The Last Post

point out, a little tentatively, that her husband was by now Tietjens of Groby to all intents and purposes. And people⁠—and in particular American ladies⁠—would attach particular importance before her to English Country gentlemen who had turned down titles and the like. Her husband had not turned down a title; he had not been able to, for much as Mark had desired to refuse a baronetcy at the last moment he had been given to understand that he couldn’t. But her husband had practically turned down a whole great estate, and the romantic aspect of that feat was beginning to filter through to her friends. For all her assertions that his seeming poverty was due to dissolute living and consequent bankruptcy, her friends would occasionally ask her whether in fact his poverty was not simply a voluntary affair, the result either of a wager or a strain of mysticism. They would point out that the fact that she and her son at least had all the symptoms of considerable wealth looked like a sign rather that Christopher did not desire wealth, or was generous, than that he had no longer money to throw away.⁠ ⁠…

There were symptoms of that sort of questioning of the mind rising up in the American ladies whom Cammie Fittleworth liked to have staying with her. Hitherto Sylvia had managed to squash them. After all, the Tietjens household below her feet was a singular affair for those who had not the clue to its mystery. She had the clue herself; she knew both about the silent feud between the two brothers and about their attitude to life. And if it enraged her that Christopher should despise the things that money could buy and that she so valued, it none the less gratified her to know that, in the end, she was to be regarded as responsible for that silent feud and the renunciation that it had caused. It was her tongue that had set going the discreditable stories that Mark had once believed against his brother.

But if she was to retain her power to blast that household with her tongue, she felt she ought to have details. She must have corroborative details. Otherwise she could not so very convincingly put over her picture of abandoned corruption. You might have thought that in her coercing Mrs. de Bray Pape and her son into making that rather outrageous visit, and in awakening Mrs. Lowther’s innocent curiosity as to the contents of the cottage, she had been inspired solely by the desire to torment Valentine Wannop. But she was aware that there was more than that to it. She might get details of all sorts of queernesses that, triumphantly, to other groups of listeners she could retail as proof of her intimacy with that household.

If her listeners showed any signs of saying that it was queer that a man like Christopher, who appeared like a kindly group of sacks, should actually be a triply crossed being, compounded of a Lovelace, Pandarus and a Satyr, she could always answer: “Ah, but what can you expect of people who have hams drying in their drawing-room!” Or if others alleged that it was queer, if Valentine Wannop had Christopher as much under her thumb as she was said to have, even by Sylvia, that she should still allow Christopher to run an Agapemone in what was, after all, her own house, Sylvia would have liked to be able to reply: “Ah, but what can you expect of a woman upon whose stairs you will find, side by side, a hairbrush, a frying-pan and a copy of Sappho!”

That was the sort of detail that Sylvia needed. The one item she had: The Tietjens, she knew from Mrs. Carpenter Cramp, had an immense fireplace in their living-room and, after the time-honoured custom, they smoked their hams in that chimney. But to people who did not know that smoking hams in great chimneys was a time-honoured custom, the assertion that Christopher was the sort of person who dried hams in his drawing-room would bring up images of your finding yourself in a sort of place where hams reclined on the sofa-cushions. Even that was not a proof to the reflective that the perpetrator was a Sadic lunatic⁠—but few people are reflective and at any rate it was queer, and one queerness might be taken as implying another.

But as to Valentine she could not get details enough. You had to prove that she was a bad housekeeper and a bluestocking in order that it should be apparent that Christopher was miserable⁠—and you had to prove that Christopher was miserable in order to make it apparent that the hold that Valentine Wannop certainly had over him was something unholy. For that it was necessary to have details of misplaced hairbrushes, frying-pans and copies of Sappho.

It had, however, been difficult to get those details. Mrs. Cramp, when appealed to, had made it rather plain that, far from being a bad housekeeper, Valentine Wannop did no housekeeping at all, whereas Marie Léonie⁠—Lady Mark⁠—was a perfect devil of a ménagère. Apparently Mrs. Cramp was allowed no further into the dwelling than the washhouse⁠—because of half-pounds of sugar and dusters that Mrs. Cramp, in the character of charwoman, had believed to be her perquisites. Marie Léonie hadn’t.

The local doctor and the parson, both of whom visited the house, had contributed only palely-coloured portraits of the young woman. Sylvia had gone to call on them, and making use of the Fittleworth aegis⁠—hinting that Lady Cammie wanted details of her humbler neighbours for her own instruction⁠—Sylvia had tried to get behind the professional secrecy that distinguished parsons and doctors. But she had not got much behind. The parson gave her the idea that he thought Valentine rather a jolly girl, very hospitable and with a fine tap of cider at disposal and fond of reading under trees⁠—the classics mostly. Very much interested also in rock-plants as you could see by the bank