By the end of May most of the summer folk had come to their cottages in
South Hatboro'. One after another the ladies called upon Annie. They all
talked to her of the Social Union, and it seemed to be agreed that it was
fully in train, though what was really in train was the entertainment to
be given at Mrs. Munger's for the benefit of the Union; the Union always
dropped out of the talk as soon as the theatricals were mentioned.
When Annie went to return these visits she scarcely recognised even
the shape of the country, once so familiar to her, of which the summer
settlement had possessed itself. She found herself in a strange world--a
world of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, where conscious lines and
insistent colours contributed to an effect of posing which she had never
seen off the stage. But it was not a very large world, and after the young
trees and hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure
that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but
the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries,
loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to
palliate.
Mrs. Munger was at home, and wanted her to spend the day, to drive out with
her, to stay to lunch. When Annie would not do any of these things, she
invited herself to go with her to call at the Brandreths'. But first she
ordered her to go out with her to see the place where they intended to have
the theatricals: a pretty bit of natural boscage--white birches, pines, and
oaks--faced by a stretch of smooth turf, where a young man in a flannel
blazer was painting a tennis-court in the grass. Mrs. Munger introduced him
as her Jim, and the young fellow paused from his work long enough to bow to
her: his nose now seemed in perfect repair.
Mr. Brandreth met them at the door of his mother's cottage. It was a very
small cottage on the outside, with a good deal of stained glass _en
évidence_ in leaded sashes; where the sashes were not leaded and the
glass not stained, the panes were cut up into very large ones, with little
ones round them. Everything was very old-fashioned inside. The door opened
directly into a wainscoted square hall, which had a large fireplace with
gleaming brass andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was
both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of
imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side
of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to
be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together
with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the
panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things to Annie, and to tell how
little they cost, as soon as the ladies entered. His mother's voice called
from above, "Now, Percy, you stop till _I_ get there!" and in a moment
or two she appeared from behind a _portière_ in one corner. Before she
shook hands with the ladies, or allowed any kind of greeting, she pulled
the _portière_ aside, and made Annie admire the snug concealment of
the staircase. Then she made her go upstairs and see the chambers, and the
second-hand colonial bedsteads, and the andirons everywhere, and the old
chests of drawers and their brasses; and she told her some story about
each, and how Percy picked it up and had it repaired. When they came down,
the son took Annie in hand again and walked her over the ground-floor,
ending with the kitchen, which was in the taste of an old New England
kitchen, with hard-seated high-backed chairs, and a kitchen table with
curiously turned legs, which he had picked up in the hen-house of a
neighbouring farmer for a song. There was an authentic crane in the
dining-room fireplace, which he had found in a heap of scrap-iron at a
blacksmith's shop, and had got for next to nothing. The sideboard he had
got at an old second-hand shop in the North End; and he believed it was
an heirloom from the house of one of the old ministers of the North End
Church. Everything, nearly, in the Brandreth cottage was an heirloom,
though Annie could not remember afterward any object that had been an
heirloom in the Brandreth family.