any upheaval: Mrs Lucas, busy and serene, worked
harder than any of her subjects, and exercised an autocratic control
over a nominal democracy.
Something of the consciousness of her sovereignty was in her mind, as
she turned the last hot corner of the road and came in sight of the
village street that constituted her kingdom. Indeed it belonged to her,
as treasure trove belongs to the Crown, for it was she who had been the
first to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan village
into the palace of culture that was now reared on the spot where ten
years ago an agricultural population had led bovine and unilluminated
lives in their cottages of grey stone or brick and timber. Before that,
while her husband was amassing a fortune, comfortable in amount and
respectable in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small dim
lamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and his had
been to bask and be busy in artistic realms of their own when the
materialistic needs were provided for by sound investments, and so when
there were the requisite thousands of pounds in secure securities she
had easily persuaded him to buy three of these cottages that stood
together in a low two-storied block. Then, by judicious removal of
partition-walls, she had, with the aid of a sympathetic architect,
transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently building
on to them a new wing, that ran at right angles at the back, which was,
if anything, a shade more inexorably Elizabethan than the stem onto
which it was grafted, for here was situated the famous smoking-parlour,
with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with pewter tankards,
and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practically
impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed in
oak-beams with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within the
chimney, and a genuine spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here,
though in the rest of the house she had for the sake of convenience
allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such
concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that
only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then
reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained
nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later
than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically
Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often
spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing
on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the
fumes of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an Elzevir
Horace rather late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubted
bargain.
The house stood at the end of the village that was nearest the station,
and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she had
but a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from a
neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and
indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden
from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it
was cut, across the little lawns inside. Here, as was only right and
proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned
in the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare's garden,
and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was Ophelia's
border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught
maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a
lunatic asylum. Mrs Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that such
institutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day, or that, if known,
Shakespeare artistically ignored their existence. Pansies, naturally,
formed the chief decoration--though there were some very flourishing
plants of rue. Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in
flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully
efficacious. Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one of
the squares of grass between which a path of broken paving-stone led to
the front door, was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, for
it harboured only the spring-flowers enumerated by Perdita. But the
first day every year when Perdita's border put forth its earliest
blossom was a delicious anniversary, and the news of it spread like
wild-fire through Mrs Lucas's kingdom, and her subjects were very
joyful, and came to salute the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was.
The three cottages dexterously transformed into The Hurst, presented a
charmingly irregular and picturesque front. Two were of the grey stone
of the district and the middle one, to the door of which led the paved
path, of brick and timber; latticed windows with stone mullions gave
little light to the room within, and certain new windows had been
added; these could be detected by the observant eye for they had a
markedly older appearance than the rest. The front-door, similarly,
seemed as if it must have been made years before the house, the fact
being that the one which Mrs Lucas had found there was too dilapidated
to be of the slightest service in keeping out wind or wet or undesired
callers. She had therefore caused to be constructed an even older one
made from the oak-planks of a dismantled barn, and had it studded with
large iron nails of antique pattern made by the village blacksmith. He
had arranged some of them to look as if they spelled A.D. 1603. Over
the door hung an inn-sign, and into the space where once the sign had
swung was now inserted a lantern, in which was ensconced, well hidden
from view by its patinated glass sides, an electric light. This was one
of the necessary concessions to modern convenience, for no lamp
nurtured on oil would pierce those genuinely opaque panes, and
illuminate the path to the gate. Better to have an electric light than
cause your guests to plunge into Perdita's border. By the side of this
fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When
first Mrs Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense
that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted
his feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in
the servants' passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete
continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash from
the ceiling fell down in flakes. She had therefore made another
concession to the frailty of the present generation and the
inconveniences of having whitewash falling into salads and puddings on
their way to the dining room, and now at the back of the mermaid's tail
was a potent little bone button, coloured black and practically
invisible, and thus the bell-pull had been converted into an electric
bell-push. In this way visitors could make their advent known without
violent exertion, the mermaid lost no visible whit of her Elizabethan
virginity, and the spirit of Shakespeare wandering in his garden would
not notice any anachronism. He could not in fact, for there was none to
notice.
Though Mrs Lucas's parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, it
was not to be wondered at that she was always known among the more
intimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in the
Italian mode--La Lucia, the wife of Lucas; and it was as "Lucia mia"
that her husband hailed her as he met her at the door of The Hurst.
