The Fox in the Attic Read Free Page B

had given asylum to everything in the house no woman of taste or delicacy could stand; and Augustine himself had altered nothing. The paint was a sour chocolate brown. The chairs and settees were uniformly covered in leather. This faded purple leather covered even the top of a kind of stool made from a huge elephant’s-trotter (Great-uncle William had ridden the beast in battle or shot it in the chase, Augustine could never remember which).
    In a tall china-cabinet here there were some lovely pieces of porcelain—Sèvres, Wedgwood, Dresden, Worcester—and other exquisite objects too: a large conch in silver-gilt, engraved with the royal arms of the Wittelsbachs and held out invitingly by a nymph: again, a delicate tureen-like receptacle in Pacific tortoiseshell which had stood (so the printed card stated) in the cabin of Captain Cook. You wondered, perhaps, to see such beauties banished here—till you realized that this was Uncle William’s unique collection of rare spittoons.
    But there was even worse here than leather and brown paint and china of equivocal uses. The engravings on the walls for instance: if you looked at them closely and with not too innocent an eye you found they tended to be coarse—or even French.
    Those two good old Tory bachelors, those noble Victorian figures—Great-uncle Arthur! Great-uncle William! Indeed what a powder-magazine of schoolboy naughtiness it had pleased them to sit on, in here! Hardly anything in this room was quite what it seemed at first sight. That ribbed-glass picture looked at first just an innocent rustic scene, but as you walked past you saw from the tail of your eye the billy-goat going incessantly in and out, in and out. Again, the top of that elephant-foot stool was hinged, and lifted. Absently, Augustine lifted it now: it housed a commode of course, and there was a dead spider in it; but until this very moment he had never noticed that under the spider and the dust you could just descry, printed in green under the glaze on the bottom of the china pot, the famous—the execrated face of Gladstone.
    That had been typical of the fanatical way those two Tory old children felt about Liberals. Their treatment of Augustine’s own father was a case in point. Though a Conservative himself he had married the daughter of a house traditionally Whig and for this he had never been forgiven, never asked here again. Thus Augustine’s own childhood visits here had always been paid either alone or with a nurse. As if the taint was one clinging to the female line, even his elder sister Mary had never once been asked here to Newton Llantony (in fairness for this deprivation, Mary had been sent alone to spend one whole summer holidays in Germany, where they had cousins. That must have been 1913: she was to have gone again, only next year the Kaiser invaded Belgium and the war came).
    In addition to improper pictures, many of the lesser family portraits were hung here in this billiardroom—“lesser” in the sense that either the sitter or the painter was better forgotten: black sheep and frail ladies; and the pseudo-Lely, the Academy rejects. But as soon as Augustine’s father had married a Liberal, even the lovely drawing Rossetti had done of him as an infant angel with a tabor could no longer be hung anywhere at all at Newton Llantony—not even in here! Augustine had lately found this drawing hidden away upstairs in his grandmother’s bedroom drawer: whereas Henry’s portrait, posthumously painted by a limited company from photographs—that vast act of worship in oil-paint hung over the fireplace in the largest drawing-room.
    Henry even while he lived had been the apple of every eye. The uncles had built him his own squash-court: when he was killed at Ypres in permanent mourning for him the court was not played in any more: it became where the larger stuffed animals were housed, including a giraffe.
    So much bitter