Satterthwaite, but the lady never let him enter her private rooms for fear of infection. He had to content himself with nursing a growing adoration for Father Consett. This priest, with an enormous mouth, high cheek bones, untidy black hair, a broad face that never looked too clean and waving hands that always looked too dirty, never kept still for a moment, and had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old–fashioned English novels of Irish life. He had a perpetual laugh, like the noise made by a steam round–about. He was, in short, a saint, and Mr Bayliss knew it, though he didn’t know how. Ultimately, and with the financial assistance of Mrs Satterthwaite, Mr Bayliss became almoner to Father Consett, adopted the rule of St. Vincent de Paul and wrote some very admirable, if decorative, devotional verse.
They proved thus a very happy, innocent party. For Mrs Satterthwaite interested herself—it was the only interest she had—in handsome, thin and horribly disreputable young men. She would wait for them, or send her car to wait for them, at the gaol gates. She would bring their usually admirable wardrobes up to date and give them enough money to have a good time. When contrary to all expectations—but it happened more often than not!—they turned out well, she was lazily pleased. Sometimes she sent them away to a gay spot with a priest who needed a holiday; sometimes she had them down to her place in the west of England.
So they were a pleasant company and all very happy. Lobscheid contained one empty hotel with large verandahs and several square farmhouses, white with grey beams, painted in the gables with bouquets of blue and yellow flowers or with scarlet huntsmen shooting at purple stags. They were like gay cardboard boxes set down in fields of long grass; then the pinewoods commenced and ran, solemn, brown and geometric for miles up and down hill. The peasant girls wore black velvet waistcoats, white bodices, innumerable petticoats and absurd parti–coloured headdresses of the shape and size of halfpenny buns. They walked about in rows of four to six abreast; with a slow step, protruding white–stockinged feet in dancing pumps, their headdresses nodding solemnly; young men in blue blouses, knee–breeches and, on Sundays, in three–cornered hats, followed behind singing part–songs.
The French maid—whom Mrs Satterthwaite had borrowed from the Duchesse de Carbon Château–Herault in exchange for her own maid—was at first inclined to find the place maussade. But getting up a tremendous love affair with a fine, tall, blond young fellow, who included a gun, a gold–mounted hunting knife as long as his arm, a light, grey–green uniform, with gilt badges and buttons, she was reconciled to her lot. When the young Förster tried to shoot her—’ et pour cause,’ as she said—she was ravished and Mrs Satterthwaite lazily amused.
They were sitting playing bridge in the large, shadowy dining–hall of the hotel: Mrs Satterthwaite, Father Consett, Mr Bayliss. A young blond sub–lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was there as a last chance for his right lung and his career, and the bearded Kur–doctor cut in. Father Consett, breathing heavily and looking frequently at his watch, played very fast, exclaiming: ‘Hurry up now; it’s nearly twelve. Hurry up wid ye.’ Mr Bayliss being dummy, the Father exclaimed: ‘Three no trumps; I’ve to make. Get me a whisky and soda quick, and don’t drown it as ye did the last.’ He played his hand with extreme rapidity, threw down his last three cards, exclaimed: ‘Ach! Botheranouns an’ all; I’m two down and I’ve revoked on the top av it,’ swallowed down his whisky and soda, looked at his watch and exclaimed: ‘Done it to the minute! Here, doctor, take my hand and finish the rubber.’ He was to take the mass next day for the local priest, and mass must be said fasting from midnight, and without cards played. Bridge was his only passion; a fortnight every year was what, in his worn–out life, he got of it. On his holiday he rose at ten. At eleven it was: ‘A four for the Father.’ From two to four they walked in the forest. At five it was: ‘A four for the Father.’ At nine it was: ‘Father, aren’t you coming to your bridge?’ And Father Consett grinned all over his face and said: ‘It’s good ye are to a poor ould soggart. It will be paid back to you in Heaven.’
The other four played on solemnly. The Father sat himself down behind Mrs Satterthwaite, his chin in the nape of her neck. At excruciating moments he gripped her shoulders, exclaimed: ‘Play the queen, woman!’ and breathed hard down her back. Mrs Satterthwaite would play the two of diamonds, and the Father, throwing himself back, would groan. She said over her shoulder:
‘I want to talk to you to–night, Father,’ took the last trick of the rubber, collected 17 marks 50 from the doctor and 8 marks from the unter–leutnant. The doctor exclaimed:
‘You gan’t dake that immense sum from us and then ko off. Now we shall pe ropped py Herr Payliss at gutt–throat.’
She drifted, all shadowy black silk, across the shadows of the dining–hall, dropping her winnings into her black satin vanity bag and attended by the priest. Outside the door, beneath the antlers of a royal stag, in an atmosphere of paraffin lamps and varnished pitch–pine, she said:
‘Come up to my sitting–room. The prodigal’s returned. Sylvia’s here.’
The Father said:
‘I thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye in the bus after dinner. She’ll be going back to her husband. It’s a poor world.’
‘She’s a wicked devil!’ Mrs Satterthwaite said.
‘I’ve known her myself since she was nine,’ Father Consett said, ‘and it’s little I’ve seen in her to hold up to the commendation of my flock.’ He added: ‘But maybe I’m made unjust by the shock of it.’
They climbed the stairs slowly.
Mrs Satterthwaite sat herself on the edge of a cane chair. She said:
‘Well!’
She wore a black hat like a cart–wheel and her dresses appeared always to consist of a great many squares of silk that might have been thrown on to her. Since she considered that her complexion, which was matt white, had gone slightly violet from twenty years of make–up, when she was not made–up—as she never was at Lobscheid—she wore bits of puce–coloured satin ribbon stuck here and there, partly to counteract the violet of her complexion, partly to show she was not in mourning. She was very tall and extremely emaciated; her dark eyes that had beneath them dark brown thumb–marks were very tired or very indifferent by turns.
Father Consett walked backwards and forwards, his hands behind his back, his head bent, over the not too well–polished floor. There were two candles, lit but dim, in imitation pewter nouvel art candlesticks, rather dingy; a sofa of cheap mahogany with red plush cushions and rests, a table covered with a cheap carpet, and an American roll–top desk that had thrown into it a great many papers in scrolls or flat. Mrs Satterthwaite was extremely indifferent to her surroundings, but she insisted on having a piece of furniture for her papers. She liked also to have a profusion of hot–house, not garden, flowers, but as there were none of these at Lobscheid she did without them. She insisted also, as a rule, on a comfortable chaise longue which she rarely, if ever, used; but the German Empire of those days did not contain a comfortable chair, so she did without it, lying down on her bed when she was really tired. The walls of the large room were completely covered with pictures of animals in death agonies: capercailzies giving up the ghost with gouts of scarlet blood on the snow; deer dying with their heads back and eyes glazing, gouts of red blood on their necks; foxes dying with scarlet blood on green grass. These pictures were frame to frame, representing sport, the hotel having been a former Grand Ducal hunting–box, freshened to suit the taste of the day with varnished pitch–pine, bath–rooms, verandahs, and excessively modern but noisy lavatory arrangements which had been put in for the delight of possible English guests.
Mrs Satterthwaite sat on the edge of her chair; she had always the air of being just about to go out somewhere or of having just come in and being on the point of going to take her things off. She said:
‘There’s been a telegram waiting for her all the afternoon. I knew she was coming.’
Father Consett said:
‘I saw it in the rack myself. I misdoubted it.’ He added: ‘Oh dear, oh dear! After all we’ve talked about it; now it’s come.’
Mrs