LUCIA'S PROGRESS

PART 6

CHAPTER VI

This frightful discrepancy in the premium was adjusted by Lucia offering--more than equitably so she thought, and more than meanly thought the other contracting party--to split the difference, and the double move was instantly begun. In order to get into Mallards more speedily, Lucia left Grebe vacant in the space of two days, not forgetting the india-rubber felting in the passage outside the Office, for assuredly there would be another Temple of Silence at Mallards, and stored her furniture until her new house was fit to receive it. Grebe being thus empty, the vans from Mallards poured tiger-skins and Polynesian aprons into it, and into Mallards there poured a regiment of plumbers and painters and cleaners and decorators. Drains were tested, pointings between bricks renewed, floors scraped and ceilings whitewashed, and for the next fortnight other householders in Tilling had the greatest difficulty in getting any repairs done, for there was scarcely a workman who was not engaged on Mallards.

Throughout these hectic weeks Lucia stayed with Georgie at the Cottage, and not even he had ever suspected the sheer horse-power of body and mind which she was capable of developing when really extended. She had breakfasted before the first of her workmen appeared in the morning, and was ready to direct and guide them and to cancel all the orders she had given the day before, till everyone was feverishly occupied, and then she went back to the Cottage to read the letters that had come for her by the first post and skim the morning papers for world-movements. Then Mammoncash got his orders, if he had recommended any change in her investments, and Lucia went back to choose wallpapers, or go down into the big cellars that spread over the entire basement of the house. They had not been used for years, for a cupboard in the pantry had been adequate to hold such alcoholic refreshment as Aunt Caroline and her niece had wished to have on the premises, and bins had disintegrated and laths fallen, and rubbish had been hurled there, until the floor was covered with a foot or more of compacted debris. All this, Lucia decreed, must be excavated, and the floor level laid bare, for both her distaste for living above a rubbish heap, and her passion for restoring Mallards to its original state demanded the clearance. Two navvies with pick-axe and shovel carried up baskets of rubbish through the kitchen where a distracted ironmonger was installing a new boiler. There were rats in this cellar, and Diva very kindly lent Paddy to deal with them, and Paddy very kindly bit a navvy in mistake for a rat. At last the floor level was reached, and Lucia examining it carefully with an electric torch, discovered that there were lines of brickwork lying at an angle to the rest of the floor. The moment she saw them she was convinced that there was a Roman look about them, and secretly suspected that a Roman villa must once have stood here. There was no time to go into that just now: it must be followed up later, but she sent to the London Library for a few standard books on Roman remains in the South of England, and read an article during lunch-time in Georgie's Encyclopædia about hypocausts.

After such sedentary mornings Lucia dug in the kitchen garden for an hour or two clad in Irene's overalls. Her gardener vainly protested that the spring was not the orthodox season to manure the soil, but it was obvious to Lucia that it required immediate enrichment and it got it. There was a big potato-patch which had evidently been plundered quite lately, for only a few sad stalks remained, and the inference that Elizabeth, before quitting, had dug up all the potatoes and taken them to Grebe was irresistible. The greenhouse, too, was strangely denuded of plants: they must have gone to Grebe as well. But the aspect was admirable for peach trees, and Lucia ordered half-a-dozen to be trained on the wall. Her gardening book recommended that a few bumble-bees should always be domiciled in a peach house for the fertilization of the blossoms, and after a long pursuit her gardener cleverly caught one in his cap. It was transferred with angry buzzings to the peach house and immediately flew out through a broken pane in the roof.

A reviving cup of tea started Lucia off again, and she helped to burn the discoloured paint off the banisters of the stairs which were undoubtedly of oak, and she stayed on at this fascinating job till the sun had set and all the workmen had gone. While dressing for dinner she observed that the ground floor rooms of Mallards that looked on to the street were brilliantly illuminated, as for a party, and realizing that she had left all the electric light burning, she put a cloak over her evening gown and went across to switch them off. A ponderous parcel of books had arrived from the London Library and she promised herself a historical treat in bed that night. She finished dressing and hurried down to dinner, for Georgie hated to be kept waiting for the meals. Lucia had had little conversation all day, and now, as if the dam of a reservoir had burst, the pent waters of vocal intercourse carried all before them.

