He dined in the crowded, bustling restaurant in the Station Hotel with a little better appetite than he had felt for a long time, and took his seat in a corner of a compartment of the Rapide—not affecting the stuffy luxury of the “Sleeping”—for the long night journey to Paris, with a calmer mind than he had known since Shrove Tuesday. He looked out into the darkness when the train stopped at Avignon, and it was winter again, the bleak March winter before the Easter Noon; and at Lyons the blasts from the two rivers blew colder still, and he felt that he was near home.
He was in Charles Street by afternoon teatime, sitting in the cosy drawing-room with his mother and sister, being petted and made much of in a manner calculated to stimulate any young man’s self-love. His mother adored him, and he had been away from her nearly half a year. His sister was seven years his junior, a pretty, frivolous young creature, whose mind rarely dwelt upon any more serious question than the fashion of her next ball-dress or how she should wear her hair, or the newest toy on her silver table. Yet she, too, adored Jack Vansittart in her pretty frivolous way, and had not yet begun to adore anybody else.
The room was full of flowers and old china, and little tables crowded with silver, and enamels, and Dresden boxes, and ivory paper-knives; and there were books in every available corner; an old room with panelled walls and a low ceiling, in a somewhat shabby old house which had belonged to Mrs. Vansittart’s grandfather, an East India director, in the days when the Pagoda tree was still worth shaking. The furniture was seventy years old, a quaint mixture of old-fashioned English things, before the influence of Sheraton and Chippendale had died out, and Indian things, really and intensely Indian, bought in the East, long before Oriental goods began to be manufactured wholesale for English buyers. Bombay blackwood, with its clumsy bulkiness enriched by elaborate carving, ivories, screens of black and gold, rainbow-hued embroideries which time had scarcely faded, porcelain jars and enamelled vases, relieved the stern simplicity of rosewood and pale chintz. A few choice watercolours on the walls, and an abundance of flowers harmonized everything, and made Mrs. Vansittart’s drawing-room a fitting nest for a very elegant woman and her very pretty daughter.
The London house was Mrs. Vansittart’s own property; the house in Hampshire belonged to her son, and she spoke of herself and her daughter laughingly as caretakers.
“When you marry,” said Maud, tossing up her pretty head, with pale gold hair crisped and curled in the prevailing fashion, “mother and I will have to budge. Whatever slut you may choose to fall in love with will be mistress of Merewood.”
“Why must you needs suppose I may fall in love with a slut?”
“Oh, by the doctrine of opposites. You are one of those orderly, superior persons who are foredoomed to admire some wild girl of the woods, some harum-scarum minx, with fine eyes and half an inch of mud on the edge of her gown.”
“However fine the eyes were, I think the half-inch of mud would be a warning that I could hardly ignore. But I do not claim to be either orderly or superior. My father’s Irish blood has infused a spice of disorder into my Anglo-Saxon character.”
And now on this bright April afternoon Jack Vansittart was being petted and fed by these two loving women, who could not do too much to prove their devotion to him after the long severance. They had only given him time to wash his hands and brush the Kentish dust and chalk out of his hair and clothes before he sat down between them to a cup of tea. He had to assure them that he had lunched heartily at Calais, and wanted nothing but tea, or else a substantial meal would have been set out in the dining-room below.
“And you have come straight through from Marseilles?” said Mrs. Vansittart. “What a terrible journey!”
“Hot and dusty, mother; not very appalling to a traveller. But you are such a stay-at-home.”
“To my cost,” pouted Maud. “I haven’t the least idea of what the world is like. I have to take other people’s word that it is round.”
“We found your telegram from Marseilles at two o’clock this morning when we came home from Mrs. Mountain’s dance, and, rejoiced as I was to know you were coming back to us, I took it for granted you would loiter in Paris for a week,” said Mrs. Vansittart.
“Paris is always delightful,” replied her son; “but I was tired of wandering, and was honestly homesick. And here I am safe at home, and ever so much better off than poor old Odysseus. By the way, mother, your Italian spaniel did her level best to bite me as I came upstairs, and she and I were once such friends. Dogs have altered since the days of Argus.”
“How silly of her! but she’ll love you again after a day or two. And now tell me, Jack, all you have been doing and seeing since you left Merewood last October. You are such a bad correspondent that one knows nothing about your wanderings, and if I were not well broken to your neglect I should be miserable about you.”
“See how wise my system is,” he said, laughing; “were I a good correspondent an interval of a week without a letter would scare you. I have heard of men who write regularly once a week to their people, or who keep a journal of their travels and send it home every fortnight for family perusal. But since you and Maud both know that I detest letter-writing, you expect nothing of me, and
