an empty bowl labelled DOG. A chest of drawers in shiny mahogany, covered with more bottles and pill-boxes, stood against the wall. One or two shabby kitchen chairs and a big throne-like affair in red Chineselacquer completed the furniture of the lower end of the room. Dust lay everywhere.
A wide archway of delicately chiselled stone framing three shallow steps divided the lower from the upper section of the divan. Set right back in one corner of the upper room or dais was a huge bed, which at one time must have been a luxurious affair with legs shaped like dragons’ claws, a high carved head-board, and hanging from the ceiling above it some sort of gilt device resembling a bird, which was supposed to have held bed-drapes in its talons, Now one wing of the bird was broken, the gilt was flaked and dirty, and from the claws hung only a couple of rubbed velvet curtains which could have been any shade from dark red to black, and which sagged in big loops down on either side of the bed-head, almost concealing with their heavy swags of shadow the figure which reclined in a welter of rugs and blankets.
The light which had flowed so generously out on the flag-way of the garden hardly penetrated into the upper corners of the room. It came from an old-fashioned oil lamp standing among the supper dishes, and as I passed it, approaching the bed, my shadow seemed to leap monstrously ahead of me, then teeter up the steps of the dais to add another layer of darkness to the grotesque obscurity in the corner.
For grotesque it certainly was. I had expected to find Great-Aunt Harriet very different from a child’s far-back recollections of her, but not quite so outlandish as this. As I had told John Lethman, I had retained merely a dim memory of a tallish hook-nosed woman withgreying hair and snapping black eyes who argued fiercely with my father, bullied my mother over the garden, and had a habit of bestowing sudden and exotic gifts on me and Charles, in the intervals of ignoring us completely. Even had she been dressed as she was fifteen years before, I should not have known her. John Lethman had warned me that she would have shrunk, and this was so; and though I thought I would have recognised the jutting nose and black eyes which peered at me from the shadows of the bed curtains, nothing – not even Lethman’s warnings – had prepared me for the sheer outlandishness of the figure which sat there like a Buddha cocooned in coloured silks and gesturing with one large pale hand for me to come nearer.
If I had not known who it was, I should have taken her for some fantastically-robed Eastern male. She was wearing some kind of bedgown of natural silk, and over this a loose coat in scarlet velvet with gold facings, and over this again an enormous cashmere shawl; but these draperies – in spite of the soft and even luxurious materials – had a distinctly masculine air. Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must haveshaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.
One thing I would have known her by; the ring on her left hand. This was unequivocally as big and as bright as I remembered from my childhood. I remembered, too, how impressed Charles and I had been by the way my mother and father spoke of the ring. It was a cabochon-cut Burma ruby, the size of a thumb-nail, and had even in those days been immensely valuable. It had been the gift of some princeling in Baghdad, and she wore it always on her big,
A wide archway of delicately chiselled stone framing three shallow steps divided the lower from the upper section of the divan. Set right back in one corner of the upper room or dais was a huge bed, which at one time must have been a luxurious affair with legs shaped like dragons’ claws, a high carved head-board, and hanging from the ceiling above it some sort of gilt device resembling a bird, which was supposed to have held bed-drapes in its talons, Now one wing of the bird was broken, the gilt was flaked and dirty, and from the claws hung only a couple of rubbed velvet curtains which could have been any shade from dark red to black, and which sagged in big loops down on either side of the bed-head, almost concealing with their heavy swags of shadow the figure which reclined in a welter of rugs and blankets.
The light which had flowed so generously out on the flag-way of the garden hardly penetrated into the upper corners of the room. It came from an old-fashioned oil lamp standing among the supper dishes, and as I passed it, approaching the bed, my shadow seemed to leap monstrously ahead of me, then teeter up the steps of the dais to add another layer of darkness to the grotesque obscurity in the corner.
For grotesque it certainly was. I had expected to find Great-Aunt Harriet very different from a child’s far-back recollections of her, but not quite so outlandish as this. As I had told John Lethman, I had retained merely a dim memory of a tallish hook-nosed woman withgreying hair and snapping black eyes who argued fiercely with my father, bullied my mother over the garden, and had a habit of bestowing sudden and exotic gifts on me and Charles, in the intervals of ignoring us completely. Even had she been dressed as she was fifteen years before, I should not have known her. John Lethman had warned me that she would have shrunk, and this was so; and though I thought I would have recognised the jutting nose and black eyes which peered at me from the shadows of the bed curtains, nothing – not even Lethman’s warnings – had prepared me for the sheer outlandishness of the figure which sat there like a Buddha cocooned in coloured silks and gesturing with one large pale hand for me to come nearer.
If I had not known who it was, I should have taken her for some fantastically-robed Eastern male. She was wearing some kind of bedgown of natural silk, and over this a loose coat in scarlet velvet with gold facings, and over this again an enormous cashmere shawl; but these draperies – in spite of the soft and even luxurious materials – had a distinctly masculine air. Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must haveshaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.
One thing I would have known her by; the ring on her left hand. This was unequivocally as big and as bright as I remembered from my childhood. I remembered, too, how impressed Charles and I had been by the way my mother and father spoke of the ring. It was a cabochon-cut Burma ruby, the size of a thumb-nail, and had even in those days been immensely valuable. It had been the gift of some princeling in Baghdad, and she wore it always on her big,
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