"Georgino, such an interesting day," she said, "but I marvel at the vandalism of the late owner. Drab paint on those beautiful oak banisters, and I feel convinced that I have found the remains of a Roman villa. I conjecture that it runs out towards the kitchen garden. Possibly it may be a temple. My dear, what delicious fish! Did you know that in the time of Elizabeth--not this one--the Court was entirely supplied with fish from Tilling? A convoy of mules took it to London three times a week. . . . In a few days more I hope and trust, Mallards will be ready for my furniture, and then you must be at my beck and call all day. Your taste is exquisite: I shall want your sanction for all my dispositions. Shall the garden-room be my office, do you think? But, as you know, I cannot exist without a music-room, and perhaps I had better use that little cupboard of a room off the hall as my office. My ledgers and a telephone is all I want there, but double windows must be put in as it looks on to the street. Then I shall have my books in the garden-room: the Greek dramatists are what I shall chiefly work at this year. My dear, how delicious it would be to give some tableaux in the garden from the Greek tragedians! The return of Agamemnon with Cassandra after the Trojan wars. You must certainly be Agamemnon. Could I not double the parts of Cassandra and Clytemnestra? Or a scene from Aristophanes. I began the Thesmophoriazusae a few weeks ago. About the revolt of the Athenian women, from their sequestered and blighted existence. They barricaded themselves into the Acropolis, exactly as the Pankhursts and the suffragettes padlocked themselves to the railings of the House of Commons and the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. I have always maintained that Aristophanes is the most modern of writers, Bernard Shaw, in fact, but with far more wit, more Attic salt. If I might choose a day in all the history of the world to live through, it would be a day in the golden age of Athens. A talk to Socrates in the morning; lunch with Pericles and Aspasia: a matinée at the theatre for a new play by Aristophanes: supper at Plato's Symposium. How it fires the blood!"

Georgie was eating a caramel chocolate and reply was impossible, since the teeth in his upper jaw were firmly glued to those of the lower and care was necessary. He could only nod and make massaging movements with his mouth, and Lucia, like Cassandra, only far more optimistic, was filled with the spirit of prophecy.

"I mean to make Mallards the centre of a new artistic and intellectual life in Tilling," she said, "much as the Hurst was, if I may say so without boasting, at our dear little placid Riseholme. My Attic day, I know, cannot be realized, but if there are, as I strongly suspect, the remains of a Roman temple or villa stretching out into the kitchen garden, we shall have a whiff of classical ages again. I shall lay bare the place, even if it means scrapping the asparagus bed. Very likely I shall find a tesselated pavement or two. Then we are so near London, every now and then I shall have a string quartet down, or get somebody to lecture on an archæological subject, if I am right about my Roman villa. I am getting rather rich, Georgie, I don't mind telling you, and I shall spend most of my gains on the welfare and enlightenment of Tilling. I do not regard the money I spent in buying Mallards a selfish outlay. It was equipment: I must have some central house with a room like the garden-room where I can hold my gatherings and symposia and so forth, and a garden for rest and refreshment and meditation. Non e bella vista?"

Georgie had rid himself of the last viscous strings of the caramel by the aid of a mouthful of hot coffee which softened them.

"My dear, what big plans you have," he said. "I always--" but the torrent foamed on.

"Caro, you know well that I have never cared for small interests and paltry successes. The broad sweep of the brush, Georgie: the great scale! Indeed it will be a change in the life-history of Mallards--I think I shall call it Mallards House--to have something going on there beyond those perennial spyings from the garden-room window to see who goes to the dentist. And I mean to take part in the Civic, the municipal government of the place: that too, is no less than a duty. Dear Irene's very ill-judged exhibition at the election to the Town Council, deprived me, I feel sure, of hundreds of votes, though she meant so well. It jarred, it was not in harmony with the lofty aims I was hoping to represent. I am the friend of the poor, but a public pantomime was not the way to convince the electors of that. I shall be the friend of the rich, too. Those nice Wyses, for instance, their intellectual horizons are terribly bounded, and dear Diva hasn't got any horizons at all. I seem to see a general uplift, Georgie, an intellectual and artistic curiosity, such as that out of which all renaissances came. Poor Elizabeth! Naturally, I have no programme at present: it is not time for that yet. Well, there's just the outline of my plans. Now let us have an hour of music."

"I'm sure you're tired," said Georgie.

"Never fresher. I consider it is a disgrace to be tired. I was, I remember, after our last day's canvassing, and was much ashamed of myself. And how charming it is to be spending tranquil quiet evenings with you again. When you decided on a permanent beard after your shingles, and went to your own house again, the evenings seemed quite lonely sometimes. Now let us play something that will really test us."

Lucia's fingers were a little rusty from want of practice and she had a few minutes of rapid scales and exercises. Then followed an hour of duets, and she looked over some samples of chintzes.

That night Georgie was wakened from his sleep by the thump of some heavy object on the floor of the adjoining bedroom. Lucia, so he learned from her next morning, had dropped into a doze as she was reading in bed one of those ponderous books from the London Library about Roman remains in the South of England, and it had slid on to the floor.

