Of course Priscilla confessed to her friend Rosa by what means she had encompassed the downfall of Mr. Kelton. Rosa was not much of a musician, and it seemed to her quite wonderful that any one could perform such a feat as the transposition of a song within the space of twenty-four hours, and then not shrink from playing the modulated version from memory.
“It had to be done,” said Priscilla firmly. “How could I stand by and hear that conceited man—but there was a clever man—a Frenchman of course—who said ‘a tenor is not a man but a disease.’ I wonder why it is that so many girls simply worship a tenor. Dr. Needham says it dates back to primeval man and primeval woman, All singing, he says, is simply primeval man calling to primeval woman to come out for a walk in the moonlight. And that’s why the most favourite songs nowadays are love-songs—tenor love-songs—languishing things—I hate them!”
“It served that horrid man right,” said Rosa. She did not show herself to be greatly interested in the theories of Dr. Needham; but she was intensely interested in the humiliation of a man who was horrid. “I should like to be able to do just what you did. Men want to be taken down dreadfully; but if a girl ever rises to do it she is looked on as horrid herself.”
“And she usually is,” said Priscilla. “I have sometimes felt that it was very horrid of me to play that trick upon that odious Mr. Kelton. Who am I that I should set myself up to avenge his insults in regard to Mr. Tutt? I have heard a little voice whispering in my ear.”
“You were quite right. Besides—” here Rosa made a little pause—“besides, haven’t you very good reason to—to—well, I meant that you were very badly treated by men, Priscilla dear.”
“Only by one man,” said Priscilla quickly. “Only by one.”
“And isn’t that enough? It’s a shame that one man should have it in his power to wreck the life of a girl.”
“It does seem to be a shame. But what’s the good of complaining? A woman has always been the bearer of burdens, and if she complains she is treated worse than ever. I’m not sure that in the old days—before there was any thought of convention or religion, which is only another form of convention—a woman was much better off than she is now. To be sure, when she found that she had married the wrong man she had it in her power to run away with the right one, or the nearest approach to the right one that she could find. I have now and again wondered during the past year why I shouldn’t run away to another man and try to patch up this wrecked life of mine.”
“Why shouldn’t you? It would only be fair and just; but you never would do it, Priscilla.”
“Why should I not? I believe that I would do it if only the right man turned up.”
“If he would let you do it he would not be the-right man.”
“I’m not so sure of that. The best men—the greatest men—the bravest—the cleverest—the most devout men have never been over-particular when it came to a question of women. I believe if I were really to fall in love with a man I would do as so many of the best women in the world have done—I would go to him, and let convention and religion go hang.”
“Don’t tell me. You would do nothing of the sort. But do you really feel so strongly about being married? I think, you know, that since you worked out your plan of teaching Mr. Kelton a lesson you seem to be a different girl, but still——”
“My dear Rosa, don’t let any one try to tell you that there’s any life for a woman in this world apart from a man. There’s not. And don’t let any one try to convince you that there’s any life for a man without a woman by his side. There’s not.”
“To play his accompaniments?”
“Yes, in the right key, mind. That’s just what a woman is placed in the world to do—to play a man’s accompaniments in the right key. If Mr. Kelton had a wife by his side he would not now have a sense of being made a fool of.”
“He’s probably as conceited as ever by this time. Now how was it that we went on to talk of men and women when really our topic was Mr. Kelton?”
“I know. You were about to say that no one should think hardly of me for making a fool of any man, considering how great a fool I was made by a man. That was what was in your mind; but you were wrong, Rosie dear, for I don’t think at all bitterly of men. On the contrary, I tell you that you must be prepared for the worst—what your father and other professional moralists would call the worst—from me. I’m only an amateur moralist. In fact, I’m not quite sure that I should even call myself an amateur. I don’t really know that I have any morals whatever.”
“You have no need for any. What do girls like you or me know of morals?”
“Nothing, except those we got hold of when we read Fontaine’s Fables at school.”
“And then we always skipped or slurred over the ‘morals’—they spoilt the story.”
“They did, and that is what they do every day; they spoil our stories. Oh, what idiots we are—a couple of girls who have seen nothing in the world and know nothing in the world, moralizing on morals! I’m not sure that it isn’t immoral to discuss morality, Rosa. I should like to have the opinion of a specialist on this point.”
“Try Miss Southover.”
“A maiden schoolmistress who makes a thousand a year by teaching girls how to be at once dignified and dunces! She would be too shocked to be able to give an opinion. No, I should apply to a man of the world—a bishop, or at least a rural dean. Now I have done with this subject. I didn’t go very far, did I? A year ago I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone even so far.”
“Poor old Pris!”
“You may say that. I feel to-day as old as your grandmother. And I have been thinking—oh, what thinking! I know what there is in me, Rosa. If ever any girl was made to be a help to a man, that girl was me. And am I, because I allowed myself to be made a fool of—am I therefore bound to do nothing with my life—nothing, only to live it—to live my life apart from all that makes life life?”