He had been watching for her arrival from the panes of the parlour
while he meditated upon one of the little prose poems which formed so
delectable a contribution to the culture of Riseholme, for though, as
had been hinted, he had in practical life a firm grasp of the obvious,
there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and ethereal
prospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible.
In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, but
their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to
the productions of that barbaric bard, whose works were quite unknown
in Riseholme. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems had been
published, not of course in the hard business-like establishment of
London, but at "Ye Sign of ye Daffodil," on the village green, where
type was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, was
printed. The press had only been recently started at Mr Lucas's
expense, but it had put forth a reprint of Shakespeare's sonnets
already, as well as his own poems. They were printed in blunt type on
thick yellowish paper, the edges of which seemed as if they had been
cut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregular
were they, and they were bound in vellum, the titles of these two slim
flowers of poetry, "Flotsam" and "Jetsam," were printed in black letter
type and the covers were further adorned with a sort of embossed seal
and with antique looking tapes so that you could tie it all up with two
bows when you had finished with Mr Lucas's "Flotsam" for the time
being, and turned to untie the "Jetsam."
Today the prose-poem of "Loneliness" had not been getting on very well,
and Philip Lucas was glad to hear the click of the garden-gate, which
showed that his loneliness was over for the present, and looking up he
saw his wife's figure waveringly presented to his eyes through the
twisted and knotty glass of the parlour window, which had taken so long
to collect, but which now completely replaced the plain, commonplace
unrefracting stuff which was there before. He jumped up with an
alacrity remarkable in so solid and well-furnished a person, and had
thrown open the nail-studded front-door before Lucia had traversed the
path of broken paving-stones, for she had lingered for a sad moment at
Perdita's empty border.
"_Lucia mia_!" he exclaimed. "_Ben arrivata_! So you walked
from the station?"
"_Si, Peppino, mio caro_," she said. "_Sta bene_?"
He kissed her and relapsed into Shakespeare's tongue, for their
Italian, though firm and perfect as far as it went, could not be
considered as going far, and was useless for conversational purposes,
unless they merely wanted to greet each other, or to know the time. But
it was interesting to talk Italian, however little way it went.
"_Molto bene_," said he, "and it's delightful to have you home
again. And how was London?" he asked in the sort of tone in which he
might have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not
likely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.
"Terrifically busy about nothing," she said. "All this fortnight I have
scarcely had a moment to myself. Lunches, dinners, parties of all
kinds; I could not go to half the gatherings I was bidden to. Dear good
South Kensington! Chelsea too!"
"_Carissima_, when London does manage to catch you, it is no
wonder it makes the most of you," he said. "You mustn't blame London
for that."
"No, dear, I don't. Everyone was tremendously kind and hospitable; they
all did their best. If I blame anyone, I blame myself. But I think this
Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for
other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of
its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades.
Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together,
gabbles and gobbles: am not I naughty? If there is a concert in a
private house--you know my views about music and the impossibility of
hearing music at all if you are stuck in the middle of a row of
people--even then, the moment it is over you are whisked away to supper,
or somebody wants to have a few words. There is always a crowd, there is
always food, you cannot be alone, and it is only in loneliness, as
Goethe says, that your perceptions put forth their flowers. No one in
London has time to listen: they are all thinking about who is there and
who isn't there, and what is the next thing. The exquisite present, as
you put it in one of your poems, has no existence there: it is always
the feverish future."
"Delicious phrase! I should have stolen that gem for my poor poems, if
you had discovered it before."
She was too much used to this incense to do more than sniff it in
unconsciously, and she went on with her tremendous indictment.
"It isn't that I find fault with London for being so busy," she said
with strict impartiality, "for if being busy was a crime, I am sure
there are few of us here who would escape hanging. But take my life
here, or yours for that matter. Well, mine if you like. Often and often
I am alone from breakfast till lunch-time, but in those hours I get
through more that is worth doing than London gets through in a day and
a night. I have an hour at my music not looking about and wondering who
my neighbours are, but learning, studying, drinking in divine melody.
Then I have my letters to write, and you know what that means, and I
still have time for an hour's reading so that when you come to tell me
lunch is ready, you will find that I have been wandering through
Venetian churches or sitting in that little dark room at Weimar, or was
it Leipsic? How would those same hours have passed in London?
"Sitting perhaps for half an hour in the Park, with dearest Aggie
pointing out to me, with thrills of breathless excitement, a woman who
was in the divorce court, or a coroneted bankrupt. Then she would drag
me off to some terrible private view full of the same people all
staring at and gabbling to each other, or looking at pictures that made
poor me gasp and shudder. No, I am thankful to be back at my own sweet
Riseholme again. I can work and think here."
