As if conscious of his scrutiny Gillian turned and met his searching gaze. The colour flooded her face and she pushed the dog aside and rose hastily to her feet. Shyness supervened again and she was thankful for the arrival of Miss Craven, who was breathless and apologetic.
“Late as usual! I shall be late when the last trump sounds. But this time it was really not my fault. Mrs. Appleyard descended upon me!—our old housekeeper, Gillian—and her tongue has wagged for a solid hour by the clock. I am now au fait with everything that has happened at the Towers since I was here last—do your ears burn, Peter?—metaphorically she has dragged me at her heels from garrets to cellars and back to the garrets again. She is pathetically pleased to have the house open once more.”
Still talking she led the way to the dining room. It was an immense room, panelled like most of the house, the table an oasis on a desert of Persian carpet, a huge fireplace predominating, and some of the more valuable family portraits on the walls.
As Miss Craven entered she looked instinctively for the portrait of her brother, which since his death had hung—following a family custom—in a panel over the high carved mantelpiece. But it had been removed and for it had been substituted a beautiful painting of Barry’s mother. She stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. “An innovation?” she murmured to her nephew, with her shrewd eyes on his face.
“A reparation,” he answered shortly, as he moved to his chair. And his tone made any further comment impossible. She sat down thoughtfully and began her soup in silence, vaguely disturbed at the departure from a precedent that had held for generations. Unconventional and ultra-modern as she was she still clung to the traditions of her family, and from time immemorial the portrait of the last reigning Craven had hung over the fireplace in the big dining room waiting to give place to its successor. It all seemed bound up somehow with the terrible change that had taken place in him since his return from Japan—a change she was beginning more and more to connect with the man whose portrait had been banished, as though unworthy, from its prominence. Unworthy indeed—but how did Barry know? What had he learned in the country that had had such a fatal attraction for his father? The old shameful story she had thought buried for ever seemed rising like a horrible phantom from the grave where it had lain so long hidden.
With a little shudder she turned resolutely from the painful thoughts that came crowding in upon her and entered into animated conversation with Peters.
Gillian, content to be unnoticed, looked about her with appreciative interest; the big room, its sombre, rather formal furniture and fine pictures, appealed to her. The arrangements were in perfect harmony, nothing clashed or jarred, electric lighting was carefully hidden and only wax candles burnt in heavy silver candlesticks on the table.
The fascination of the old house was growing every moment more insistent, like a spell laid on her. She gave herself up to it, to the odd happiness it inspired. She felt it curiously familiar. A strange feeling came to her—it was as if from childhood she had been journeying and now come home. An absurd thought, but she loved it. She had never had a home, but for the next two years she could pretend. To pretend was easy. All her life she had lived in a land of dreams, tenanted with shadowy inhabitants of her own imagining—puppets who moved obedient to her will through all the devious paths of make-believe; a spirit world where she ranged free of the narrow walls that restricted her liberty. It had been easy to pretend in the convent—how much easier here in the solid embodiment of a dream castle and stimulated by the real human affection for which her heart had starved. The love she had hitherto known had been unsatisfying, too impersonal, too restrained, too interwoven with mystical devotion. Mass Craven’s affection was of a hardier, more practical nature. Blunt candour and sincerity personified, she did not attempt to disguise her attachment. She had been attracted, had approved, and had finally co-opted Gillian into the family. She had, moreover, great faith in her own judgment. And to justify that faith Gillian would have gone through fire and water.
She looked gratefully at the solid little figure sitting at the foot of the table and a gleam of amusement chased the seriousness from her eyes. Miss Craven was in the throes of a heated discussion with Peters which involved elaborate diagrams traced on the smooth cloth with a salt spoon, and as Gillian watched she completed her design with a fine flourish and leant back triumphant in her chair, rumpling her hair fantastically. But the agent, unconvinced, fell upon her mercilessly and in a moment she was bent forward again in vigorous protest, drumming impatiently on the table with her fingers as he laughingly altered her drawing. They were the best of friends and wrangled continually. To Gillian it was all so fresh, so novel. Then her attention veered. Throughout dinner Craven had been silent. When once started on a discussion his aunt and Peters tore the controversy amicably to tatters in complete absorption. He had not joined in the argument. As always Gillian was too shy to address him of her own accord, but she was acutely conscious of his nearness. She deprecated her own attitude, yet silence was better than the banal platitudes which were all she had to offer. Her range was so restricted, his—who had travelled the world over—must be so great. With the exception of one subject her knowledge was negligible. But he too was an artist—hopeless to attempt that topic, she concluded with swift contempt for her own limitations; to offer the opinions of a convent-bred amateur to one who had studied in famous Paris ateliers and was acquainted with the art of many countries would be an impertinence. But yet she knew that sometime she must break through the wall that her own diffidence had built up; in the intimacy of country house life the continuance of such an attitude would be both impossible and ridiculous. Contritely she acknowledged that the tension between them was largely her own fault, a disability due to training. But she could not go through life sheltering behind that wholly inadequate plea. If there was anything in her at all she must rise above the conventions in which she had been reared; she had done with the narrowness of the past, now she must think broadly, expansively, in all things—even in the trivial matter of social intercourse. A saving sense of humour sent a laugh bubbling into her throat which nearly escaped. It was such a little thing, but she had magnified it so greatly. What, after all, did it amount to—the awkwardness of a schoolgirl very properly ignored by a guardian who could not be other than bored with her society. Tant pis! She could at least try to be polite. She turned with the heroic intention of breaking the ice and plunging into conversation, banal though it might be. But her eyes did not arrive at his face, they were caught and held by his hand, lying on the white cloth, turning and twisting an empty wine-glass between long strong fingers. Hands fascinated her. They were indicative of character, testimonies of individual peculiarities. She was sensitive to the impression they conveyed. With the limited material available she had studied them—nuns’ hands, priests’ hands, hands of the various inmates of the houses where she had stayed, and the hands of the man who had taught her. From him she had learned more than the mere rudiments of her art; under his tuition a crude interest had developed into a definite study, and as she sat looking at Barry Craven’s hand a sentence from one of his lectures recurred to her—“there are in some hands, particularly in the case of men, characteristics denoting certain passions and attributes that jump to the eye as forcibly as if they were expressions of face.”