The Pelicans

“AS a matter of fact—although one hates to say such a thing——” Lady Argent paused, in order to give the thing its full conversational value. “As a matter of absolute fact, those poor children are really to be congratulated.”

“Because they are left orphans at five years old?”

“How you exaggerate, Ludovic! Rosamund is quite fourteen, and the little one can’t be less than ten or eleven years old. And she wasn’t much of a mother to them, poor thing.”

“Well, what form did her modified motherhood take?”

“Ludovic, she is dead, after all,” Lady Argent reminded her son. “But she was so much absorbed in her music, and they didn’t get any proper education, as far as one knows. And then, of course, during this last year she was quite obviously dying—she ought really to have been in a sanatorium.”

“She must have been quite young,” said Ludovic Argent reflectively.

“Only about seven- or eight-and-thirty. Don’t you remember when she first settled here, just after the husband died, and we were all so excited about this pretty young widow and that enormous grand piano that had to be forced in at the front-door with such difficulty?”

“I suppose I was at Oxford then, since I don’t remember the sensation which the grand piano must indeed have caused, if they got it through the front-door of that small place.”

Ludovic Argent and his mother both gazed across the valley below, because the front-door under discussion was immediately opposite their own, although separated from it by two slopes of hill and the River Wye. Only the window-panes twinkling in the afternoon sun were visible.

“And what will happen to her grand piano now? I suppose it will have to be got out again,” said Ludovic nonchalantly.

“That’s what I was just telling you,” Lady Argent mistakenly assured him. “In a way they really are to be congratulated, poor little things. I believe Bertie Tregaskis is going to look after them.”

“Is that the woman who pervades Cornwall with model dairies and good works generally, and if so, what is she doing in this galère?”

“She was a cousin of Mrs. Grantham’s, and the very day after Mrs. Grantham became so much worse Bertie was down here to see after those poor little girls. So exactly like her, because it wasn’t a particularly near relationship or anything—simply one of her magnificent, generous impulses. They really have nobody, poor waifs; the mother doesn’t seem to have had any belongings at all, or if she had, they are Hungarians of sorts, and much better not raked up, in all probability.”