“Poor old Pris! There never was any one who had half your bad luck!”
“You may say that. But you needn’t think that I have done with life yet. I haven’t.”
“That’s what I love about you, Priscilla. You are so rebellious! You are not one of the tame ones who submit to what they call the will of Providence.”
“I think too highly of Providence to believe that its will is that my life should be wrecked by no fault of my own—no fault except obedience. It was my obedience that made me what I am to-day, and upon my word I don’t believe that my punishment is out of proportion to my offence.”
“Your offence? But you never——”
“I did. I ceased to be myself. I put myself behind myself and allowed myself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter—the slaughter of that womanhood which I should have upheld—my womanhood, which meant the right to think for myself—the right to be a woman to love a man, and help him in his life and be loved by him and to give him children. That is how love is immortal—our children live after us, and our children’s children!... No more obedience for me, thanks; I mean to live my life. That’s all!”
“I’ll tell you what I think, Priscilla——” Rosa allowed a considerable interval to elapse before she spoke. “I’ll tell you what I think, and that is, that the awfulness of the past year has made a woman of you in this way.”
Priscilla seemed a little startled by the enunciation of this theory. She looked quickly at her companion, and then laughed queerly.
“God is too busy making worlds, universes and that, to have a moment to spare to a woman,” said she. “No, it is the man who makes the woman; and be sure that if the woman is made by the man, the man is made by the woman—by the woman and by the children that she gives him. And yet—here we are.”
“Yes,” said Rosa, “here we are. Oh, there is one thing certain: God made primroses.”
They had been walking along the narrow hilly road that branched off from the broad highway between the little town of Framsby and the villages of Dean Grange, Beastlington, and Elfrisleigh, and now they were standing on the ridge of the Down that overlooked the lovely valley of the Wadron. The day was one toward the end of April, when everything in nature, including men and women and healthy girls, feels stirred with the impulses of the Spring, and while all fancy they are living only in the joy of the present, they are yet giving their thoughts to the future. Everything in nature was showing signs of thinking of the future. The early flowers were looking after themselves, doing their best to offer allurements to the insects which they trusted to carry their love tokens for them from stamen to pistil; and the pale butterflies became messenger Cupids all unconsciously. But the birds were doing their own love-making. Every bough was vocal, every brake quivered in harmony. In that green lane there was the furtive flutter of wings. Some nests had been built and padded for the eggs, and here and there a stranger looking carefully through the interspaces among the glossy leaves could see the glitter of the beady eye of a hiding blackbird, and, with greater pains, the mottling of a thrush’s throat. Love-making and home-making on all sides—this is what the Spring meant, and it was probably because she was so closely in touch with the season and its instincts that one of the girls had spoken out some of the thoughts that made her warm as though her thoughts were infants of the Spring, to be cherished very close to her body.
They stood at that part of the road which bridged one of the tributary streams that went down to the Wadron, losing itself for many yards where it crept among the bosky slopes nearest to the road, but making its course apparent by many a twinkle of quick water, and now and again by a crystal pool, overflowing among mossy stones and cascading where there was a broad steep rock. Again it disappeared among the wilderness of bramble, but when one looked for its continuation, its glistening, not directly downward, but many yards to one side, gave one a glad surprise.
And all its course was marked by primroses. The park through which it flowed was carpeted with primroses, and all the distance of the valley was tinted with ten thousand tufts. Only on one of the high banks of the parkland, where the pines stood in groups, was the brown earth covered with a haze of bluebells. Close though this bank was to the road, it was picked over with rabbit burrows, and when the girls came near there was a scurrying of brown and a flicker of white among the bluebells and the ferns.
“It is getting wilder and wilder,” said Rosa.
“Thank goodness!” added Priscilla. “It was the wisest thing that ever the owner did, to die and keep every one out of it for all these years.”
“Yes, so far as we are concerned,” said Rosa. “We have got more out of the place than any one else.”
“You would have been a visitor to the Manor in any case,” said Priscilla; “but what chance would I have had? Well, I might have come in under the shelter of your wing, not otherwise.”
“Perhaps the son’s wife might not have been so stuck up as the rest of the people in our neighbourhood,” remarked Rosa, consolingly.
Priscilla laughed.
“I think I should take their—their—standoffishness more to heart if you were not here, Rosa,” said Priscilla, thoughtfully “What shall I do when you go away?”
“Go away? I heard nothing about my going away.”
“I hear a good deal about it to-day from the birds, and the sheep, and all the other voices of the Spring. They have talked about nothing else all the morning.”
Rosa looked at her anxiously for some moments. Then she gave a sound that had something of contempt in it, crying, “What rot! My dear girl, you know as well as I do that I have no intention of going away—that I do not bother my head with any notion of—of that sort of thing. I am quite content to remain here. It would take a lot of coaxing to carry me away. Come along now, I don’t trust strangers, and I certainly don’t trust April weather, and I certainly don’t trust that cloud that puts a black cap on Beacon Hill. If we are to get our baskets full in time we would do well not to wait here sentimentalizing.”