Thanks to the incessant spur and scourge of Lucia's presence, which prevented any of her workmen having a slack moment throughout the day, the house was ready incredibly soon for the reception of her furniture, and Cadman had been settled into a new garage and cottage near by, so that Foljambe's journeys between her home and Georgie's were much abbreviated. There was a short interlude during which fires blazed and hot water pipes rumbled in every room in Mallards for the drying of newly hung paper and of paint. Lucia chafed at this inaction, for there was nothing for her to do but carry coal and poke the fires, and then a second period of feverish activity set in. The vans of her stored furniture disgorged at the door and Georgie was continually on duty so that Lucia might consult his exquisite taste and follow her own.

"Yes, that bureau would look charming in the little parlour upstairs," she would say. "Charming! How right you are! But somehow I seem to see it in the garden-room. I think I must try it there first."

In fact Lucia saw almost everything in the garden-room, till a materialistic foreman told her that it would hold no more unless she meant it to be a lumber-room, in which case another table or two might be stacked there. She hurried out and found it was difficult to get into the room at all, and the piano was yet to come. Back came a procession of objects which were gradually dispersed among other rooms which hitherto had remained empty. Minor delays were caused by boxes of linen being carried out to the garden-room because she was sure they contained books, and boxes of books being put in the cellar because she was equally certain that they contained wine.

But by mid-April everything was ready for the house-warming lunch. All Tilling was bidden with the exception of quaint Irene, for she had another little disturbance with Elizabeth, and Lucia thought that their proximity was not a risk that should be taken on an occasion designed to be festive, for there were quite enough danger zones without that. Elizabeth at first was inclined to refuse her invitation: it would be too much of a heart-break to see her ancestral home in the hands of an alien, but she soon perceived that it would be a worse heart-break not to be able to comment bitterly on the vulgarity or the ostentation or the general uncomfortableness or whatever she settled should be the type of outrage which Lucia had committed in its hallowed precincts, and she steeled herself to accept. She had to steel herself also to something else, which it was no longer any use putting off; the revelation must be made, and, as in the case of Georgie's beard everybody had better know together. Get it over.

Elizabeth had fashioned a very striking costume for the occasion. One of Benjy's tiger-skins was clearly not sufficiently strong to stand the wear and tear of being trodden on, but parts of it were excellent still, and she had cut some strips out of it which she hoped were sound and with which she trimmed the edge of the green skirt which had been exciting such interest in Tilling, and the collar of the coat which went with it. On her head she wore a white woollen crochetted cap, just finished: a decoration of artificial campanulas, rendering its resemblance to the cap of a hydrocephalous baby less noticeable.

Elizabeth drew in her breath, wincing with a stab of mental anguish when she saw the dear old dingy panels in the hall, once adorned with her water-colour sketches, gleaming with garish white paint, and she and Benjy followed Grosvenor out to the garden-room. The spacious cupboard in the wall once concealed behind a false bookcase of shelves ranged with leather simulacra of book backs, "Elegant Extracts," and "Poems" and "Commentaries," had been converted into a real bookcase, and Lucia's library of standard and classical works filled it from top to bottom. A glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, Persian rugs had supplanted the tiger-skins and the walls were of dappled blue.

Lucia welcomed them.

"So glad you could come," she said. "Dear Elizabeth, what lovely fur! Tiger, surely."

"So glad you like it," said Elizabeth. "And sweet of you to ask us. So here I am in my dear garden-room again. Quite a change."

She gave Benjy's hand a sympathetic squeeze, for he must be feeling the desecration of his room, and in came the Padre and Evie, who after some mouselike squeals of rapture began to talk very fast.

"What a beautiful room!" she said. "I shouldn't have known it again, would you, Kenneth? How de do, Elizabeth. Bits of Major Benjy's tiger-skins, isn't it? Why that used to be the cupboard where you had been hoarding all sorts of things to eat in case the coal strike went on, and one day the door flew open and all the corned beef and dried apricots came bumping out. I remember it as if it was yesterday."

Lucia hastened to interrupt that embarrassing reminiscence.

"Dear Elizabeth, pray don't stand," she said. "There's a chair in the window by the curtain, just where you used to sit."

"Thanks, dear," said Elizabeth, continuing slowly to revolve, and take in the full horror of the scene. "I should like just to look round. So clean, so fresh."

Diva trundled in. Elizabeth's tiger-trimmings at once caught her eye, but as Elizabeth had not noticed her cropped hair the other day, she looked at them hard and was totally blind to them.

