THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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home-truths at her husband and son like a minute gun, in a low, scornful voice. This habit of hers was rather embarrassing at times. At dinner, for instance, that evening, when he had been airing his musical views to Edith as usual, she had suddenly said,—
"You don't know how silly you're making yourself, Bob. Everyone knows that you can't distinguish one note from another!"
Though Edith felt on fairly intimate terms with the family, there were occasions when she didn't quite know how to behave. She attempted to continue her conversation with the Baronet, but Lady Grantham would not allow it.
"Edith, you know he doesn't know 'God save the Queen' when he hears it. You'll only make him conceited."
"She's only like this when she's here, Miss Staines," remarked Frank, alluding to his mother in the third person. "She's awfully polite when she's in London; she was to you the first week you were here, you know, but she can't keep it up. She's had a bad education. Poor dear!"
"Oh, you are a queer family," said Edith sometimes. "You really ought to have no faults left, any of you, you are so wonderfully candid to each other."
"Some people think mother so charming," continued Frank. "I never yet found out what her particular charm is."
On this occasion, when Edith mentioned that Dodo was coming to stay with her, Lady Grantham sounded truce at once, and left her unnatural offspring alone.
"I wish you'd ask me to come and stay with you, too," said she presently. "Bob and Frank will be going off partridge shooting all day, and Nora and I will be all alone, and they'll be sleepy in the evening, and snore in the drawing-room."
"I'd make her promise to be polite, Miss Staines," remarked Frank.
"I want to meet Lady Chesterford very much," she continued. "I hear she is so charming. She's a friend of yours; isn't she, Nora? Why have you never asked her to stay here? What's the good of having friends if you don't trot them out?"
"Oh, I've asked her more than once, mother," said Miss Grantham, "but she couldn't ever come."
"She's heard about ma at home," said Frank.
"I'm backing you, Frank," remarked the Baronet, who was still rather sore after his recent drubbing. "Go in and win, my boy."
"Bob, you shouldn't encourage Frank to be rude," said Lady Grantham. "He's bad enough without that."
"That's what comes of having a mamma with foreign manners. There's no word for 'thank you' in Spanish, is there, mother? Were you here with Charlie Broxton, Miss Staines? She told him he didn't brush his hair, or his teeth, and she hated little men. Charlie's five feet three. He was here as my friend."
"Do come," said Edith, when this skirmishing was over. "Nora will come with you, of course. We shall be only four. I don't suppose there will be anyone else at home."
"Hurrah," said Frank, "we'll have a real good time, father. No nagging in the evenings. We won't dress, and we'll smoke in the drawing-room."
"I long to see Dodo again," remarked Miss Grantham. "She's one of the few people I never get at all tired of."
"I know her by sight," said Lady Grantham. "She was talking very loud to Prince Waldenech when I saw her. It was at the Brettons'."
"Dodo can talk loud when she wants," remarked Miss Grantham. "Did you see her dance that night, mother? I believe she was splendid."
"She was doing nothing else," replied Lady Grantham.
"Oh, but by herself," said Edith. "She took a select party away, and tucked up her skirts and sent them all into raptures."
"That's so like Dodo," said Miss Grantham. "She never does anything badly. If she does it at all, it's good of its kind."
"I should like to know her," said Lady Grantham. The remark was characteristic.
Lady Grantham returned to the subject of Dodo in the course of the evening.
"Everyone says she is so supremely successful," she said to Edith. "What's her method?"
All successful people, according to Lady Grantham, had a method. They found out by experience what rôle suited them best, and they played it assiduously. To do her justice, there was a good deal of truth in it with regard to the people among whom she moved.
"Her method is purely to be dramatic, in the most unmistakable way," said Edith, after some consideration. "She is almost always picturesque. To all appearance her only method is to have no method. She seems to say and do anything that comes into her head, but all she says and does is rather striking. She can accommodate herself to nearly any circumstances. She is never colourless; and she is not quite like anybody else I ever met. She has an immense amount of vitality, and she is almost always doing something. It's hopeless to try and describe her; you will see. She is beautiful, unscrupulous, dramatic, warm-hearted, cold-blooded, and a hundred other things."
"Oh, you don't do her justice, Edith," remarked Miss Grantham. "She's much more than all that. She has got genius, or something very like it. I think Dodo gives me a better idea of the divine fire than anyone else."
"Then the divine fire resembles something not at all divine on occasions," observed Edith. "I don't think that the divine fire talks so much nonsense either."
Lady Grantham got up.
"I expect to be disappointed," she said. "Geniuses are nearly always badly dressed, or they wear spectacles, or they are very short. However, I shall come. Come, Nora, it's time to go to bed."
Lady Grantham never said "good-night" or "good-morning" to the members of her family. "They all sleep like hogs," she said, "and they are very cheerful in the morning. They get on quite well enough without my good wishes. It is very plebeian to be cheerful in the morning."
Although, as I have mentioned before, Sir Robert was an adept at choosing his conversation to suit his audience, there was one subject on which he considered that he might talk to anyone, and in which the whole world must necessarily take an intelligent and eager interest. The Romans used to worship the bones and spirits of their ancestors, and Sir Robert, perhaps because he was undoubtedly of Roman imperial blood, kept up the same custom. Frank used irreverently to call it "family prayers."
To know how the Granthams were connected with the Campbells, and the Vere de Veres, and the Stanleys, and the Montmorencies, and fifty other bluest strains, seemed to Sir Robert to be an essential part of a liberal education.
To try to be late for family prayers was hopeless. They were at no fixed hour, and were held as many times during the day as necessary. Sometimes they were cut down to a sentence or two; suggested by the mention of some ducal name; sometimes they involved a lengthy, pious orgie in front of the portraits. To-night Edith was distinctly to blame, for she deliberately asked the name of the artist who had painted the picture hanging over the door into the library.
Sir Robert, according to custom, seemed rather bored by the subject. "Let's see," he said; "I've got no head for names. I think that's the one, of my great-grandfather, isn't it? A tall, handsome man in peer's robes?"
"Now he's off." This sotto voce from Frank, who was reading Badminton on Cover Shooting.
Sir Robert drew his hand over his beautiful moustache once or twice.
"Ah, yes, how stupid of me. That's the Reynolds, of course. Reynolds was quite unknown when he did that portrait. Lord Linton, that was my great-grand-father—he was made an earl after that portrait was taken—saw a drawing in a little shop in Piccadilly, which took his fancy, and he inquired the name of the artist. The shopman didn't know; but he said that the young man came very often with drawings to sell, and he gave him a trifle for them. Well, Lord Linton sent for him, and gave him a commission to do his portrait, had it exhibited, and young Reynolds came into notice. The portrait came into possession of my grandfather, who, as you know, was a younger son; don't know how, and there it is."
"It's a beautiful picture," remarked Edith.
"Ah, you like it? Lord Sandown, my first cousin, was