Part 2

The car running down a slight incline with a free engine had almost stopped. The chauffeur appeared to be deep in thought.

"At Mr Kenyon's age ..." he began tentatively

"One would not expect him to be quite the man he was at twenty-eight," Arthur supplied.

"Exactly, sir, one wouldn't," the chauffeur replied in the tone of one aroused to a consciousness of his immediate duties; and he let in the clutch and speeded up the car with an effect of turning his attention to more pressing affairs.

For the last quarter of a mile they had been running alongside a high brick wall, and as they now swerved in between a pair of wide-open iron gates, Arthur realised that the rather ugly wall was the boundary of Mr Kenyon's property.

The contrast between the outside and the inside was, as perhaps it was designed to be, sudden and startling. From the dusty side road flanked on one side by that erection of crude brickwork, he was transported without any kind of preparation into a finished and extensively cultivated garden of unusual extent and beauty. Seen from that entrance by the little lodge, the garden wonderfully displayed itself. It lay on a moderate slope, lifting up in a steady rise from the entrance gates to the climax of the house, that spread itself along the crest of the hill with an effect of dignified watchfulness. And the designer of that garden had had fine natural material to work upon other than the slope that provided the excuse for that triple tier of terraces with their shallow stone steps and low balustrading. He had had, for example, a fine selection of forest trees, elm, oak, and beech, with as a contrast a plantation of larches and silver birch bounding the estate on the east side. Also he had had an abundance of running water. A little river, its point of entrance hidden by the close shrubberies and plantations that shut out all sight of the ugly boundary wall on the garden side, cascaded not too artificially, out of obscurity into the sunlight, ran as a decently restrained little river for a hundred yards or so between close-cut lawns, the upper one of which was bordered by a row of graceful wych elms; and then spread itself into an irregular lake, over which the main drive to the house was carried by the spring of a slender bridge. But any catalogue of that garden's innumerable "features" must inevitably convey a false impression. Whoever had planned it, had had the genius to conceive his effect as a whole. It was arranged, composed, to display itself from the entrance lodge as a broad mass that was presented to the mind as a miniature park, abounding with natural opportunities, which had for many years been scrupulously kept, planted, and mown. And seen thus on the broad, it could not be classified as belonging either to the formal or the landscape type; rather it had the air of a diligently cultivated suburban garden enormously enlarged. There was something new, bright, almost deliberately factitious in its pretensions.

The chauffeur had but one comment to offer as they spun up the long curve of the gravel drive to the house. As they crossed the stone bridge over the pond, he pointed to the right, indicating a rough-cast and half-timbered building nearly hidden by the trees of the larch plantation into which the little river plunged out of sight.

"Power house, sir," he explained. "We do all our own lighting and pumping by water-power. Pleased to show you over, sir, if you have time. Nice little plant we've got."

Arthur found a sense of satisfaction in the thought of the completeness of the place.

III

Arthur remembered the bridge and the lake now that he saw them again. He had had some vague recollection of an immense sheet of water and an equally immense bridge that he had vaguely connected--he thought, mistakenly--with his boyhood visits to Hartling. The only other thing he remembered was a colossal elephant's pad in the hall. He found it still there, and in the interval of twenty years, it had diminished less than the lake. The detail of the house itself had apparently left little impression on his boyish mind. As he glanced round the hall, he had an uncertain feeling of being familiar with that massive staircase, but he had no idea how the rooms were placed.

His bags had gone round to some other entrance with the car; and as he gave his keys to the butler Arthur realised the splendid support of his expensive outfit. It made a difference, gave him assurance, a sense of being at home in these surroundings. That outfit was worth the money if only for the one week-end. It would have been absolutely rotten to have spent his whole time in trying to live down shabby clothes.

There seemed to be a perfect crowd of people in the room into which he was shown by the butler after having elected to go straight in to tea. He presumed it was a regular week-end party.

