When we came to Stourwater that Sunday morning, the first sight was impressive. Set among oaks and beeches in a green hollow of the land, the castle was approached by a causeway crossing the remains of a moat, a broad expanse of water through which, with great deliberation, a pair of black swans, their passage sending ripples through the pond weed, glided between rushes swaying gently in the warm September air. Here was the Middle Age, from the pages of Tennyson, or Scott, at its most elegant: all sordid and painful elements subtly removed. Some such thought must have struck Sir Gavin too, for I heard him murmuring at the wheeclass="underline"
“‘And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two…”
There was, in fact, no one about at all; neither knights nor hinds, this absence of human life increasing a sense of unreality, as if we were travelling in a dream. The cars passed under the portcullis, and across a cobbled quadrangle. Beyond this open space, reached by another archway, was a courtyard of even larger dimensions, in the centre of which a sunken lawn had been laid out, with a fountain at the centre, and carved stone flower-pots, shaped like urns, at each of the four corners. The whole effect was not, perhaps, altogether in keeping with the rest of the place. Through a vaulted gateway on one side could be seen the high yew hedges of the garden. Steps led up to the main entrance of the castle’s domestic wing, at which the cars drew up.
Mounted effigies in Gothic armour guarded either side of the door by which we entered the Great Hall; and these dramatic figures of man and horse struck a new and somewhat disturbing note; though one at which the sunken garden had already hinted. Such implications of an over-elaborate solicitude were followed up everywhere the eye rested, producing a result altogether different from the cool, detached vision manifested a minute or two earlier by grey walls and towers rising out of the green, static landscape. Something was decidedly amiss. The final consequence of the pains lavished on these halls and galleries was not precisely that of a Hollywood film set, the objects assembled being, in the first place, too genuine, too valuable; there was even a certain sense of fitness, of historical association more or less correctly assessed. The display was discomforting, not contemptible. The impression was of sensations that might precede one of those episodes in a fairy story, when, at a given moment, the appropriate spell is pronounced to cause domes and minarets, fountains and pleasure-gardens, to disappear into thin air; leaving the hero — in this case, Sir Magnus Donners — shivering in rags beneath the blasted oak of a grim forest, or scorched by rays of a blazing sun among the rocks and boulders of some desolate mountainside. In fact, Sir Gavin’s strictures on Stourwater as “too perfect” were inadequate as a delineation to the extent of being almost beside the point.
I had supposed that, in common with most visits paid on these terms in the country, the Walpole-Wilson group might be left most of the time huddled in a cluster of their own, while the Donners house-party, drawn together as never before by the arrival of strangers, would discourse animatedly together at some distance off, the one faction scarcely mixing at all with the other. This not uncommon predicament could no doubt in a general way have been exemplified soon after we had been received by Sir Magnus — looking more healthily clerical than ever — in the Long Gallery (at the far end of which hung the Holbein, one of the portraits of Erasmus), had not various unforeseen circumstances contributed to modify what might be regarded as a more normal course of events. For example, among a number of faces in the room possessing a somewhat familiar appearance, I suddenly noticed Stringham and Bill Truscott, both of whom were conversing with an unusually pretty girl.
We were presented, one by one, to Prince Theodoric, who wore a grey flannel suit, unreservedly continental in cut, and appeared far more at his ease than at Mrs. Andriadis’s party: smiling in a most engaging manner when he shook hands. He spoke that scrupulously correct English, characteristic of certain foreign royalties, that confers on the language a smoothness and flexibility quite alien to the manner in which English people themselves talk. There was a word from him for everyone. Sir Gavin seized his hand as if he were meeting a long lost son, while Prince Theodoric himself seemed, on his side, equally pleased at their reunion. Lady Walpole-Wilson, probably because she remembered Prince Theodoric only as a boy, showed in her eye apparent surprise at finding him so grown-up. Only Eleanor’s, and her aunt’s firmly-clasped lips and stiff curtsey suggested entire disapproval.
Further introductions took place. The Huntercombes were there — Lord Huntercombe was Lord Lieutenant of the county — and there were a crowd of persons whose identities, as a whole, I failed to assimilate; though here and there was recognisable an occasional notability like Sir Horrocks Rusby, whose name I remembered Widmerpool mentioning on some occasions, who had not so long before achieved a good deal of prominence in the newspapers as counsel in the Derwentwater divorce case. I also noticed Mrs. Wentworth — whom Sir Horrocks had probably cross-questioned in the witness-box — still looking rather sulky, as she stood in one of the groups about us. When the formalities of these opening moves of the game had been completed, and we had been given cocktails, Stringham strolled across the room. His face was deeply burned by the sun. I wondered whether this was the result of the Deauville trip, of which Mrs. Andriadis had spoken, or if, on the contrary, division between them had been final. He had not wholly lost his appearance of fatigue.
“You must inspect my future wife,” he said at once.
This announcement of imminent marriage was a complete surprise. Barnby had said, during the course of the evening we had spent together: “When people think they are never further from marriage, they are often, in reality, never nearer to it,” but that kind of precept takes time to learn. I had certainly accepted the implication that nothing was more distant than marriage from Stringham’s intentions when he had so violently abandoned Mrs. Andriadis’s house; although now I even wondered whether he could have decided to repair matters by making Mrs, Andriadis herself his wife. To be able to consider this a possibility showed, I suppose, in its grasp of potentialities, an advance on my own part of which I should have been incapable earlier in the year. However, without further developing the news, he led me, to the girl from whose side he had come, who was still talking to Truscott.
“Peggy,” he said, “this is an old friend of mine.”
Apart from former signs given by Stringham’s behaviour, external evidence had been supplied, indirectly by Anne Stepney, and directly by Rosie Manasch, to the effect that anything like an engagement was “off.” Peggy Stepney, whom I now recognised from pictures I had seen of her, was not unlike her sister, with hair of the same faintly-reddish shade, though here, instead of a suggestion of disorder, the elder sister looked as if she might just have stepped gracefully from the cover of a fashion magazine; “too perfect,” indeed, as Sir Gavin might have said. She was, of course, a “beauty,” and possessed a kind of cold symmetry, very taking, and at the same time a little alarming. However, this exterior was not accompanied by a parallel coolness of manner; on the contrary, she could in the circumstances scarcely have been more agreeable. While we talked, we were joined by Mrs. Wentworth, at whose arrival I was conscious of a slight stiffening in Stringham’s bearing, an almost imperceptible acerbity, due possibly — though by no means certainly, I thought — to the part played by Mrs. Wentworth in his sister’s divorce. In comparing the looks of the two young women, it was immediately clear that Peggy Stepney was more obviously the beauty; though there was something about Mrs. Wentworth that made the discord she had aroused in so many quarters easily understandable.