CHAPTER IIITHE WANDERERS
Never had the gracious eastward face of Shonts looked more beautiful than it did on the morning of the Lord Chancellor’s visit. It glowed as translucent as amber lit by flames, its two towers were pillars of pale gold. It looked over its slopes and parapets upon a great valley of mist-barred freshness through which the distant river shone like a snake of light. The south-west façade was still in the shadow, and the ivy hung from it darkly greener than the greenest green. The stained-glass windows of the old chapel reflected the sunrise as though lamps were burning inside. Along the terrace a pensive peacock trailed his sheathed splendours through the dew.
Amidst the ivy was a fuss of birds.
And presently there was pushed out from amidst the ivy at the foot of the eastward tower a little brownish buff thing, that seemed as natural there as a squirrel or a rabbit. It was a head,—a ruffled human head. It remained still for a moment contemplating the calm spaciousness of terrace and garden and countryside. Then it emerged further and rotated and surveyed thehouse above it. Its expression was one of alert caution. Its natural freshness and innocence were a little marred by an enormous transverse smudge, a bar-sinister of smut, and the elfin delicacy of the left ear was festooned with a cobweb—probably a genuine antique. It was the face of Bealby.
He was considering the advisability of leaving Shonts—for good.
Presently his decision was made. His hands and shoulders appeared following his head, and then a dusty but undamaged Bealby was running swiftly towards the corner of the shrubbery. He crouched lest at any moment that pursuing pack of butlers should see him and give tongue. In another moment he was hidden from the house altogether, and rustling his way through a thicket of budding rhododendra. After those dirty passages the morning air was wonderfully sweet—but just a trifle hungry.
Grazing deer saw Bealby fly across the park, stared at him for a time with great gentle unintelligent eyes, and went on feeding.
They saw him stop ever and again. He was snatching at mushrooms, that he devoured forthwith as he sped on.
On the edge of the beech-woods he paused and glanced back at Shonts.
Then his eyes rested for a moment on the clump of trees through which one saw a scrap of the head gardener’s cottage, a bit of the garden wall....
A physiognomist might have detected a certain lack of self-confidence in Bealby’s eyes.
But his spirit was not to be quelled. Slowly, joylessly perhaps, but with a grave determination, he raised his hand in that prehistoric gesture of the hand and face by which youth, since ever there was youth, has asserted the integrity of its soul against established and predominant things.
“Ketchme!” said Bealby.