AN HABITATION ENFORCED
My friend, if cause doth wrest
thee, Ere folly hath much oppressed thee, Far from acquaintance
kest thee Where country may digest thee… Thank God that so hath
blessed thee, And sit down, Robin, and rest thee.
—THOMAS TUSSER.
It came without warning, at the
very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and
Gunsberg Combine. The New York doctors called it overwork, and he
lay in a darkened room, one ankle crossed above the other, tongue
pressed into palate, wondering whether the next brain–surge of
prickly fires would drive his soul from all anchorages. At last
they gave judgment. With care he might in two years return to the
arena, but for the present he must go across the water and do no
work whatever. He accepted the terms. It was capitulation; but the
Combine that had shivered beneath his knife gave him all the
honours of war: Gunsberg himself, full of condolences, came to the
steamer and filled the Chapins’ suite of cabins with overwhelming
flower–works.
“Smilax,” said George Chapin when
he saw them. “Fitz is right. I’m dead; only I don’t see why he left
out the ‘In Memoriam’ on the ribbons!”
“Nonsense!” his wife answered,
and poured him his tincture. “You’ll be back before you can
think.”
He looked at himself in the
mirror, surprised that his face had not been branded by the hells
of the past three months. The noise of the decks worried him, and
he lay down, his tongue only a little pressed against his
palate.
An hour later he said: “Sophie, I
feel sorry about taking you away from everything like this. I—I
suppose we’re the two loneliest people on God’s earth
to–night.”
Said Sophie his wife, and kissed
him: “Isn’t it something to you that we’re going together?”
They drifted about Europe for
months—sometimes alone, sometimes with chance met gipsies of their
own land. From the North Cape to the Blue Grotto at Capri they
wandered, because the next steamer headed that way, or because some
one had set them on the road. The doctors had warned Sophie that
Chapin was not to take interest even in other men’s interests; but
a familiar sensation at the back of the neck after one hour’s keen
talk with a Nauheimed railway magnate saved her any trouble. He
nearly wept.
“And I’m over thirty,” he cried.
“With all I meant to do!”
“Let’s call it a honeymoon,” said
Sophie. “D’ you know, in all the six years we’ve been married,
you’ve never told me what you meant to do with your life?”
“With my life? What’s the use?
It’s finished now.” Sophie looked up quickly from the Bay of
Naples. “As far as my business goes, I shall have to live on my
rents like that architect at San Moritz.”
“You’ll get better if you don’t
worry; and even if it rakes time, there are worse things than
—How much have you?”
“Between four and five million.
But it isn’t the money. You know it isn’t. It’s the principle. How
could you respect me? You never did, the first year after we
married, till I went to work like the others. Our tradition and
upbringing are against it. We can’t accept those ideals.”
“Well, I suppose I married you
for some sort of ideal,” she answered, and they returned to their
forty–third hotel.
In England they missed the alien
tongues of Continental streets that reminded them of their own
polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one tongue, speciously
like American to the ear, but on cross–examination
unintelligible.
“Ah, but you have not seen
England,” said a lady with iron–grey hair. They had met her in
Vienna, Bayreuth, and Florence, and were grateful to find her again
at Claridge’s, for she commanded situations, and knew where
prescriptions are most carefully made up. “You ought to take an
interest in the home of our ancestors as I do.”
“I’ve tried for a week, Mrs.
Shonts,” said Sophie, “but I never get any further than tipping
German waiters.”
“These men are not the true
type,” Mrs. Shouts went on. “I know where you should go.”
Chapin pricked up his ears,
anxious to run anywhere from the streets on which quick men,
something of his kidney, did the business denied to him.
“We hear and we obey, Mrs.
Shonts,” said Sophie, feeling his unrest as he drank the loathed
British tea.
Mrs. Shonts smiled, and took them
in hand. She wrote widely and telegraphed far on their behalf till,
armed with her letter of introduction, she drove them into that
wilderness which is reached from an ash–barrel of a station called
Charing Cross. They were to go to Rockett’s—the farm of one Cloke,
in the southern counties—where, she assured them, they would meet
the genuine England of folklore and song.
