The Inheritors Part 8

My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have a.s.serted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the _Hour_--but an Etchingham Granger that compet.i.tive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was "one of us," who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author's bottle-holder.

A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It seemed to say: "Why any noisy vigour?" It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me--more real than the face of one's nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before--as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly--almost protestingly, "What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?"

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance--a start that meant, "Why wasn't I warned before?" This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His att.i.tudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pa.s.s in a person of his eminence. He stuck his eye-gla.s.ses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of looking down from an immense height--of needing a telescope.

"Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger's son, I presume.... I wasn't aware...." The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere--not for years and years.

"No," I said, rather brusquely, "I'm only from the _Hour_."

He thought me one of Fox's messengers then, said that Fox might have written: "Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or...."

He had the air of wis.h.i.+ng to be amiable, of wis.h.i.+ng, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my ident.i.ty.

"Oh," I said, a little loftily, "I haven't any message, I've only come to interview you." An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face.

"To...." he began, "but I've never allowed--" He recovered himself sharply, and set the gla.s.ses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track. "Oh, I remember now," he said, "I hadn't looked at it in that way."

The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.

"Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice note. And so--." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore.

"Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously--"one has to do these things."

"Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he regretted it--regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning to the words.

"And ... what is the procedure?" he asked, after a pause. "I am new to the sort of thing." He had the air, I thought, of talking to some respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is _in extremis_--to a distinguished p.a.w.nbroker, a man quite at the top of a tree of inferior timber.

"Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I answered. "I'm supposed to get your atmosphere, as Callan put it."

"Indeed," he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, "You know Callan?" I was afraid I should fall in his estimation.

"One has to do these things," I said; "I've just been getting his atmosphere."

He looked again at the letter in his hand, smoothed his necktie and was silent. I realised that I was in the way, but I was still so disturbed that I forgot how to phrase an excuse for a momentary absence.

"Perhaps, ..." I began.

He looked at me attentively.

"I mean, I think I'm in the way," I blurted out.

"Well," he answered, "it's quite a small matter. But, if you are to get my atmosphere, we may as well begin out of doors." He hesitated, pleased with his witticism; "Unless you're tired," he added.

"I will go and get ready," I said, as if I were a lady with bonnet-strings to tie. I was conducted to my room, where I kicked my heels for a decent interval. When I descended, Mr. Churchill was lounging about the room with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his head hanging limply over his chest. He said, "Ah!" on seeing me, as if he had forgotten my existence. He paused for a long moment, looked meditatively at himself in the gla.s.s over the fireplace, and then grew brisk. "Come along," he said.

We took a longish walk through a lush home-country meadow land. We talked about a number of things, he opening the ball with that infernal Jenkins sketch. I was in the stage at which one is sick of the thing, tired of the bare idea of it--and Mr. Churchill's laboriously kind phrases made the matter no better.

"You know who Jenkins stands for?" I asked. I wanted to get away on the side issues.

"Oh, I guessed it was----" he answered. They said that Mr. Churchill was an enthusiast for the school of painting of which Jenkins was the last exponent. He began to ask questions about him. Did he still paint?

Was he even alive?

"I once saw several of his pictures," he reflected. "His work certainly appealed to me ... yes, it appealed to me. I meant at the time ... but one forgets; there are so many things." It seemed to me that the man wished by these detached sentences to convey that he had the weight of a kingdom--of several kingdoms--on his mind; that he could spare no more than a fragment of his thoughts for everyday use.

"You must take me to see him," he said, suddenly. "I ought to have something." I thought of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should talk in that way without meaning a word of it--as if the words were a polite formality.

"Nothing would delight me more," I answered, and added, "nothing in the world."

He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists, and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain timidity--a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame of mind. In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice. I could talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I talked Churchill down. The position, even then, struck me as gently humorous. It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some colossus among the beasts. I was of no account in the world, he had his say among the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any little school-master, and he swallowed it.

We reached the broad market-place of a little, red and grey, home county town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard a-top of an enormous white post. The effigy of So-and-So of gracious memory swung lazily, creaking, overhead.

"This is Etchingham," Churchill said.

It was a pleasant commentary on the course of time, this entry into the home of my ancestors. I had been without the pale for so long, that I had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They had done very little, the Grangers of Etchingham--never anything but live at Etchingham and quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham and be the monstrous important Grangers of Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian. The Grangers of Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best known of all of them. They had grown poor in their generation; they bade fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth.

I wondered what the portentous old woman who ruled alone in Etchingham thought of these times--the portentous old woman who ruled, so they said, the place with a rod of iron; who made herself unbearable to her companions and had to fall back upon an unfortunate niece. I wondered idly who the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of Etchingham, for I was the only one of the breed. One of her own nieces, most probably.

Churchill had gone into the post-office, leaving me standing at the foot of the sign-post. It was a pleasant summer day, the air very clear, the place very slumbrous. I looked up the street at a pair of great stone gate-posts, august, in their way, standing distinctly aloof from the common houses, a little weather-stained, staidly lichened. At the top of each column sat a sculptured wolf--as far as I knew, my own crest. It struck me pleasantly that this must be the entrance of the Manor house.

The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came s.h.i.+ning down toward me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into composition--the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street. The bright sky fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of a postman's cart. She was gliding toward me, growing and growing into the central figure. She descended and stood close to me.

"You?" I said. "What blessed chance brought you here?"

"Oh, I am your aunt's companion," she answered, "her niece, you know."

"Then you _must_ be a cousin," I said.

"No; sister," she corrected, "I a.s.sure you it's sister. Ask anyone--ask your aunt." I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.

"But really, you know," I said. She was smiling, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her body.

"It's a little ridiculous, isn't it?" she said.

"Very," I answered, "but even at that, I don't see--. And I'm not phenomenally dense."

"Not phenomenally," she answered.

"Considering that I'm not a--not a Dimensionist," I bantered. "But you have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?"

"Really," she answered, "she doesn't know any better. She believes in me immensely. I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one.

And we shake our heads together over you." My bewilderment was infinite, but it stopped short of being unpleasant.

"Might I call on my aunt?" I asked. "It wouldn't interfere--"

"Oh, it wouldn't _interfere_," she said, "but we leave for Paris to-morrow. We are very busy. We--that is, my aunt; I am too young and too, too discreet--have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the regimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are."

"I don't understand in the least," I said; "not in the least."