The Lady Paramount | Page 6

drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they beauties?" he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour, nothing less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer Blogrim's chalk-pit. If eyes were made for seeing, see and admire--admire and confess your admiration."
He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets," he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "would n't the apathetic man admire you?"
And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent of the grateful prima-donna.
"They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine art, and worth a rational being's consideration,--in those days, and in just that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced in deep tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you no soul for the loveliness of flowers?"
Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall and well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that it was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps, carried with it certain obligations--an obligation of fastidious dressing, for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously dressed indeed, in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that bespoke a practised hand beside a discerning taste. But his general air, none the less,--the expression of his figure and his motions, as well as of his face and voice,--was somehow that of an indolent melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to the perception with a regret that was half amusement.
His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt and a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly a man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never to be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call "the flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful, and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation a composer and singer of songs, and--"contrapuntally," as he would explain--Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of business.
Anthony sighed.
"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming. The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled from the skies."
Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain malicious satisfaction.
"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony turned up to-morrow,' said I."
"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."
"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked.
"No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "I 'll set out for the house; and you (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk and gambol round about me. Come on."
And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood--I was on the point of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?--for its quaintness, and in some measure too, perhaps, for its history:--Craford Old Manor, a red-brick Tudor house, low, and,