Rocketts they found after some
hours, four miles from a station, and, so far as they could, judge
in the bumpy darkness, twice as many from a road. Trees, kine, and
the outlines of barns showed shadowy about them when they alighted,
and Mr. and Mrs. Cloke, at the open door of a deep stone–floored
kitchen, made them shyly welcome. They lay in an attic beneath a
wavy whitewashed ceiling, and, because it rained, a wood fire was
made in an iron basket on a brick hearth, and they fell asleep to
the chirping of mice and the whimper of flames.
When they woke it was a fair day,
full of the noises, of birds, the smell of box lavender, and fried
bacon, mixed with an elemental smell they had never met
before.
“This,” said Sophie, nearly
pushing out the thin casement in an attempt to see round the
corner, “is—what did the
hack–cabman say to the railway porter about my trunk—‘quite on the
top?’”
“No; ‘a little bit of all right.’
I feel farther away from anywhere than I’ve ever felt in my life.
We must find out where the telegraph office is.”
“Who cares?” said Sophie,
wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire the illustrated
weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard.
But there was no rest for the
alien soul till he had made sure of the telegraph office. He asked
the Clokes’ daughter, laying breakfast, while Sophie plunged her
face in the lavender bush outside the low window.
“Go to the stile a–top o’ the
Barn field,” said Mary, “and look across Pardons to the next spire.
It’s directly under. You can’t miss it—not if you keep to the
footpath. My sister’s the telegraphist there. But you’re in the
three–mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this
door from Pardons village.”
“One has to take a good deal on
trust in this country,” he murmured.
Sophie looked at the close turf,
scarred only with last night’s wheels, at two ruts which wound
round a rickyard, and at the circle of still orchard about the
half–timbered house.
“What’s the matter with it?” she
said. “Telegrams delivered to the Vale of Avalon, of course,” and
she beckoned in an earnest–eyed hound of engaging manners and no
engagements, who answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led
them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile
stood against the skyline, and, “I wonder what we shall find now,”
said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.
It was a slope of gap–hedged
fields possessed to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were
not, and the rabbit–mined, cattle–rubbed posts leaned out and in. A
narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of white tails
twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling
shrilly.
“No roads, no nothing!” said
Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers. “I thought all England
was a garden. There’s your spire, George, across the valley. How
curious!”
They walked toward it through an
all abandoned land. Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne
that had refused to die: there a harsh fallow surrendered to
yard–high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to
be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff
caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At
the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its
footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great
woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded
tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.
“All this within a hundred miles
of London,” he said. “Looks as if it had had nervous prostration,
too.” The footpath turned the shoulder of a slope, through a
thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had once been a
carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic
holm–oaks.
“A house!” said Sophie, in a
whisper. “A Colonial house!”
Behind the blue–green of the twin
trees rose a dark–bluish brick Georgian pile, with a
shell–shaped fan–light over its
pillared door. The hound had gone off on his own foolish quests.
Except for some stir it the branches and the flight of four
startled magpies; there was neither life nor sound about the square
house, but it looked out of its long windows most friendlily.
“Cha–armed to meet you, I’m
sure,” said Sophie, and curtsied to the ground. “George, this is
history I can understand. We began here.” She curtsied again.
The June sunshine twinkled on all
the lights. It was as though an old lady, wise in three
generations’ experience, but for the present sitting out, bent to
listen to her flushed and eager grandchild.
“I must look!” Sophie tiptoed to
a window, and shaded her eyes with her hand. “Oh, this room’s
half–full of cotton–bales—wool, I suppose! But I can see a bit of
the mantelpiece. George, do come! Isn’t that some one?”
She fell back behind her husband.
The front door opened slowly, to show the hound, his nose white
with milk, in charge of an ancient of days clad in a blue linen
ephod curiously gathered on breast and shoulders.