"You've made the room lovely, Lucia," she said. "I never saw such an improvement, did you, Elizabeth? What a library, Lucia! Why that used to be a cupboard behind a false bookcase. Of course, I remember--"

"And such a big chandelier," interrupted Elizabeth, fearful of another recitation of that frightful incident. "I should find it a little dazzling, but then my eyes are wonderful."

"Mr. and Mrs. Wyse," said Grosvenor at the door.

"Grosvenor, sherry at once," whispered Lucia, feeling the tension. "Nice of you to come, Susan. Buon giorno, Signor Sapiente."

Elizabeth, remembering her promise to Diva, just checked herself from saying "Bon jour, Monsieur Sage," and Mr. Wyse kissed Lucia's hand, Italian-fashion, as a proper reply to this elegant salutation, and put up his eyeglass.

"Genius!" he said. "Artistic genius! Never did I appreciate the beautiful proportions of this room before; it was smothered--ah, Mrs. Mapp-Flint! Such a pleasure, and a lovely costume if I may say so. That poem of Blake's: 'Tiger, tiger, burning bright.' I am writing to my sister Amelia to-day, and I must crave your permission to tell her about it. How she scolds me if I do not describe to her the latest fashions of the ladies of Tilling."

"A glass of sherry, dear Elizabeth," said Lucia.

"No, dear, not a drop, thanks. Poison to me," said Elizabeth fiercely.

Georgie arrived last. He, of course, had assisted at the transformation of the garden-room, but naturally he added his voice to the chorus of congratulation which Elizabeth found so trying.

"My dear, how beautiful you've got the room!" he said. "You'd have made a fortune over house-decorating. When I think what it was like--oh, good morning, Mrs. Major Benjy. What a charming frock, and how ingenious. It's bits of the tiger that used to be the hearthrug here. I always admired it so much."

But none of these compliments soothed Elizabeth's savagery, for the universal admiration of the garden-room was poisoning her worse than sherry. Then lunch was announced, and it was with difficulty she was persuaded to lead the way, so used was she to follow other ladies as hostess, into the dining-room. Then, urged to proceed, she went down the steps with astonishing alacrity, but paused in the hall as if uncertain where to go next.

"All these changes," she said. "Quite bewildering. Perhaps Lucia has turned another room into the dining-room."

"No, ma'am, the same room," said Grosvenor.

More shocks. There was a refectory table where her own round table had been, and a bust of Beethoven on the chimney-piece. The walls were of apple-green, and instead of being profusely hung with Elizabeth's best water-colours, there was nothing on them but a sconce or two for electric light. She determined to eat not more than one mouthful of any dish that might be offered her, and conceal the rest below her knife and fork. She sat down, stubbing her toes against the rail that ran round the table, and gave a little squeal of anguish.

"So stupid of me," she said. "I'm not accustomed to this sort of table. Ah, I see. I must put my feet over the little railing. That will be quite comfortable."

Lobster à la Riseholme was handed round, and a meditative silence followed in its wake, for who could help dwelling for a moment on the memory of how Elizabeth, unable to obtain the recipe by honourable means, stole it from Lucia's kitchen? She took a mouthful, and then, according to plan, hid the rest of it under her fork and fish-knife. But her mouth began to water for this irresistible delicacy, and she surreptitiously gobbled up the rest, and then with a wistful smile looked round the desecrated room.

"An admirable shade of green," said Mr. Wyse, bowing to the walls. "Susan, we must memorize this for the time when we do up our little salle à manger."

"Begorra, it's the true Oirish colour," said the Padre. "I canna mind me what was the way of it before."

"I can tell you, dear Padre," said Elizabeth eagerly. "Biscuit-colour, such a favourite tint of mine, and some of my little paintings on the walls. Quite plain and homely. Benjy, dear, how naughty you are: hock always punishes you."

"Dear lady," said Mr. Wyse, "surely not such nectar as we are now enjoying. How I should like to know the vintage. Delicious!"

Elizabeth turned to Georgie.

"You must be very careful of these treacherous spring days, Mr. Georgie," she said. "Shingles are terribly liable to return, and the second attack is always much worse than the first. People often lose their eyesight altogether."

"That's encouraging," said Georgie.

Luckily Elizabeth thought that she had now sufficiently impressed on everybody what a searing experience it was to her to re-visit her ancestral home, and see the melancholy changes that had been wrought on it, and under the spell of the nectar her extreme acidity mellowed. The nectar served another purpose also: it bucked her up for the anti-maternal revelation which she had determined to make that very day. She walked very briskly about the garden after lunch. She tripped across the lawn to the giardino segreto: she made a swift tour of the kitchen garden under her own steam, untowed by Benjy, and perceived that the ladies were regarding her with a faintly puzzled air: they were beginning to see what she meant them to see. Then with Diva she lightly descended the steps into the greenhouse and, diverted from her main purpose for the moment, felt herself bound to say a few words about Lucia's renovations in general, and the peach trees in particular.

