"I've got too many caps, Mrs. Worfolk," John proclaimed next morning to
his housekeeper. "You can give this one away."
"Yes, sir. Who would you like it given to?"
"Oh, anybody, anybody. Tramps very often ask for old boots, don't they?
Some tramp might like it."
"Would you have any erbjections if I give it to my nephew, sir?"
"None whatever."
"It seems almost too perky for a tramp, sir; and my sister's boy--well,
he's just at the age when they like to dress theirselves up a bit. He's
doing very well, too. His employers is extremely satisfied with the way
he's doing. Extremely satisfied, his employers are."
"I'm delighted to hear it."
"Yes, sir. Well, it's been some consolation to my poor sister, I mean to
say, after the way her husband behaved hisself, and it's to be hoped
Herbert'll take fair warning. Let me see, you _will_ be having lunch at
home I think you said?"
John winced: this was precisely what he would have avoided by catching
the 9:05 at Waterloo last night.
"I shan't be in to lunch for a few days, Mrs. Worfolk, no--er--nor to
dinner either as a matter of fact. No--in fact I'll be down in the
country. I must see after things there, you know," he added with an
attempt to suggest as jovially as possible a real anxiety about his new
house.
"The country, oh yes," repeated Mrs. Worfolk grimly; John saw the
beech-woods round Ambles blasted by his housekeeper's disapproval.
"You wouldn't care to--er--come down and give a look round yourself,
Mrs. Worfolk? My sister, Mrs. Curtis--"
"Oh, I should prefer not to intrude in any way, sir. But if you insist,
why, of course--"
"Oh no, I don't insist," John hurriedly interposed.
"No, sir. Well, we shall all have to get used to being left alone
nowadays, and that's all there is to it."
"But I shall be back in a few days, Mrs. Worfolk. I'm a Cockney at
heart, you know. Just at first--"
Mrs. Worfolk shook her head and waddled tragically to the door.
"There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned
to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in
spite of everything.
"No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good
heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room,
"why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next
thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be
offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I
arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a
play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new
play. I absolutely _must_."
John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the
arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal
neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had
supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by
ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with
feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her
"understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles;
John in the prospect of half a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed
flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in
success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called
"jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it.
"Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a
little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of
valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint
coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks.
"They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the
verb.
John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's
humanity and retreated hurriedly. He would have liked to explain that
his inquiry had merely been a venture into abstract esthetics and that
he had not had the least intention of extracting her opinion about these
suits _on him_; but he felt that an attempt at explanation would
embarrass her, and he hummed instead over a selection of ties, as a bee
hums from flower to flower in a garden, careless of the gardener who
close at hand is potting up plants.
"I will take these ties," he announced on the last stave of _A Fine Old
English Gentleman_.
Maud noted them gravely.
"And I shall have a few books. Perhaps there won't be room for them?"
"There won't be room for them, not in your dressing-case, sir."
"Oh, I know there won't be room in that," said John, bitterly.
His dressing-case might be considered the medal he had struck in honor
of _The Fall of Babylon_: he had passed it every morning on his way to
rehearsals and, dreaming of the triumph that might soon be his, had
vowed he would buy it were such a triumph granted. It had cost L75, was
heavy enough when empty to strain his wrist and when full to break his
back, and it contained more parasites of the toilet table and the
writing desk than one could have supposed imaginable. These parasites
each possessed an abode of such individual shape that leaving them
behind made no difference to the number of really useful articles, like
pajamas, that could be carried in the cubic space lined with blue
corded silk on which they looked down like the inconvenient houses of a
fashionable square. Therefore wherever John went, the fittings went too,
a glittering worthless mob of cut-glass, pigskin, tortoiseshell and
ivory.
"But in my portmanteau," John persisted. "Won't there be room there?"
"I might squeeze them in," Maud admitted. "It depends what boots you're
wanting to take with you, sir."
"Never mind," he sighed. "I can make a separate parcel of them."
"There's the basket what we were going to use for the cat, sir."
"No, I should prefer a brown paper parcel," he decided. It would be
improper for the books out of which the historical trappings of his
_Joan of Arc_ were to be manufactured to travel in a lying-in hospital
for cats.
John left Maud to finish the packing and went downstairs to his library.