“Certainly,” said George, half
aloud. “Father Time himself. This is where he lives, Sophie.”
“We came,” said Sophie weakly.
“Can we see the house? I’m afraid that’s our dog.”
“No, ‘tis Rambler,” said the old
man. “He’s been, at my swill–pail again. Staying at Rocketts, be
ye? Come in. Ah! you runagate!”
The hound broke from him, and he
tottered after him down the drive. They entered the hall—just such
a high light hall as such a house should own. A slim–balustered
staircase, wide and shallow and once creamy–white, climbed out of
it under a long oval window. On either side delicately moulded
doors gave on to wool–lumbered rooms, whose sea–green mantelpieces
were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low relief.
“What’s the firm that makes these
things?” cried Sophie, enraptured. “Oh, I forgot! These must be the
originals. Adams, is it? I never dreamed of anything like that
steel–cut fender. Does he mean us to go everywhere?”
“He’s catching the dog,” said
George, looking out. “We don’t count.”
They explored the first or ground
floor, delighted as children playing burglars.
“This is like all England,” she
said at last. “Wonderful, but no explanation. You’re expected to
know it beforehand. Now, let’s try upstairs.”
The stairs never creaked beneath
their feet. From the broad landing they entered a long,
green–panelled room lighted by three full–length windows, which
overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden, and wooded
slopes beyond.
“The drawing–room, of course.”
Sophie swam up and down it. “That mantelpiece— Orpheus and
Eurydice—is the best of them all. Isn’t it marvellous? Why, the
room seems furnished with nothing in it! How’s that, George?”
“It’s the proportions. I’ve
noticed it.”
“I saw a Heppelwhite couch
once”—Sophie laid her finger to her flushed cheek and considered.
“With, two of them—one on each side—you wouldn’t need anything
else. Except—there must be one perfect mirror over that
mantelpiece.”
“Look at that view. It’s a framed
Constable,” her husband cried.
“No; it’s a Morland—a parody of a
Morland. But about that couch, George. Don’t you think Empire might
be better than Heppelwhite? Dull gold against that pale green? It’s
a pity they don’t make spinets nowadays.”
“I believe you can get them. Look
at that oak wood behind the pines.”
“‘While you sat and played
toccatas stately, at the clavichord,”’ Sophie hummed, and, head on
one; side, nodded to where the perfect mirror should hang:
Then they found bedrooms with
dressing–rooms and powdering–closets, and steps leading up and
down—boxes of rooms, round, square, and octagonal, with enriched
ceilings and chased door–locks.
“Now about servants. Oh!” She had
darted up the last stairs to the chequered darkness of the top
floor, where loose tiles lay among broken laths, and the walls were
scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop records. “They’ve been
keeping pigeons here,” she cried.
“And you could drive a buggy
through the roof anywhere,” said George.
“That’s what I say,” the old man
cried below them on the stairs. “Not a dry place for my pigeons at
all.”
“But why was it allowed to get
like this?” said Sophie.
“Tis with housen as teeth,” he
replied. “Let ‘em go too far, and there’s nothing to be done. Time
was they was minded to sell her, but none would buy. She was too
far away along from any place. Time was they’d ha’ lived here
theyselves, but they took and died.”
“Here?” Sophie moved beneath the
light of a hole in the roof.
“Nah—none dies here excep’
falling off ricks and such. In London they died.” He plucked a lock
of wool from his blue smock. “They was no staple—neither the
Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all of ‘em. Dead they be
seventeen year, for I’ve been here caretakin’ twenty–five.”
“Who does all the wool belong to
downstairs?” George asked.
“To the estate. I’ll show you the
back parts if ye like. You’re from America, ain’t ye? I’ve had a
son there once myself.” They followed him down the main stairway.
He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward the wall. “Plenty
room, here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men
at each end wouldn’t brish the paint. If I die in my bed they’ll
‘ave to up–end me like a milk–can. ‘Tis all luck, dye see?”