"Poor things, they'll come to nothing," she said. "I could have told dear hostess that, if she had asked me. You might as well plant cedars of Lebanon. And the dining-room, Diva! The colour of green apples, enough to give anybody indigestion before you begin! The glaring white paint in the hall! The garden-room! I feel that the most, and so does poor Benjy. I was prepared for something pretty frightful, but not as bad as this!"

"Don't agree," said Diva. "It's all beautiful. Should hardly have known it again. You'd got accustomed to see the house all dingy, Elizabeth, and smothered in cobwebs and your own water-colours and muck--"

That was sufficient rudeness for Elizabeth to turn her back on Diva, but it was for a further purpose that she whisked round and positively twinkled up those steep steps again. Diva gasped. For weeks now Elizabeth had leant on Benjy if there were steps to mount, and had walked with a slow and dignified gait, and all of a sudden she had resumed her nimble and rapid movement. And then the light broke. Diva felt she would burst unless she at once poured her interpretation of these phenomena into some feminine ear, and she hurried out of the greenhouse nearly tripping up on the steps that Elizabeth had so lightly ascended.

The rest of the party had gathered again in the garden-room, and by some feminine intuition Diva perceived in the eyes of the other women the knowledge which had just dawned on her. Presently the Mapp-Flints said good-bye, and Mr. Wyse, who, with the obtuseness of a man, had noticed nothing, was pressing Elizabeth to take the Royce and go for a drive. Then came the first-hand authentic disclosure.

"So good of you," said she, "but Benjy and I have promised ourselves a long walk. Lovely party, Lucia: some day you must come and see your old house. Just looked at your peach trees: I hope you'll have quantities of fruit. Come along, Benjy, or there won't be time for our tramp. Good-bye, sweet garden-room."

They went out, and instantly there took place a species of manœuvre which partook of the nature of a conjuring trick and a conspiracy. Evie whispered something to her Padre, and he found that he had some urgent district-visiting to do: Susan had a quiet word with her husband, and he recollected that he must get off his letter to Contessa Amelia Faraglione by the next post and Lucia told Georgie that if he could come back in half-an-hour she would be at leisure to try that new duet. The four ladies therefore were left, and Evie and Diva, as soon as the door of the garden-room was shut, broke into a crisp, unrehearsed dialogue of alternate sentences, like a couple of clergymen intoning the Commination service.

"She's given it up," chanted Diva. "She nipped up those steep steps from the greenhouse, as if it was on the flat."

"But such a sell, isn't it," cried Evie. "It would have been exciting. Ought we to say anything about it to her? She must feel terribly disappointed--"

"Not a bit," said Diva. "I don't believe she ever believed it. Wanted us to believe it: that's all. Most deceitful."

"And Kenneth had been going through the Churching of Women."

"And she had no end of drives in your motor, Susan. False pretences, I call it. You'd never have lent her it at all, unless--"

"And all that nutritious honey from the Contessa."

"And I think she's taken in the old green skirt again, but the strips of tiger-skin make it hard to be certain."

"And I'm sure she was crocheting a baby-cap in white wool, and she must have pulled a lot of it out and begun again. She was wearing it."

"And while I think of it," said Diva in parenthesis, "there'll be a fine mess of tiger hairs on your dining-room carpet, Lucia. I saw clouds of them fly when she banged her foot."

Susan Wyse had not had any chance at present of joining in this vindictive chant. Sometimes she had opened her mouth to speak, but one of the others had been quicker. At this point, as Diva and Evie were both a little out of breath, she managed to contribute.

"I don't grudge her her drives," she said, "but I do feel strongly about that honey. It was very special honey. My sister-in-law, the Contessa, took it daily when she was expecting her baby, and it weighed eleven pounds."

"Eleven pounds of honey? O dear me, that is a lot!" said Evie.

"No, the baby--"

The chant broke out afresh.

"And so rude about the sherry," said Diva, "saying it was poison."

"And pretending not to know where the dining-room was."

"And saying that the colour of the walls gave her indigestion like green apples. She's enough to give anybody indigestion herself."

The torrent spent itself: Lucia had been sitting with eyes half-closed and eyebrows drawn together as if trying to recollect something, and then took down a volume from her bookshelves of classical literature and rapidly turned over the pages. She appeared to find what she wanted, for she read on in silence a moment, and then replaced the book with a far-away sigh.