This double room of fine proportions was, as one might expect from the
library of a popular writer, the core--the veritable omphalos of the
house; with its fluted pilasters, cream-colored panels and
cherub-haunted ceiling, the expanse of city and sky visible from three
sedate windows at the south end and the glimpse of a busy Hampstead
street caught from those facing north, not to speak of the prismatic
rows of books, it was a room worthy of art's most remunerative triumphs,
the nursery of inspiration, and, save for a slight suggestion that the
Muses sometimes drank afternoon tea there, the room of an indomitable
bachelor. When John stepped upon the wreaths, ribbons, and full-blown
roses of the threadbare Aubusson rug that floated like gossamer upon a
green carpet of Axminster pile as soft as some historic lawn, he was
sure that success was not a vacuum. In his now optimistic mood he hoped
ultimately to receive from Ambles the kind of congratulatory benediction
that the library at Church Row always bestowed upon his footsteps.
Indeed, if he had not had such an ambition for his country house, he
could scarcely have endured to quit even for a week this library, where
fires were burning in two grates and where the smoke of his Partaga was
haunting, like a complacent ghost, the imperturbable air. John possessed
another library at Ambles, but he had not yet had time to do more than
hurriedly stock it with the standard works that he felt no country house
should be without. His library in London was the outcome of historical
research preparatory to writing his romantic plays; and since all works
of popular historical interest are bound with a much more lavish
profusion of color and ornament even than the works of fiction to which
they most nearly approximate, John's shelves outwardly resembled rather
a collection of armor than a collection of books. There were, of course,
many books the insides of which were sufficiently valuable to excuse
their dingy exterior; but none of these occupied the line, where romance
after romance of exiled queens, confession after confession of
morganatic wives, memoir after memoir from above and below stairs,
together with catch-penny alliterative gatherings as of rude regents and
libidinous landgraves flashed in a gorgeous superficiality of gilt and
text. In order to amass the necessary material for a play about Joan of
Arc John did not concern himself with original documents. He assumed,
perhaps rightly, that a Camembert cheese is more palatable and certainly
more portable than a herd of unmilked cows. To dramatize the life of
Joan of Arc he took from his shelves _Saints and Sinners of the
Fifteenth Century_ ... but a catalogue is unnecessary: enough that when
the heap of volumes chosen stood upon his desk it glittered like the
Maid herself before the walls of Orleans.
"After all," as John had once pointed out in a moment of exasperation to
his brother, James, the critic, "Shakespeare didn't sit all day in the
reading-room of the British Museum."
An hour later the playwright, equipped alike for country rambles and
poetic excursions, was sitting in a first-class compartment of a London
and South-Western railway train; two hours after that he was sitting in
the Wrottesford fly swishing along between high hazel hedges of
golden-brown.
"I shall have to see about getting a dog-cart," he exclaimed, when after
a five minutes' struggle to let down the window with the aid of a strap
that looked like an Anglican stole he had succeeded in opening the door
and nearly falling head-long into the lane.
"You have to let down the window _before_ you get out," said the driver
reproachfully, trying to hammer the frameless window back into place and
making such a noise about it that John could not bear to accentuate by
argument the outrage that he was offering to this morning of exquisite
decline, on which earth seemed to be floating away into a windless
infinity like one of her own dead leaves. No, on such a morning
controversy was impossible, but he should certainly take immediate steps
to acquire a dog-cart.