She led the way on the road by the park fence, and Priscilla was still behind her when they went round the curve, where the road had been widened in front of the pillars that supported a pair of well-worn entrance gates. Lodges were on each side, picturesque sexagonal cottages, their shape almost undiscernible through the straggling mass of the creepers that covered them.
“Do you remember the pheasants’ eggs?” whispered Rosa, when they had gone through the gates and had just passed the lodges.
“I am trying my best to forget them,” replied Priscilla. “How awful it would be if I accidentally spoke of that omelette in the hearing of some one who would mention it to Mr. Dunning!”
“It would be awful!” acquiesced Rosa.
Their exchange of confidences related to the hospitality of the wife of one of the keepers, who occupied the lodge on the right. One day during the previous year the girls had been drenched in the park, and while they were drying their clothes the good woman, who had been a cook at the Manor, made them an omelette, using pheasants’ eggs, of which quite a number were in her larder awaiting consumption.
“It was a nice omelette,” said Priscilla, “but it made me feel that old Mr. Wingfield mightn’t have been so wise after all in allowing the place to remain unoccupied for so long.”
Signs of neglect were to be observed on all sides—not by any means the neglect that suggests the Court of Chancery or an impoverished owner; merely the neglect that is the result of the absence of any one interested in the maintenance of tidiness. The broad carriage drive was a trifle green, where fresh gravel was needed, and the grass borders had become irregular. The enormous bough that had broken away from the trunk of one of the elms of the avenue was lying just where it had fallen, sprawling halfway across the drive, and much of the timber shielding of a sapling had been broken down by some animal and remained unmended, so that the bark of the young tree had been injured. These tokens that some one had been saying “What does it matter?” a good many times within the year, were not the only ones to be seen within the grounds; and when Priscilla pointed them out to Rosa, she too said, “What does it matter? Who is there to make a row? You don’t expect them to keep the place tidy for us?”
Priscilla said that nothing was further from her expectations, but still she thought—but of course beggars can’t be choosers, and after all a primrose by the river’s brim was still a yellow primrose, and a joy to the cottage hospital.
“And a black cloud is a beast of a thing when it bursts,” added Rosa, pointing to the menace in the distance, above the balloon-like foliage of the immemorial elms.
Priscilla shook her head.
“We’ll do it,” she cried; “yes, if we hurry. I don’t want to get this frock wet, so we’ll rush for the primroses and shelter at the house. It will be an April shower, but we’ll dodge it.”
“No fear,” acquiesced Rosa.
Down they plunged among the trees of the long slope, at the bottom of which the trout stream curled among the mossy stones, spreading its delicate white floss over some, and threading the narrows with a cord of silk, and then spattering the ferns on each side of a rock that met its advance too abruptly.
In a few minutes the girls were among the primroses. They were like the yellow pattern upon a green carpet at this place, only one could not see the carpet for the pattern. When the two serviceable baskets were packed with primroses there did not seem to be a clump the less in this garden that appeared to be the very throne of Spring itself—the throne and the golden treasury of the millionaire Spring.
And all the time that they were filling their baskets the blackbirds were making music among the bracken on the opposite slope, and once a great thrush came down with a wild winnowing of wings to a bramble that swung above the ripples of the water. It sounded its cackling note of alarm, and before it had ceased a cuckoo was heard as it flew from among a clump of chestnuts, gorgeous in drapery, to where a solitary ash, not yet green, stood far away from the billowy foliage of the slope.
And then the sunlit land became aware of a shadow sweeping up the valley. The rumble of thunder came from the distance.
“We’re in for it!” cried Rosa, springing up from the carpet where she had been kneeling.
“We’ll be in for it, as fast as we make ourselves—in the porch at least,” shouted Priscilla, catching up her basket and making a run for the zig-zag track up the bank. She was followed by Rosa with all speed, but before they got to the carriage drive at the top the first drops were making kettledrums of the crowns of their straw hats, and once again the organ of the orchestra was beginning to peal.
They gathered up their print skirts and ran like young does for the shelter of the house. It was an example of dignified Georgian, with a pillared porch and square windows. People said there was no nonsense about Overdean Manor; and others remarked that that was a pity. The front was masked by trees from the carriage drive. Some people said that it was just as well that this was so; it gave the horses a chance. No horse could maintain a trot in view of so dignified a front.
But it had an ample porch, and into its sheltering embrace the two girls plunged with only breath enough left for their laughter.
“Not a dozen drops,” they gasped, pinching each other’s blouses at their arms. “Actually not a dozen drops—practically dry—but hot—oh, goodness, wasn’t it hot!” And now they were going to have it in earnest.
