Sir Charles was not so sure of that, but he cheerfully responded, “Certainly. He is not the man for her at all, and you are. He knows it, too.”
“Hmf!” muttered Erskine, rising dejectedly. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“By-the-bye, we are to call on him to-morrow, to go through his house, and his collection of photographs. Photographs! Ha, ha! Damn his house!” said Erskine.
Next day they went together to Sallust’s House. It stood in the midst of an acre of land, waste except a little kitchen garden at the rear. The lodge at the entrance was uninhabited, and the gates stood open, with dust and fallen leaves heaped up against them. Free ingress had thus been afforded to two stray ponies, a goat, and a tramp, who lay asleep in the grass. His wife sat near, watching him.
“I have a mind to turn back,” said Sir Charles, looking about him in disgust. “The place is scandalously neglected. Look at that rascal asleep within full view of the windows.”
“I admire his cheek,” said Erskine. “Nice pair of ponies, too.”
Sallust’s House was square and painted cinnamon color. Beneath the cornice was a yellow frieze with figures of dancing children, imitated from the works of Donatello, and very unskilfully executed. There was a meagre portico of four columns, painted red, and a plain pediment, painted yellow. The colors, meant to match those of the walls, contrasted disagreeably with them, having been applied more recently, apparently by a color-blind artist. The door beneath the portico stood open. Sir Charles rang the bell, and an elderly woman answered it; but before they could address her, Trefusis appeared, clad in a painter’s jacket of white jean. Following him in, they found that the house was a hollow square, enclosing a courtyard with a bath sunk in the middle, and a fountain in the centre of the bath. The courtyard, formerly open to the sky, was now roofed in with dusty glass; the nymph that had once poured out the water of the fountain was barren and mutilated; and the bath was partly covered in with loose boards, the exposed part accommodating a heap of coals in one corner, a heap of potatoes in another, a beer barrel, some old carpets, a tarpaulin, and a broken canoe. The marble pavement extended to the outer walls of the house, and was roofed in at the sides by the upper stories which were supported by fluted stone columns, much stained and chipped. The staircase, towards which Trefusis led his visitors, was a broad one at the end opposite the door, and gave access to a gallery leading to the upper rooms.
“This house was built in 1780 by an ancestor of my mother,” said Trefusis. “He passed for a man of exquisite taste. He wished the place to be maintained forever—he actually used that expression in his will—as the family seat, and he collected a fine library here, which I found useful, as all the books came into my hands in good condition, most of them with the leaves uncut. Some people prize uncut copies of old editions; a dealer gave me three hundred and fifty pounds for a lot of them. I came into possession of a number of family fetishes—heirlooms, as they are called. There was a sword that one of my forbears wore at Edgehill and other battles in Charles the First’s time. We fought on the wrong side, of course, but the sword fetched thirty-five shillings nevertheless. You will hardly believe that I was offered one hundred and fifty pounds for a gold cup worth about twenty-five, merely because Queen Elizabeth once drank from it. This is my study. It was designed for a banqueting hall.”
They entered a room as long as the wall of the house, pierced on one side by four tall windows, between which square pillars, with Corinthian capitals supporting the cornice, were half sunk in the wall. There were similar pillars on the opposite side, but between them, instead of windows, were arched niches in which stood life-size plaster statues, chipped, broken, and defaced in an extraordinary fashion. The flooring, of diagonally set narrow boards, was uncarpeted and unpolished. The ceiling was adorned with frescoes, which at once excited Sir Charles’s interest, and he noted with indignation that a large portion of the painting at the northern end had been destroyed and some glass roofing inserted. In another place bolts had been driven in to support the ropes of a trapeze and a few other pieces of gymnastic apparatus. The walls were whitewashed, and at about four feet from the ground a dark band appeared, produced by pencil memoranda and little sketches scribbled on the whitewash. One end of the apartment was unfurnished, except by the gymnastic apparatus, a photographer’s camera, a ladder in the corner, and a common deal table with oil cans and paint pots upon it. At the other end a comparatively luxurious show was made by a large bookcase, an elaborate combination of bureau and writing desk, a rack with a rifle, a set of foils, and an umbrella in it, several folio albums on a table, some comfortable chairs and sofas, and a thick carpet under foot. Close by, and seeming much out of place, was a carpenter’s bench with the usual implements and a number of boards of various thicknesses.
“This is a sort of comfort beyond the reach of any but a rich man,” said Trefusis, turning and surprising his visitors in the act of exchanging glances of astonishment at his taste. “I keep a drawing-room of the usual kind for receiving strangers with whom it is necessary to be conventional, but I never enter it except on such occasions. What do you think of this for a study?”
“On my soul, Trefusis, I think you are mad,” said Sir Charles. “The place looks as if it had stood a siege. How did you manage to break the statues and chip the walls so outrageously?”
Trefusis took a newspaper from the table and said, “Listen to this: ‘In spite of the unfavorable nature of the weather, the sport of the Emperor and his guests in Styria has been successful. In three days 52 chamois and 79 stags and deer fell to 19 single-barrelled rifles, the Emperor allowing no more on this occasion.’
“I share the Emperor’s delight in shooting, but I am no butcher, and do not need the royal relish of blood to my sport. And I do not share my ancestors’ taste in statuary. Hence—” Here Trefusis opened a drawer, took out a pistol, and fired at the Hebe in the farthest niche.
“Well done!” said Erskine coolly, as the last fragment of Hebe’s head crumbled at the touch of the bullet.
“Very fruitlessly done,” said Trefusis. “I am a good shot, but of what use is it to me? None. I once met a gamekeeper who was a Methodist. He was a most eloquent speaker, but a bad shot. If he could have swapped talents with me I would have given him ten thousand pounds to boot willingly, although he would have profited as much as I by the exchange alone. I have no more desire or need to be a good shot than to be king of England, or owner of a Derby winner, or anything else equally ridiculous, and yet I never missed my aim in my life—thank blind fortune for nothing!”
“King of England!” said Erskine, with a scornful laugh, to show Trefusis that other people were as liberty-loving as he. “Is it not absurd to hear a nation boasting of its freedom and tolerating a king?”
“Oh, hang your republicanism, Chester!” said Sir Charles, who privately held a low opinion of the political side of the Patriot Martyrs.
“I won’t be put down on that point,” said Erskine. “I admire a man that kills a king. You will agree with me there, Trefusis, won’t you?”
“Certainly not,” said Trefusis. “A king nowadays is only a dummy put up to draw your fire off the real oppressors of society, and the fraction of his salary that he can spend as he likes is usually far too small for his risk, his trouble, and the condition of personal slavery to which he is reduced. What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch? We deny him all privacy; he may not marry whom he chooses, consort with whom he prefers, dress according to his taste, or live where he pleases. I don’t believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best; a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council. We dictate everything except his thoughts and dreams, and even these he must keep to himself if they are not suitable, in our opinion, to his condition. The work we impose on him has all the hardship of mere task work; it is unfruitful, incessant, monotonous, and has to be transacted for the most part with nervous bores. We make his kingdom a treadmill to him, and drive him to and fro on the face of it. Finally, having taken everything else