He led them on and on, through a
maze of back kitchens, dairies, larders, and sculleries, that
melted along covered ways into a farm–house, visibly older than the
main building, which again rambled out among barns, byres,
pig–pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields behind.
“Somehow,” said Sophie, sitting
exhausted on an ancient well–curb—“somehow one
wouldn’t insult these lovely old
things by filling them with hay.”
George looked at long stone walls
upholding reaches of silvery–oak weather–boarding; buttresses of
mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone;
curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house–leeked
tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and the
repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the
telegraph office for two and a half hours.
“But why,” said Sophie, as they
went back through the crater of stricken fields,—“why is one
expected to know everything in England? Why do they never
tell?”
“You mean about the Elphicks and
the Moones?” he answered.
“Yes—and the lawyers and the
estate. Who are they? I wonder whether those painted floors in the
green room were real oak. Don’t you like us exploring things
together—better than Pompeii?”
George turned once more to look
at the view. “Eight hundred acres go with the house—the old man
told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is one of ‘em.”
“I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is
the old house called?”
George laughed. “That’s one of
the things you’re expected to know. He never told me.”
The Clokes were more
communicative. That evening and thereafter for a week they gave the
Chapins the official history, as one gives it to lodgers, of Friars
Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie asked so many
questions, and George was so humanly interested, that, as
confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and
acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the
Elphicks and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the
Torrells. It was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his
wife in the dairy, the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o’
nights by the big fire, when the two had been half the day
exploring about the house, where old Iggulden, of the blue smock,
cackled and chuckled to see them. The motives that swayed the
characters were beyond their comprehension; the fates that shifted
them were gods they had never met; the sidelights Mrs. Cloke threw
on act and incident were more amazing than anything in the record.
Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs.
Shonts.
“But why—why—why—did So–and–so do
so–and–so?” Sophie would demand from her seat by the pothook; and
Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her knees, “For the sake of the
place.”
“I give it up,” said George one
night in their own room. “People don’t seem to matter in this
country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it,
Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.”
“Poor old thing!” They had been
walking round the farms as usual before tea. “No wonder they loved
it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it. Jane Elphick married
the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The octagonal room
with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was hers. Now what
did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?” said Sophie.
“About the Torrell cousins and
the uncle who died in Java. They lived at Burnt House— behind High
Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.”
“No; Burnt House is under High
Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale Anstey,” Sophie
corrected.
“Well, old man Cloke said—”
Sophie threw open the door and
called down into the kitchen, where the Clokes were covering the
fire “Mrs. Cloke, isn’t Burnt House under High Pardons?”
“Yes, my dear, of course,” the
soft voice answered absently. A cough. “I beg your pardon, Madam.
What was it you said?”
“Never mind. I prefer it the
other way,” Sophie laughed, and George re–told the missing chapter
as she sat on the bed.
“Here to–day an’ gone to–morrow,”
said Cloke warningly. “They’ve paid their first month, but we’ve
only that Mrs. Shonts’s letter for guarantee.”
“None she sent never cheated us
yet. It slipped out before I thought. She’s a most humane young
lady. They’ll be going away in a little. An’ you’ve talked a lot
too, Alfred.”
“Yes, but the Elphicks are all
dead. No one can bring my loose talking home to me. But why do they
stay on and stay on so?”
In due time George and Sophie
asked each other that question, and put it aside. They argued that
the climate—a pearly blend, unlike the hot and cold ferocities of
their native land—suited them, as the thick stillness of the nights
certainly suited George. He was saved even the sight of a metalled
road, which, as presumably leading to business, wakes desire in a
man; and the telegraph office at the village of Friars Pardon,
where they sold picture post–cards and pegtops, was two walking
miles across the fields and woods.
For all that touched his past
among his fellows, or their remembrance of him, he might have been
in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had been very largely
spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had no wish to leave
this present of God. The unhurried meals, the foreknowledge of
deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft sky under
which they walked together and reckoned time only by their hunger
or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the
miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms—Griffons,
Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where
Iggulden of the blue smock–frock would waylay them, and they would
ransack the old house once more; the long wet afternoons when, they
tucked up their feet on the bedroom’s deep window–sill over against
the apple–trees, and talked together as never till then had they
found time to talk—these things contented her soul, and her body
throve.
