They found the summer sun had been at work for some hours on the storm-drenched world ere they woke to the lowing roar of the heifer from the neighbouring cow-house. Motherhood had evidently come to her at dawn, bringing its wider outlook, its larger self; and sure enough, when they scrambled down from the loft, they found at the foot of the ladder, penned in by an old door, a big, black bull-calf lustily answering anxiety by assertion.
The cottage over against them, however,--it formed part of a long range of farm-steadings, which stretched right away to the stream they had crossed the night before--showed no sign of life. The door was closed, the window-blinds down; the inmates were most likely sleeping sound after their broken rest.
So, their clothes being still damp, the two young men went up stream to a long, deep pool, and spreading them out to dry in the hot sunshine, had a morning bath, thereinafter drying themselves in the same fashion on a grassy bank, whence, looking up the valley, they could see the mountains closing in on the narrow strip of level pasture. Behind them, the downward view was absolutely shut out by the farm-buildings, above which showed a yew tree, and by a dense clump of rhododendrons, which trended away until it met the other wooded hillside of the little glen.
"I believe we are really on an island," remarked Ted, critically appraising the values of some willows and elders which, higher up beyond the pasture fields, seemed to betoken another channel of water.
"A desert island," said Ned, busy over the intricacies of cold water and a razor from his, shoulder-wallet. "We are reduced to the makeshifts of primitive manhood. What more do we want?--and all without that hundred pounds! I never slept better than I did in that hay."
"Small blame to you with feather pillows and best Whitney blankets! And as for money--we shall have to tip these people. I suppose half-a-crown will do----"
"Ahem," replied Ned somewhat doubtfully; "but it was beastly late, you know."
"Very; but that wasn't our doing: they were up with the 'hi'fer.' However, let's put it at three shillings."
"But, my dear fellow, consider the beefsteak pie--it was simply the best pie----"
"Charge it to appetite," said Ted, rising ready dressed, supple, clean, and strong. "Three shillings is ample. Come along if you're ready, and let us get off. I'm keen to start."
He looked it; but the starting was not so easy, for though on trial the door of the cottage was found to be on the latch only, no one could be made to hear.
"Let's leave the tip on the table," suggested Ted impatiently.
"My dear fellow," replied Ned, "I won't go without seeing the 'General,' and thanking her for that excellent pie. Besides--think how she simply scooped us up last night like half-drowned kittens and set us going again! I tell you, sir, that if--it being Saturday night--she had suggested washing my head, I'd have submitted meekly, as I used with old nurse. Why! I dreamt about frilled drawers all last night!"
Ted was irresponsive; a word had arrested his attention. "Saturday!" he echoed thoughtfully, "then to-day is Sunday!"
"First Sunday after Whitsun--No! Trinity Sunday, of course, the shortest night in the year and Midsummer Night's Dream all combined. How time flies...."
"What luck!" gloomed Ted. "I shouldn't wonder if the smith were to refuse us our cycles--they are like that in these wild parts--what beastly bad luck!"
Here Ned, who had been prospecting at the back of the passage, opened a door, suspecting it to be possibly a coal-cellar; but he fell back from the sudden blaze of almost blinding sunlight which poured in from a long, low, absolutely empty room, which stretched away on either side over boards scrubbed to whiteness to a wide oriel window.
At that on the left-hand side stood a parrot-perch, beside which was a tall girl in blue engaged in making a white cockatoo with a yellow crest talk.
"Gimme a sixpence," it muttered hurriedly as the bit of banana turned away with the girl at the interruption.
So for a second or two they stood; the two young men smitten helpless by the extreme beauty of that girlish figure, framed as it was by the great sprays of white June clematis and great trusses of scarlet ivy geranium from the garden beyond the window.
"Gimme a sixpence, gimme a sixpence," reiterated the cockatoo in guttural allurement. Then the girl smiled.
"You must have been very wet last night, I'm afraid," she said in an absolutely perfect voice, true, pure, sweet; the real voice of the siren, which none who hear forget.
The two at the door, who stood bare-headed, almost doubting the evidence of their own eyes, gave an audible sigh of relief. This was no vision then, this beauty of womanhood pure, and simple, with softly smiling eyes.
And yet? They glanced at each other doubtfully, and the three shillings in Ted's palm seemed suddenly to become hot and scorch him. Impossible to offer three shillings to perfection!
"Thank you, yes--I mean no--I mean that we were wet, quite wet--but now thanks to the kindness of your----" Ned paused. Much as he admired "the General," he could not affiliate to her this radiant creature.
Ted, becoming conscious vaguely that here was something new to him, something which held possible danger to his outlook in life, remembered his hurry and came to the point.
"We are very much obliged, and so, if you please, as we are about to start, we should like--I mean if you----"
Here absolute terror lest Ted should really offer those three shillings to the glorious creature in the first flush of a womanhood which seemed to Ned to be worth the whole world, made him step forward, holding out a shining sovereign.
