Jackson smiling. It was necessary that Rutherfurd should be sold, and Lady Jane was brave about it and uncomplaining, but she found the preliminaries trying. She disliked exceedingly—how could she help it?—the thought of unknown people going through the house, appraising the furniture, raising eyebrows at the shabbiness, casting calculating glances round rooms that were to her sacred. Ronnie’s room with the book-shelves made by himself—they always stood a little crooked—and the cricket-bats and fishing-rods and tennis-racquets stacked in one corner, the school and college groups on the walls, everything just as he had left it. And next door Archie’s room—waiting too. And her own room, the big, airy, sunny room with its windows opening on the view she loved best; and next it the oddly-shaped Corner Room that had been a sort of sanctuary to the whole family. When the house was full of people she and her husband had, with a sort of guilty joy, escaped at times from their guests and crept to the Corner Room to play with the children and refresh their souls. In that room had been kept all the precious picture-books that were looked at only when hands were clean and records unblemished, and the toys, too good for the nursery—the lovely Manchu doll which had been sent to Nicole from China; the brass animals from India, the gaily painted wooden figures from Russia, kings and queens with robes and crowns, priests with long white beards. The pictures on the walls were all family portraits, faded water-colours of children long since grown up and gone away, many of them now finished with their pilgrimage. Four little pictures hung in a line over the fire-place, the three Rutherfurd children, each painted at the age of five—Ronnie with his serious eyes and beautiful mouth, Archie, blue-eyed and obstinate, Nicole, bright-tinted, a fire-fly of a creature. The fourth was the cousin, Barbara Burt, who now sat beside Lady Jane and poured out tea.
Barbara’s mother had been a Rutherfurd and had married foolishly. Norman Burt had been tutor to the Rutherfurd boys, a handsome young man with brains and ambition, but unstable as water. His wife after two years of misery and anxiety had died, leaving a baby daughter which the father had been only too thankful to get rid of, so Lady Jane had taken the child and had never let her feel that she was not as much to her as her own.
Barbara had only a dim recollection of her father, when he came to Rutherfurd for yet another loan. He died when she was ten. Her uncle Walter took her into the Corner Room and told her. He called her “poor child,” and she wondered why. She felt no grief, and was too young to realise that in that lay the tragedy.
At that time nothing had seemed less likely than that the Rutherfurds should ever have to leave their home, but the years passed, and the War came and took Ronnie and Archie and the light from the eyes of their mother. Lean years came, bringing the need for retrenchment to people who did not know how to retrench, and now Sir Walter Rutherfurd had been in his grave three months, and Rutherfurd was in the market.
The most casual visitor, entering the Rutherfurd drawing-room, was certain to break off any conversation in which he might be engaged, and let his eyes wander round the place in silence. It was an involuntary tribute to the spell of the old chamber, a spell compounded of homeliness and strangeness. Once it may have been part of the great hall of the fortalice, which was encased in the modern structure like a stone quern built into a dyke. But about the time when Mary of Scots came to her uneasy throne, a Rutherfurd clothed the walls with little square Tudor panels, now dark as ebony with age, and his grandson had imported some English craftsman—perhaps a pupil of Inigo Jones—who, in place of the oak rafters, had designed a plaster ceiling, with deep medallions and a heavy enrichment of flowers and foliage. That was nearly three hundred years ago, and the plaster to-day had mellowed to a fine ivory. Later, the Adam brothers had contributed an ornate classical mantelpiece, whose marble nymphs and cornucopias had, like the ceiling, a dull ivory sheen. By some queer trick of perspective, the room seemed to slope down towards each end as if the roof were a shallow arch, so that the fire-place became the centre and shrine of it.
But it was not the room itself, or even the faded Mortlake brocades of the old chairs and settees, which most enthralled the stranger. There was a window on each side the hearth of a more modern pattern, which served the purposes of light, but the window at the west end was of the small sunken type of Scottish architecture, and it was in itself a picture, for in its deep embrasure it framed a landscape. Not the shorn lawns and the clipped yews of a Tudor garden, which might have consorted with the panelling, but a long vista of rushy parks and wild thorn trees, with, at the end, the top of the Lammerlaw, which in August, when the heather flowered, hung like an amethyst in the pale heavens. That window was the choicest of the Rutherfurd pictures, but others hung on the dim panels. All but one were portraits of men. There was a Rutherfurd by Jameson, in black armour and a gorgeous scarlet sash; another by Allan Ramsay, in a purple coat, a sprigged waistcoat and a steenkirk cravat, pointing with an accusing forefinger to a paper, while a violent thunderstorm seemed to be gathering in the background. A lean warrior in shako and coatee held a red Kathiawar stallion by the bridle, oblivious of the battle that was raging round him. There was a Raeburn, too, of a Lord of Session, in which plump hands were folded over scarlet robes, and rosy cheeks were puckered as if at the memory of some professional jest.
All the pictures but one were of men. That one was framed in the panelling above the fire-place and gave the room its peculiar character, as a famous altar-piece makes the atmosphere of the chapel where it hangs. It was a woman, no longer in her first youth, with a mouth narrowed a little by pain and disappointment, but with great brown eyes still full of the hunger of life. It was a replica of the Miereveldt of the “Queen of Hearts,” Elizabeth of Bohemia, and, as sometimes happens in copies, there was a smoothing away of the cruder idiosyncrasies of the original, so that what it may have lost as a portrait it gained as a picture. One saw a woman who had known the whole range of mortal joys and sorrows. Her eyes did not command, but beguiled, for her kingdom was not of this world. Her beauty had in it something so rare and secret, so far from common loveliness, that the thing seemed in very truth an altar-piece, belonging not to this epoch or to that land, but to the eternity of the human soul. Looking down with her wistful small face above the ivory of the mantelpiece, she seemed to make the marble nymphs fussy and ill at ease. She herself, was profoundly at ease among the grim Rutherfurd soldiers and sailors. She had always been at ease among men, for they must needs follow where she beckoned.
Into the dim beauty of this room came Mrs. Jackson, stepping delicately over the polished floor on her high heels. She seated herself in the chair that her hostess suggested as comfortable, and said:
“Well, I’m sure this is very nice, but they’ll be wondering at home where I am! Yes, thanks, I take both sugar and cream and I like it strong. Servants’ tea, they tell me I take, when I laugh at the weak washy stuff people drink nowadays! But I’ll be home before it’s dark, anyway. The extra hour’s a blessing when the days begin to draw in.”
Mrs. Jackson beamed at her hostess as she accepted a cup of strong, sugary tea, and Lady Jane said, “I do hope you won’t be too tired after your long afternoon. It is such hard work looking at houses. Other people’s belongings are so fatiguing, don’t you think?”
“Not to me,” said Mrs. Jackson firmly. She was sitting forward on the very edge of her chair, her tight figure very erect, a piece of bread and butter held elegantly. “I’m getting a wee bit tired of it now, but as a rule there’s nothing I like better than a chance to get into somebody’s house and take a good look. Mind, you learn a lot, for everybody has a different way of arranging furniture and ornaments, and all that. Just look at this room.” She put the last bite of bread and butter into her mouth and twisted herself round to look. “That cabinet there . . . and the screen and that mirror.” Her eyes wandered to the fire-place. “That’s a new idea, isn’t it, to have a picture put in like that? Who’s the lady?”
“That,” said Nicole, “is my Lovely Lady, the ‘Queen of Hearts.’ ”
Mrs. Jackson looked utterly at sea, and Barbara said, “That is a portrait of Elizabeth of Bohemia.”
“Is that so?” said Mrs. Jackson.
Nicole
