Queen Lucia | Page 7

regards cats, and also carried out the suggestion of
humour in furniture. The humour had attained the highest point of
felicity when Peppino concealed a mechanical nightingale in a bush,
which sang "Jug-jug" in the most realistic manner when you pulled a
string. Georgie had not yet seen the Copenhagen pigeons, or being

rather short-sighted thought they were real. Then, oh then, Peppino
pulled the string, and for quite a long time Georgie listened entranced
to their melodious cooings. That served him out for his "trap" about the
real pear introduced among the stone specimens. For in spite of the
rarefied atmosphere of culture at Riseholme, Riseholme knew how to
"desipere in loco," and its strenuous culture was often refreshed by
these light refined touches.
Mrs Lucas walked quickly and decisively up and down the paths as she
waited for the summons to lunch, for the activity of her mind reacted
on her body, making her brisk in movement. On each side of her
forehead were hard neat undulations of black hair that concealed the
tips of her ears. She had laid aside her London hat, and carried a red
cotton Contadina's umbrella, which threw a rosy glow onto the oval of
her thin face and its colourless complexion. She bore the weight of her
forty years extremely lightly, and but for the droop of skin at the
corners of her mouth, she might have passed as a much younger woman.
Her face was otherwise unlined and bore no trace of the ravages of
emotional living, which both ages and softens. Certainly there was
nothing soft about her, and very little of the signs of age, and it would
have been reasonable to conjecture that twenty years later she would
look but little older than she did today. For such emotions as she was
victim of were the sterile and ageless emotions of art; such desires as
beset her were not connected with her affections, but her ambitions.
Dynasty she had none, for she was childless, and thus her ambitions
were limited to the permanence and security of her own throne as
queen of Riseholme. She really asked nothing more of life than the
continuance of such harvests as she had so plenteously reaped for these
last ten years. As long as she directed the life of Riseholme, took the
lead in its culture and entertainment, and was the undisputed
fountain-head of all its inspirations, and from time to time refreshed her
memory as to the utter inferiority of London she wanted nothing more.
But to secure that she dedicated all that she had of ease, leisure and
income. Being practically indefatigable the loss of ease and leisure
troubled her but little and being in extremely comfortable
circumstances, she had no need to economise in her hospitalities. She
might easily look forward to enjoying an unchanging middle-aged

activity, while generations of youth withered round her, and no star,
remotely rising, had as yet threatened to dim her unrivalled effulgence.
Though essentially autocratic, her subjects were allowed and even
encouraged to develop their own minds on their own lines, provided
always that those lines met at the junction where she was station-master.
With regard to religion finally, it may be briefly said that she believed
in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she had
no doubt whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to church
on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in
the Zoological Gardens, for kangaroos come from Australia.
A low wall separated the far end of her garden from the meadow
outside; beyond that lay the stream which flowed into the Avon, and it
often seemed wonderful to her that the water which wimpled by would
(unless a cow happened to drink it) soon be stealing along past the
church at Stratford where Shakespeare lay. Peppino had written a very
moving little prose-poem about it, for she had royally presented him
with the idea, and had suggested a beautiful analogy between the
earthly dew that refreshed the grasses, and was drawn up into the fire of
the Sun, and Thought the spiritual dew that refreshed the mind and
thereafter, rather vaguely, was drawn up into the Full-Orbed Soul of the
World.
At that moment Lucia's eye was attracted by an apparition on the road
which lay adjacent to the further side of the happy stream which flowed
into the Avon. There was no mistaking the identity of the stout figure
of Mrs Quantock with its short steps and its gesticulations, but why in
the name of wonder should that Christian Scientist be walking with the
draped and turbaned figure of a man with a tropical complexion and a
black beard? His robe of saffron