Free The Shocking Miss Anstey by Robert Neill

moment, though, I’m more interested in Barford’s dinner. He has some uncommonly good port, I may tell you.’
    They had crossed the park, and they were emerging from the green shade of the trees into the blaze of sunshine on a broad sweep of gravel that fronted the house. They swung in a wide semicircle as a liveried footman came solemnly down the steps, and from somewhere at the side of the house a groom came running to take the horses’ heads.
    ‘Here’s Barford,’ said Wickham.
    Another man, tall and thin, in white pantaloons and a green tail-coat, had come from the house as the chariot came to a halt by the steps. Wickham spoke with his hand on the chariot door.
    ‘Just bear in mind,’ he said, ‘he’s straight out of the last century. What they used to call a man of sensibility.’
    He stepped out, standing bareheaded in the sunlight as the older man came down the steps. Then he spoke cheerfully.
    ‘Good-day, sir. Reporting back--and here’s your chariot. I hope you’ll like it.’
    ‘So do I.’ It was the pleasant easy voice of the man of taste and of the world. ‘I’ll see it better when they’ve washed some dust off it.’
    ‘Not to be avoided, sir. But meantime . . .’ He turned for a moment. ‘I’ve a friend with me, from the Navy. We once tried beach warfare together. Permit me--Captain Grant.’
    ‘You’ re very welcome, sir.’ It came at once, with the practised affability of the diplomat. ‘Do you stay with John?’
    ‘For a few days, my lord.’
    ‘Then I shall hope to see you here again. But for the moment...’ He glanced quickly at Wickham. ‘You’ll stay to dine with me?’
    ‘We should like to. But is Mary here?’
    ‘No. She went home this morning. Said she must have the house ready for you.’
    ‘She doesn’t know I’ve a guest.’
    ‘Then I’ll send across to tell her. However . . .’ He pulled his watch from his fob and glanced quickly at it. ‘A bottle of sherry, I think, before we dine. There’s just time for it. And thank you for the chariot.’
    He stood for another moment on the steps, slim and straight, contemplating the chariot and carrying easily his sixty years and more. He could have been called good-looking, a man of quality in every sense, dignified and confident, with fine intelligent eyes and a lean spare vigour that told of interests and an abstemious life. There was shrewdness in his clear sharp face, and certainly a worldly sagacity; but then, as he turned for an instant to look straight at Grant, there was a sudden glimpse of something deeper.
    ‘I’m glad to see you, sir,’ he said again. ‘I--have some ties with the Navy. Pray come in.’ For an instant his eyes seemed tired and sad, but then he turned briskly to the groom, who was still standing with the horses. ‘See these beasts fed. Then dinner for the postboy. Now, if you please.’
    He led up the steps, his guests on either side of him, and into a hall that was as classical as the portico, a vaulted ceiling of ornamental plaster carried on fluted Doric columns, a stairway that went sweeping left and right, and tall mahogany doors behind the columns. Sherry was in his library, where pilasters graced the plastered walls, and three tall windows looked out to a velvet lawn fringed with cedars. Then he took them to dinner, set on a table of rich mahogany that could have seated twenty, in a softly carpeted room whose windows looked across the park to an ornamental lake with a miniature of a Grecian temple on its further bank. Dinner was worthy of the room, perfectly cooked, perfectly served by a butler and three young parlour-maids. It was not a heavy meal, for which their host politely apologized, saying that he had seen enough of mottled noses and found it better, in these days, to be sparing of food. There was a turbot with lobster sauce, a pair of boiled fowls, a ham, a saddle of mutton, a pudding, a syllabub, and fruit; with madeira, claret, and champagne; the port and the coffee