"We've really been most awfully comfortable," he said apologetically, "and if you--if you wouldn't mind giving this----"
"Why!" she exclaimed, all eagerness, snatching at the coin, "I believe it's a sovereign! Fancy that! A whole sovereign!"
Ned felt outraged at her indecent haste; and at the back of Ted's brain lay an instant regret concerning the three shillings; he would then only have been responsible for one and sixpence instead of ten shillings.
Suddenly she held the coin up to the window, laughed--a rippling laugh like running water--and handed it back again. "Thanks for letting me see it; I hadn't seen one before, but, as grandfather says, it blocks the sunlight just like a penny!"
"You--you hadn't seen a sovereign!" said Ned feebly.
She shook her head. "We don't have money in this house. Grandfather doesn't hold with it."
"Not hold with it!" echoed Ted argumentatively. "But you must--you must pay your debts; and we want to pay ours."
Her face grew serious. "Ah! you want to pay something. That's Martha's business. Here! Martha! These gentlemen want to pay you a sovereign."
At an inner door the figure of "the General" appeared with floury arms and her prim bob curtsey.
"Hope the hi'fer didn't disturb of you, gentlemen," she said cheerfully; "but really there ain't nothing owin', let alone a sovereign's worth."
"But there must be something; and we tried to find you before, but you were asleep," protested Ned in an aggrieved tone.
"Asleep! Lord save us!" laughed Martha. "Why! Adam bein' that sound after the calvin', I was over to the loft myself three times afore I come in to my stove. But there ain't nothin'. The yay was 'ome grown, and welcome, seeing 'twas but beddin' stuff at best, and none spoilt for use by humans sleepin' on it." A faint chuckle showed her sense of superiority.
"But there was the beefsteak pie," began Ned.
Martha's giggle increased. "'Twouldn't never 'ave kep' sweet over Sunday, sir, so the pigs 'ud 'ave 'ad it if you gentlemen 'adn't."
That was an unanswerable argument.
"Will you please take it back," said the girl imperiously, holding the gold out in the easy clasp of her finger and thumb.
"But there was the tea--and the pillows and the blankets," protested Ted severely.
She turned on him swiftly. "Don't you hear Martha doesn't want it, and I don't want it. So if you don't want it also, we'd better give it to Cockatua, for I'm tired of holding it. Here, Cockatua, is a golden sovereign for you."
The bird's great yellow crest rose with greed as it grabbed at the prize, but fell again at its first hasty bite. The beady black eyes showed distrust; it turned the coin round, and bit at it again; then again. Finally, with a guttural murmur of "Gimme a sixpence," it dropped the sovereign deliberately into its bread and milk tin.
Every one laughed, Martha, however, checking herself with a hasty "Drat them scones; they'll be burnt as black as the back o' the grate," and disappearing whence she came, her voice calling back in warning to Miss Aura, not to forget the master's message.
"Aura?" questioned Ned quickly. "That's not a very appropriate----"
"My name is Aurelia," she said quite frankly, "and the message is that grandfather would like you to breakfast with him. I think you had better," she added still more frankly, "for you mightn't get anything in the village. It's Sunday, you know."
They glanced at each other mechanically, though each had decided to accept the invitation. So she led them through the kitchen, where Martha was bustling about over her stove, into a hall. This further house had evidently been joined on to the back of the cottage by the long room in which the cockatoo lived.
"We breakfast in the verandah," said Aurelia, turning to the left into a large low-roofed room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, but containing no other furniture save a chair and a writing-table.
The glimpse afforded by the open hall-door showed them that Ted's surmise had been correct. They were on an island, for to the right of the garden a stream, after dashing over some rocks, disappeared behind the high wall enclosing the orchard which filled up the end of the valley, while, as they passed on through the book room, a lawn lay before them sloping down to a deep, still pool, a pool shadowed by surely the biggest yew-tree they had ever seen. Its great arms spread themselves out, and, bowed to earth by their own weight, found a fresh foothold for another upward spring, until the one tree seemed a grove.
Here in a sunny square formed by the joining of house and steading walls, they found a breakfast-table, and beside it, in an arm-chair, an old man with a thin face and Florentine-cut, silver-white hair.
"Excuse my rising, gentlemen," he said in a high, suave voice, his nervous hands gripping the chair-arms in rather a helpless fashion, "but I am somewhat--more or less--of a cripple at times--I suffer from rheumatism, and last night's rain----"
"Might have made us rheumatic also but for your kindness," began Ned politely.
