‘If we cannot find out by less drastic means, we will leave it,’ said Priscilla.
‘If only the photograph could speak!’ said Susan. ‘Sir Jesse never looks at it. It is not of much interest to him.’
‘He is careful never to look at it,’ said Lester.
‘Why are inanimate things supposed to be so communicative?’ said Priscilla. ‘It might tell us nothing. And it may be on the side of Sir Jesse.’
‘To think what we could tell the photograph!’ said Susan.
‘Well, not so much,’ said Lester.
‘There isn’t so much to be told,’ said Priscilla. ‘Photographs would find that.’
‘Mr Ridley Cranmer,’ said Mrs Morris at the door.
‘You are satisfactory friends to call upon,’ said Ridley, pausing inside the room, as if its size would hardly allow advance. ‘We can rely on finding you at home. It is not easy for an occupied man to appoint his time.’
‘I wonder if Mother likes to hear that about us,’ said Priscilla.
‘You still find that your mother’s photograph adds an interest to your life,’ said Ridley, resting his eyes on the chimneypiece. ‘I can understand that it suggests many pictures of the past. I wonder Sir Jesse did not grant it to you before.’
‘He only found it by accident,’ said Susan.
‘Is that the case?’ said Ridley. ‘I believe Sir Jesse has paid you a visit this afternoon?’
‘Yes, he has just gone.’
‘I saw him coming away from the house.’
‘Then you would believe it,’ said Priscilla.
‘Does he often honour you in that way?’
‘No, very seldom,’ said Susan.
‘It is sad to think he is now a childless man.’
‘He said that of himself,’ said Lester.
‘Did he?’ said Ridley, with a look of interest.
‘Does it strike you as a curious thing to say?’
‘I can hardly imagine our friend, Sir Jesse, making such an intimate statement.’
‘The news had leaked out,’ said Priscilla.
Ridley threw back his head and went into laughter.
‘I wish I could have relied upon that process for making it known to the family. But it fell to me to reveal it by a more exacting method, by word of mouth.’ His tone became grave as he ended.
‘It must have been a hard moment for everyone,’ said Susan.
‘But I had my reward in the courage and resolution displayed by them all,’ went on Ridley, ‘especially by the chief character in the scene, Eleanor Sullivan. She indeed rose to the heights. No yielding to personal feeling or thought of self. A calm, firm advance into the future. It was an impressive thing.’
‘She will have a difficult life,’ said Lester.
‘Lester, it seems almost too much,’ said Ridley, turning in sudden feeling. ‘It seems that something should be done to ease so great a burden.’
‘She has three grown-up children.’
‘And the word relegates them to their position, points out how much and how little they can do. To her they are her children. Nothing can make them less; nothing can add to their significance. Nothing alters the deep, essential, limited relation.’
‘She has her husband’s parents.’
‘Rather would I say, Lester, that they have her.’
‘So that is how Mother feels to us,’ said Priscilla. ‘I feel half-inclined to take her away from the chimneypiece.’
‘Leave her,’ said Ridley, in a rather dramatic manner, resting his eyes again on the photograph. ‘Nothing was further from me than to belittle the relation. She is your mother. You bear the traces of her lineaments. She is in her place.’
‘People say we are like her,’ said Susan.
‘That is what Ridley meant,’ said Priscilla.
‘I must leave you now,’ said Ridley, seeming not to hear the words, and perhaps not doing so in the stress of his feelings. ‘My duties call me. I have more in these sad days. I hardly know why I came in. I happened to be passing.’
‘Why do people give that reason for calling?’ said Susan. ‘They can’t drop in on every acquaintance they pass.’
‘They imply that they would not call at the cost of any trouble,’ said Priscilla. ‘They mean to give the impression of not wanting much to come. And really they give one of wanting to come so much, that they are embarrassed by the strength of the feeling. Sir Jesse called because that was his intention. We will always call in that spirit.’
‘It is not like Ridley to call by himself on people of no place and parentage.’
‘He had his own reasons,’ said Lester.
Chapter 10
‘Well, my boy, I must solicit your help,’ said Ridley, entering the Sullivans’ hall. ‘I have come to seek a moment with your grandfather.’
‘I don’t know where he is,’ said Gavin.
‘Can you find out for me?’
‘We never do find out things about him.’
‘Grandpa is in the library,’ said Honor, coming up. ‘Couldn’t you go and see him?’
‘So I am to beard the lion in his den.’
‘Grandpa is a big lion,’ said Nevill, pausing by the group. ‘He can roar very loud.’
‘He can at times,’ said Honor, making a mature grimace, and glancing to see if Ridley had had the advantage of it.
‘Do you often play in the hall?’ said the latter.
‘Sometimes when it is wet,’ said Gavin.
‘Shall I play at lions with you?’ said Ridley, looking at a skin on the floor, and seeming to be struck by an idea that would serve his own purpose.
‘Yes,’ said Honor and Gavin.
Nevill turned on his heel and toiled rapidly up the staircase, and paused at a secure height in anticipation of the success of the scene. Ridley put the skin over his head and ran in different directions, uttering threatening sounds and causing Honor and Gavin to leap aside with cries of joy and mirth. Nevill watched the action with bright, dilated eyes, and, when Ridley ran in his direction, fled farther upwards with piercing shrieks. Hatton descended in expostulation, and Miss Mitford in alarm, the latter not having distinguished between the notes of real and pleasurable terror in Nevill’s voice. Regan hustled forward in the same spirit as Hatton, and smiled upon Ridley in a rare benevolence.
‘I plead guilty, Lady Sullivan,’ said the latter, standing with outspread hands, and the rug in one of them. ‘I am caught red-handed.’
‘You have had a good game,’ said Regan, to the children.
‘We did while it went on,’ said Gavin.
‘I fear we do not receive encouragement to prolong it,’ said Ridley.
‘Grandma could hide behind the staircase,’ suggested Gavin.
‘He will kill the lion,’ said Nevill, coming tentatively down the stairs. ‘He won’t let it eat poor Grandma. He will kill it dead.’
‘There, it is dead,’ said Ridley, dropping the skin on the floor. ‘You see you have killed it.’
‘It is quite dead,’ said Nevill, in a regretful tone, descending the rest of the stairs and cautiously touching the skin with his foot, before trampling freely upon it. ‘But he will make it alive again.’
‘It was dead before,’ said Gavin.
‘But once it was alive. It was in a forest and could roar.’
‘It was in a jungle,’ said Honor.
‘A jungle,’ said Nevill, in reverent tone.
‘It is a lioness, not a lion,’ said Gavin. ‘It has no mane.’
‘It is really a tiger,’ said Honor.
‘Which is more fierce?’ said Nevill.
‘A tiger,’ said his sister.
‘Then it is a tiger, a great big tiger. No, it is a lion. A lion is more fierce.’
‘I fear I am in disgrace, Lady Sullivan,’ said Ridley. ‘And it is not a day when I should choose such a situation. I am here to make an appeal to your favour.’