Christmas at Candleshoe Read Free Page B

about horses, dogs, gardeners. Lord Arthur has the inventiveness of his father, into whose head will come nonsense about family ghosts or Noah’s Ark. But he has too a streak of artistry. As he tells how the bigger girls played Sheridan in gowns which had for two centuries been laid away in lavender, or how the smaller girls were allowed to paint with their water-colours the putti that play hide and seek round the tall marble chimneypiece in Queen Caroline’s Drawing-Room, or how, treasured in the library, there is a sound-strip of a hundred young voices echoing in the great gallery: as Lord Arthur tells of these things he makes them golden – as golden as the light now pouring in level shafts across the park – Claude’s light, the light of the great ideal landscapes, glinting on the gold-leaf that sheaths the high windows without, on the gold damask that drapes them within, on the long lines of gilt frames on the walls, on furniture here smothered and here licked with gold. The great room is full of the golden light. But soon it will be fading and everybody will go away. Already from the nearer stretches of the park comes the pulse and throb of engines, as if the pasturing chars-à-bancs were raising their heads and lowing – lowing to be led to some milking-parlour mightier than that erected by the sixth Marquis of Scattergood in the Chinese taste.
    And presently this is answered by another sound. From a distant court of the great building – a court palatial in itself, but here serving for offices and stables – a deep-toned bell is calling the hour in long golden syllables that carry through Benison’s two hundred rooms, roll across its spreading formal gardens, its ornamental waters, and its spacious park, to die finally into a just perceptible vibration in the distant streets and houses of Benison Magna, Benison Parva, Abbot’s Benison, and Candleshoe.

 
     
2
    ‘If that wasn’t a darn queer thing!’ Grant Feather slows down behind a char-à-banc on the Palladian Bridge. ‘What makes them put in time, do you think, taking round a raggle-taggle of tourists like you and me?’
    With her nose still in her guidebook, Mrs Feather absently shakes her head. ‘The Temple of Ancient Virtue’, she reads, ‘was designed by Kent. Now, why didn’t we see that? A graceful but massive structure. The Temple of Modern Virtue was constructed nearby in the form of a ruin, the contrast being allegorical in intention. It was removed by the seventh marquess, who intended to erect in its place a Temple of Progress and Perfectibility. His interests changed however and he built a mosque, now used as a cow-shed. I’d say that folks crazy enough to do things like that are crazy enough to take round tourists.’
    ‘You agree, momma, that it was a mite crazy?’
    ‘Well, Grant, it was courteous too. If you’re good enough to be let in at all, even at half a dollar, you’re good enough to be talked to. Your grandfather would have done the same, if he’d ever felt like collecting half-dollars from people wanting to see round his house at Newport.’
    ‘Nobody would want to see round that house at Newport.’
    ‘They might now. Your grandfather’s house is almost as much a period piece as Benison.’ Mrs Feather turns the page of her guidebook. ‘The chapel is by Wren, and contains a fine statuary group by Roubiliac. We didn’t see that either.’
    Grant Feather sets his foot on the accelerator and chuckles. ‘Perhaps that’s another half-dollar. After all, Benison isn’t just one period piece. It’s several.’ He stops the car. ‘There’s your last glimpse of it.’
    They have driven for two miles through the park, and lodge-gates and the public highway are just in front of them. On their left is a broad sheet of ornamental water, part balustraded and part overhung by dark-foliaged trees. Small islands support obelisks, groups of statuary, miniature temples. Beyond, the river winds gently through a valley whose