They had it in earnest, but only as a spectacle. They were glowing after their race, but the porch contained no seats, and so they leant against the pillars and looked out at the rollicking Spring storm. It came with all the overdone vehemence of a practical jester—a comical bellow and a swirl and a swish; the topmost branches began complaining of their ill-treatment, bending and waving at first gracefully, then wildly—panic-stricken. Then the rain came—a comical flood suggesting the flinging of buckets of water—the rough play of grooms in the stable yard. The air became dark where the first swish of the rain swept by—dark and silent among the trees, while that madcap wind rushed on and made its fun on the fringe of the plantation. Out of the darkness a flash, and out of the distance a bombastic roar of thunder, but not the thunder of a storm that meant devastation; it was more like the laughter of good-humoured gods over some boy’s joke—something that had to do with the bursting of a cistern, or the turning on of a standpipe in the centre of a score of unsuspecting gentlemen wearing tall hats. The girls joined in the laughter of that boisterous thunder; but only for a moment. They became aware of an extraordinary pause—the suspicious silence of a room where the schoolboys are in hiding and ready to jump out on you. Then came the sound of a mighty rushing in the air that was not the rushing of the wind. Half-a-dozen rooks whirled in a badly-balanced flight across the tops of the nearest trees, cawing frantically; and the next instant they were seen by the girls like fish in the tanks of an aquarium. The world had become a world of waters. They were looking out upon a solid wall of water, and a hurricane of hail made up the plate glass in front of the tank.
They watched its changes for the five minutes that it lasted, and the lightning became more real and the thunder more in earnest. Then it went slamming away into the distance, leaving the big sweep of the carriage drive in front of the house the glistening lake of a minute, and transforming the Georgian mansion into an Alpine mountain of innumerable rushing torrents. It seemed as if a thousand secret springs of water had been set free in a moment, and all rushing down through their runnels to the valley.
“It will all be over in a few minutes, now; but wasn’t it a squelcher while it lasted!” cried Rosa, taking a cautious step outside to look round for the rainbow.
“I knew that we could just dodge it if we were slippy,” said Priscilla. “I wish we had some place to sit down.”
“Not worth while. We’ll be off in a minute.”
But it soon became plain that they would not be off quite so soon. When the thunderstorm with its wild blustering had departed, it left behind it, not the blue sky that might reasonably have been expected, but a tame flock of clouds that lumbered onward, discharging their contents upon the earth beneath with no great show of spirit, but with the depressing persistency of the mediocre.
“Hopeless!” sighed Priscilla.
“Horrid!” exclaimed Rosa.
After a few more minutes of waiting, the word “hungry” followed in alliterative sequence from both of them.
“If we could get round to Mrs. Pearce we might have some bread and butter,” suggested Rosa. (Mrs. Pearce was the name of the caretaker, and her premises were naturally at the other side of the Georgian mansion.)
“If we made a rush for the lodge we might have some plovers’ eggs,” said Priscilla.
Rendered desperate and, consequently, courageous by the thought of such dainties, one of the pair suggested the possibility of attracting the attention of the caretaker by ringing the door bell. The idea was a daring one, but they felt that their situation was so desperate as to make a desperate remedy pardonable, if reasonably formulated.
Hallo! there was no need to pull the bell; looking about for the handle, they found that the hall door was ajar to the extent of four or five inches.
“Careless of Mrs. Pearce! We must speak seriously to her about this,” said Rosa.
“When we have eaten her bread and butter,” whispered Priscilla, with a sagacious nod.
They passed into the great square hall, with its imposing pillars supporting the beams of the ceiling, and then they stopped abruptly, for they found themselves confronted by a vivid smell of tobacco smoke.
“Has Mother Pearce been indulging?” whispered Rosa.
“Oh, dear, no; it’s not that sort of tobacco,” replied the sagacious Priscilla. “No; it only means that Mr. Dunning has been paying a visit of inspection.”
(Mr. Dunning was the agent of the estate.)
They passed without further hesitation through the tobacco barrier, and seeing one of the doors open just beyond, they pushed through it and entered the room which they knew to be the library. They had been in the house more than once, before the days of its emptiness, and so knew their way about it.
“Hallo! we’re in luck,” said Rosa, pointing to where the table was laid with a cloth and plates, bread, cheese, biscuits, lettuce, and actually plovers’ eggs. There was, however, only one knife and fork, only one glass, and only one bottle—it was a bottle of hock, and Rosa hastened to read its label—Liebfraumilch.
“Mr. Dunning is here on business and is having a scratch lunch,” said Priscilla. “Liebfraumilch is a lovely wine, taking it year in and year out. Of course there are exceptionally good years of Liebfraumilch; but taking it all round it is a good sound wine.”
“Videauctioneer’s catalogue,” said Rosa. “But I decline to touch it, highly recommended though it is by a distinguished canootzer. I’ll have of that bread, however, une trauche, s’il vous plait, and I’ll poach a couple of those eggs, if I do get three months for it. How funny! Didn’t I say something about plovers’ eggs just now?”