"I was saying to Georgie the other day," she said, "how marvellously modern Aristophanes was. I seemed to remember a scene in one of his plays--the Thesmophoriazusae--where a somewhat similar situation occurred. A woman, a dear, kind creature really, of middle-age or a little more, had persuaded her friends (or thought she had) that she was going to have a baby. Such Attic wit--there is nothing in English like it. I won't quote the Greek to you, but the conclusion was that it was only a 'wind-egg.' Delicious phrase, really untranslatable, but that is what it comes to. Shan't we all leave it at that? Poor dear Elizabeth! Just a wind-egg. So concise."

She gave a little puff with her pursed lips, as if blowing the wind-egg away.

Rather awed by this superhuman magnanimity the conductors of the Commination service dispersed, and Lucia went into the dining-room to see if there was any serious deposit of tiger-hairs on her new carpet beside Elizabeth's place. Certainly there were some, though not quite the clouds of which Diva had spoken. Probably then that new pretty decoration would not be often seen again since it was moulting so badly. "Everything seems to go wrong with the poor soul," thought Lucia in a spasm of most pleasurable compassion, "owing to her deplorable lack of foresight. She bought Siriami without ascertaining whether it paid dividends: she tried to make us all believe that she was going to have a baby without ascertaining whether there was the smallest reason to suppose she would, and with just the same blind recklessness she trimmed the old green skirt with tiger without observing how heavily it would moult when she moved."

She returned to the garden-room for a few minutes' intensive practice of the duet she and Georgie would read through when he came back, and seating herself at the piano she noticed a smell as of escaping gas. Yet it could not be coal gas, for there was none laid on now to the garden-room, the great chandelier and other lamps being lit by electricity. She wondered whether this smell was paint not quite dry yet, for during the renovation of the house her keen perception had noticed all kinds of smells incident to decoration: there was the smell of pear-drops in one room, and that was varnish: there was the smell of advanced corruption in another, and that was the best size: there was the smell of elephants in the cellar and that was rats. So she thought no more about it, practised for a quarter of an hour, and then hurried away from the piano when she saw Georgie coming down the street, so that he should not find her poaching in the unseen suite by Mozart.

Georgie was reproachful.

"It was tarsome of you," he said, "to send me away when I longed to hear what you all thought about Elizabeth. I knew what it meant when I saw how she skipped and pranced and had taken in the old green skirt again--"

"Georgie, I never noticed that," said Lucia. "Are you sure?"

"Perfectly certain, and how she was going for a tramp with Benjy. The baby's off. I wonder if Benjy was an accomplice--"

"Dear Georgie!" remonstrated Lucia.

Georgie blushed at the idea that he could have meant anything so indelicate.

"Accomplice to the general deception was what I was going to say when you interrupted. I think we've all been insulted. We ought to mark our displeasure."

Lucia had no intention of repeating her withering comment about the wind-egg. It was sure to get round to him.

"Why be indignant with the poor thing?" she said. "She has been found out and that's quite sufficient punishment. As to her making herself so odious at lunch and doing her best, without any success, to spoil my little party, that was certainly malicious. But about the other, Georgie, let us remember what a horrid job she had to do. I foresaw that, you may remember, and expressed my wish that, when it came, we should all be kind to her. She must have skipped and pranced, as you put it, with an aching heart, and certainly with aching legs. As for poor Major Benjy, I'm sure he was putty in her hands, and did just what she told him. How terribly a year's marriage has aged him, has it not?"

"I should have been dead long ago," said Georgie.

Lucia looked round the room.

"My dear, I'm so happy to be back in this house," she said, "and to know it's my own, that I would forgive Elizabeth almost anything. Now let us have an hour's harmony."

They went to the piano where, most carelessly, Lucia had left on the music-rack the duet they were to read through for the first time. But Georgie did not notice it. He began to sniff.

"Isn't there a rather horrid smell of gas?" he asked.

"I thought I smelled something," said Lucia, successfully whisking off the duet. "But the foreman of the gasworks is in the house now, attending to the stove in the kitchen. I'll get him to come and smell too."

Lucia sent the message by Grosvenor, and an exceedingly cheerful young man bounded into the room. He smelt, too, and burst into a merry laugh.

"No, ma'am, that's not my sort of gas," he said gaily. "That'll be sewer gas, that will. That's the business of the town surveyor and he's my brother. I'll ring him up at once and get him to come and see to it."

"Please do," said Lucia.

