The Ffolliots of Redmarley Part 35

"I'm afraid"--he heard Miss Bax talking as it were an immense way off as he floated away on the wings of his dream--"that my views would startle Mr Gallup."

The motor turned in at the drive gates, they had reached the door.

Eloquent was right in the middle of his dream.

He followed Lady Campion and Miss Bax across the hall and down a corridor to a room he had never been in when he was a child.

Fusby threw open a door and announced loudly, "Sir George and Lady Campion, Miss Bax, Mr Gallup."

They were the last of the guests.

For a little while he was less conscious of his dream. This light, bright room with white panelled walls and furniture covered with gay chintzes, soft blurred chintz in palest pinks and greens, with pictures in oval frames, and people, ordinary people that he had seen before, all talking and laughing together. This was not the Redmarley that he knew, grave and beautiful and old.

This was not the Redmarley of his dream. It came back to him as Mrs Ffolliot gave him her hand in welcome, presenting him to her husband and one or two other people. It left him as she turned away and Grantly came forward and greeted him. Grantly, tall and irreproachably well dressed, cheerful withal and quite at his ease.

Sir George had pulled Mary into the very middle of the room and held her at arm's length with laughing comments. How could men find the courage for that sort of thing? He heard him ask what she had done with her sash, and then Mrs Ffolliot said, "I think you know my daughter, Mr Gallup; will you take her in to dinner?"

And once more he was well in the middle of his dream, for he found himself in the corridor he knew, side by side with Mary, part of a procession moving towards the dining-room.

Her hand was on his arm, but the exquisite moment was a little marred by the discovery that she was quite an inch taller than he.

Eloquent had been to a good many public dinners; he had even dined with certain Cabinet Ministers, but always when there were only men. He had never yet dined with people of the Ffolliots' cla.s.s in this intimate, friendly way, and he found everything a little different from what he expected. He had read very little fiction, and such mental pictures as he had evolved were drawn from his inner consciousness. As always, he wondered how they contrived to be so gay, to talk such nonsense, and to laugh at it. Seated between Mary and witty Mrs Ward, whose husband was one of his ardent supporters in the county, he did his best to join in the general conversation, but he found it hard. Miss Bax, whose premonition regarding her fate was justified, seemed to have overcome her objection to cadets. She and Grantly were just opposite to him, and he noticed with regret that Grantly was drinking champagne. It would have been better, Eloquent thought, if the boy had abstained altogether after his experience at the election. Mary, too, drank champagne, but Eloquent condoned this weakness in her case, she drank so little. Everyone drank champagne except Sir George, who preferred whisky, and Eloquent himself, who drank Apollinaris.

"Do you suffer from rheumatism?" Mary asked innocently. "Do you think it would hurt you once in a way?"

"I am not in the least rheumatic," Eloquent protested, "but I have never tasted anything intoxicating."

"Then you don't know whether you'd like it or not. Why not try some and see?" Mary suggested hospitably.

Eloquent shook his head. "Better not," he said, "you don't know what effect it might have on me."

He ate whatever was put before him, wholly unaware of its nature, and in spite of Mary's efforts to keep the conversational ball rolling gaily, he was very silent.

The dream had got him again, for he knew this room with the dark oak panelling and great old portraits of departed Ffolliots, some of them with eyes that followed you. He knew the room, but as he knew it, the long narrow table, like the table in a refectory, was bare and polished and empty; or with a little cloth laid just at one end for old Mr Ffolliot.

What did they think of it now, these solemn pictured people?--this long, narrow strip of brilliant light and flowers and sparkling gla.s.s and silver, surrounded by well-dressed cheerful persons, all, apparently, laughing and talking at the same time.

They had reached dessert, and he was handing Mary a dish of sweets; she took four. "Do take some," she whispered, "take lots, and what you don't want give to me; you can put them in my bridge-bag under the table, I want them for the children. I promised Ger."

Bewildered, but only too happy to do anything she asked him, Eloquent helped himself largely.

"Now," Mary whispered, holding a little white satin bag open under the table, "and if they come round again, take some more."

"It was my grandfather began it," she explained; "he used always to save sweets for us when we stayed with him, and now it's a rule--if we dine downstairs--if there are any--there aren't always, you know--and Fusby's so stingy, if there are any left he takes them and locks them up in a box till next time. You watch Grantly, he's got some too, but he hasn't got anywhere to put them, like me. I must go round behind him when mother collects eyes, then I'll nip up to Ger, for he'll never go to sleep till I've been . . ."