“I’d be afraid to meddle with the eggs, but I’ll back you up in the matter of the bread and cheese; I’m fairly starving. On the whole, perhaps we would do well to hunt up Mrs. Pearce first. It’s as well to be ceremonial even in a house that you have broken into by stealth. If you take so much as a bite of that egg before we can start level, I’ll cut you up into such small slices.”
The knife which Priscilla had picked up for the purpose which she had but partly defined, fell from her hand. A sound had come from the big hooded chair in the shadow of the screen at the fireplace, and she had glanced round and seen, looking round the side of the chair at her, a man’s face.
The knife fell from her grasp at the startling sight. Rosa, following the direction of her gaze, turned round and saw the apparition; but she did not let fall the egg which she had taken up for critical inspection.
There was an awkward silence, but an effective tableau, had any one been present to see it. There was the large square room, with bookcases of the loveliest Chippendale design hiding all its walls, and at one side of the table stood a young woman, with a face beautifully rosy, and a mouth slightly open to complete the expression of astonishment that looked forth from her eyes; at the end of the table nearest the fireplace, another girl glancing over her shoulder at the man’s face that protruded beyond the line of downward slope at one side of the chair.
Perhaps the expression of astonishment on the man’s face was the strongest of the three. His mouth was quite wide open, and his eyes were staring curiously, with a look within them that suggested that he had not quite succeeded in taking in the details of the picture before him—that he had not succeeded in reconciling all that he saw with the actualities of life.
Both the girls perceived in a moment that he had just awakened; but this fact did not prevent their being paralysed for the moment—for several moments. The moments went on into minutes, until the whole thing had the note of the child’s game of “Who speaks first?”
It was this broadening of an impressive silence into a child’s comedy that was the saving of the situation. A smile, to which his open mouth lent itself quite readily, came over the young man’s face—he was a young man, and his face was still younger—and, after a maidenly hesitancy of a few seconds, the girls also smiled. His smile broadened into a grin, and both girls broke into a peal of laughter.
He pulled himself round in his chair and got upon his feet, still grinning, and then they saw that he was just what girls accustomed to tall men would call short, or what girls accustomed to short men would call medium-sized. He had very short hair of an indefinite shade of brown, and his mouth, when he grinned, was well proportioned, if it was designed to make a gap touching the lobe of each ear.
He stood up before them and shook himself out, as it seemed, after the manner of a newly awakened dog. Then he took in a reef or two (also speaking figuratively) of his mouth, and it became quite ordinary. He bowed as awkwardly as most men do in ordinary circumstances, and this fact was pleasing to the girls; no girl who is worth anything tolerates a man who makes a graceful bow.
“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said. “That is—for me; it can’t be the same for you—that is, of course it’s unexpected, but little enough of the pleasure. Only if I had known—you didn’t say you were coming, you know—maybe you are in the habit of coming every day.”
The girls shook their heads; both glanced toward the window. He followed their example.
“Gloriana!” he said, “it has been raining after all.”
“Yes,” said Priscilla. “It has been a thunderstorm—a terrible thunderstorm!”
“You don’t say so! Long ago?”
“Half an hour ago. You must have heard it—the hail was terrific!” continued Priscilla.
“Gloriana! I’m afraid I’ve given myself away. If I said I wasn’t asleep I suppose you wouldn’t believe me.”
He looked from one to the other as if to guess whether of the twain was the more charitable or the more likely to make a fool of herself by telling a lie that would take in no one. He could not make up his mind on either point; and so he illuminated the silence by another grin. The girls looked at each other; they could hardly be blamed; and they certainly were not blamed by him.
He became quite serious in a moment, and his mouth seemed actually normal.
“I think that I’m rather lucky, do you know, in awaking to find such visitors—my first visitors—the first people to give me a welcome in my house. Before I have slept a single night under its roof—only for a matter of half an hour, and that in the day—I have two visitors. I hope that you will let me bid you welcome and that you will welcome me. May we exchange cards? My name is Wingfield—Jack Wingfield. I am the grandson, you know. You didn’t take me for the grandfather, did you?”
WE never heard that you were coming—not a word,” said Rosa.
“Not a word,” echoed Priscilla. “We have enjoyed permission from Mr. Dunning to walk in the park and to pluck the wild flowers and blackberries and things like that. That was why we came to-day.”
“Let me see; isn’t it a bit too early for blackberries?” said he.
“Yes; but not for primroses,” said Rosa.
“Nor for lunch,” said he. “Did I dream that I heard one of you—if not both—say that this house should be called Starvation Hall?”
They both laughed.
“Not exactly,” said Priscilla.
“Well, words to that effect,” he cried. “Anyhow, whether you did or not, you’ll never say it again. Here comes Mrs. Pearce—of course you know Mrs. Pearce. I needn’t introduce her to you.”
“Oh, we all know Mrs. Pearce,” cried Rosa, as the caretaker entered, bearing a tray and a smell of a grill.
“Then she can introduce you to me,” said he.