His aunt got up when he was announced and came across the room to greet him. She was a little tired-looking woman with a distinct likeness to his own mother, who had died in the first year of the war. He had always attributed that gray, pinched, slightly distracted air, in his mother's case, to the difficulties of life in a country parish on insufficient means; but as his aunt had the same air it was probably a family characteristic.

Mrs Kenyon's voice and manner also reminded him of his mother.

"How you've altered, Arthur," she said in a low, even voice.

"In twenty years, aunt," he reminded her cheerfully, "one grows a certain amount."

"I've seen you since then," she said quietly, "in town. Your poor mother brought you to see me off at Charing Cross: your first year at the hospital, I think it was. Now, come and have some tea."

She led him towards the tea-table as she spoke, and introduced him in passing to her husband, a bald, rather untidy man, who was lying back in an arm-chair. "How're you?" he said indifferently to the newly recovered nephew. "Little chap in knickerbockers, about three foot nothing, last time I saw you."

Arthur smiled his acknowledgment of this reminiscence with, he hoped, an effect of not caring whether he was remembered or not. These people were certainly not effusive; but probably this was their usual manner. The more money you had the less you troubled about manners and personal appearance. His uncle had been wearing a soft, rather crumpled collar and old flannel bags. Miss Kenyon, the eldest of the family, was presiding at the tea-table. She was a tall, white-haired woman of sixty or so, with what Arthur mentally described to himself as a "domineering expression." She hardly smiled as she shook hands with him.

"I remember your first visit here very well," she said, and he grasped at the opportunity to avoid the usual futilities of an opening conversation.

"Only the vaguest recollection of it myself, Miss Kenyon," he replied brightly, as he accepted the tea she offered him. "I dare say that's because my earlier memories have been rather overlaid by the experiences of the last six years." He felt that he had taken rather a sound line. He could see chances of quite good talking ahead, supported by a backing of medical and psychological authority.

Miss Kenyon, however, cut him off by saying in her cold, clear voice, "One wouldn't expect you to remember much, you were only five."

He couldn't believe it. "Oh! surely a lot more than that," he protested. "About nine or ten, I thought."

"Jubilee year," Miss Kenyon affirmed quietly, but with an air of final authority. "In August."

Arthur did not care to contradict her again, but he was still unconvinced. "Was it really?" he asked. "Astonishing how one forgets!"

Miss Kenyon was not to be deceived by this simulation of agreement.

"Don't you remember, Hannah?" she asked, turning to her sister-in-law, who had sat down near them, and was apparently brooding over the emptiness of life.

Mrs Kenyon started. "Remember, Esther? Oh! when Arthur came before," she said. "Not very distinctly, I am afraid. But he was quite a little fellow, in a holland tunic. I remember that because he got himself very dirty one morning, and poor Emily hadn't got a change for him."

Miss Kenyon nodded calmly. "In any case," she remarked, "we can verify the date without difficulty. I shall have a note of it in my diary."

"Esther is always accurate in her facts," her sister-in-law murmured. "Her memory is simply wonderful."

Miss Kenyon did not acknowledge this compliment. She was looking out through the great bay-window that was one of the principal features of the room in which they were sitting. Her expression was one of conscious authority--supreme, unquestionable.

Arthur felt snubbed, and, for the moment could think of no other suitable topic of conversation. Perhaps it would be advisable to admit that he was wrong, before he tried another subject.

"Stupid of me," he tried. "But as I was saying just now, the experiences of the past few years have rather altered one's scale of values. I probably mixed up my visit here with some other visit I paid with my mother when I was a bit older. One does that, sometimes."

He paused. Miss Kenyon was regarding him with a quiet, detached interest. It was evident that she had no further intention of interrupting him if he cared to go on talking, but that he must not expect any sort of response.

Arthur dropped his thesis with a slight sense of irritation and turned to his aunt.

"Aren't there some cousins of mine I ought to know?" he asked.

She indicated her two children with what Arthur thought to be a singular lack of enthusiasm. "That is Hubert by the fireplace. Elizabeth is over there in the window. I will introduce you to them when you have finished your tea."