"Not at all! Not at all--Martha does all that sort of thing well--an excellent creature--really an excellent creature, but alas! quite devoid of intelligence," said their host, and his large, restless, pale blue eyes which, from the smallness of his other features, dominated his face, took on a remonstrant expression that was curiously obstinate yet weak. "Yes!" he continued, "absolutely devoid of brains. One of those hewers of wood and drawers of water by desire and determination who stand so--so infernally--in the way of true socialistic development. But, by the way I am forgetting to introduce myself. I am Sylvanus Smith, President--but stay----! Aurelia, my child, fetch the Syllabus of the Socialistic Congress from my writing-table; that will be the best introduction. And here comes Martha with, I presume, breakfast. We generally have a parlourmaid, but"--the remonstrant expression came to his face again--"Martha is somewhat hard on maids. She--she doesn't believe in perfect freedom of soul and body, so the last left yesterday in--in a flame of fire! The young men of the village----"
Ned laughed. "We know about that, sir; we were taken last night for 'lazy good-for-nothin' Welsh libertynes.'"
Mr. Sylvanus Smith appeared shocked. "I really must speak to Martha," he said in an undertone, adding aloud, "Well, Martha, what have you there?"
The question was provoked by the setting down of a silver dish among the fruits, nuts, and other vegetarian diets on the table, and there was a certain tremulous authority in it.
The subservience of Martha's bob was phenomenal.
"Bacin an' eggs, sir, an' there's more ter follow if required."
The authority dissolved into an ill--assured cough.
"As a rule," remarked Mr. Smith helplessly, "we do not allow meat----"
"But lor! sir," put in Martha, beaming, "wasn't it jest a Providence as me and Adam had left that bit o' beefsteak pie, seeing that strawberries an' sech like are but cold comforts to stummicks as has bin drenched through by storm."
There could be no reply but acquiescence to this proposition, so the strangers began on the bacon and eggs. Mr. Sylvanus Smith breakfasted off some patent food, and Aurelia ate strawberries and brown bread, and drank milk; they seemed to have got into her complexion and hair--at least so thought Ned.
The clematis wreaths, the great bosses of the scarlet geraniums hung round them, the great yew-tree shot out fingers of shadow claiming the lawn and actually touching one of the jewelled flower-beds, while behind these, tall larkspurs and lychnis, their feet hidden in a wilderness of bright blossom, rose up against the rows of peas and raspberries in the kitchen garden, and the green of young apples in the orchard.
Against this paradise of flower and fruit they saw Aurelia, like any Eve, beautiful, healthful, gracious, smiling; and they lost both their hearts and their heads promptly--for the time being, at any rate.
They looked at her by stealth in the long silences which were perforce the fate of Mr. Sylvanus Smith's guests, for he could talk, and talk as he wrote well, of the future of Socialism, and the happiness of the many, oblivious altogether of the happiness or unhappiness, of the few that was being worked out in his immediate neighbourhood. That did not trouble him in the least.
Whether from happiness or unhappiness, past, present, or to come, the two young men were singularly silent as, after being piloted by Adam through the rhododendrons and across the drawbridge, they left the island paradise behind them.
"That was a beautiful garden," said Ted.
"Very," remarked Ned.
Then they were silent again; but they thought persistently of Aurelia, of her beauty, her unworldliness, her curious frank dignity, and the shrewd common-sense she had shown in every word she uttered.
The road to the village led through a wood at first; a wood--as such Welsh mountain woods are at Midsummer--all lush with fern and bramble and great drifts of foxglove envious of each other's height, and holding their heads higher upon the narrowing clefts, until some very ordinary spike, gaining a vantage of rock, out-tops the rest, and so lords it over all.
Then, after a while, the wooded slopes closed in to rock. Here the divided streams rejoined each other with a quick babble of recognition, and, as if out of sheer good spirits, gave a gladsome leap or two ere settling down to race hand in hand through a ravine but a few feet below the curving road.
Finally a precipitous bluff blocked the view, but round this at a sharp turn Ted paused.
"Hullo!" he said. "Why, here we are again!"
They were at the bridge by the cross-roads where they had parted with Dr. Ramsay the day before. On the bare hillside stood the school, deserted this Sunday morning; below them lay the village. Over yonder was hidden the hundred pounds of floating deposit--(Ted's eyes sought this out immediately.) Over there, still shrugging that high shoulder of his in the sunshine, was Llwggd-y-Brydd disclaiming--so Ned thought--all responsibility for their last night's adventure. A real Midsummer Eve's dream, indeed! And to-night?--Midsummer night--would the adventure continue?
"It was two o'clock, was it, he said, for dinner?" asked Ted irrelevantly. He knew the hour perfectly, but he wanted to discuss the question.
"Two o'clock if the cycles couldn't be got," corrected Ned gravely.
"Of course," replied Ted impatiently, "and we will go and ask----"
Ned suddenly burst out laughing. "Why the deuce should we ask? You'd rather dine and so would I. That's simplicity itself; besides, we can go to church or chapel and confess the sin of omission meanwhile--if you like."