“Have you realized,” she asked
one morning, “that we’ve been here absolutely alone for the last
thirty–four days?”
“Have you counted them?” he
asked. “Did you like them?” she replied.
“I must have. I didn’t think
about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted
myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I’ve only had two or three bad
times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”
“Climate, all climate.” Sophie
swung her new–bought English boots, as she sat on the stile
overlooking Friars Pardon, behind
the Clokes’s barn.
“One must take hold of things
though,” he said, “if it’s only to keep one’s hand in.” His eyes
did not flicker now as they swept the empty fields. “Mustn’t
one?”
“Lay out a Morristown links over
Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire it.”
“No, I’m not as English as
that—nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the farms here could be made
to pay.”
“Well, I’m Anastasia in the
‘Treasure of Franchard.’ I’m content to be alive and purr. There’s
no hurry.”
“No.” He smiled. “All the same,
I’m going to see after my mail.” “You promised you wouldn’t have
any.”
“There’s some business coming
through that’s amusing me. Honest. It doesn’t get on my nerves at
all.”
“Want a secretary?”
“No, thanks, old thing! Isn’t
that quite English?”
“Too English! Go away.” But none
the less in broad daylight she returned the kiss. “I’m off to
Pardons. I haven’t been to the house for nearly a week.”
“How’ve you decided to furnish
Jane Elphick’s bedroom?” he laughed, for it had come to be a
permanent Castle in Spain between them.
“Black Chinese furniture and
yellow silk brocade,” she answered, and ran downhill. She scattered
a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground–ash that Iggulden
had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the
holmoaks, sought the farm–house at the back of Friars Pardon. The
old man was not to be found, and she knocked at his half– opened
door, for she needed him to fill her idle forenoon. A blue–eyed
sheep–dog, a new friend, and Rambler’s old enemy, crawled out and
besought her to enter.
Iggulden sat in his chair by the
fire, a thistle–spud between his knees, his head drooped. Though
she had never seen death before, her heart, that missed a beat,
told her that he was dead. She did not speak or cry, but stood
outside the door, and the dog licked her hand.
When he threw up his nose, she
heard herself saying: “Don’t howl! Please don’t begin to howl,
Scottie, or I shall run away!”
She held her ground while the
shadows in the rickyard moved toward noon; sat after a while on the
steps by the door, her arms round the dog’s neck, waiting till some
one should come. She watched the smokeless chimneys of Friars
Pardon slash its roofs with shadow, and the smoke of Iggulden’s
last lighted fire gradually thin and cease. Against her will she
fell to wondering how many Moones, Elphicks, and Torrells had been
swung round the turn of the broad Mall stairs. Then she remembered
the old man’s talk of being “up–ended like a milk–can,” and buried
her face on Scottie’s neck. At last a horse’s feet clinked upon
flags, rustled in the old grey straw of the rickyard, and she found
herself facing the vicar—a figure she had seen at church declaiming
impossibilities (Sophie was a Unitarian) in an unnatural
voice.
“He’s dead,” she said, without
preface.
“Old Iggulden? I was coming for a
talk with him.” The vicar passed in uncovered. “Ah!” she heard him
say. “Heart–failure! How long have you been here?”
“Since a quarter to eleven.” She
looked at her watch earnestly and saw that her hand did not
shake.
“I’ll sit with him now till the
doctor comes. D’you think you could tell him, and—yes, Mrs. Betts
in the cottage with the wistaria next the blacksmith’s? I’m afraid
this has been rather a shock to you.”
Sophie nodded, and fled toward
the village. Her body failed her for a moment; she dropped beneath
a hedge, and looked back at the great house. In some fashion its
silence and stolidity steadied her for her errand.
Mrs. Betts, small, black–eyed,
and dark, was almost as unconcerned as Friars Pardon.