Arthur took stock of his two cousins with attention. He was beginning to wonder if he were not in for an uncommonly depressing week-end. His observations of the third generation did little to reassure him.

Hubert was a young man of about twenty-five, with a long, melancholy face. He was dressed in rough tweeds, and wearing cloth gaiters, that gave him the look of a man whose interests lay among horses. And in Arthur's experience men who talked about horses were quite unable to talk about anything else. Elizabeth, a rather pretty girl, probably two or three years younger than her brother, was more interesting, but she, too, had the same expression of lassitude.

Arthur, still brightly aware of his newly recovered youth, felt as if he would like to take her by the arm and run with her out into the sunlight; shake her, make her sing and dance, force her to show some signs of enjoying her consciousness of life.

"And the little man talking to Hubert, who is he?" Arthur had no urgent desire to hurry the introduction to his cousins, and he was thoroughly enjoying the various cakes provided for tea.

He had not tasted cakes like these since the war. Also, Miss Kenyon had now gone from the table and left the room, and he felt more free to talk. Aunt Hannah might be rather dull but she was at least reasonably polite.

"That's Charles Turner," she told him. "He married Mr Kenyon's second daughter, Katherine--she's over there in the window by Elizabeth. Charles is the uncle of the present Lord Greening, you know."

Arthur did not know, but he nodded as he replied, "Are they staying here for the week-end?"

"Oh! no," Mrs Kenyon said. "We all live here. There is no one from outside here this week-end--except yourself."

Was that the reason for their tepidity? Arthur reflected. He was some one "from the outside" intruding upon the family circle. Perhaps, in spite of their wealth, the Kenyon family mixed very little with the outside world. They were a complete group living within the enceinte of that ten-foot brick wall, self-sufficient, and it might be a little self-conscious in the presence of a stranger. That general air of lassitude and of--there was some other element in it that he could not quite define--might be the effect of shyness which, as he knew, often took strange forms. Not that Miss Kenyon had appeared to suffer from any known form of shyness. She was evidently an overbearing woman.

"You're quite a large family party, aunt," he commented to keep the conversation going.

Mrs Kenyon blinked as if he had in some way touched upon a sore subject. She gave, however, no hint of that in her reply. "And there's Eleanor, whom you haven't seen yet," she said. "She acts as a sort of secretary to Mr Kenyon. She's the daughter of James, the second son. He and his wife are both dead, and so is their elder daughter Margery." She looked at her son as she added, "Charles and Katherine have a son too, but he does not live with us. He is acting as a clerk to a stockbroker. Quite a good position, I believe. Have you finished your tea? I am sure Hubert is waiting to talk to you."

"All but, aunt," Arthur said. "Sorry to bother you with all these questions, but I want to know who's who to begin with. And Mr Kenyon? He isn't down here of course."

"He never takes tea," Mrs Kenyon said; "and we don't see a great deal of him at any time. I don't mean that he is in any way an invalid or a recluse, you know, but at his age...."

"Oh! precisely," Arthur agreed. His aunt's sentence had tailed out into nothing, in much the same tone as that of the chauffeur when he had hesitated over precisely the same words. At his age.... The inference undoubtedly was that anything might happen when a man reaches the age of ninety-one.

"He keeps awfully fit, though, doesn't he?" Arthur went on.

"Yes. He's remarkably well and active ..." his aunt replied, paused again, and then concluded firmly, "but you will see him at dinner."

Arthur noted again that effect of some unstated contingent.

Possibly his aunt, also, was a trifle uneasy about the old man's health.

"I've really finished at last, Aunt Hannah," he said, with a smile.

She did not return the smile, but rose at once with an appearance of relief. Arthur felt as if he ought to apologise for having bored her.

His cousin Hubert greeted him, as Arthur had expected, without enthusiasm. He turned almost at once to the Hon. Charles Turner, hoping that there he might perhaps find some kind of response.