Mrs. Pearce, red of face and opulent of bust, stood for a moment as one amazed, looking from the young women to the young man.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pearce,” cried Rosa.
“Good morning, Miss Rosa—Miss Caffyn,” said the woman, nearly dropping the tray in her attempt to drop a curtsey—the curtsey of the charity school girl to a member of the Rector’s family.
“Good morning,” said Priscilla.
“Good morning, Miss Wadhurst.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pearce,” said the man, as she laid down her tray on the table. “Do you think you could add to your favours by hunting out a couple more plates and knives and forks, and, above all, glasses? I quite forgot to tell you that I had sent out invitations to lunch. My first guests have arrived.”
“Please do not trouble; bread and cheese for us,” cried Priscilla.
“What about that plover’s egg that you were trifling with—oh, I see you have laid it quietly back on the dish,” he remarked, with an ingratiating smile in the direction of Rosa.
“I’m afraid,” murmured Mrs. Pearce—“I’m afraid that—that——”
She was looking in the direction of the covered dish on the tray.
“I’m not,” cried he. He lifted off the cover and displayed the twin halves of a chicken beautifully grilled. “She’s afraid that there isn’t enough to go round!” He pointed to the dish. “Gloriana! as if I could eat all that off my own bat! Do hurry about those plates—and, above all, don’t forget the glasses. Can you guess what the name of this hock is?” he added, turning to Rosa.
“It’s Liebfraumilch, and you were not asleep after all,” cried the girl, rosy and smiling.
“Not after all, but just before,” he said reassuringly, placing chairs at the table also with a good deal of assurance. But he was not so engrossed by the occupation as to fail to see the glances exchanged between the girls—glances of doubt, shot through with the enquiry, “Should we?”
“What a day it is turning out, and the morning looked so fine,” said he, not gloomily, but cheerfully. “Won’t you sit down? The spatchcock’s all right, only it takes offence if it isn’t eaten at once.”
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” said Rosa boldly to her friend. The man turned his head away to enable her to do so—a movement that displayed tact and not tactics.
“You are extremely kind, Mr. Wingfield,” said Priscilla very formally. “I don’t suppose that we are quite in line with the precepts of the book of etiquette; and, besides, we have no business to deprive you of your lunch and——”
“And sleep,” murmured Rosa.
That finished the formally-worded apology. Before their triolet of laughter had passed away they were all seated at the table, and Mrs. Pearce had brought in the requisite crockery and cutlery. She did not forget the glasses. She beamed confidently upon the girls as if she was endeavouring to assure them that she was a mother herself, and that she would be at hand in case she should hear screams.
He showed some dexterity in carving his spatchcock. They kept their eyes on him, with a protest ready if he should leave nothing for himself; but they had no need of such vigilance, and their protest was uncalled for. He was quite fair to them and to himself, and witnessing his tact once more they became still more at their ease.
“The day doesn’t seem quite so hopeless now as it did a quarter of an hour ago,” he remarked, when they had all praised the cooking of Mrs. Pearce. “Nothing seems the same when a chap has done himself well in the eating and drinking line—especially the drinking. I don’t wonder that crimes are committed when people haven’t enough to eat.”
“I wonder if having too little to eat or too much to drink is most responsible,” said Priscilla.
“Meaning that it’s about time I opened that bottle?” said he. “Now, I can’t think that either of you is under the influence of a temperance lecturer; but if you are, you’ll drink all the same to my homecoming.”
“Delighted, I’m sure,” cried Rosa. “There’s no nicer thing to drink than Liebfraumilch, when it’s of the right year.”
“I was under the impression,” said he, scrutinizing the bottom of the cork, “that taking the bad years with the good, a chap has a better chance with Liebfraumilch than anything in that line.”
“I got it all from a catalogue—I have a good memory,” confessed Priscilla. “I hope it’s true.”
“A wine merchant’s catalogue? Gospel—absolute gospel,” said he solemnly.
He poured out half a glass and became more solemn still while he examined it in breathless silence. He held it up to the light, and the girls saw that it was a pale flame smouldering in the glass. He gave it a shake and it became a glorious topaz.
“A very fair colour indeed,” said he on the completion of these mysteries, and the girls breathed again. “Yes, I don’t know who laid it down, but I know who’ll take it up, and every time it will be with a hope that his grandsire’s halo is as good a colour. The occasion is an extremely interesting one, and the wine is almost equal to the occasion. If not, we are. Ladies and gentlemen, it is with feelings of etcetera, etcetera, that I bring to your notice the toast of the young heir now come into his inheritance. Long may he reign—I mean long may it rain, when it was the means of bringing so charming a company round his table, and so say all of us; with a—I’m extremely obliged to you, and I’ll respond later on.”
