The Venetians

find us woefully ignorant,” she explained, when she had answered in the negative about several books, which to him were of the best. “We have only had a nursery governess. She was a dear old thing, but I don’t think you could imagine a more ignorant person. She came to us when I was six, and she only left us when Peggy was nine, and she would have stayed on as a kind of Duenna, only she had a poor, old, infirm mother, and she was the only spinster daughter left, and so had to go home and nurse the mother. She was very strong upon the multiplication table, and she was pretty good at French. She knew La Grammaire des Grammaires by heart, I believe. But as to history or literature! Even the little we contrived to pick up for ourselves was enough to enable us to make fun of her. We used to ask her why Charles the Second didn’t make Erasmus a bishop, or whether Eleanor of Aquitaine was the daughter or only the niece of Charlemagne. She always tumbled into any trap we set for her.”

“A lax idea of chronology, that was all,” said Vansittart.

He walked very nearly to the Homestead, and was dead beat by the time he got back to Redwold Towers. He had been tramping about ever since luncheon. He and Eve Marchant had done a good deal of talking in that four-mile walk, but not once had he mentioned Sefton’s name, nor had he made the faintest attempt to discover the drift of that confidential conversation of which a few brief sentences had reached his ear. Yet those sentences haunted his memory, and the thought of them came between him and all happier thoughts of Eve Marchant.

His sister was considerably his junior, and he had been accustomed to order her to do this or that from her babyhood upward, she deeming herself honoured in obeying his caprices. It was a small thing, then, for him to request her to invite Miss Marchant and all her sisters to luncheon next day.

“Do you really mean me to ask all three?” questioned Maud, arching her delicate eyebrows in mild wonder.

“I mean you to ask all five. The little girls are coming to skate on your pond. Give them a good lunch, Maud. Let there be game and kickshaws, such as girls like⁠—and plenty of puddings.”

“All five! How absurd!”

“You said you would be kind to them.”

“But five! Well, I don’t suppose the number need make any difference. What alarms me is the idea of getting too friendly with them⁠—a dropping in to lunch or tea acquaintance, don’t you know. The girls are as good as gold, I have no doubt; but they lead such an impossible life with that impossible father⁠—he almost always away, no chaperon, no nice aunts to look after them⁠—only an old Yorkshire servant and a bit of a girl to open the door. It is all too dreadful.”

“From your point of view, no doubt; but lives as dreadful are being led by a good many families all over England, and out of lives as dreadful has come a good deal of the intellectual power of the country. Come, Maud, don’t prattle, but write your letter⁠—just a friendly little letter to say that I have told you they are coming to skate, and that you must insist upon their stopping to lunch.”

He had found her in her boudoir just before dressing for dinner, and in the very act of sealing the last of a batch of letters. She took up her pen at his bidding, and dashed off an invitation, almost in his own words, with a thick stroke of the J pen under “insist.”

“Will that do?” she asked.

“Admirably,” said Vansittart, with his hand on the bell. “All you have to do is to order a groom to ride to the Homestead with it.”

“Hadn’t I better invite Mr. Sefton to meet them?” inquired Maud, with a malicious little laugh.

“Why?”

“Because he is said to be running after Miss Marchant. I only hope pour le bon motif.”

“However shady a customer Colonel Marchant may be, I shouldn’t think any man would dare to approach his daughter with a bad motive,” said Vansittart, sternly.

“The Colonel encourages him, I am told; so I suppose it is all right.”

“You are told,” cried Vansittart, scornfully. “What is this cloud of unseen witnesses which compasses about village life so that what a man owes, what a man eats, what a man thinks and purposes are common topics of conversation for people who never enter his house? It is petty to childishness, all this twaddle about Colonel Marchant and his daughters.”

“Jack, Jack!” cried Maud, shaking her head. “I can only say I am sorry for you. And now run away, for goodness’ sake. We shall both be late for dinner. I shall only have time to throw on a tea-gown.”

A footman brought Lady Hartley a letter at half-past nine that evening. Vansittart crossed the drawing-room to hear the result of the invitation.

“Dear Lady Hartley,

“It is too good of you to ask us to luncheon after skating, and I know it will be a treat for my young sisters to see your beautiful house, so I am pleased to accept your kind invitation for the two youngest and myself. Sophy and Jenny beg to thank you for including them, but they cannot think of inflicting so large a party as five upon you.

“Very sincerely yours,
“Eve Marchant.”

“She has more discretion than you have, at any rate, Jack,” said Maud, as he read the letter over her shoulder.

“She writes a fine bold hand,” said he, longing to ask for the letter, the first letter of hers that his eyes had looked upon.

“I’m very sorry the five are not coming,” he went on. “Those two poor girls will have a scurvy luncheon at home, I dare say⁠—dismal martyrs to conventionality. You must ask them another