Priscilla’s gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end. Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla’s days were spent in casting the horoscopes of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about the outcome.
“Such a pity you don’t believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,” said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.
“I can’t say I feel it so.”
“Ah, that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to have faith. You’ve no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater, you’d think; but no, I don’t find it so. I don’t regret the Old Days a bit. I have the Stars …” She picked up the sheet of paper that was lying on the blotting-pad. “Inman’s horoscope,” she explained. “(I thought I’d like to have a little fling on the billiards championship this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with,” she waved her hand. “And then there’s the next world and all the spirits, and one’s Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you’re not ill, and the Christian Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It’s all splendid. One’s never dull for a moment. I can’t think how I used to get on before—in the Old Days. Pleasure—running about, that’s all it was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner, theatre, supper every day. It was fun, of course, while it lasted. But there wasn’t much left of it afterwards. There’s rather a good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith’s new book. Where is it?”
She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by the head of the sofa.
“Do you know him, by the way?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Mr. Barbecue-Smith.”
Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author of “What a Young Girl Ought to Know”.
“No, not personally,” he said.
“I’ve invited him for next week-end.” She turned over the pages of the book. “Here’s the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark the things I like.”
Holding the book almost at arm’s length, for she was somewhat long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began to read, slowly, dramatically.
“ ‘What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?’ ” She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated. Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?
“ ‘What are Thrones and Sceptres?’ ”
The orange Transformation—yes, it must be a Transformation—bobbed up again.
“ ‘What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful, what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High Society?’ ”
The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.
“ ‘They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart. Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.’ ”
Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal “H’m.”
“Ah, it’s a fine book this, a beautiful book,” said Priscilla, as she let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. “And here’s the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool, you know.” She held up the book again and read. “ ‘A Friend of mine has a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal waters …’ Ah, and that reminds me,” Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh—“that reminds me of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in the evenings. You’ve no idea of the things that happened.”
She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. “… mixed bathing … saw them out of my window … sent for a pair of field-glasses to make sure … no doubt of it …” The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too. Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the floor.
“It’s time we went to see if tea’s ready,” said Priscilla. She hoisted herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to himself:
“That’s why I’m going to
Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”
And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: “ra-ra.”
CHAPTER III.
The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf, bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one; from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification—a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.
The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer—unageing, calm, serenely without expression.
Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her deafness