He had the aspect and the manner of a merry boy. About him there was a complete absence of self-consciousness. He treated the girls in the spirit of comradeship, and Priscilla at least felt that he must have been possessed of a certain gift of intuition to perceive that this spirit and no other was the one that was appropriate to the occasion; and moreover that he must have had other gifts that enabled him to perceive that they were the very girls to appreciate such a form of unconventional courtesy. He was in no way breezy or free-and-easy in his manner. He made fun like a schoolboy, never forcing the note; and these young women knew that he was perfectly natural from the ease with which they remained natural and with no oppression of self-consciousness in his company, in spite of the fact that the situation was not merely unconventional, but within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, to indiscreetness, as indiscreetness would be defined by the district visitor or her relative, Mrs. Grundy.
These young women, who found themselves taking lunch and drinking wine—actually hock of a brand that was habitually highly spoken of in the catalogues—at the invitation and in the house of a young man to whom they had never been presented, were beginning to feel as if they had been acquainted with him all their life, and they made an extremely good meal. The plovers’ eggs vanished when the spatchcock had been despatched, and the cream cheese and lettuce were still occupying them when Mrs. Pearce came from the kitchen to find out if all was well, and if she should serve the coffee in the library or in the drawing-room.
“Oh, the drawing-room by all means,” cried Mr. Wingfield; and when she disappeared he whispered, “The good creature has just been to the drawing-room to take off the covers, I’m sure, and she would never forgive us if we didn’t go to see how careful she has been of everything. The only thing about it is that I couldn’t find my way from here to the drawing-room.”
“You may depend on us,” said Rosa.
“I may? Then I place myself unreservedly in your hands,” said he. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You shall show me through the house and tell me the story of all the rooms—who was killed in which, and where the celebrated duel was fought—you may, by the aid of a reasonable amount of imagination, still see the marks of the bullets in the wainscot.”
“I never heard anything of that,” said Rosa. “A duel? When did it happen?”
“What, do you mean to say that there’s no room in this house where the celebrated duel was fought?” cried he. “And you can assure me that there’s no picture of an old reprobate who went in the county by the name of Butcher Wingfield—or was it old Black Jack Wingfield—maybe Five-bottle Wingfield?”
“I really can’t tell. All that I can say is that I never heard of any of them,” said Rosa.
“This is a nice thing to confront a chap who has just entered into possession of an old house and, as he hoped, a lot of ready-made ancestors,” said he mournfully. “Not one of them with any of the regulation tokens of the old and crusted ancestor about him! But you’ll at least show me the room that Nell Gwyn slept in—or was it the Young Pretender?—you’ll show me his initials, Y. P., that he carved on the eighteenth century panelling of the Priest’s Room with the sliding panel—you know?”
“Oh, yes, I know,” laughed Priscilla. “And the ghost of Lady Barbara that appears to the stranger who has been inadvertently put to sleep in the Blue Room, and the old chest where the bones were found, and the tiny pink shoes with genuine Liberty buckles.”
“You give me hope—the ghost of a hope—I mean the hope of a ghost. I expected half a dozen at least; but one sees, on reflection, that that would be unreasonable. I’ll be content with one if you throw the tiny shoes into the bargain.”
“I’m afraid that you’ll have to be contented with comfort and a surveyor’s certificate,” said Priscilla.
“What I am thinking is, who will give us a certificate that we have been reasonably engaged when we return home,” remarked Rosa, when they were rising from the table—he did not offer them cigarettes.
“Do you really think it possible that your people will be uneasy?” said he, with some concern in his voice. “It’s still raining. Will they not be certain that you took shelter somewhere? If there’s any doubt, I’ll send a message by my motor.”
“You have brought a motor, and yet you looked for ghosts and things?” said Priscilla.
“I came from Barwellstone in it this morning. A nice run. I tried a railway guide for trains, and found that with luck I could do the journey in eight hours.”
“And you did it in twenty minutes by motor?”
“Twenty-five, in addition to three hours. It’s just ninety-two miles. So this is the drawing-room? Very nice, I’m sure.”
They had walked across the hall and had passed through a very fine mahogany door into another big square room, with exquisite plaster decorations on the walls and ceiling and mantelpieces, of which there were two. The eighteenth century furniture was mahogany and upholstered in faded red damask. The chairs were all uncovered, though the curtains remained tied up in such a way as caused each to reproduce with extraordinary clearness the figure of Mrs. Pearce. The transparent cabinets all round the room were filled with specimens of the art of Josiah Wedgwood—blue and green and buff and black—beautiful things.
“This is the Wedgwood drawing-room,” said Priscilla. “It is considered one of the most perfect things of its kind in the country.”
“Why the Wedgwood room? Was there a Mr. Wedgwood who planned it?” asked the owner.
“There was a Mr. Wedgwood who supplied the china,” said Priscilla.
“Local—a local man, I suppose—Framsby, or is it Southam?”
“Oh, no, Wedgwood was not a local man by any means,” replied Priscilla, wondering in what circles this young man had spent the earlier years of his life that he had never heard of Wedgwood.
“Anyhow, it’s quite nice to look at; and here comes the coffee,” said he. “It’s a queer room—gives even an ignorant chap like me a feeling that it’s all right—furnished throughout, and not on the hire-purchase system.”
