It was she who asked the next question.
“Could you tell us a little about this Dean of yours, Vernon?” she said to the Master, in a high, delicate, amused voice.
“He’s quite a good Dean,” said the Master. “He’s very useful on the financial side. Colleges need their Marthas, you know. The unfortunate thing is that one can never keep the Marthas in their place. Before you can look round, you find they’re running the college and regarding you as a frivolous and irresponsible person.”
“What’s the Dean’s name?” said Lord Boscastle, getting back to the point.
“Chrystal.”
“It sounds Scotch,” said Lord Boscastle dubiously.
“I believe, Lord Boscastle,” Roy put in, seeming tentative and diffident, “that he comes from Bedford.”
Lord Boscastle shook his head.
“I know his wife, of course,” said Lady Muriel. “Naturally I have to know the wives of the fellows. She’s a nice quiet little thing. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s an Eggar, whoever they may be.”
“She’s the sister of this man you’re telling us about,” Lord Boscastle remarked, half to himself. “I should have said he was nothing out of the ordinary, shouldn’t you have said so?”
His social judgments became more circuitous the nearer they came to anyone the company knew: Lady Muriel, more direct and unperceptive than her brother, had never quite picked up the labyrinthine phrases with which he finally placed an acquaintance of someone in the room; but in effect she and he said the same thing.
Mrs Seymour, who was still looking faintly distressed, suddenly clapped her hands.
“Of course, I’d forgotten to tell you. I’ve just remembered about the post office place—”
“Yes, Doris?” said Lady Muriel inexorably.
“Houston’s a brilliant young man. He’s in the Foreign Office. They said he was first secretary” — Mrs Seymour gabbled rapidly in case she should forget — “at that place which looks after the post, the place in Switzerland, I forget—”
“Berne,” Roy whispered.
“Berne.” She smiled at him gratefully.
“How old is your Houston?” asked Lady Boscastle.
“About forty, I should say. And I think that’s a very nice and sensible age,” said Mrs Seymour with unexpected firmness. “I always wished my husband had been older—”
“If he’s only a first secretary at forty, I should not think he was going so terribly far.” Lady Boscastle directed her lorgnette at her husband. “I remember one years younger. We were in Warsaw. Yes, he was clever.” A faint, sarcastic, charming smile crossed her face. Lord Boscastle smiled back — was I imagining it, or was there something humble, unconfident, about that smile?
At any rate, he began to address the table again.
“I shouldn’t have thought that the Foreign Office was specially distinguished nowadays. I’ve actually known one or two people who went in,” he added as though he were straining our credulity.
While he thought no one was looking, Roy could not repress a smile of delight. He could no longer resist taking a hand: his face composed again, he was just beginning to ask Lord Boscastle a question, when Lady Muriel cut across him.
“Of course,” she said, “someone’s obliged to do these things.”
“Someone’s obliged to become civil servants and look after the drains,” said Lord Boscastle with good-natured scorn. “That doesn’t make it any better.”
Roy started again.
“Should you have said, Lord Boscastle,” (the words, the tone, sounded suspiciously like Lord Boscastle’s own) “that the Foreign Office was becoming slightly common?”
Lord Boscastle regarded him, and paused.
“Perhaps that would be going rather far, Calvert. All I can say is that I should never have gone in myself. And I hope my son doesn’t show any signs of wanting to.”
“Oh, it must be wonderful to make treaties and go about in secret—” cried Mrs Seymour, girlish with enthusiasm, her voice trailing off.
“Make treaties!” Lord Boscastle chuckled. “All they do is clerk away in offices and get one out of trouble if one goes abroad. They do it like conscientious fellows, no doubt.”
“Why shouldn’t you like your son to want it, Lord Boscastle?” Roy asked, his eyes very bright.
“I hope that, if he feels obliged to take up a career, he’ll choose something slightly more out of the ordinary.”
“It isn’t because you don’t want him to get into low company?” Lord Boscastle wore a fixed smile. Roy looked more than ever demure.
“Of course,” said Roy, “he might pick up an unfortunate accent from one of those people. One needs to be careful. Do you think,” he asked earnestly, “that is the reason why some of them are so anxious to learn foreign languages? Do you think they hope it will cover up their own?”
“Mr Calvert!” Lady Boscastle’s voice sounded high and gentle. Roy met the gaze behind the lorgnette.
“Mr Calvert, have you been inside an embassy?”
“Only once, Lady Boscastle.”
“I think I must take you to some more. You’ll find they’re quite nice people. And really not unelegant. They talk quite nicely too. I’m just a little surprised you didn’t know that already, Mr Calvert.”
Roy burst into a happy, unguarded laugh: a blush mounted his cheeks. I had not seem him blush before. It was not often people played him at his own game. Usually they did not know what to make of him, they felt befogged, they left him still enquiring, straight-faced, bright-eyed.
The whole table was laughing — suddenly I noticed Joan’s face quite transformed. She had given way completely to her laughter, the sullenness was dissolved; it was the richest of laughs, and hearing it one knew that some day she would love with all her heart.
Lord Boscastle himself was smiling. He was not a slow-witted man, he had known he was being teased. I got the impression that he was grateful for his wife’s support. But his response to being teased was to stick more obstinately to his own line. So now he said, as though summing up: “It’s a pity about Tom Seymour’s girl. She ought to have fished something better for herself.”
“You’ll all come round to him,” said Mrs Seymour. “I know he’ll do.”
“It’s a pity,” said Lord Boscastle with finality, “that one doesn’t know who he is.”
Joan, melted by her laughter, still half-laughing and half-furious, broke out: “Uncle, you mean that you don’t know who his grandfather is.”
“Joan!” Lady Muriel boomed, but, with an indulgent nod, Lord Boscastle went on to discuss in what circumstances Tom’s girl had a claim to be invited to the family house. Boscastle was a great mansion: “my house” as Lord Boscastle called it with an air of grand seigneur, “our house” said Lady Muriel with splendour: but the splendour and the air of grand seigneur disappeared at moments, for they both had a knack of calling the house “Bossy”. Lady Boscastle never did: but to her husband and his sister there seemed nothing incongruous in the nickname.
After port, as soon as I got inside the drawing-room, Lady Boscastle called out: “Mr Eliot! I want you to talk to me, please.” I sat with her in a corner by the fire, and she examined me about my hopes and prospects; she was very shrewd, used to having her own way, accustomed to find pleasure in men’s confidences. We should have gone on, if it had not been that Lord Boscastle, on the largest sofa a few feet away, was asking Roy to describe his work. It was a perfectly serious question, and Roy treated it so. He explained how he had to begin unravelling a language which was two-thirds unknown. Then he passed on to manuscripts in that language — manuscripts battered, often with half the page missing, so faded that much could not be read at all, sometimes copied by incompetent and careless hands. Out of all this medley he was trying to restore the text.