Turner was a small man whose age might have been anything between sixty and seventy, but he at least, obviously took trouble over his dress, and his rather elvish face was crinkled into an expression that gave promise of a rather satirical humour. Once or twice Arthur had caught Turner's gaze resting upon him with a slightly quizzical look.

"You've gone in for medicine, I hear," Turner began, and without waiting for a reply, continued: "Depressing kind of profession, isn't it? Always listening to other people's complaints?"

Arthur had never considered that aspect of the doctor's life. "Oh! I don't know," he said. "There are other things besides diagnosis. I mean...."

"Oh! quite," Turner cut in; "but you're always with sick people. That's what you're for. Don't you find yourself getting in the way of looking at every one as a possible patient?"

"Lord, no," Arthur replied, laughing. "You don't get so wrapped up in it as all that."

"_You_ don't, perhaps," Turner said. "You're young yet, and I dare say you can drop your work when you are away from it. But I know a fellow, a Harley Street specialist, great authority on the heart...."

"Sir Stephen Hunt?" Arthur put in.

"That's the chap," Turner agreed. "Well, he's a terrible fellow. You'll see him looking round a dinner table and spotting symptoms. I remember sitting near him at dinner one night, and after the women had gone, he leant over to me and said, 'D'you know how long Lady Spendale has been suffering from'--let's see what did he call it--some sort of goitre?"

"Exophthalmic, possibly," Arthur supplied.

"I believe it was. She had rather protuberant eyes, I remember."

"That's it," Arthur confirmed him.

"Well, naturally I didn't even know she'd got it, if she had," Turner continued. "But what I mean is--ghastly sort of life to lead, always trying to spot something wrong with people's hearts or what not. Now, d'you mean to tell me honestly that you can help looking out for symptoms like that, more or less? Supposing I'd got protuberant eyes, for instance?"

"That's such a frightfully obvious thing," Arthur objected. "As a matter of fact, there aren't so many diseases that can be diagnosed like that at sight. And--and--well, one rather gets out of the way of looking for them when one's off duty. As a student, I'll admit, one did a certain amount of showing off; kind of a game, you know, trying to spot the symptoms you'd just been reading up. But one soon dropped that."

"H'm! Well! And so you like doctoring, do you? Got a practice, or what?" Turner asked.

"No, nothing at the moment," Arthur said. "I've been helping a friend down in Peckham, but I've chucked that for the time being."

"Loose end? What?" Turner inquired.

"Got some notion of going to Canada," Arthur said.

Turner pursed his mouth and looked down at his neat patent-leather shoes. "Fine climate and splendid opportunities there," he commented softly. "Free, open-air life and all that sort of thing. Just suit a vigorous young chap like you, I should say."

Hubert Kenyon, who had been gloomily listening to the conversation without attempting to join in it, drew a long breath and exhaled it in a deep sigh.

"That how you feel about it?" Arthur inquired.

"I? Oh! How d'you mean?" Hubert asked.

"Blowing a bit, weren't you, at the mention of Canada?" Arthur said.

"Oh! That! I don't know," Hubert replied, without throwing much light on the meaning of his sigh.

The conversation was dropping again. Arthur felt the silence coming, and did not care. He was a guest and it was the family's duty to entertain him. But what was the matter with them all? Or with him?

He looked down the room. Miss Kenyon had come back, and they were all sitting about, reading or working in an uninterested kind of way--doing something or other as if it did not matter whether the thing was done or not. What was it the place and the people reminded him of? Yes! It was that boarding-house he had stayed in at Scarborough one winter. He had been there for a week with his mother. But that was a very different kind of place, and those were very different people. This room was beautifully designed and furnished, and these relations and connections of his were all rich and presumably care-free. Nevertheless there was something that reminded him of that Scarborough boarding-house. Something in the pose of those indifferently diligent women, perhaps?

The voice of Hubert broke in on his meditations.

"I don't know what we're waiting here for?" he said. "Care to come and have a look at the garden?"

"Thanks. Yes, I should," Arthur replied cheerfully.