Then he drank his coffee and looked about him, and then at his visitors—first at one and then at the other. They were standing together at one of the oval windows looking out upon a flagged terrace with a balustrade and piers and great stone vases of classical design.
“A really nice room,” he said, as if he were summing up the result of his survey of the young women. “I think, you know, that I make its acquaintance in rather happy circumstances,” he added. “I hope I may consider that you have left cards on me so that I may ask you to dinner or something. I went into the dining-room the first thing, and then down to the cellar. I don’t think that the dining-room looks so finished as this room. I felt a bit uneasy, you know, to see all those frames with hand-painted ancestors grinning down at me. They seemed to be winking at one another and whispering, ‘Lord, what a mug!’ I didn’t feel at all at home among them—pretty bounders they were to make their remarks—silk coats and satin embroidered waistcoats and powdered hair worn long! Bounders to a man! I felt a bit lonely among them, and that’s why I told the woman I should have my plate laid in the library. I didn’t want any of their cheek. I was thinking what a rather dismal homecoming it was for me—not a soul to say a word of welcome to a chap. I felt a bit down on my luck, and I suppose that’s why I fell into that doze. Only five minutes I could have slept, and when I opened my eyes—I give you my word I had a feeling—that halfwaking feeling, you know—that it was the ghosts of two of the nicest of my ancestors come back to say a word of encouragement to me to make up for the bad manners of those satin-upholstered ones. I do hate the kind of chap that gets painted in fancy dress!”
The notion of the Georgian portraits being in fancy dress sent the young women into a peal of laughter; and then he laughed too.
“That’s like coming home,” he said a minute later. “That’s what I looked for, and if I didn’t feel grateful to you both——”
“Grateful to the rain, the thunder and lightning,” suggested Rosa.
“All right, thunder and lightning and rain and all the rest. I’ll have a greater respect for them in the future; but all the same the gratitude will go to you. You have turned a failure into a success, and no other girls would have been able to do so much. They would have giggled and gone the moment they caught sight of me. Yes, I’m grateful.”
“And we are glad,” said Priscilla, gently. “And we’re quite sorry that the rain is over so that we have no excuse for—for—oh, yes, trespassing on your hospitality.”
“But you have only shown me one of the rooms, and there are about forty others, I believe. Think of me getting lost in a rabbit warren of bedrooms and dressing-rooms and still rooms and sparkling! Wouldn’t it be on your conscience if you heard of that happening?”
“Our conscience—Mr. Wingfield takes it for granted that we have only one conscience between us,” said Priscilla.
“And perhaps he thinks that he’s generous,” said Rosa.
They did it very nicely, he thought. They were really very charming—not a bit like any other girls he had ever met.
“You don’t need a conscience, I’ll bet,” he said. “What do you ever do to keep it up to its work?”
“If we stay here another five minutes it will be working overtime,” laughed Priscilla. “Good-bye, Mr. Wingfield, and receive our thanks for shelter, and a—a—most unusual afternoon.”
“Good-bye. You have done a particularly good turn to a chap to-day, and don’t you forget it. I’ll go to the door with you.”
He walked with them to the pillared porch and said another good-bye in a different key.
They heard him close the hall door, and they knew that he would have to go to a window of the dining-room if he wished to watch them departing on the carriage drive.
They wondered—each of them on her own account—if he had hurried to that particular window.
“He is not so silly as he promised to be the first five minutes we came upon him,” said Rosa, when they were approaching the entrance gates.
“Not nearly. As a matter of fact I found him entertaining.”
“Not intellectually.”
“Perhaps not. I’m not sure that I am entertained by intellectual entertainment. He is a man in the clay stage. I’m not sure that that isn’t the most interesting—it certainly is the most natural. He might be anything that a woman might choose to make him.”
“Of course we’ll tell them at home what happened,” said Rosa, after a long pause.
“Why should we not? We would do well to be an hour or two in advance of Mrs. Pearce,” said Priscilla.
They got upon the road, and were forced to pay attention to its condition of muddiness rather than to the delight of breathing the sweet scents of the rain-drenched hedges on each side. They parted at the cross-roads, and only at that moment remembered that they had left their primroses in the porch.
Rosa went in the direction of the town, and Priscilla set her face toward the slope of the Down in front of her. Before she had gone for more than half a mile on her way to the farm, she saw a man approaching her—a middle-aged man in a black coat and leggings rather the worse for wear. He held up his hand to her while they were still far apart.
“Something has happened,” she said. “It cannot be that he became uneasy at my absence.” Then they met. “What is it, father?” she asked quickly.
“Dead—he is dead—the man is dead!” he said in a low voice.
“Dead—Marcus Blaydon—dead—are you sure?”
“Quite sure,” he replied.
“Thank God!” she said, speaking her words as though she were breathing a sigh of great relief.
And so she was; she was speaking of her husband.