we give a dance to-morrow," said Kit, "and we feed only the very brightest and best."
"All the more reason for Alington coming, perhaps," said Jack. "I have heard it said that there are still a few people who care for a duke as such. It sounds odd, but let us hope he is one."
"Yes, those people are so easy to deal with," said Kit thoughtfully. "But it will upset the table, Jack."
"Of course, if you put your table as more important than possible thousands," said Jack.
"It is really a big thing then?" asked Kit.
"It is possibly a very big thing. I know no more than you yet. It may even run to a Saturday till Monday or more."
"Very good. I'll upset the whole apple-cart for it, as Mr. Rhodes says. Here we are. Let's get away early, Jack. I said we'd go to Berkeley Street afterwards."
"We'll go as early as we can," he replied. "But you mustn't risk not landing your fish because you don't play him long enough."
"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," she said. "Order the carriage for ten. I'd undertake in this gown to land the whole house of laymen by ten without a gaff. Dear Jean Worth! What a lot of money I owe him, and what a lot of pleasure he gives me! I should be puzzled to say which was the greater."
CHAPTER II
SUNDAY MORNING
Mr. Frank Alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact a Saturday till Monday star, almost a comet. Lord Conybeare found that the whirl and bustle of London did not allow of his seeing enough of him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days after the dinner at the Drapers' Company (Kit's playing and landing of the fish having been masterly, for she had him dead-beat long before ten), Mr. Alington arrived on a Saturday afternoon in June at what Kit called their "cottage" in Buckinghamshire.
Strictly speaking – though she did not often speak strictly – it was not a cottage at all; and it was certainly not in Buckinghamshire, but in Berkshire. But there was a rustic, almost Bohemian, sound to Kit's mind in Buckinghamshire, whereas Berkshire only reminded one of bacon, and a few miles either way made a very little difference. "And if I choose to call Berkshire the Malay Archipelago," said Kit, "who is to stop me?"
However, to adopt Kit's nomenclature, the cottage in question was a large red-brick Elizabethan house on the banks of the Thames, with a few acres of conservatories, and a charming flower-garden, leading down by green degrees and cut yew hedges to the river. But the cottage idea was not wholly absent, for they always dined in the room which had once certainly been the kitchen. The range had been removed, leaving an immense open fireplace, where it was sacrilege to burn anything but logs, and the most charming dark oak dressers, bearing under the new régime quantities of old blue Nankin ware, ran round the walls. Following the same idea, they always sat in the big hall which opened straight on to the front-door, instead of in the drawing-room. "Quite like hobnailed day-labourers," said Kit.
The analogy is obvious, and Kit's admirable taste had made the likeness almost glaring. There was a grandfather's clock there, a couple of large oak settles on each side of the fireplace, which had bronze dogs for the fire-irons, and homely Chippendale and basket chairs. A few Persian rugs, it is true, which it would have tasked a connoisseur to price, happened to be lying on the floor, but otherwise it was quite uncarpeted, and you trod on real naked wooden boards of polished oak. In all the windows but one there were tiny diamond panes of old wavy glass, which made the features of the landscape outside go up and down like a switchback as you walked across the room; and in the other window, which gave light to the serving-up-room (a highly inconvenient arrangement, in which Kit, in the rôle of labourer, delighted), were real bottom-of-glasses panes, which looked charming. The roof was gabled and not even whitewashed (being also of oak), and altogether an unexacting labourer might have spent very fairly comfortable evenings in this simple room.
The cottage idea was carried out in the garden also. The beds were all of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, London-pride, poppies, wallflowers, dahlias, mignonette, quite rustic and herbaceous, with no pincushion Italian beds, which Kit said were very expensive and out of keeping with the prevalent simplicity. They also reminded her of badly-mixed salads. Stern frugality further showed itself in the clothing of the red-brick walls which bounded the garden. Here were no flaunting, flaming creepers, bright and profitless, but homely pear-trees and apricots, which bore quite excellent fruit. A common wooden punt lay moored at the end of the garden, useful and homely, fit for the carrying of the produce of the labourer's garden to market. A pile of embroidered cushions happened at that moment to be lying in it, and Kit had also left her jewelled Russian cigarette-case there, but that was all. Even the cigarette-case was made of simple plaited straw, and the monogram and coronet set in very blue turquoises at one corner seemed to have got there by accident, as if they had been chips which had fallen out of the sky, and might be shortly expected to float back there again.
It was Sunday morning, obviously Sunday morning, and Nature was proceeding as usual on her simple but pleasant way. A brilliant sun, a gentle wind, the smooth, unruffled river, all testified to the tenderness and benignity of the powers of the air. Spring, the watery, impetuous spring of the North, had now a month ago definitely given place to summer, leaving another year in which poets, with their extraordinary want of correct observation, might forget what it had really been like, and rhyme it a hundred undeserved and unfounded courtesies. But summer had come in earnest in the latter days of May, with a marked desire to make itself pleasant, and give to the sturdy British yeoman, who had till then complained (with statistics of rainfall) of the wetness of the spring, another excellent opportunity of vilifying the dryness of the summer. Over such Providence watches with a special care, and, knowing that the one thing worse than having a grievance is to have none, gives them a kindly interchange of wet springs, dry summers, wet summers, dry springs, secure of never pleasing anybody.
A soft blue haze of heat and moisture hung over the river and the low-lying water-meadows on the far side, but as the hills beyond climbed upwards from the valley, they rose into an atmosphere extraordinarily clear. Though the day was hot, there was a precision of outline about the woods that cut the sky almost suggestive of a frosty morning, and even here below the heat was of a brisk quality. Everything was steeped in Sunday content, and from the gray church-tower standing guardian among the huddled hamlet-roofs came the melodious jangle of bells ringing for the eleven o'clock service. The labourers' garden was in full luxuriance of midsummer flower (for a bright and cheerful garden should be within reach of the humblest), and a rainbow of colour bounded the close-shaven lawn. Nothing, as is right, was ever done on this lawn, mossy to the foot, restful to the eye; no whitewash lines cut it up into horrible squares and oblongs, no frenzied tennis-balls ever did decapitation among the flower-beds that framed it, and you could wander about it at dusk immune from anxiety as to whether your next step would be tripped in a croquet-hoop or entangled in the snares of a drooped tennis-net. During the weeks of spring it had been a star-sown space of crocuses, like the meadow in Fra Angelico's Annunciation, but these were over, and it had again become a green, living velvet.
Kit had developed that morning at breakfast a strange unreasoning desire to go to church, and until Jack saw her eat he was almost afraid she was going to be ill. To church accordingly she had gone, dragging with her Alice Haslemere, who was staying with them. They had been put across the river in the punt, Kit armed with a huge Church service, and it was evident, so thought Conybeare as he strolled down to the water's edge after the return of the punt, that Kit had smoked a cigarette as she went across. This, by the standard of perfection, he considered a mistake. If you are going to do a thing at all, do it thoroughly, he argued to himself, and that a woman should smoke just before going to church was a lapse from the proper level. But he took the cigarette-case with its turquoise monogram from where it lay on the cushion, and put it into his pocket. As like as not Kit would step on it when she got into the punt again.