"He'll nip up in a minute to oblige Mrs. Lucas," said the gasman. "Dear me, how we all laughed at Miss Irene's procession, if you'll excuse my mentioning it. But this is business now, not pleasure. Horrid smell that. It won't do at all."

Lucia and Georgie moved away from the immediate vicinity of the sewer, and presently with a rap on the door, a second young man entered exactly like the first.

"A pleasure to come and see into your little trouble, ma'am," he said. "In the window my brother said. Ah, now I've got it."

He laughed very heartily.

"No, no," he said. "Georgie's made a blooming error--beg your pardon, sir, I mean my brother--Let's have him in."

In came Georgie of the gasworks.

"You've got something wrong with your nosepiece, Georgie," said the sewer man. "That's coal gas, that is."

"Get along, Percy!" said Georgie. "Sewers. Your job, my lad."

Lucia assumed her most dignified manner.

"Your immediate business, gentlemen," she said, "is to ascertain whether I am living (i) in a gas pipe or (ii) in a main drain."

Shouts of laughter.

"Well, there's a neat way to put it," said Percy appreciatively. "We'll tackle it for you, ma'am. We must have a joint investigation, Georgie, till we've located it. It must be percolating through the soil and coming up through the floor. You send along two of your fellows in the morning, and I'll send two of the Corporation men, and we'll dig till we find out. Bet you a shilling it's coal gas."

"I'll take you. Sewers," said Georgie.

"But I can't live in a room that's full of either," said Lucia. "One may explode and the other may poison me."

"Don't you worry about that, ma'am," said Georgie. "I'll guarantee you against an explosion, if it's my variety of gas. Not near up to inflammatory point."

"And I've workmen, ma'am," said Percy, "who spend their days revelling in a main drain, you may say, and live to ninety. We'll start to dig in the road outside in the morning, Georgie and me, for that's where it must come from. No one quite knows where the drains are in this old part of the town, but we'll get on to their scent if it's sewers, and then tally-ho. Good afternoon, ma'am. All O.K."

At an early hour next morning the combined exploration began. Up came the pavement outside the garden-room and the cobbles of the street, and deeper all day grew the chasm, while the disturbed earth reeked even more strongly of the yet unidentified smell. The news of what was in progress reached the High Street at the marketing hour, and the most discouraging parallels to this crisis were easily found. Diva had an uncle who had died in the night from asphyxiation owing to a leak of coal gas, and Evie, not to be outdone in family tragedies, had an aunt, who, when getting into a new house (ominous), noticed a "faint" smell in the dining-room, and died of blood-poisoning in record time. But Diva put eucalyptus on her handkerchief and Evie camphor and both hurried up to the scene of the excavation. To Elizabeth this excitement was a god-send, for she had been nervous as to her reception in the High Street after yesterday's revelation, but found that everyone was entirely absorbed in the new topic. Personally she was afraid (though hoping she might prove to be wrong) that the clearing out of the cellars at Mallards might somehow have tapped a reservoir of a far deadlier quality of vapour than either coal gas or sewer gas. Benjy, having breathed the polluted air of the garden-room yesterday, thought it wise not to go near the plague-spot at all, but after gargling with a strong solution of carbolic, fled to the links, with his throat burning very uncomfortably, to spend the day in the aseptic sea air. Georgie (not Percy's gay brother) luckily remembered that he had bought a gas-mask during the war, in case the Germans dropped pernicious bombs on Riseholme, and Foljambe found it and cleared out the cobwebs. He adjusted it (tarsome for the beard) and watched the digging from a little distance, looking like an elephant whose trunk had been cut off very short. The Padre came in the character of an expert, for he could tell sewer gas from coal gas, begorra, with a single sniff, but he had scarcely taken a proper sniff when the church clock struck eleven, and he had to hurry away to read matins. Irene, smoking a pipe, set up her easel on the edge of the pit and painted a fine impressionist sketch of navvies working in a crater. Then, when the dinner-hour arrived, the two gay brothers, Gas and Drains, leaped like Quintus Curtius into the chasm and shovelled feverishly till their workmen returned, in order that no time should be lost in arriving at a solution and the settlement of their bet.

As the excavation deepened Lucia with a garden-spud, raked carefully among the baskets of earth which were brought up, and soon had a small heap of fragments of pottery, which she carried into Mallards. Georgie was completely puzzled at this odd conduct, and, making himself understood with difficulty through the gas-mask, asked her what she was doing.

Lucia looked round to make sure she would not be overheard.

"Roman pottery without a doubt," she whispered. "I am sure they will presently come across some remains of my Roman villa--"

A burst of cheering came from the bowels of the earth. One of the gas workmen with a vigorous stroke of his pick at the side of the pit close to the garden-room brought down a slide of earth, and exposed the mouth of a tiled aperture some nine inches square.