She looked round the panelled entrance-hall with a glow of warm content
at being at home again that quite eclipsed the mere physical heat
produced by her walk from the station. Wherever her eyes fell, those
sharp dark eyes that resembled buttons covered with shiny American
cloth, they saw nothing that jarred, as so much in London jarred. There
were bright brass jugs on the window sill, a bowl of pot-pourri on the
black table in the centre, an oak settee by the open fireplace, a
couple of Persian rugs on the polished floor. The room had its
quaintness, too, such as she had alluded to in her memorable essay read
before the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture,"
and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas.
Equally quaint was the dish of highly realistic stone fruit that stood
beside the pot-pourri and the furry Japanese spider that sprawled in a
silk web over the window.
Such was the fearful verisimilitude of this that Lucia's new housemaid
had once fled from her duties in the early morning, to seek the
assistance of the gardener in killing it. The dish of stone fruit had
scored a similar success, for once she had said to Georgie Pillson,
"Ah, my gardener has sent in some early apples and pears, won't you
take one home with you?" It was not till the weight of the pear (he
swiftly selected the largest) betrayed the joke that he had any notion
that they were not real ones. But then Georgie had had his revenge, for
waiting his opportunity he had inserted a real pear among those stony
specimens and again passing through with Lucia, he picked it out, and
with lips drawn back had snapped at it with all the force of his jaws.
For the moment she had felt quite faint at the thought of his teeth
crashing into fragments.... These humorous touches were altered from
time to time; the spider for instance might be taken down and replaced
by a china canary in a Chippendale cage, and the selection of the
entrance hall for those whimsicalities was intentional, for guests
found something to smile at, as they took off their cloaks and entered
the drawing room with a topic on their lips, something light, something
amusing about what they had seen. For the gong similarly was sometimes
substituted a set of bells that had once decked the collar of the
leading horse in a waggoner's team somewhere in Flanders; in fact when
Lucia was at home there was often a new little quaintness for quite a
sequence of days, and she had held out hopes to the Literary Society
that perhaps some day, when she was not so rushed, she would jot down
material for a sequel to her essay, or write another covering a rather
larger field on "The Gambits of Conversation Derived from Furniture."
On the table there was a pile of letters waiting for Mrs Lucas, for
yesterday's post had not been forwarded her, for fear of its missing
her--London postmen were probably very careless and untrustworthy--and
she gave a little cry of dismay as she saw the volume of her
correspondence.
"But I shall be very naughty," she said "and not look at one of them
till after lunch. Take them away, _Caro_, and promise me to lock
them up till then, and not give them me however much I beg. Then I will
get into the saddle again, such a dear saddle, too, and tackle them. I
shall have a stroll in the garden till the bell rings. What is it that
Nietzsche says about the necessity to _mediterranizer_ yourself
every now and then? I must _Riseholme_ myself."
Peppino remembered the quotation, which had occurred in a review of some
work of that celebrated author, where Lucia had also seen it, and went
back, with the force of contrast to aid him, to his prose-poem of
"Loneliness," while his wife went through the smoking-parlour into the
garden, in order to soak herself once more in the cultured atmosphere.
In this garden behind the house there was no attempt to construct a
Shakespearian plot, for, as she so rightly observed, Shakespeare, who
loved flowers so well, would wish her to enjoy every conceivable
horticultural treasure. But furniture played a prominent part in the
place, and there were statues and sundials and stone-seats scattered
about with almost too profuse a hand. Mottos also were in great
evidence, and while a sundial reminded you that "_Tempus fugit,_"
an enticing resting-place somewhat bewilderingly bade you to "Bide a
wee." But then again the rustic seat in the pleached alley of laburnums
had carved on its back, "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,"
so that, meditating on Keats, you could bide a wee with a clear
conscience. Indeed so copious was the wealth of familiar and
stimulating quotations that one of her subjects had once said that to
stroll in Lucia's garden was not only to enjoy her lovely flowers, but
to spend a simultaneous half hour with the best authors. There was a
dovecote of course, but since the cats always killed the doves, Mrs
Lucas had put up round the desecrated home several pigeons of
Copenhagen china, which were both imperishable as regards cats, and
also carried out the suggestion of humour in furniture. The humour had
attained the highest point of felicity when Peppino concealed a
mechanical nightingale in a bush, which sang "Jug-jug" in the most
realistic manner when you pulled a string. Georgie had not yet seen the
Copenhagen pigeons, or being rather short-sighted thought they were
real. Then, oh then, Peppino pulled the string, and for quite a long
time Georgie listened entranced to their melodious cooings. That served
him out for his "trap" about the real pear introduced among the stone
specimens. For in spite of the rarefied atmosphere of culture at
Riseholme, Riseholme knew how to "_desipere in loco_," and its
strenuous culture was often refreshed by these light refined touches.
