9
Jane was enjoying herself passionately. Curiously enough, she thought, she had not fallen in love with Albert at all, but simply regarded him as a most perfect companion. Always cheerful and amusing, he was at the same time seriously intellectual and had the capacity of throwing himself heart and soul into whatever he happened to be doing. He and Jane had spent much of their time collecting together all the Victorian odds-and-ends that they could find in the house. These they assembled in the billiard-room, where Albert was now busy photographing them for a brochure which he intended to produce entitled ‘Recent Finds at Dalloch Castle’, and which was to form a supplement to his larger work, ‘Household Art of the Nineteenth Century’.
Jane, who had up till then maintained a wholesome superiority with regard to everything Victorian, quickly smothered this feeling, and learnt from Albert really to admire the bead stools, lacquer boxes, wax flowers and albums of water-colour sketches which so fascinated him.
They practically lived in the billiard-room, hard at work the whole time, Albert making still-life compositions for his photographs, while Jane copied designs from chintzes and pieces of needlework in water-colours.
One day she was poking about in the attics trying to find more treasures for the catalogue when she noticed, poked away in a corner behind piles of furniture, a dusty glass dome. After a dangerous climb over rickety chests of drawers, derelict bedsteads and other rubbish, she managed to secure it and carry it to her bedroom, where she carefully removed the dome, which was opaque with dirt, expecting to discover some more wax fruit. Underneath it, however, she found to her amazement a representation in white wax of Jacob’s Ladder. It was quite perfect. Jacob, in a sort of night-gown and an enormous beard, lay upon a floor of green plush. His head rested on a large square stone, and from just behind this rose the ladder, delicately balanced against wax clouds which billowed out of the green plush. Two angels were rather laboriously climbing on it (whether up or down it would be hard to say), while three more angels, supported by wires which rose from behind the clouds, hovered round about, twitching and quivering delightfully whenever the stand was moved.
Jane washed and replaced the dome, and then carried this treasure down to the billiard-room in great triumph. When Albert saw it his joy and delight knew no bounds.
‘It is easily our most important find and shall be the frontispiece of my book!’ he cried. ‘I have never seen anything half so lovely. It is a poem! How can I find out the name of the artist? I must endeavour to do so without delay. But how sad, my dear, to think that this jewel should belong to people who so evidently have no feeling for beauty! It ought, of course, to occupy a place of honour in a museum. Never mind, I shall photograph it from every angle and in all lights, so that the artistic public will be able to gain some slight idea of its exquisite form, and thus share, to a certain extent, in my own emotions.’
At that moment Lady Prague was seen to pass by the open door, and Albert, longing to share his enthusiasm with somebody, rather thoughtlessly dashed out, seized her by the arm and said:
‘Lady Prague, do come and see our wonderful new find. Something to cause the greatest sensation among all cultured persons – so amusing, so exquisite, so stimulating …’
With the naïveté of a child showing off its new toy he led her up to the dome.
She stared at it for a moment, sniffed and said rather pityingly:
‘What a lot of drip you do talk. Why, that’s nothing more than a particularly unattractive form of dust-trap!’
She left the room.
All the excitement died out of Albert’s face and was succeeded by an expression of the deepest disgust.
‘Dust-trap!’ he muttered between his teeth. ‘You just wait until you see the booby-trap I’m going to make for you – you viviparous old vixen!’
Walter and Sally now came in and made up for Lady Prague’s lack of appreciation by an enthusiasm almost as unbounded as Albert’s. They walked round and round the dome, exclaiming:
‘How beautiful!’ – ‘How amusing!’ – ‘That angel’s so like Lord Prague, d’you see? And, of course, Jacob just is the admiral with a beard!’
Walter soon retired to write a poem beginning:
Green plush.
Admiral Jacob lay beneath a dome
Of crazy glass upon green plush.
And in this ‘nautical’ posture
With angels rising from the Guinness foam
The Admiral
(Who was Jacob, too, out of the Bible)
Fell, bucolically, asleep.
Even Lady Brenda was quite appreciative, saying that her children would simply love it.
‘It reminds me so much of a lodging-house at Westgate where we used to go for our summer holidays when we were small. Every room in it had several domes of that sort.’
Albert breathlessly asked the address of this gold mine, but Lady Brenda had forgotten it and presently left them to go out fishing.
‘What a disappointing woman that is,’ said Jane when she had gone. ‘I noticed her particularly in the train coming up here, and somehow thought she looked rather interesting. And then, when I heard her name, I was really excited to meet her. One’s always being told how charming she is – so original and cultured. But she’s a perfect fool, though I must say quite nice compared to old Prague.’
‘She is cultured in the worst sort of way,’ said Albert. ‘But original! Oh, dear! I had a long conversation with her yesterday after tea so I know all about her
