Chapter II

"Mr Haddon has left, sir," said the footman, standing by Claude's bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. "Here is a note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing."

And he handed it on a salver.

Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The Northamptonshire sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his chaperon had already "left," possibly to be a "half-back," or something equally ridiculous, at a local football match in a neighbouring village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped to the very manifest spring.

"DEAR BOY,--Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are
never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to
be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson
better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her
cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all
right. Study hard.--Yours ever,

JIM."

Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--

"Jimmy writes a very dull letter."

At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep, instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.

"Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a boiled egg and a bit of toast?" he asked himself as he entered the breakfast-room.

Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed high, and void of cap.

"You are very punctual," she said with a smile. "I was going to send up to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy has run away and left us together, I find."

"Yes, Jimmy has run away," Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the plot.

"I hope you will not be bored," Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. "But, indeed, I think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country."

Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.

"You don't agree with me?" she asked.

"I cannot disagree, at least," he said; "because, to tell the truth, I am always in towns."

"Probably you are happy there then," she rejoined, with a briskness that was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.

But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this utterly erroneous belief.

"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."

Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly acute, scrutiny.

"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not suffered enough."

"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."

"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done. I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so. There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a quarter of the different departments."

"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"

"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It is a most delightful time."

Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and more surprised.

"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.

"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."

"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try everything, of course. That is one's duty."

"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of facts."

"Such as what books?"

"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"

"They ignore nothing."

"Not even duty?"

"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."

Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon. She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to the egg.

"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive me--sometimes the young devil of the day."

"I am decadent, Miss Haddon," Claude said with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.

The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy interest.

"How exciting," she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with a completely natural air. "You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy isn't one, is he?"

"Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for lunch."

"Do tell me--how does one do it?"

She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown in one of her own orchards.

Claude raised his dark eyebrows.

"I beg your pardon?"

"How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all, about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and draw, and smoke, and think, and--and eat--"

She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.

"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me, teach me to be a decadent."

"But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and stopped just in time. "I mean--er--"

He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.

"Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.

"Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully.

He was remarking to himself:--

"Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!"

She was murmuring in her mind: "I have always heard they have no sense of humour!"