Ted looked at him with gloomy virtue. "Of course we must ask--at any rate I shall," he replied haughtily. He felt in his way exactly as his companion did, that is, as if every atom of life in him had been stirred to its depths; but conventional morality and solid fact meant more to him than they did to Ned.
The smith, mercifully, was kind. It had been too late to finish repairs on Saturday; they must wait over till Monday.
So, in a blissful state of relief, they sat on the bridge parapet again and watched the country folk come in to chapel.
"The Calvinists take the cake in dress," remarked Ned. "Half the big drapery shops in Blackborough belong to them, I'm told, and they give a percentage to their assistants. So I expect Miss--what's her name?--Jones is responsible for half the hats here. Ye gods! what a superstructure for one soul!" As he spoke he watched a carrotty-haired girl with a brick-red burnt face, who wore, both inside and outside a leghorn hat, a wreath of crushed roses shaded from beetroot to carrots.
"Myfanwy," said Ted lightly, "is equal to the burden. Here she comes with the parson, and Miss Alicia has the beauty-boy Mervyn. How happy could both be with either--I wonder how they grow those curls."
He spoke with lazy scorn; but by and by the sound of part-singing instinct with swing and go roused him, for he had sung in a choir all his life, and, after vainly trying to persuade Ned to accompany him, he went off to listen, leaving the latter stretched out full length on the parapet watching for invisible trout.
After a time, however, the old churchyard in its turn attracted Ned's lazy interest, and he strolled off to examine the tombstones. They stood cheek by jowl, and to judge by the dates on many, must represent a perfect battlefield of dead, if all the parish came thither to rest. Some lettering over a low round arch of a sunk door in the church arrested him. Fourteen hundred and fifty-two! No wonder the place looked ruinous, and that he had to step down into the porch! Here his eye took in various framed regulations in red and black, signed "Gawain Meredith, Rector." Evidently the Reverend Gawain was high. And was that a smell of incense?
He set aside the curtain, and stood under the organ-loft. Here surprise held him motionless. Everything was so new, so gilded, so flawless. There was a blaze of red and white on the altar, before which a tall figure in red and white attended by two acolytes, knelt reading the ante-communion service. From them, scattered sparsely over regulation oak benches, was a surpliced choir, four boys on either side coming down, as it were, to meet a huge brass lectern and a red embroidered faldstool.
But the congregation? Six or seven may be in dark corners, or rather since some one must play the organ, eight! No! for the celebrant, after giving out a hymn, strode to a harmonium close to the pulpit, and thereinafter, upborne by his strong baritone, a long-drawn sacramental chant wavered in the aisles, and died away in the rafters of the roof.
What then of the organ? Ned turned, crept up the stair without waking an old man--the bell-ringer no doubt--who was asleep in his long-accustomed seat beside the blow-handle, and found himself before the usual red-curtain screen. Seating himself on the organ stool he looked out, unseen, on the church below.
It was quaint. There was the Reverend Gawain in the pulpit giving out his text, "There came a mighty rushing wind," and looking out over his church as if it had been full instead of empty.
There were some, said the preacher, who expected signs and wonders direct from the Almighty, but the great rushing mighty wind was the teaching of the Church which had begun on Whit Sunday and would go on throughout the year. It was a mighty voice, indeed, sounding in the ears of all his parishioners, even those who were absent. And it spoke through him, their priest, responsible to the Church for the soul of every man, woman, and child, in the parish of Dinas. Seven minutes, by Ned's watch, of unbounded authority, of absolute priesthood, of the Middle Ages. Ned, watching the dignity of the Reverend Gawain Meredith's denial of the passage of Time became admiring. And he was such a fine figure of a man. The old type, chief, medicine man, Druid, Archbishop--Archangel if you will--always the same, in all ages.
Ned wandered off into thoughts such as men of his type have had since the beginning of time, and was roused from them by seeing the priest, holding a huge sacrificial brass platter, awaiting the sheepish sidesman at the chancel steps.
By all that was holy!--one penny--only one, the sidesman's own; but its poverty was covered the next instant by the Rector's sovereign. Well done to the Rector!
What an imagination, what a magnificent make-believe. Something in Ned's innermost soul leapt up to meet this escape from deadly reality. It deserved a recognition. Yes! as the man couldn't play himself out of church,hewould--the organ was there!
In sudden impulse he laid an awakening hand on the drowsy sexton. "Blow!" he whispered strenuously, "Blow, I tell you, for all you're worth."
The man, half--asleep, obeyed; Ned opened the keyboard, and not knowing his instrument put on full diapason. Thus, when the last Amen had echoed out from the Rector, for the choir appeared to be dummies, and the cope and the brass platter began to follow the little white surplices, the whole procession paused in amazement, as, with many a note dumb, many a dissonance overborne by the full burst of sound, Handel's "Lift up your heads, oh! ye gates," crashed into every corner of the old church. Crashed for the first two bars, then, the pressure on leaky bellows yielding, wavered and sank.