He had it now. They all had the effect of waiting for something; for some climax, or change, or interruption; of waiting interminably for some known or unknown crisis that might never develop. Mr Turner was politely yawning as he stooped to pick up the _Times_.

IV

The garden was certainly wonderful. The modern house, although it had a well-designed south elevation, in which effective use had been made of mullioned oriel windows corbelled out from the first floor, was less successful inside--if the architect's intention had been to give the impression of age and dignity. The decoration and arrangement conveyed the effect of a really first-class hotel rather than that of an Elizabethan Manor, or even of a gentleman's country-house. This may have been due to the fact that it had been built in the late 'seventies of the last century, a bad period for country-house architecture; or it may have been a result of the exercise of old Mr Kenyon's domestic taste in furniture arrangement.

No such indictment could be brought against the garden. It was unique in its variety--full of contrasts and surprises; a place to explore, and to get lost in, but more particularly a place that had a dozen settings from which the seeker might choose a mood.

Arthur, finding new cause for astonishment and rapture at every turn, was enthusiastic in his expressions of admiration. After French battlefields, base hospitals, and Peckham, this garden seemed to him a true fairyland.

Even the melancholy Hubert became a trifle more cheerful.

"Yes, it is pretty good, isn't it?" he agreed. "'Course it has been worked at, day and night almost, you might say, for forty years."

"What happened to it during the war?" Arthur asked.

"Four of our gardeners were over age," Hubert said, "and we got boys to work under them. At first, that is. We had some wounded Tommies afterwards."

"You weren't in it yourself?" Arthur asked.

Hubert coloured faintly. "No, my grandfather got me a job in a Government office," he said. "I wanted to join up, but he wouldn't let me. I'm sort of steward to this place, you know. There are a couple of farms and so on to look after. Not that I have much to do. However, what I mean is that my grandfather made a tremendous point of keeping me out of the Army, and it was rather difficult for me to disobey him right out. He's--he's not altogether easy to handle."

"Bit of an autocrat in his way?" Arthur suggested.

Hubert looked uneasy. "In a way, yes," he agreed; and Arthur inferred that a tactful change of subject was advisable.

"Have you got names for all these different parts of the garden?" he asked, choosing the most obvious topic.

Hubert did not appear to have heard the question. He was frowning and fidgeting; he had the look of a weak man trying to make an important decision.

"You don't know him, do you?" he said. "What I mean is, you've never been here since you came as a boy, and you've never kept in with us or anything?"

"No, he's to all intents and purposes an utter stranger to me," Arthur agreed.

"Just come down to have a look at us, then?" Hubert continued, with a feeble affectation of sprightliness.

"Well, you and my aunt are about the only relations I've got," Arthur replied. "And as Aunt Hannah wrote out of the blue, as it were, and invited me to come down, I was glad of the opportunity."

"Oh! yes, exactly," Hubert said. "I can understand that all right."

Arthur was aware again of that sense of irritation that had come to him when he had been trying to talk to Miss Kenyon. He felt as if his cousin, in another manner, was also opposing him, was in some way suspicious and inimical.

"Well what is it you don't understand?" he asked curtly.

Hubert smiled, with the placatory air of a dog that has been threatened. He was standing with his feet crossed and rocked slowly from one to the other as he spoke.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing, I was just wondering if you wanted the old man's influence for anything, get you a job as medical attendant to anyone or something of that sort."

"Good Lord, no," Arthur returned brusquely. "Never entered my head for a moment. Didn't I tell you that I thought of going out to Canada for a year or two?"

So that was why these Kenyons had been unfriendly. They believed that he had come down there cadging for influence. He grew warm at the thought of that implication, and raised his voice slightly as he continued:--

"Pretty rotten aspersion to make that, wasn't it, Hubert? After Aunt Hannah had written and invited me to come down?"

"Don't see anything rotten in it. Natural enough," Hubert replied, still rocking gently and looking down at his crossed ankles. "However--sorry. There's no need to get excited about it." He looked up and added: "Here's Eleanor. You haven't met her yet."