"Drains and sewers it is," he cried, "and out we go," and he and his comrade downed tools and clambered out of the pit, leaving the town surveyor's men to attend to the job now demonstrated to be theirs.

The two gay brethren instantly jumped into the excavation. The aperture certainly did look like a drain, but just as certainly there was nothing coming down it. Percy put his nose into it, and inhaled deeply as a Yogi, drawing a long breath through his nostrils.

"Clean as a whistle, Georgie," he said, "and sweet as a sugar-plum. Drains it may have been, old man, but not in the sense of our bet. We were looking for something active and stinkful--"

"But drains it is, Per," said Georgie.

A broken tile had fallen from the side of it, and Percy picked it up.

"There's been no sewage passing along that for a sight of years," he said. "Perhaps it was never a drain at all."

Into Lucia's mind there flashed an illuminating hypocaustic idea.

"Please give me that tile," she called out.

"Certainly, ma'am," said Percy, reaching up with it, "and have a sniff at it yourself. Nothing there to make your garden-room stink. You might lay that on your pillow--"

Percy's sentence was interrupted by a second cheer from his two men who had gone on working, and they also downed tools.

"'Ere's the gas pipe at last," cried one. "Get going at your work again, gas brigade!"

"And lumme, don't it stink," said the other. "Leaking fit to blow up the whole neighbourhood. Soil's full of it."

They clambered out of the excavation, and stood with the gas workers to await further orders.

"Have a sniff at that, Georgie," said Per encouragingly, "and then hand me a bob. That's something like a smell, that is. Put that on your pillow and you'll sleep so as you'll never wake again."

Georgie, though crestfallen, retained his sense of fairness, and made no attempt to deny that the smell that now spread freely from the disengaged pipe was the same as that which filled the garden-room.

"Seems like it," he said, "and there's your bob, not but what the other was a drain. We'll find the leak and have it put to rights now."

"And then I hope you'll fill up that great hole," said Lucia.

"No time to-day, ma'am," said Georgie. "I'll see if I can spare a couple of men to-morrow, or next day at the latest."

Lucia's Georgie, standing on the threshold of Mallards, suddenly observed that the excavation extended right across the street, and that he was quite cut off from the Cottage. He pulled off his gas-mask.

"But, look, how am I to get home?" he asked in a voice of acute lamentation. "I can't climb down into that pit and up on the other side."

Great laughter from the brethren.

"Well, sir, that is awkward," said Per. "I'm afraid you'll have to nip round by the High Street and up the next turning to get to your little place. But it will be all right, come the day after to-morrow."

Lucia carried her tile reverently into the house, and beckoned to Georgie.

"That square-tiled opening confirms all I conjectured about the lines of foundation in the cellar," she said. "Those wonderful Romans used to have furnaces underneath the floors of their houses and their temples--I've been reading about it--and the hot air was conveyed in tiled flues through the walls to heat them. Undoubtedly this was a hot-air flue and not a drain at all."

"That would be interesting," said Georgie. "But the pipe seemed to run through the earth, not through a wall. At least there was no sign of a wall that I saw."

"The wall may have perished at that point," said Lucia after only a moment's thought. "I shall certainly find it further on in the garden, where I must begin digging at once. But not a word to anybody yet. Without doubt, Georgie, a Roman villa stood here or perhaps a temple. I should be inclined to say a temple. On the top of the hill, you know: just where they always put temples."

Dusk had fallen before the leak in the gas pipe was repaired, and a rope was put up round the excavation and hung with red lanterns. Had the pit been less deep, or the sides of it less precipitous, Lucia would have climbed down into it and continued her study of the hot-air flue. She took the tile to her bathroom and scrubbed it clean. Close to the broken edge of it there were stamped the letters S.P.

She dined alone that night and went back to the garden-room from which the last odours of gas had vanished. She searched in vain in her books from the London Library for any mention of Tilling having once been a Roman town, but its absence made the discovery more important, as likely to prove a new chapter in the history of Roman Britain. Eagerly she turned over the pages: there were illustrations of pottery which fortified her conviction that her fragments were of Roman origin: there was a picture of a Roman tile as used in hot-air flues which was positively identical with her specimen. Then what could S.P. stand for? She ploughed through a list of inscriptions found in the South of England and suddenly gave a great crow of delight. There was one headed S.P.Q.R., which being interpreted meant Senatus Populusque Romanus, "the Senate and the People of Rome." Her instinct had been right: a private villa would never have borne those imperial letters; they were reserved for state-erected buildings, such as temples. . . . It said so in her book.