Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old George with a
telegram in her hand. “My father reported his latitude and longitude by
wireless last night. The London people think he will be off Falmouth
in four days’ time. He wants me to join his liner there and go on to
Cherbourg and Paris. He’s arranged that. He is the sort of man who can
arrange things like that. There’ll be someone at Falmouth to look after
us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them where I can pick up a
telegram to-morrow.”
“Wells in Somerset,” said Sir Richmond.
His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he wanted her
first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town that was three or
four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon
town, where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where
Canute, who had ruled over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland,
and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little
sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views. They
would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they would go in
the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had
prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans
against the Celts and the Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the
Danes against the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes
and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to
Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh village the Celts
had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the
Romans came. And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great
Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence
they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine
and sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of
Europe right up to Reformation times.
“That will be a good day for us,” said Sir Richmond. “It will be like
turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro. There
will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be
something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. Rome
will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath. And
the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn.
We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There
we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which the tobacco
comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thither--was it
yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it
is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land--to Africa and
America and the whole wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the
bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour
problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I
don’t know how many American Gloucesters. Bath we’ll get in somehow.
And then as an Anglo-American showman I shall be tempted to run you
northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here
and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars
and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Washington
family monuments.”
“It was not only from England that America came,” said Miss Grammont.
“But England takes an American memory back most easily and most
fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the
Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe.... For you and me anyhow
this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land.” He
interrupted laughing as she was about to reply. “Well, anyhow,” he said,
“it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest
history in every grain of its soil. So we’ll send a wire to your London
people and tell them to send their instructions to Wells.”
“I’ll tell Belinda,” she said, “to be quick with her packing.”