Ned, realising his failure, was down the loft stairs, through the graves, and over the back of the churchyard wall, where he lay convulsed with inextinguishable laughter at his own mad prank, before curiosity followed the amazement in the church as the last breath of air escaped in a long-drawn pipe from a stuck note in the treble.
It was some time ere, seeing the chapel folk coming out, he made his way round at the back of the Rectory wood and joined Ted, whom he found enthusiastic about the singing, and glad to have heard the Reverend Morris Pugh's "hwl," the bardic note. It was really rather impressive, that constant iteration of the A-flat, and even to one ignorant of Welsh gave a feeling of something being desperately wrong, of something needing desperately to be set right.
But there had been no outpouring--nothing out of the common.
"You should have----" said Ned, and paused.
"What?" asked Ted.
"Nothing, except that it must be about time for us to be going back--to Paradise!"
Aurelia in a blessed white frock, looking like a Botticelli angel, was in the garden talking to old Adam. She received their half-hearted apologies for return with a fine superiority.
"Of course," she said, "we all knew you were coming. Martha was unkind enough to kill a beautiful white chicken for you, and there is raspberry tart, and curds and cream. Oh yes! and I made a sponge-cake for tea. So you ought to have enough I'm sure. Now, before we go in, I do want to find my Ourisia coccinea, and Adam has mislaid it. Now, Adam, do think! and please don't say the underground mice have eaten the label, for I'm sure they haven't--it would be a miracle, you know, if they did."
Here she turned to her companions with shining eyes.
"You see, Adam believes in boggles and miracles, and all sorts of queer things, though he isn't Welsh. And to-day there was a miracle in church."
"A miracle," echoed Ned, flushing slightly and wondering more.
She nodded. "Yes! The organ that hasn't sounded a note for ever so long, played of itself, or rather Griffiths Morgan, the sexton, says he was awoke by the Archangel Gabriel."
"Nonsense," interrupted Ned with spirit, "it--it couldn't have been----"
"That is what Adam says," replied Aurelia smiling. "Adam! tell the story yourself."
"'Twain't much story, Miss Aura," put in the old gardener, "but 'twas how as this. Rector he bin preechin' of the roarin', rushin' wynd, an' as he coombed down the chauntrey steps, as might be the Pope o' Rome with that there brass platter, it let loose quite suddint. A wynd, indeed, a rushin' and roarin', an' heavenly notes all a-dyin' away to twanks like the last Trump. Folks were greatly put about, even passon himself didn't know what to make on't till Griffiths Morgan, as sleeps on the beller's 'andle through being accustomed to it as a lad, said he was woke and bid blow by the Archangel Gabriel. Whereupon passon give it 'im for sleepin', and says as he must a' laid on the notes somehow; but I says, says I, that nothin' but true miracle 'ud ever make the broken-wynded old orgin' give out sech a rare 'ollerin'."
"But there's no such thing as a miracle, Adam," declared the girl, and the next moment was on her knees peering into an aster patch. "Why, there it is," she cried, "Oh! Adam, how could you?"
Adam stooped over the border in simulated astonishment.
"Why, drat my garters" (this was his most extreme form of words). "So be it. Well, miss, 'tis true miracle how that pr'anniel stuff comes up, libel or no. 'Tis the Lord's doings, as don't call 'em by name, see you."
"But Adam did," said Ned, relieved as the necessity for confessing that he was not the Archangel Gabriel vanished before this change of venue.
"What Adam?" asked Aura. "Oh! I suppose you mean the one in the Bible, only grandfather doesn't believe in it, you know. It couldn't, anyhow, be this one," she continued, her eyes shining with laughter once more as they moved across the lawn, leaving Adam shaking his head over the Ourisia coccinea, "for when he digs my borders he begins by collecting all the tallies into a heap; then he puts them back again at regular intervals in a row. It's very funny, you know, but terribly confusing. Each spring I have to rack my brains to think what each dear thing means as it peeps up. Of course, that is interesting in itself, but"--here her eyes grew clearer, lighter as she looked up for sympathy--"it is rather sad to make mistakes. I don't like dreaming a campanula is white when it is blue, blue when it is white."
"I think one is as beautiful as the other," laughed Ted.
"Yes!"--then her eyes sought Ned's--"but it is hard, always, to lose what one has learnt to expect."
He smiled back at her but said nothing.
So as they strolled over the grass, she, every now and again giving them a glimpse of the secluded busy life she led (for she and her grandfather never went into the village except, perhaps, to judge at some competition concert) the bell rang, and crossing to the verandah they found Mr. Sylvanus Smith less crippled as the day went on, but urbane and talkative as ever, while Martha, with her little bob curtsey, was waiting to take off the covers.
And they feasted like kings on the chicken and raspberry tart; and the weak rough cider which Martha made, and Mr. Smith drank for his rheumatism, seemed to get into their heads with the Wine of Life, as they sat and talked and watched Aurelia against the background of flower and fruit.