“Yiss, yiss, of course. Dear me!
Well, Iggulden he had had his day in my father’s time. Muriel, get
me my little blue bag, please. Yiss, ma’am. They come down like
ellum– branches in still weather. No warnin’ at all. Muriel, my
bicycle’s be’ind the fowlhouse. I’ll tell Dr. Dallas, ma’am.”
She trundled off on her wheel
like a brown bee, while Sophie—heaven above and earth beneath
changed—walked stiffly home, to fall over George at his letters, in
a muddle of laughter and tears.
“It’s all quite natural for
them,” she gasped. “They come down like ellum–branches in still
weather. Yiss, ma’am.’ No, there wasn’t anything in the least
horrible, only—only—Oh, George, that poor shiny stick of his
between his poor, thin knees! I couldn’t have borne it if Scottie
had howled. I didn’t know the vicar was so—so sensitive. He said he
was afraid it was ra—rather a shock. Mrs. Betts told me to go home,
and I wanted to collapse on her floor. But I didn’t disgrace
myself. I—I couldn’t have left him—could I?”
“You’re sure you’ve took no
‘arm?” cried Mrs. Cloke, who had heard the news by farm–
telegraphy, which is older but swifter than Marconi’s.
“No. I’m perfectly well,” Sophie
protested.
“You lay down till tea–time.”
Mrs. Cloke patted her shoulder. “THEY’ll be very pleased, though
she ‘as ‘ad no proper understandin’ for twenty years.”
“They” came before twilight—a
black–bearded man in moleskins, and a little palsied old woman, who
chirruped like a wren.
“I’m his son,” said the man to
Sophie, among the lavender bushes. “We ‘ad a difference— twenty
year back, and didn’t speak since. But I’m his son all the ‘same,
and we thank you for the watching.”
“I’m only glad I happened to be
there,” she answered, and from the bottom of her heart she meant
it.
“We heard he spoke a lot o’
you—one time an’ another since you came. We thank you kindly,” the
man added.
“Are you the son that was in
America?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. On my uncle’s farm,
in Connecticut. He was what they call rood–master there.”
“Whereabouts in Connecticut?”
asked George over her shoulder. “Veering Holler was the name. I was
there six year with my uncle.”
“How small the world is!” Sophie
cried. “Why, all my mother’s people come from Veering Hollow. There
must be some there still—the Lashmars. Did you ever hear of
them?”
“I remember hearing that name,
seems to me,” he answered, but his face was blank as the back of a
spade.
A little before dusk a woman in
grey, striding like a foot–soldier, and bearing on her arm a long
pole, crashed through the orchard calling for food. George, upon
whom the unannounced English worked mysteriously, fled to the
parlour; but Mrs. Cloke came forward beaming. Sophie could not
escape.
“We’ve only just heard of it;”
said the stranger, turning on her. “I’ve been out with the
otter–hounds all day. It was a splendidly sportin’ thing—”
“Did you—er—kill?” said Sophie.
She knew from books she could not go far wrong here.
“Yes, a dry bitch—seventeen
pounds,” was the answer. “A splendidly sportin’ thing of you to do.
Poor old Iggulden—”
“Oh—that!” said Sophie,
enlightened.
“If there had been any people at
Pardons it would never have happened. He’d have been looked after.
But what can you expect from a parcel of London solicitors?”
Mrs. Cloke murmured
something.
“No. I’m soaked from the knees
down. If I hang about I shall get chilled. A cup of tea, Mrs.
Cloke, and I can eat one of your sandwiches as I go.” She wiped her
weather–worn face with a green and yellow silk handkerchief.
“Yes, my lady!” Mrs. Cloke ran
and returned swiftly.
“Our land marches with Pardons
for a mile on the south,” she explained, waving the full cup, “but
one has quite enough to do with one’s own people without poachin’.
