LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and would get the first of the sun. He loved the sun, and Caroline knew that. She knew all his minor tastes, perhaps better than he knew them himself. He would have been contented with a sunny room and all his conveniences around him, or so he would have thought. But she had seen that he had much more than that. The old furniture which had struck him pleasantly on their first visit was there—the big bed with its chintz tester, the chintz-covered sofa, the great wardrobe of polished mahogany—everything that had given the room its air of solid old-fashioned comfort, and restful, rather faded charm. But the charm and the comfort seemed to have been heightened. The slightly faded air had given place to one of freshness. The change was not so great as to bring a sense of modernity to unbalance the effect of the whole, but only to make it more real. Caroline was a genius at this sort of expression, and her love and devotion towards him had stimulated her. The freshness had come from the fact that she had changed all the chintzes, and the carpet and curtains, ransacking the house for the best she could find for the purpose. She had changed some of the furniture too, and added to it. Also the prints. He did recognise that change, as he looked around him, and took it all in. He was fond of old prints, and had noticed those that were of any value as he had gone through the rooms. There had been rubbish mixed with the good things in this room; but there was none left. "Good child!" he said to himself with satisfaction as he saw what she had done in this way.

      He thought of her and his other children as he dressed, and he thought of his young wife. A charming crayon portrait of her hung in the place of honour above the mantelpiece, on which there were also photographs of her, and of the children, in all stages of their growth. Caroline had collected them from all over the London house. The crayon portrait had been one of two done by a very clever young artist, now a famous one, whom they had met on their honeymoon. This had been the first, and Grafton had thought it had not done justice to his wife's beauty; so the artist, with a smiling shrug of the shoulders, had offered to do another one, which had pleased him much better, and had hung ever since in his bedroom in London. Now, as he looked at this portrait, which had hung in a room he seldom went into, he wondered how he could have been so blind. The beauty, with which he had fallen in love, was there, but the artist had seen much more than the beauty that was on the surface. It told immeasurably more about the sweet young bride than the picture he had made of her afterwards. It told something of what she would be when the beauty of form and feature and colouring should have waned, of what she would have been to-day more than twenty years later.

      Grafton was not a man who dwelt on the past, and his life had been too prosperous and contented to lead him to look forward very often to the future. He took it as it came, and enjoyed it, without hugging himself too much on the causes of his enjoyment. The only unhappiness he had ever known had been in the loss of his wife, but the wound had healed gradually, and had now ceased to pain him.

      But it throbbed a little now as he looked at the portrait with new eyes. He and she had talked together of a country house some time in the future of their long lives together—some such house as this, if they should wait until there was enough money. It was just what she would have delighted in. She had been brought up in a beautiful country house, and loved it. Caroline inherited her fine perceptions and many of her tastes from her. It would have been very sweet to have had her companionship now, in this pleasant and even exciting life that was opening up before them. They would all have been intensely happy together.

      He turned away with a faint frown of perplexity. She would have been a middle-aged woman now, the mother of grown-up daughters. To think of her like that was to think of a stranger. His old wound had throbbed because he had caught a fresh glimpse of her as the young girl he had so loved, and loved still, for she had hardly been more than a girl when she had died. He supposed he would have gone on loving her just the same; his love for her had grown no less during the short years of their married life; he had never wanted anybody else, and had never wanted anybody else since, remembering what she had been. But it was an undoubted fact that husbands and wives in middle-age had usually shed a good deal of their early love, or so it seemed to him, from his experience of married men of his own age. Would it have been so with him? He couldn't think it, but he couldn't tell. To him she would always be what she had been, even when he grew old. It was perplexing to think of her as growing old too; and there was no need to do so.

      The years had passed very quickly. Caroline had been only five when she had died, Beatrix three, and Barbara a baby. And now the two elder were grown up, and Barbara nearly so. It came home to him, as he looked at their photographs on the mantelpiece, how pleasant they had made life for him, and how much he still had in his home in spite of the blank that his wife's death had made. This puzzled him a little too. He thought he ought to have missed her more, and be missing her more now. But introspection was not his habit, and the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece were progressing towards the dinner hour. He dressed quickly, with nothing in his mind but pleasurable anticipation of the evening before him.

      Worthing was in the morning-room talking to Caroline when he went downstairs. He looked large and beaming and well washed and brushed. The greeting between the two men was cordial. Each had struck a chord in the other, and it was plain that before long they would be cronies. Worthing was outspoken in his admiration of what had been done with the house.

      "I've been telling this young lady," he said, "that I wouldn't have believed it possible. Nothing seems to be changed, and yet everything seems to be changed. Look at this room now! It's the one that Brett used to occupy, and it used to give me a sort of depressed feeling whenever I came into it. Now it's a jolly room to come into. You know, somehow, that when you go out of it, you're going to get a good dinner."

      He laughed with a full throat. Caroline smiled and looked round the room, which had been transformed by her art from the dull abode of a man who cared nothing for his surroundings into something that expressed home and contentment and welcome.

      Grafton put his arm around her as they stood before the fire. "She's a wonder at it," he said. "She's done all sorts of things to my room upstairs. I felt at home in it at once."

      She smiled up at him and looked very pleased. He did not always notice the things she did out of love for him.

      The other two girls came in with Miss Waterhouse. Beatrix looked enchanting in a black frock which showed up the loveliness of her delicate colouring and scarcely yet matured contours. Worthing almost gasped as he looked at her, and then shook hands, but recovered himself to look at the three of them standing before him. "Now how long do you suppose you're going to keep these three young women at home?" he asked genially, as old Jarvis came in to announce dinner.

      They were all as merry as possible over the dinner-table. Beatrix made them laugh with her account of the house in London as run by herself with a depleted staff. She was known not to be domestically inclined and made the most of her own deficiencies, while not sparing the servants who had been left behind. But she dealt with them in such a way that old Jarvis grinned indulgently at her recital, and the two new footmen who had been engaged for the Abbey each hoped that it might fall to his lot some day to take the place of their colleague who had been left behind.

      Worthing enjoyed himself immensely. All three of the girls talked gaily and freely, and seemed bubbling over with laughter and good spirits. Their father seemed almost as young as they were, in the way he laughed and talked with them. Miss Waterhouse took little part in the conversation, but smiled appreciatively on each in turn, and was never left out of it. As for himself, he was accepted as one of themselves, and initiated into all sorts of cryptic allusions and humours, such as a laughter-loving united and observant family gathers round about its speech. He became more and more avuncular as the meal progressed, and at last Barbara, who was sitting next to him, said: "You know, I think we must call you Uncle Jimmy, if you don't mind. It seems to fit you, and we do like things that fit, in this family."

      He accepted the title with enthusiasm. "I've got nephews and nieces all over the place," he said. "But the more the merrier. I'm a first-class uncle, and never forget anybody at Christmas."

      They began to discuss people. A trifle of criticism, hardly to be called malice, crept into the conversation. Miss Waterhouse found it necessary to say: "Barbara darling, I don't think you should get into the way of always calling the Vicar Lord Salisbury. You might forget and do

Скачать книгу