"Oh! cupbearer! save the Wine of Life, what gifts canst thou bring?" quoted Ned suddenly under his breath.
"A fine poet Hâfiz--a very fine poet," remarked Sylvanus Smith, who appeared to have read and remembered most things, "but he lacks the true human spirit. He fuddles himself into content with mystic unrealities, and misses the great individual claim of each soul to freedom and equality. So unlike Byron."
"Very," assented Ned dryly.
Still the conversation did not languish, and when dinner was over they adjourned to another large room opposite the library, which was also empty of all things save a grand piano, an arm-chair, and a music rest. Here Ned settled himself down to accompany Ted and Aura as they sang, and finally, with apologies, for not being so much at home on the piano as on the organ, persuaded Mr. Sylvanus Smith, who turned out to be a passed musician, into trying a Brahms sonata for piano and violin. And here Martha coming to announce tea found them still happily busy over the great piles of music that were ranged along the wall.
It was when Ned lingered to close the piano that Aura lingered also watching him quietly; but she made him start and blush violently by saying with a smile, "You were the Archangel Gabriel, weren't you?"
Taken aback as he was, his eyes met hers with a reflection of their confidence. "I was. But how did you find out?"
"I don't know," she said, a faint trouble coming into her face, "that is the worst of it. It was when we were running through theMessiah, something in your mind touched mine, I think. It happens sometimes, doesn't it?--and--and it isn't altogether pleasant."
She drew herself away from him instinctively, but he followed her.
"Why?" he asked.
She flashed round on him. "Because I dislike being touched."
There was a silence; finally he asked curiously, "Ought I to tell Adam?"
"Why should you? He loves miracles, and it will give him something to talk about, besides"--here she laughed--"it was a miracle, you know, to make the old organ sound at all."
"Perhaps," replied Ned, relieved of the necessity for confessing one of the many sudden impulses which were always getting him into trouble.
They found Martha by the tea-table looking very rakish and young in a coat and skirt and a sailor hat, which, however, did not prevent her from, as usual, masking her supremacy by subserviency. The gentlemen's rooms were quite ready for them, and as she was going through the village could she leave any message with the smith?
"Thanks, no!" replied Ted curtly, for he had noticed Aura's confidence with Ned, and had--he scarcely had time to think why--resented it; "but, I think, Cruttenden, that if we do avail ourselves of Mr. Smith's kindly offered hospitality, we must start at dawn, picking up our bicycles by the way."
"As you please, Ted," replied Ned carelessly. "But thanks all the same, Martha. I hope there will be no more miracles in church."
"Thankyou, sir," retorted Martha cheerfully, "but I don't 'old with church nor yet with chapel neither. As I keep tellin' of Adam, they makes people think too much of their sins. An' 'is is but what we cooks call second stock at that, sir; for takin' 'im, fine an' wet, Adam do 'is work like a real Briton--yes! he really do----"
With which testimonial to Adam's worth she bobbed another curtsey, and was off for her panacea for all ills, a "spin on her bike."
"I suppose," said Ted after a pause, in a somewhat awed voice, "that Adam is Martha's husband."
Aura bubbled over with quick mirth. "Martha's husband! Oh dear, no! Why, she is always at me 'not to incline to no man, no; not if his 'air be 'ung round with gold'; and just think of Adam's little cropped head!"
Her laugh was infectious.
"And so Martha shares the--the family dislike to gold," suggested Ned slyly.
Mr. Sylvanus Smith rose to the fly at once. "We do not dislike it, sir; gold has undoubtedly its appointed place in the world, but it happens to be in its wrong place. So I disregard it, and pay all my bills by cheque."
"Martha makes out the lists for the Army and Navy, you know," explained Aura quickly. "It's rather fun unpacking the boxes when they come."
"There is no doubt," continued Mr. Smith, in a tone of voice which suggested an effort to be strictly original, "that as now administered, money is the root of all evil. Our hoarded millions instead of, as they should, bringing equality--comfortable, contented equality--to the world, separate man from his fellow man by a purely artificial distinction; they bring about class antagonism, and are a premium on inept idleness."
"Hear, hear!" said Ted. "I quite agree with you, sir. If these millions were equitably divided----"
"They would be a premium on idle ineptitude instead," laughed Ned lightly. "If you gave a loafer the same wage as a working man, I for one would loaf. It is the better part. If any one were to offer me a golden sovereign at the present moment, Miss Aura----"
She arrested the teapot in the middle of pouring out his second cup, and glanced up at him in smiling horror.
"And I never gave back the one in Cockatua's bread and milk tin! Dear me, what should I have done if you had gone away and left it? I'll remember it after tea."
But after tea found them still laughing, still talking, still sitting silent awhile listening to the song of a thrush which, as the day drew down to dusk, sat on the bent branch of the old yew to sing as surely never thrush sang before.
