Free Kept by D. J. Taylor Page B

around by currant bushes, that abutted the back parts of the house. Here some faint signs of human activity declared themselves. A man in a shabby suit of green, who might have been a gamekeeper, one foot braced against a tree stump, was sharpening the points of a trap with a little whetstone, while a maid with short yellow hair was taking in washing that had been spread to dry over the bushes. Dewar, staring about him, thought the scene a very dreary one—there were old harnesses piled up by the porch that seemed as if they had been there everso many years, and what looked like a fox’s pelt nailed up on the barn door—but he approved of the servant girl, who nodded unblushingly to Dunbar as he went by.
    “That’s a nice-looking girl,” Dunbar observed as they passed out of earshot. “And here is old Randall. How are you, Mr. Randall? Tolerably well, I take it?”
    Dewar, still registering the first impressions of a dozen other things that he saw, could not separate the butler’s face from his surroundings. A row of pewter pots on the long sideboard behind him; a line of prints on the further wall, over which the soft rays of firelight played, a sheet of newspaper pale in the murk of an armchair—all these seemed to him elements of Mr. Randall’s being and his worn old face. An elderly woman with shiny black hair looked up from a chair by the fire, where she sat stitching a cushion cover, and Dewar, thinking that some gesture was expected from him, touched his hat. The woman turned her head away, whether pleased or offended he could not tell.
    “Quite an adventure,” Dunbar was saying to Mr. Randall, as they proceeded into a wide, panelled hallway where portraits hung in dirty gilt frames. “But there is not much sport left in these isles. Why, Mr. Cumming says he thinks of taking his guns to Africa.” A tall footman carrying a tray before him came hurrying down the staircase, bobbed his head to Mr. Randall as he passed and disappeared into the silence they had left behind them, and Dewar thought of the grocer’s shop in Hoxton, with the great blinds drawn low over the window and the drift of white dust upon the lids of the flour barrels, and the two assistants all attentive behind the counter, and the pleasure it had been to command them.
    A staircase of twenty-seven steps, a serpentine corridor whose lamps had not been lit, a man’s face, hard and accusing, staring out at him from a picture frame, a closed door from whose lintel soft light gleamed—all this Dewar saw, and did not see, for his mind was lost in the airiest speculations over what lay around him: the footman with his tray, the casket in his hand, the murmur of a voice, whether above or beneath him he could not tell, elsewhere in the house. The door from behind which the soft light glowed having been wrested openfor him by Mr. Randall, he tumbled into the room over a ridge in the carpet, regained his footing, assured himself that the casket was secure in his grasp and then looked around him.
    Dunbar, in whom the strangeness of their surroundings produced no obvious disquiet, was already on his way towards the wide desk that lay at an angle to the fireplace. Dewar followed dutifully behind him. In the course of his commercial career he had attended upon many gentlemen in their studies—he had brought in his little bill, defended it, conceded alterations to it and negotiated its settlement—but he was conscious that he had attended upon no such person as Mr. Dixey and in no such surroundings. The gentlemen of Hoxton had sat, for the most part, in small, ill-favoured rooms with cash boxes on their desks, whose windows afforded a view of mean little gardens and stunted trees. Mr. Dixey, alternatively, sat in a great wide room before a high window affording glimpses of a receding gravel drive and an ornamental pool, around which the wind whistled and careened, and on his desk there lay not a cash box but what appeared to be a human skull. He