wife next to the duchess. The duchess engaged her in conversation on the subject of working-class dwellings, a subject on which she seemed to be much more at home than the parson’s lady, and my attention being thus set free I watched Edward Driffield. He was talking to Lady Hodmarsh. She was apparently telling him how to write a novel and giving him a list of a few that he really ought to read. He listened to her with what looked like polite interest, putting in now and then a remark in a voice too low for me to catch, and when she made a jest (she made them frequently and often good ones) he gave a little chuckle and shot her a quick look that seemed to say: this woman isn’t such a damned fool after all. Remembering the past, I asked myself curiously what he thought of this grand company, his neatly turned out wife, so competent and discreetly managing, and the elegant surroundings in which he lived. I wondered if he regretted his early days of adventure. I wondered if all this amused him or if the amiable civility of his manner masked a hideous boredom. Perhaps he felt my eyes upon him, for he raised his. They rested on me for a while with a meditative look, mild and yet oddly scrutinizing, and then suddenly, unmistakably this time, he gave me another wink. The frivolous gesture in that old, withered face was more than startling, it was embarrassing; I did not know what to do. My lips outlined a dubious smile.
But the duchess joining in the conversation at the head of the table, the vicar’s wife turned to me.
“You knew him many years ago, didn’t you?” she asked me in a low tone.
“Yes.”
She gave the company a glance to see that no one was attending to us.
“His wife is anxious that you shouldn’t call up old memories that might be painful to him. He’s very frail, you know, and the least thing upsets him.”
“I’ll be very careful.”
“The way she looks after him is simply wonderful. Her devotion is a lesson to all of us. She realizes what a precious charge it is. Her unselfishness is beyond words.” She lowered her voice a little more. “Of course he’s a very old man and old men sometimes are a little trying; I’ve never seen her out of patience. In her way she’s just as wonderful as he is.”
These were the sort of remarks to which it was difficult to find a reply, but I felt that one was expected of me.
“Considering everything I think he looks very well,” I murmured.
“He owes it all to her.”
At the end of luncheon we went back into the drawing room and after we had been standing about for two or three minutes Edward Driffield came up to me. I was talking with the vicar and for want of anything better to say was admiring the charming view. I turned to my host.
“I was just saying how picturesque that little row of cottages is down there.”
“From here.” Driffield looked at their broken outline and an ironic smile curled his thin lips. “I was born in one of them. Rum, isn’t it?”
But Mrs. Driffield came up to us with bustling geniality. Her voice was brisk and melodious.
“Oh, Edward, I’m sure the duchess would like to see your writing room. She has to go almost immediately.”
“I’m so sorry, but I must catch the three-eighteen from Tercanbury,” said the duchess.
We filed into Driffield’s study. It was a large room on the other side of the house, looking out on the same view as the dining room, with a bow window. It was the sort of room that a devoted wife would evidently arrange for her literary husband. It was scrupulously tidy and large bowls of flowers gave it a feminine touch.
“This is the desk at which he’s written all his later works,” said Mrs. Driffield, closing a book that was open face downward on it. “It’s the frontispiece in the third volume of the
We all admired the writing table and Lady Hodmarsh, when she thought no one was looking, ran her fingers along its under edge to see if it was genuine. Mrs. Driffield gave us a quick, bright smile.
“Would you like to see one of his manuscripts?”
“I’d love to,” said the duchess, “and then I simply must bolt.”
Mrs. Driffield took from a shelf a manuscript bound in blue morocco, and while the rest of the party reverently examined it I had a look at the books with which the room was lined. As authors will, I ran my eye round quickly to see if there were any of mine, but could not find one; I saw, however, a complete set of Alroy Kear’s and a great many novels in bright bindings, which looked suspiciously unread; I guessed that they were the works of authors who had sent them to the master in homage to his talent and perhaps the hope of a few words of eulogy that could be used in the publisher’s advertisements. But all the books were so neatly arranged, they were so clean, that I had the impression they were very seldom read. There was the Oxford Dictionary and there were standard editions in grand bindings of most of the English classics, Fielding, Boswell, Hazlitt, and so on, and there were a great many books on the sea; I recognized the variously coloured, untidy volumes of the sailing directions issued by the Admiralty, and there were a number of works on gardening. The room had the look not of a writer’s workshop, but of a memorial to a great name, and you could almost see already the desultory tripper wandering in for want of something better to do and smell the rather musty, close smell of a museum that few visited. I had a suspicion that nowadays if Driffield read anything at all it was the
When the ladies had seen all they wanted we bade our hosts farewell. But Lady Hodmarsh was a woman of tact and it must have occurred to her that I, the excuse for the party, had scarcely had a word with Edward Driffield, for at the door, enveloping me with a friendly smile, she said to him:
“I was so interested to hear that you and Mr. Ashenden had known one another years and years ago. Was he a nice little boy?”
Driffield looked at me for a moment with that level, ironic gaze of his. I had the impression that if there had been nobody there he would have put his tongue out at me.
“Shy,” he replied. “I taught him to ride a bicycle.”
We got once more into the huge yellow Rolls and drove off.