Still, if I’d known, I’d have sent Dora, of course. Have you seen
her this afternoon, Mrs. Cloke? No? I wonder whether that girl did
sprain her ankle. Thank you.” It was a formidable hunk of bread and
bacon that Mrs. Cloke presented. “As I was sayin’, Pardons is a
scandal! Lettin’ people die like dogs. There ought to be people
there who do their duty. You’ve done yours, though there wasn’t the
faintest call upon you. Good night. Tell Dora, if she comes, I’ve
gone on.”
She strode away, munching her
crust, and Sophie reeled breathless into the parlour, to shake the
shaking George.
“Why did you keep catching my eye
behind the blind? Why didn’t you come out and do your duty?”
“Because I should have burst. Did
you see the mud on its cheek?” he said.
“Once. I daren’t look again. Who
is she?”
“God—a local deity then. Anyway,
she’s another of the things you’re expected to know by
instinct.”
Mrs. Cloke, shocked at their
levity, told them that it was Lady Conant, wife of Sir Walter
Conant, Baronet, a large landholder in the neighbourhood; and if
not God; at least His visible Providence. George made her talk of
that family for an hour.
“Laughter,” said Sophie afterward
in their own room, “is the mark of the savage. Why couldn’t you
control your emotions? It’s all real to her.”
“It’s all real to me. That’s my
trouble,” he answered in an altered tone. “Anyway, it’s real enough
to mark time with. Don’t you think so?”
“What d’you mean?” she asked
quickly, though she knew his voice. “That I’m better. I’m well
enough to kick.”
“What at?”
“This!” He waved his hand round
the one room. “I must have something to play with till I’m fit for
work again.”
“Ah!” She sat on the bed and
leaned forward, her hands clasped. “I wonder if it’s good for
you.”
“We’ve been better here than
anywhere,” he went on slowly. “One could always sell it
again.”
She nodded gravely, but her eyes
sparkled.
“The only thing that worries me
is what happened this morning. I want to know how you feel about
it. If it’s on your nerves in the least we can have the old farm at
the back of the house pulled down, or perhaps it has spoiled the
notion for you?”
“Pull it down?” she cried.
“You’ve no business faculty. Why, that’s where we could live while
we’re putting the big house in order. It’s almost under the same
roof. No! What happened this morning seemed to be more of a—of a
leading than anything else. There ought to be people at Pardons.
Lady Conant’s quite right.”
“I was thinking more of the woods
and the roads. I could double the value of the place in six
months.”
“What do they want for it?” She
shook her head, and her loosened hair fell glowingly about her
cheeks.
“Seventy–five thousand dollars.
They’ll take sixty–eight.”
“Less than half what we paid for
our old yacht when we married. And we didn’t have a good time in
her. You were—”
“Well, I discovered I was too
much of an American to be content to be a rich man’s son. You
aren’t blaming me for that?”
“Oh, no. Only it was a very
businesslike honeymoon. How far are you along with the deal,
George?”
“I can mail the deposit on the
purchase money to–morrow morning, and we can have the thing
completed in a fortnight or three weeks—if you say so.”
“Friars Pardon—Friars Pardon!”
Sophie chanted rapturously, her dark gray eyes big with delight.
“All the farms? Gale Anstey, Burnt House, Rocketts, the Home Farm,
and Griffons? Sure you’ve got ‘em all?”
“Sure.” He smiled.
“And the woods? High Pardons
Wood, Lower Pardons, Suttons, Dutton’s Shaw, Reuben’s Ghyll,
Maxey’s Ghyll, and both the Oak Hangers? Sure you’ve got ‘em
all?”
“Every last stick. Why, you know
them as well as I do.” He laughed. “They say there’s five
thousand—a thousand pounds’ worth of lumber—timber they call it—in
the Hangers alone.”
“Mrs. Cloke’s oven must be mended
first thing, and the kitchen roof. I think I’ll have all this
whitewashed,” Sophie broke in, pointing to the ceiling. “The whole
place is a scandal. Lady Conant is quite right. George, when did
you begin to fall in love with the house? In the greenroom that
first day? I did.”
“I’m not in love with it. One
must do something to mark time till one’s fit for work.”