"For it's like being jolted in a badly made coffin," he thought, when he
was once more encased in the fly and, having left the high road behind,
was driving under an avenue of sycamores bordered by a small stream, the
water of which was stained to the color of sherry by the sunlight
glowing down through the arches of tawny leaves overhead. To John this
avenue always seemed the entrance to a vast park surrounding his country
house; it was indeed an almost unfrequented road, grass-grown in the
center and lively with rabbits during most of the day, so that his
imagination of ancestral approaches was easily stimulated and he felt
like a figure in a painting by Marcus Stone. It was lucky that John's
sanguine imagination could so often satisfy his ambition; prosperous
playwright though he was, he had not yet made nearly enough money to buy
a real park. However, in his present character of an eighteenth-century
squire he determined, should the film version of _The Fall of Babylon_
turn out successful, to buy a lawny meadow of twenty acres that would
add much to the dignity and seclusion of Ambles, the boundaries of which
at the back were now overlooked by a herd of fierce Kerry cows who
occupied the meadow and during the summer had made John's practice
shots with a brassy too much like big-game shooting to be pleasant or
safe. After about a mile the avenue came to an end where a narrow curved
bridge spanned the stream, which now flowed away to the left along the
bottom of a densely wooded hillside. The fly crossed over with an
impunity that was surprising in face of a printed warning that
extraordinary vehicles should avoid this bridge, and began to climb the
slope by a wide diagonal track between bushes of holly, the green of
which seemed vivid and glossy against the prevailing brown. The noise of
the wheels was deadened by the heavy drift of beech leaves, and the
stillness of this russet world, except for the occasional scream of a
jay or the flapping of disturbed pigeons, demanded from John's
illustrative fancy something more remote and Gothic than the eighteenth
century.
"Malory," he said to himself. "Absolute Malory. It's almost impossible
not to believe that Sir Gawaine might not come galloping down through
this wood."
Eager to put himself still more deeply in accord with the romantic
atmosphere, John tried this time to open the door of the fly with the
intention of walking meditatively up the hill in its wake; the door
remained fast; but he managed to open the window, or rather he broke it.
"I've a jolly good mind to get a motor," he exclaimed, savagely.
Every knight errant's horse in the neighborhood bolted at the thought,
and by the time John had reached the top of the hill and emerged upon a
wide stretch of common land dotted with ancient hawthorns in full
crimson berry he was very much in the present. For there on the other
side of the common, flanked by shelving woods of oak and beech and
backed by rising downs on which a milky sky ruffled its breast like a
huge swan lazily floating, stood Ambles, a solitary, deep-hued,
Elizabethan house with dreaming chimney-stacks and tumbled mossy roofs
and garden walls rising from the heaped amethysts of innumerable
Michaelmas daisies.
"My house," John murmured in a paroxysm of ownership.
The noise of the approaching fly had drawn expectant figures to the
gate; John, who had gratified affection, curiosity and ostentation by
sending a wireless message from the _Murmania_, a telegram from
Liverpool yesterday, and another from Euston last night to announce his
swift arrival, had therefore only himself to thank for perceiving in the
group the black figure of his brother-in-law, the Reverend Laurence
Armitage. He drove away the scarcely formed feeling of depression by
supposing that Edith could not by herself have trundled the
barrel-shaped vicarage pony all the way from Newton Candover to Ambles,
and, finding that the left-hand door of the fly was unexpectedly
susceptible to the prompting of its handle, he alighted with such
rapidity that not one of his smiling relations could have had any
impression but that he was bounding to greet them. The two sisters were
so conscious of their rich unmarried brother's impulsive advance that
each incited her own child to responsive bounds so that they might meet
him half-way along the path to the front door, in the harborage of which
Grandma (whose morning nap had been interrupted by a sudden immersion in
two shawls, and a rapid swim with Emily, the maid from London, acting as
lifebuoy down the billowy passages and stairs of the old house) rocked
in breathless anticipation of the filial salute.
"Welcome back, my dear Johnnie," the old lady panted.
"How are you, mother? What, another new cap?"
Old Mrs. Touchwood patted her head complacently. "We bought it at
Threadgale's in Galton. The ribbons are the new hollyhock red."
"Delightful!" John exclaimed. "And who helped you to choose it? Little
Frida here?"
"Nobody _helped_ me, Johnnie. Hilda accompanied me into Galton; but she
wanted to buy a sardine-opener for the house."
John had not for a moment imagined that his mother had wanted any
advice about a cap; but inasmuch as Frida, in what was intended to be a
demonstrative welcome, prompted by her mother, was rubbing her head
against his ribs like a calf against a fence, he had felt he ought to
hook her to the conversation somehow. John's concern about Frida was
solved by the others' gathering round him for greetings.
First Hilda offered her sallow cheek, patting while he kissed it her
brother on the back with one hand, and with the other manipulating
Harold in such a way as to give John the impression that his nephew was
being forced into his waistcoat pocket.
