Part 14 (2/2)

'Don't you think that's a good place to have a gong?' he asked, raising his voice because the gong, which had begun quietly, was getting rapidly louder. 'Then when you're upstairs in your sitting-room you'll hear it just as distinctly as if you were downstairs. Vera----'

But what he was going to say about Vera was drowned this time in the increasing fury of the gong.

'Why doesn't she leave off?' Lucy tried to call out to him, straining her voice to its utmost, for the maid was very good at the gong and was now extracting the dreadfullest din out of it.

'Eh?' shouted Wemyss.

In the dining-room, whither they were preceded by the parlourmaid, who at last had left off standing still and had opened the door for them, as Lucy could hear the gong continuing to be beaten though m.u.f.fled now by doors and distance, she again said, 'Why doesn't she leave off?'

Wemyss took out his watch.

'She will in another fifty seconds,' he said.

Lucy's mouth and eyebrows became all inquiry.

'It is beaten for exactly two and a half minutes before every meal,' he explained.

'Oh?' said Lucy. 'Even when we're visibly collected?'

'She doesn't know that.'

'But she saw us.'

'But she doesn't know it officially.'

'Oh,' said Lucy.

'I had to make that rule,' said Wemyss, arranging his knives and forks more accurately beside his plate, 'because they would leave off beating it almost as soon as they'd begun, and then Vera was late and her excuse was that she hadn't heard. For a time after that I used to have it beaten all up the stairs right to the door of her sitting-room. Isn't it a fine gong? Listen----' And he raised his hand.

'_Very_ fine,' said Lucy, who was thoroughly convinced there wasn't a finer, more robust gong in existence.

'There. Time's up,' he said, as three great strokes were followed by a blessed silence.

He pulled out his watch again. 'Let's see. Yes--to the tick. You wouldn't believe the trouble I had to get them to keep time.'

'It's wonderful,' said Lucy.

The dining-room was a narrow room full of a table. It had a window facing west and a window facing north, and in spite of the uninterrupted expanses of plate gla.s.s was a bleak, dark room. But then the weather was bleak and dark, and one saw such a lot of it out of the two big windows as one sat at the long table and watched the rolling clouds blowing straight towards one from the north-west; for Lucy's place was facing the north window, on Wemyss's left hand. Wemyss sat at the end of the table facing the west window. The table was so long that if Lucy had sat in the usual seat of wives, opposite her husband, communication would have been difficult,--indeed, as she remarked, she would have disappeared below the dip of the horizon.

'I like a long table,' said Wemyss to this. 'It looks so hospitable.'

'Yes,' said Lucy a little doubtfully, but willing to admit that its length at least showed a readiness for hospitality. 'I suppose it does.

Or it would if there were people all round it.'

'People? You don't mean to say you want people already?'

'Good heavens no,' said Lucy hastily.' Of course I don't. Why, of course, Everard, I didn't mean that,' she added, laying her hand on his and smiling at him so as to dispel the gathering cloud on his face; and once more she flung all thoughts of the parlourmaid to the winds. 'You know I don't want a soul in the world but you.'

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