"You see," she went on confidentially, "they will take them to Willets to-morrow. He loves good sweets and he never gets any unless they take them to him. They'll make a party of it, and Mrs Willets will give them each a weeny gla.s.s of ginger-wine. They'll have a lovely time--do you know Willets?"

"By sight, I think . . . he's your keeper, isn't he? From all I can hear to-night he seems a very remarkable person, everyone is talking about him."

"Oh, you ought to know him, he's the greatest dear in Redmarley.

Everyone who knows us knows Willets, and dukes and people have tried to get him away, he's such a good sportsman, but he won't leave us. We love him so much we couldn't bear it. He couldn't either. He's been keeper here nearly twenty-three years. Before mother came he was here, and now there's all of us he'll never leave."

"Have you got enough? Won't they want some for themselves as well as Willets?"

"Thanks to you, I've got a splendid lot. One can't always ask people, you know, but I thought you wouldn't mind."

"Shall I demand some more in a loud voice? there are some at the end of the table," Eloquent murmured; "I'm very shy, but I can be bold in a good cause."

Mary looked at him in some surprise. "Would you really? Ah, it's too late, there's mother----"

Eloquent watched her with breathless interest as she "went round the longest way" and received new spoils from Grantly as she pa.s.sed. How curious they were about their servants these people, where Fusby seemed to control the supplies and the children of the house secretly saved sweets for the keeper.

The men did not sit long over their wine, and it was to the hall they went and not to the white-panelled room that Eloquent unconsciously resented as an anachronism; and in the hall bridge-tables were set out.

This was a complication Eloquent had not foreseen. Among his father's friends cards were regarded as the Devil's Books, and he did not know the ace of spades from the knave of hearts.

Would they force him to play, he wondered. Would he cover himself with shame and ignominy? and what if he said it was against his principles to play for money?

He braced himself to be faithful to the traditions in which he had been trained, only to find that on his saying he never _had_ played bridge no one expressed the smallest desire that he should do so.

In fact it seemed to him that three tables were arranged with almost indecent haste, cryptic remarks about "cutting in" were bandied about, and in less than five minutes he was sitting on the oak settle by the fire with Mrs Ffolliot, who talked to him so delightfully that the dream came back.

Here on the high-backed settle he found courage to tell her how clearly he remembered that first time he had seen her in his father's shop; and plainly she was touched and interested, and drew him on to speak of his queer lonely childhood and the ultimate goal that had been kept ever before his eyes.

He was very happy, and it seemed but a short time till somebody at one of the tables exclaimed "game and rub," and Mary came over to the settle saying, "Now, mother, you must take my place. I've been awfully lucky, I've won half a crown."

She sat down beside him on the settle asking, "Would you care to watch, or shall we just sit here and talk--which would you rather?"

What Eloquent wanted to do was to stare: to gaze and gaze at the gracious young figure sitting there in gleaming white flecked with splashes of rosy light from the dancing flames, but he could hardly say this.

"I'm afraid it would be of no use for me to watch; I have never played cards, and don't understand them in the least."

"You mean you don't know the suits?"

"What are suits?"

"This must be seen to," said Mary; "you don't smoke, you drink nothing festive, you don't know one card from another; you can't go through life like this. It's not fair. We won't waste another minute, I'll teach you the suits now."

She made him fetch a little table, she produced a pack of cards. She spread them out and she expounded. He was a quick study. By the time Mr Ffolliot came to take Mary's place he knew all the suits. By the time Mr Ffolliot had thoroughly confused him by a learned disquisition on the principles of bridge, Lady Campion's motor was announced, and he departed in her train.

"Surely Mr Gallup is a very absent-minded person," Miss Bax remarked to her aunt when they had deposited Eloquent at his door.

"I expect he's shy," said Lady Campion, who was sleepy and not particularly interested; "but wasn't Mary nice to him?--I do like that girl--she's so natural and unaffected."

"She always strikes me as being a mere child," said Miss Bax, "so very unformed; is she out yet, or is she still in the schoolroom?"

Sir George chuckled. "She's on her way out," he said, "and, I fancy, on her way to an uncommonly good time as well. That girl is a sight to make an old man young."

"She certainly is handsome," said Miss Bax.