"He feels you're his father now," whispered Hilda with a look that was
meant to express the tender resignation of widowhood, but which only
succeeded in suggesting a covetous maternity. John doubted if Harold
felt anything but a desire to escape from being sandwiched between his
mother's crape and his uncle's watch chain, and he turned to embrace
Edith, whose cheeks, soft and pink as a toy balloon, were floating
tremulously expectant upon the glinting autumn air.
"We've been so anxious about you," Edith murmured. "And Laurence has
such a lot to talk over with you."
John, with a slight sinking that was not altogether due to its being
past his usual luncheon hour, turned to be welcomed by his
brother-in-law.
The vicar of Newton Candover's serenity if he had not been a tall and
handsome man might have been mistaken for smugness; as it was, his
personality enveloped the scene with a ceremonious dignity that was not
less than archidiaconal, and except for his comparative youthfulness (he
was the same age as John) might well have been considered
archiepiscopal.
"Edith has been anxious about you. Indeed, we have all been anxious
about you," he intoned, offering his hand to John, for whom the sweet
damp odors of autumn became a whiff of pious women's veils, while the
leaves fluttering gently down from the tulip tree in the middle of the
lawn lisped like the India-paper of prayer-books.
"I've got an air-gun, Uncle John," ejaculated Harold, who having for
some time been inhaling the necessary breath now expelled the sentence
in a burst as if he had been an air-gun himself. John hailed the
announcement almost effusively; it reached him with the kind of relief
with which in childhood he had heard the number of the final hymn
announced; and a robin piping his delicate tune from the garden wall was
welcome as birdsong in a churchyard had been after service on Sundays
handicapped by the litany.
"Would you like to see me shoot at something?" Harold went on, hastily
cramming his mouth with slugs.
"Not now, dear," said Hilda, hastily. "Uncle John is tired. And don't
eat sweets just before lunch."
"Well, it wouldn't tire him to see me shoot at something. And I'm not
eating sweets. I'm getting ready to load."
"Let the poor child shoot if he wants to," Grandma put in.
Harold beamed ferociously through his spectacles, took a slug from his
mouth, fitted it into the air-gun, and fired, bringing down two leaves
from an espalier pear. Everybody applauded him, because everybody felt
glad that it had not been a window or perhaps even himself; the robin
cocked his tail contemptuously and flew away.
"And now I must go and get ready for lunch," said John, who thought a
second shot might be less innocuous, and was moreover really hungry. His
bedroom, dimity draped, had a pleasant rustic simplicity, but he decided
that it wanted living in: the atmosphere at present was too much that of
a well-recommended country inn.
"Yes, it wants living in," said John to himself. "I shall put in a good
month here and break the back of Joan of Arc."
"What skin is this, Uncle John?" a serious voice at his elbow inquired.
John started; he had not observed Harold's scout-like entrance.
"What skin is that, my boy?" he repeated in what he thought was the
right tone of avuncular jocularity and looking down at Harold, who was
examining with myopic intensity the dressing-case. "That is the skin of
a white elephant."
"But it's brown," Harold objected.
John rashly decided to extend his facetiousness.
"Yes, well, white elephants turn brown when they're shot, just as
lobsters turn red when they're boiled."
"Who shot it?"
"Oh, I don't know--probably some friend of the gentleman who keeps the
shop where I bought it."
"When?"
"Well, I can't exactly say when--but probably about three years ago."
"Father used to shoot elephants, didn't he?"
"Yes, my boy, your father used to shoot elephants."
"Perhaps he shot this one."
"Perhaps he did."
"Was he a friend of the gentleman who keeps the shop where you bought
it?"
"I shouldn't be surprised," said John.
"Wouldn't you?" said Harold, skeptically. "My father was an asplorer.
When I'm big I'm going to be an asplorer, too; but I sha'n't be friends
with shopkeepers."
"Confounded little snob," John thought, and began to look for his
nailbrush, the address of whose palatial residence of pigskin only Maud
knew.
"What are you looking for, Uncle John?" Harold asked.
"I'm looking for my nailbrush, Harold."
"Why?"
"To clean my nails."
"Are they dirty?"
"Well, they're just a little grubby after the railway journey."
"Mine aren't," Harold affirmed in a lofty tone. Then after a minute he
added: "I thought perhaps you were looking for the present you brought
me from America."