Mrs Lucas walked quickly and decisively up and down the paths as she
waited for the summons to lunch, for the activity of her mind reacted
on her body, making her brisk in movement. On each side of her forehead
were hard neat undulations of black hair that concealed the tips of her
ears. She had laid aside her London hat, and carried a red cotton
Contadina's umbrella, which threw a rosy glow onto the oval of her thin
face and its colourless complexion. She bore the weight of her forty
years extremely lightly, and but for the droop of skin at the corners
of her mouth, she might have passed as a much younger woman. Her face
was otherwise unlined and bore no trace of the ravages of emotional
living, which both ages and softens. Certainly there was nothing soft
about her, and very little of the signs of age, and it would have been
reasonable to conjecture that twenty years later she would look but
little older than she did today. For such emotions as she was victim of
were the sterile and ageless emotions of art; such desires as beset her
were not connected with her affections, but her ambitions. Dynasty she
had none, for she was childless, and thus her ambitions were limited to
the permanence and security of her own throne as queen of Riseholme. She
really asked nothing more of life than the continuance of such harvests
as she had so plenteously reaped for these last ten years. As long as
she directed the life of Riseholme, took the lead in its culture and
entertainment, and was the undisputed fountain-head of all its
inspirations, and from time to time refreshed her memory as to the
utter inferiority of London she wanted nothing more. But to secure
that she dedicated all that she had of ease, leisure and income.
Being practically indefatigable the loss of ease and leisure troubled
her but little and being in extremely comfortable circumstances, she
had no need to economise in her hospitalities. She might easily look
forward to enjoying an unchanging middle-aged activity, while
generations of youth withered round her, and no star, remotely rising,
had as yet threatened to dim her unrivalled effulgence. Though
essentially autocratic, her subjects were allowed and even encouraged
to develop their own minds on their own lines, provided always that
those lines met at the junction where she was station-master. With
regard to religion finally, it may be briefly said that she believed
in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she had
no doubt whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to church
on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the
Zoological Gardens, for kangaroos come from Australia.
A low wall separated the far end of her garden from the meadow outside;
beyond that lay the stream which flowed into the Avon, and it often
seemed wonderful to her that the water which wimpled by would (unless a
cow happened to drink it) soon be stealing along past the church at
Stratford where Shakespeare lay. Peppino had written a very moving
little prose-poem about it, for she had royally presented him with the
idea, and had suggested a beautiful analogy between the earthly dew
that refreshed the grasses, and was drawn up into the fire of the Sun,
and Thought the spiritual dew that refreshed the mind and thereafter,
rather vaguely, was drawn up into the Full-Orbed Soul of the World.
At that moment Lucia's eye was attracted by an apparition on the road
which lay adjacent to the further side of the happy stream which flowed
into the Avon. There was no mistaking the identity of the stout figure
of Mrs Quantock with its short steps and its gesticulations, but why in
the name of wonder should that Christian Scientist be walking with the
draped and turbaned figure of a man with a tropical complexion and a
black beard? His robe of saffron yellow with a violently green girdle
was hitched up for ease in walking, and unless he had chocolate
coloured stockings on, Mrs Lucas saw human legs of the same shade. Next
moment that debatable point was set at rest for she caught sight of
short pink socks in red slippers. Even as she looked Mrs Quantock saw
her (for owing to Christian Science she had recaptured the quick vision
of youth) and waggled her hand and kissed it, and evidently called her
companion's attention, for the next moment he was salaaming to her in
some stately Oriental manner. There was nothing to be done for the
moment except return these salutations, as she could not yell an aside
to Mrs Quantock, screaming out "Who is that Indian"? for if Mrs
Quantock heard the Indian would hear too, but as soon as she could, she
turned back towards the house again, and when once the lilac bushes
were between her and the road she walked with more than her usual
speed, in order to learn with the shortest possible delay from Peppino
who this fresh subject of hers could be. She knew there were some
Indian princes in London; perhaps it was one of them, in which case it
would be necessary to read up Benares or Delhi in the Encyclopaedia
without loss of time.