The noise and movement of an outer world seemed to break in upon the
recorded vision of arrested life.
The door opened, a quick, decisive step approached down the hall, and,
closely following the announcing maid, Mrs. Grey, the local squiress,
entered the room. In the normal run of rural conventions, Lady Channice
should have held the place; but Charlock House no longer stood for what
it had used to stand in the days of Sir Hugh Channice's forbears. Mrs.
Grey, of Pangley Hall, had never held any but the first place and a
consciousness of this fact seemed to radiate from her competent
personality. She was a vast middle-aged woman clad in tweed and leather,
but her abundance of firm, hard flesh could lend itself to the roughest
exigences of a sporting outdoor life. Her broad face shone like a ripe
apple, and her sharp eyes, her tight lips, the cheerful creases of her
face, expressed an observant and rather tyrannous good-temper.
"Tea? No, thanks; no tea for me," she almost shouted; "I've just had tea
with Mrs. Grier. How are you, Lady Channice? and you, Augustine? What a
man you are getting to be; a good inch taller than my Tom. Reading as
usual, I see. I can't get my boys to look at a book in vacation time.
What's the book? Ah, fuddling your brains with that stuff, still, are
you? Still determined to be a philosopher? Do you really want him to be
a philosopher, my dear?"
"Indeed I think it would be very nice if he could be a philosopher,"
said Lady Channice, smiling, for though she had often to evade Mrs.
Grey's tyranny she liked her good temper. She seemed in her reply to
float, lightly and almost gaily above Mrs. Grey, and away from her. Mrs.
Grey was accustomed to these tactics and it was characteristic of her
not to let people float away if she could possibly help it. This matter
of Augustine's future was frequently in dispute between them. Her feet
planted firmly, her rifle at her shoulder, she seemed now to take aim at
a bird that flew from her.
"And of course you encourage him! You read with him and study with him!
And you won't see that you let him drift more and more out of practical
life and into moonshine. What does it do for him, that's what I ask?
Where does it lead him? What's the good of it? Why he'll finish as a
fusty old don. Does it make you a better man, Augustine, or a happier
one, to spend all your time reading philosophy?"
"Very much better, very much happier, I find:--but I don't give it all
my time, you know," Augustine answered, with much his mother's manner of
light evasion. He let Mrs. Grey see that he found her funny; perhaps he
wished to let her see that philosophy helped him to. Mrs. Grey gave up
the fantastic bird and turned on her heel.
"Well, I've not come to dispute, as usual, with you, Augustine. I've
come to ask you, Lady Channice, if you won't, for once, break through
your rules and come to tea on Sunday. I've a surprise for you. An old
friend of yours is to be of our party for this week-end. Lady Elliston;
she comes tomorrow, and she writes that she hopes to see something of
you."
Mrs. Grey had her eye rather sharply on Lady Channice; she expected to
see her colour rise, and it did rise.
"Lady Elliston?" she repeated, vaguely, or, perhaps, faintly.
"Yes; you did know her; well, she told me."
"It was years ago," said Lady Channice, looking down; "Yes, I knew her
quite well. It would be very nice to see her again. But I don't think I
will break my rule; thank you so much."
Mrs. Grey looked a little disconcerted and a little displeased. "Now
that you are growing up, Augustine," she said, "you must shake your
mother out of her way of life. It's bad for her. She lives here, quite
alone, and, when you are away--as you will have to be more and more, for
some time now,--she sees nobody but her village girls, Mrs. Grier and me
from one month's end to the other. I can't think what she's made of. I
should go mad. And so many of us would be delighted if she would drop in
to tea with us now and then."
"Oh, well, you can drop in to tea with her instead," said Augustine. His
mother sat silent, with her faint smile.
"Well, I do. But I'm not enough, though I flatter myself that I'm a good
deal. It's unwholesome, such a life, downright morbid and unwholesome.
One should mingle with one's kind. I shall wonder at you, Augustine, if
you allow it, just as, for years, I've wondered at your father."
It may have been her own slight confusion, or it may have been something
exasperating in Lady Channice's silence, that had precipitated Mrs. Grey
upon this speech, but, when she had made it, she became very red and
wondered whether she had gone too far. Mrs. Grey was prepared to go far.
If people evaded her, and showed an unwillingness to let her be kind to
them--on her own terms,--terms which, in regard to Lady Channice, were
very strictly defined;--if people would behave in this unbecoming and
ungrateful fashion, they only got, so Mrs. Grey would have put it, what
they jolly well deserved if she gave them a "stinger." But Mrs. Grey did
not like to give Lady Channice "stingers"; therefore she now became red
and wondered at herself.
Lady Channice had lifted her eyes and it was as if Mrs. Grey saw walls
and moats and impenetrable thickets glooming in them. She answered for
Augustine: "My husband and I have always been in perfect agreement on
the matter."