So the moon climbed into the sky and the flowers faded into the ghosts of flowers, each holding just a hint of the hues it had worn by day.
"What a pity it is to go to bed at all," said Aura suddenly, leaning over her grandfather's chair and laying her cheek on his thick, white hair; "for we seem to have so much to say to each other, don't we?"
He winced slightly; since for once he had forgotten the absorption of his later years, and had let himself be as he would have been but for the tragedy which he had fled into the wilderness to hide. For he had seen his wife starve to death, and his daughter sell herself for bread, while he, struck down by rheumatic fever, had waited for the tardy decision of a Law Court. The verdict had come too late for either; too late for anything but decent burial for a poor, young mother, and flight, if possible, from himself. But, though he forgot sometimes, the tragedy of seeing his wife die before his helplessness, it remained always to blur his outlook, to make him what he was, a half-crazy visionary.
And to-night he had forgotten. He had laughed at trivialities, and told trivial stories of the thousand-year-old yew tree, and the Druidical legends connected with the summer solstice--the real midsummer night, though St. John's Day came later.
But now remembrance came back, and he rose. "We have talked too much," he said almost captiously, "and these gentlemen have to leave at dawn. We wish them good luck, don't we? Come, Aurelia, my child."
So they had said good-bye; but five minutes afterwards, as the two young men sat silently finishing their pipes, they saw her returning over the lawn, holding the sovereign in her raised right hand.
It seemed to them as if the whole world came with her as, rising to their feet instinctively, they waited beside the cool, dark pool, full of the black shadows of the yew tree, full also of marvellous moonlit depths going down and down into more and more light.
The air was heavy with the flower fragrance of the garden, the round moon, large, soft, mild, hung in the velvety sky, not a breath stirred in earth or heaven, her very footstep on the turf was silent.
"Which of you gave it me?" she asked. "You are so much alike, at first, that I forget."
They were silent, uncertain what to claim, what not to claim.
She smiled. "Is it a puzzle? You want me to find out; but really, I expect it came from you both."
"Yes, from us both," assented Ned.
Her eyes were on Ted's face, which was good indeed to look upon, but she turned swiftly to Ned.
"Ah! It was you, of course. Yes, it was you," she said, holding out the coin. He took it without a word.
"It seems a shame to go to bed this heavenly night, but you have to be up so early." There was regret in her voice.
"Why should we?" said Ned impulsively. "Let us roam the hills, I have done it before now, alone."
She stood looking at them both, her face mysteriously bright.
"And you?" she asked of Ted.
He laughed. "I feel like it to-night, anyhow."
"Ah," she said, nodding her head, "you are a wise man. Good-night and pleasant dreams."
They watched her pass in her white raiment across the lawn, taking the glamour of the night with her, and leaving them with an ordinary moon shining on an ordinary garden.
Then Ted gave a short laugh and flung himself on the turf again, resuming his pipe.
"What's the matter?" asked Ned imperturbably.
"Nothing. I was only thinking of all the gassing you let out yesterday concerning money. Why, it means--everything! Hang that sovereign to your watch-chain, man, and then you can tell her a romantic tale when----"
A "whitt whitt, whitter," followed by a sudden sob among the shadows and lights of the pool, told of one more duck-and-drake----
"As if that made any difference," he continued sardonically. "You have plenty more of them."
"So far as I'm concerned, it makes some difference," retorted Ned with spirit. "That particular coin won't be put to baser uses."
There was a pause, broken only by Ned's vain effort to get his cheroot to draw. Suddenly he flung it aside, edged himself out of the shadow into the light and faced his namesake.
"Look here, Cruttenden," he said, "I've got something to explain to you, because--well--because I want this thing to be fair and square between us. The fact is, that though my name is Edward Cruttenden all right, I have the misfortune to have been for the last two years, most unexpectedly, Lord Blackborough."
"Lord Blackborough!" echoed Ted slowly. "Why--why, you're--you're my master--that is to say, I'm one of your clerks--and--and you're the richest man in the midlands."
"I believe I was, a year ago; but money doesn't stick by me. I wasn't brought up to it. Yes, I became Lord Blackborough against my will, by the death of my uncle, a cripple, who inherited the barony--bought by screws chiefly--from the original purchaser, who had a fit on hearing that his only son had shot himself over a woman. A squalid story, and the distinction between us is, as you see, a purely artificial one----"
"I quite agree with your lordship," interrupted Ted.
"My dear fellow," replied Lord Blackborough, "you will oblige me by not being a garden ass. The fact is, we have a considerable likeness to each other outside, in which you have distinctly the advantage. You're taller, broader; briefly, the better looking. As to the inside, we differ somewhat, but there again you have the qualities which make for wealth, and I haven't. I can see myself a poor man in my old age. Then we tumbled off our cycles together in an equal way. In a still more equal way we have tumbled into--let us say, this Garden of Eden. Now, why shouldn't we remain in it on equal terms?"