John turned pale and made up his mind to creep unobserved after lunch
into the market town of Galton and visit the local toyshop. It would be
an infernal nuisance, but it served him right for omitting to bring
presents either for his nephew or his niece.
"You're too smart," he said nervously to Harold. "Present time will be
after tea." The sentence sounded contradictory somehow, and he changed
it to "the time for presents will be five o'clock."
"Why?" Harold asked.
John was saved from answering by a tap at the door, followed by the
entrance of Mrs. Curtis.
"Oh, Harold's with you?" she exclaimed, as if it were the most
surprising juxtaposition in the world.
"Yes, Harold's with me," John agreed.
"You mustn't let him bother you, but he's been so looking forward to
your arrival. _When_ is Uncle coming, he kept asking."
"Did he ask _why_ I was coming?"
Hilda looked at her brother blankly, and John made up his mind to try
that look on Harold some time.
"Have you got everything you want?" she asked, solicitously.
"He hasn't got his nailbrush," said Harold.
Hilda assumed an expression of exaggerated alarm.
"Oh dear, I hope it hasn't been lost."
"No, no, no, it'll turn up in one of the glass bottles. I was just
telling Harold that I haven't really begun my unpacking yet."
"Uncle John's brought me a present from America," Harold proclaimed in
accents of greedy pride.
Hilda seized her brother's hand affectionately.
"Now you oughtn't to have done that. It's spoiling him. It really is.
Harold never expects presents."
"What a liar," thought John. "But not a bigger one than I am myself," he
supplemented, and then he announced aloud that he must go into Galton
after lunch and send off an important telegram to his agent.
"I wonder ..." Hilda began, but with an arch look she paused and seemed
to thrust aside temptation.
"What?" John weakly asked.
"Why ... but no, he might bore you by walking too slowly. Harold," she
added, seriously, "if Uncle John is kind enough to take you into Galton
with him, will you be a good boy and leave your butterfly net at home?"
"If I may take my air-gun," Harold agreed.
John rapidly went over in his mind the various places where Harold might
be successfully detained while he was in the toyshop, decided that the
risk would be too great, pulled himself together, and declined the
pleasure of his nephew's company on the ground that he must think over
very carefully the phrasing of the telegram he had to send, a mental
process, he explained, that Harold might distract.
"Another day, darling," said Hilda, consolingly.
"And then I'll be able to take my fishing-rod," said Harold.
"He is so like his poor father," Hilda murmured.
John was thinking sympathetically of the distant Amazonian tribe that
had murdered Daniel Curtis, when there was another tap at the door, and
Frida crackling loudly in a clean pinafore came in to say that the bell
for lunch was just going to ring.
"Yes, dear," said her aunt. "Uncle John knows already. Don't bother him
now. He's tired after his journey. Come along, Harold."
"He can have my nailbrush if he likes," Harold offered.
"Run, darling, and get it quickly then."
Harold rushed out of the room and could be heard hustling his cousin all
down the corridor, evoking complaints of "Don't, Harold, you rough boy,
you're crumpling my frock."
The bell for lunch sounded gratefully at this moment, and John, without
even washing his hands, hurried downstairs trying to look like a hungry
ogre, so anxious was he to avoid using Harold's nailbrush.
The dining-room at Ambles was a long low room with a large open
fireplace and paneled walls; from the window-seats bundles of drying
lavender competed pleasantly with the smell of hot kidney-beans upon the
table, at the head of which John took his rightful place; opposite to
him, placid as an untouched pudding, sat Grandmama. Laurence said grace
without being invited after standing up for a moment with an expression
of pained interrogation; Edith accompanied his words by making with her
forefinger and thumb a minute cruciform incision between two of the
bones of her stays, and inclined her head solemnly toward Frida in a
mute exhortation to follow her mother's example. Harold flashed his
spectacles upon every dish in turn; Emily's waiting was during this meal
of reunion colored with human affection.
"Well, I'm glad to be back in England," said John, heartily.
An encouraging murmur rippled round the table from his relations.
"Are these French beans from our own garden?" John asked presently.
"Scarlet-runners," Hilda corrected. "Yes, of course. We never trouble
the greengrocer. The frosts have been so light ..."
"I haven't got a bean left," said Laurence.
