The Westcotes | Page 5

who waited by the porch daily to lead them to the inn stables.
"I will stable Mercury myself," said she, addressing Endymion. She submitted her smallest plans to him for approval.
"Do so," he answered. "After running through my letters, I will step down to the Orange Room and join you. I entrust her to you, General-- the more confidently because you cannot take her far."
He laughed and followed Narcissus through the porch. Dorothea saw the old General wince. She slipped an arm through Mercury's bridle-rein and picked up her skirt; the other arm she laid in her companion's.
"You have not seen the Orange Room, Miss Dorothea?"
"Not since the decorations began." She paused and uttered the thought uppermost in her mind. "You must forgive my brother; I am sorry he spoke as he did just now."
"Then he is more than forgiven."
"He did not consider."
"Dear Mademoiselle, your brother is an excellent fellow, and not a bit more popular than he deserves to be. Of his kindness to us prisoners-- I speak not of us privileged ones, but of our poorer brothers--I could name a thousand acts; and acts say more than words."
Dorothea pursed her lips. "I am not sure. I think a woman would ask for words too."
"Yes, that is so," he caught her up. "But don't you see that we prisoners are--forgive me--just like women? I mean, we have learned that we are weak. For a man that is no easy lesson, Mademoiselle. I myself learned it hardly. And seeing your brother admired by all, so strong and prosperous and confident, can I ask that he should feel as we who have forfeited these things?"
Before she could find a reply he had harked back to the Orange Room.
"You have not seen it since the decorations began? Then I have a mind to run and ask your brother to forbid your coming--to command you to wait until Wednesday. We are in a horrible mess, I warn you, and smell of turpentine most potently. But we shall be ready for the ball, and then--! It will be prodigious. You do not know that we have a genius at work on the painting?"
"My brother tells me the designs are extraordinarily clever."
"They are more than clever, you will allow. The artist I discovered myself--a young man named Charles Raoul. He comes from the South, a little below Avignon, and of good family--in some respects." The General paused and took snuff. "He enlisted at eighteen and has seen service; he tells me he was wounded at Austerlitz. Unhappily he was shipped, about two years ago, on board the _Th��tis_ frigate, with a detachment and stores for Martinique. The _Th��tis_ had scarcely left L'Orient before she fell in with one of your frigates, whose name escapes me; and here he is in Axcester. He has rich relatives, but for some reason or other they decline to support him; and yet he seems a gentleman. He picks up a few shillings by painting portraits; but you English are shy of sitting--I wonder why? And we--well, I suppose we prefer to wait till our faces grow happier."
Dorothea had it on the tip of her tongue to ask how the General had discovered this genius; but the ring in his voice gave her pause. Twice in the course of their short walk he had shown feeling; and she wondered at it, having hitherto regarded him as a cynical old fellow with a wit which cracked himself and the world like two dry nuts for the jest of their shrivelled kernels. She did not, know that a kind word of hers had unlocked his heart; and before she could recall her question they had reached the stable-yard of "The Dogs." And after stabling Mercury it was but a step across to the inn.
The "Dogs Inn" took its name from two stone greyhounds beside its porch-- supporters of the arms of that old family from which the Westcotes had purchased Bayfield; and the Orange Room from a tradition that William of Orange had spent a night there on his march from Torbay. There may have been truth in the tradition; the room at any rate preserved in it window-hangings of orange-yellow, and a deep fringe of the same hue festooning the musicians' gallery. While serving Axcester for ball, rout, and general assembly-room, it had been admittedly dismal--its slate-coloured walls scarred and patched with new plaster, and relieved only by a gigantic painting of the Royal Arms on panel in a blackened frame; its ceiling garnished with four pendants in plaster, like bride- cake ornaments inverted.
To-day, as she stepped across the threshold, Dorothea hesitated between stopping her ears and rubbing her eyes. The place was a Babel. Frenchmen in white paper caps and stained linen blouses were laughing, plying their brushes, mixing paints, shifting