"Because it is impossible. You are Lord Blackborough, and I am your clerk."
"But why should we not remain the brothers Cruttenden? In this remote----"
"Impossible," repeated Ted angrily.
"Anyhow, let us think over it. We agreed, didn't we, to spend our holiday together. Well, let us talk it over, and if it is feasible, come back----"
Ted laughed bitterly. "A clerk hasn't so much holiday as a lord. I've had my week, while you----"
"Yes, of course; don't, please, go off at a tangent like our host. We have got to work this thing out somehow, for, unless we do--well--I won't come back alone, so you would always have that between you and your night's rest. Do you understand?"
Ted nodded sulkily. He had liked his companion before he knew he was a lord, and now all the Englishman's love for one, that strange modern inversion which grants quality to title, instead of as in the beginning granting title to quality, was mixed up in the thought of future friendship with one who would, whocouldbe such a friend.
"Of course, I could buy you off, or turn you out. Now, don't fume. I won't interfere with your personal liberty if I can help it. I really am in deadly earnest. It seems to me we have been given a lead over--that there is something behind all this. However, that is neither here nor there, so far as you are concerned." He sat for a moment thinking.
"When can you get your next holiday?" he asked abruptly.
"I believe I could get a week at Christmas," admitted Ted grudgingly.
Lord Blackborough sprang to his feet like a schoolboy, and laughed. "How will Eden look under snow? Jolly, I expect----"
"You don't mean----" began Ted, rising also.
"Yes, I do. I mean that, so far as I'm concerned, we shall say good-bye to it--till Christmas--at dawn--the dawn which will so soon be coming. Good Heavens!" he added, his eyes on the horizon of the hills, his voice softening infinitely, "whyamI going to bed? Who knows? Perchance to dream. Good-night."
Ted could hear him going on with the quotation as he strolled over to the house. Thereinafter there was a light in one of the upper windows, and then darkness.
He himself sat for a while thinking over the queer chances of the last few days. It was like a novel; not like real life. That hundred pounds, for instance, lying out on the hillside ready for any one who chose to take it. There had been plenty of chances of a hundred pounds even in his life, had he felt any immediate necessity for them, but he had not. His life on the whole had been pleasant enough. Fond of football, cricket, cycling, rowing, he had not thought much of the delights of money-getting. But now? A hundred pounds well laid out, for instance on that investment about which his old school friend, a clerk on the Stock Exchange, had written him only last week, might well be a thousand by Christmas.
It held him fast that hundred pounds, thinking what could be done with it by Christmas.
It might win him Aurelia. For if in other ways equality could be kept up, why shouldn't he have a fair chance? He was the better looking--if that counted for anything. Then he had another advantage. Though he was long past much of the old man's antiquated Socialism, he was keen on more modern ideas, a Radical of the most forward type politically, whereas Lord Blackborough--what was Lord Blackborough? Well, he was a very good fellow anyhow.
Yes, he was a good fellow, though he was right in saying money didn't stick to him. How could it, when he left it, so to speak, lying about.
Ted knocked out the ashes of his pipe, and, after a space, another light showed in one of the upper windows. Then it went out, and the window eye was shut.
But what of the eyes within. Were they shut or open?
Who knows?
Were their owners asleep or awake, conscious that they had reached a crossing of the ways--that one path led up to the rugged mountain--tops, the other into the smooth valleys.
Who knows?
The moon shone softly behind a haze of midnight coolness, rising from the earth to blur the clear circle of her heavenly rim.
There was a breathlessness in the very stillness of the night, that was broken only by the distant wailing of the lambs new-separate from their mothers.
Hark! What was it they were calling? Faint and far away, what was it?
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
Up in the corries, setting the tall brackens a-quiver, high on the birch woods hidden in their silver, higher still among the tumbled rocks of the "Eye of the World," what was that passing?
Was it, white and dim, a wandering sheep looming large upon the moonlit mountainside as it sought to answer the cry, or, this midsummer night when the spirits wander, was it a restless wraith seeking it knew not what?
Or was it Aura herself, free and fearless among the hills?
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
The faint, far--distant call sounded from the valley, from the corries, from the birch woods, from the rocks.
The shadows lay so still, so soft, yet that one surely moved--moved upwards.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!" Was it Aura, or only the echoing sound of the calling lambs?
Still, soft, equable, serene, oh, misty mountain moonlight what didst thou hold?
And in the garden across the lawn, where the girl's feet had lain, was that curved shadow, a snake making its way to the black and white shadow of the Druid's yew tree?
Oh, misty moonlight of the valley what didst thou hold, as the faint, far--away cry echoed between the hills, and up into high heaven?
Did they meet and hold converse face to face upon the mountain-top, those wandering lights and shadows on the mountainsides? or did they wander, searching for something, until dawn, and find nothing?