“My dear, my dear,” she said deprecatingly, “I am afraid I have been asleep, and left all the work to you. You should not have done this, Anastasia. You ought to have awakened me.” The flesh was weak, and she was forced to hold her hand before her mouth for a moment to conceal a yawn; but her mind reverted instinctively to the great doings of the day, and she said with serene reflection: “A very remarkable man, so dignified and yet so affable, and very handsome too, my dear.”
IX
Among the letters which the postman brought to Bellevue Lodge on the morning following these remarkable events was an envelope which possessed a dreadful fascination. It bore a little coronet stamped in black upon the flap, and “Edward Westray, Esquire, Bellevue Lodge, Cullerne,” written on the front in a bold and clear hand. But this was not all, for low in the left corner was the inscription “Blandamer.” A single word, yet fraught with so mystical an import that it set Anastasia’s heart beating fast as she gave it to her aunt, to be taken upstairs with the architect’s breakfast.
“There is a letter for you, sir, from Lord Blandamer,” Miss Joliffe said, as she put down the tray on the table.
But the architect only grunted, and went on with ruler and compass at the plan with which he was busy. Miss Joliffe would have been more than woman had she not felt a burning curiosity to know the contents of so important a missive; and to leave a nobleman’s letter neglected on the table seemed to her little short of sacrilege.
Never had breakfast taken longer to lay, and still there was the letter lying by the tin cover, which (so near is grandeur to our dust) concealed a simple bloater. Poor Miss Joliffe made a last effort ere she left the room to bring Westray to a proper appreciation of the situation.
“There is a letter for you, sir; I think it is from Lord Blandamer.”
“Yes, yes,” the architect said sharply; “I will attend to it presently.”
And so she retired, routed.
Westray’s nonchalance had been in part assumed. He was anxious to show that he, at any rate, could rise superior to artificial distinctions of rank, and was no more to be impressed by peers than peasants. He kept up this philosophic indifference even after Miss Joliffe left the room; for he took life very seriously, and felt his duty towards himself to be at least as important as that towards his neighbours. Resolution lasted till the second cup of tea, and then he opened the letter.
Dear Sir (it began),
I understood from you yesterday that the repairs to the north transept of Cullerne Minster are estimated to cost 7,800 pounds. This charge I should like to bear myself, and thus release for other purposes of restoration the sum already collected. I am also prepared to undertake whatever additional outlay is required to put the whole building in a state of substantial repair. Will you kindly inform Sir George Farquhar of this, and ask him to review the scheme of restoration as modified by these considerations? I shall be in Cullerne on Saturday next, and hope I may find you at home if I call about five in the afternoon, and that you may then have time to show me the church.
Westray had scanned the letter so rapidly that he knew its contents by intuition rather than by the more prosaic method of reading. Nor did he reread it several times, as is generally postulated by important communications in fiction; he simply held it in his hand, and crumpled it unconsciously, while he thought. He was surprised, and he was pleased—pleased at the wider vista of activity that Lord Blandamer’s offer opened, and pleased that he should be chosen as the channel through which an announcement of such gravity was to be made. He felt, in short, that pleasurable and confused excitement, that mental inebriation, which unexpected good fortune is apt to produce in any except the strongest minds, and went down to Mr. Sharnall’s room still crumpling the letter in his hand. The bloater was left to waste its sweetness on the morning air.
“I have just received some extraordinary news,” he said, as he opened the door.
Mr. Sharnall was not altogether unprepared, for Miss Joliffe had already informed him that a letter from Lord Blandamer had arrived for Mr. Westray; so he only said “Ah!” in a tone that implied compassion for the lack of mental balance which allowed Westray to be so easily astonished, and added “Ah, yes?” as a manifesto that no sublunary catastrophe could possibly astonish him, Mr. Sharnall. But Westray’s excitement was cold-waterproof, and he read the letter aloud with much jubilation.
“Well,” said the organist, “I don’t see much in it; seven thousand pounds is nothing to him. When we have done all that we ought to do, we are unprofitable servants.”
“It isn’t only seven thousand pounds; don’t you see he gives carte-blanche for repairs in general? Why, it may be thirty or forty thousand, or even more.”
“Don’t you wish you may get it?” the organist said, raising his eyebrows and shutting his eyelids.
Westray was nettled.
“Oh, I think it’s mean to sneer at everything the man does. We abused him yesterday as a niggard; let us have the grace today to say we were mistaken.” He was afflicted with the over-scrupulosity of a refined, but strictly limited mind, and his conscience smote him. “I, at any rate, was quite mistaken,” he went on; “I quite misinterpreted his hesitation when I mentioned the cost of the transept repairs.”
“Your chivalrous sentiments do you the greatest credit,” the organist said, “and I congratulate you on being able to change your ideas so quickly. As