John nearly gave a visible jump; there was something terribly suggestive
in that simple horticultural disclaimer.
"Our beans are quite over," added Edith in the astonished voice of one
who has tumbled upon a secret of nature. She had a habit of echoing many
of her husband's remarks like this; perhaps "echoing" is a bad
description of her method, for she seldom repeated literally and often
not immediately. Sometimes indeed she would wait as long as half an hour
before she reissued in the garb of a personal philosophical discovery
or of an exegitical gloss the most casual remark of Laurence, a habit
which irritated him and embarrassed other people, who would look away
from Edith and mutter a hurried agreement or ask for the salt to be
passed.
"I remember," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that beans were a favorite dish
of poor Papa, though I myself always liked peas better."
"I like peas," Harold proclaimed.
"I like peas, too," cried Frida excitedly.
"Frida," said her father, pulling out with a click one of the graver
tenor stops in his voice, "we do not talk at table about our likes and
dislikes."
Edith indorsed this opinion with a grave nod at Frida, or rather with a
solemn inclination of the head as if she were bowing to an altar.
"But I like new potatoes best of all," continued Harold. "My gosh, all
buttery!"
Laurence screwed up his eye in a disgusted wince, looked down his nose
at his plate, and drew a shocked cork from his throat.
"Hush," said Hilda. "Didn't you hear what Uncle Laurence said, darling?"
She spoke as one speaks to children in church when the organ begins; one
felt that she was inspired by social tact rather than by any real
reverence for the clergyman.
"Well, I do like new potatoes, and I like asparagus."
Frida was just going to declare for asparagus, too, when she caught her
father's eye and choked.
"Evidently the vegetable that Frida likes best," said John, riding
buoyantly upon the gale of Frida's convulsions, "is an artichoke."
It is perhaps lucky for professional comedians that rich uncles and
judges rarely go on the stage; their occupation might be even more
arduous if they had to face such competitors. Anyway, John had enough
success with his joke to feel much more hopeful of being able to find
suitable presents in Galton for Harold and Frida; and in the silence of
exhaustion that succeeded the laughter he broke the news of his having
to go into town and dispatch an urgent telegram that very afternoon,
mentioning incidentally that he might see about a dog-cart, and, of
course, at the same time a horse. Everybody applauded his resolve except
his brother-in-law who looked distinctly put out.
"But you won't be gone before I get back?" John asked.
Laurence and Edith exchanged glances fraught with the unuttered
solemnities of conjugal comprehension.
"Well, I _had_ wanted to have a talk over things with you after lunch,"
Laurence explained. "In fact, I have a good deal to talk over. I should
suggest driving you in to Galton, but I find it impossible to talk
freely while driving. Even our poor old pony has been known to shy. Yes,
indeed, poor old Primrose often shies."
John mentally blessed the aged animal's youthful heart, and said, to
cover his relief, that old maids were often more skittish than young
ones.
"Why?" asked Harold.
Everybody felt that Harold's question was one that should not be
answered.
"You wouldn't understand, darling," said his mother; and the dining-room
became tense with mystery.
"Of course, if we could have dinner put forward half an hour," said
Laurence, dragging the conversation out of the slough of sex, "we could
avail ourselves of the moon."
"Yes, you see," Edith put in eagerly, "it wouldn't be so dark with the
moon."
Laurence knitted his brow at this and his wife hastened to add that an
earlier dinner would bring Frida's bed-time much nearer to its normal
hour.
"The point is that I have a great deal to talk over with John," Laurence
irritably explained, "and that," he looked as if he would have liked to
add "Frida's bed-time can go to the devil," but he swallowed the impious
dedication and crumbled his bread.
Finally, notwithstanding that everybody felt very full of roast beef and
scarlet-runners, it was decided to dine at half-past six instead of
half-past seven.
"Poor Papa, I remember," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "always liked to dine
at half-past three. That gave him a nice long morning for his patients
and time to smoke his cigar after dinner before he opened the dispensary
in the evening. Supper was generally cold unless he anticipated a night
call, in which case we had soup."
All were glad that the twentieth century had arrived, and they smiled
sympathetically at the old lady, who, feeling that her anecdote had
scored a hit, embarked upon another about being taken to the Great
Exhibition when she was eleven years old, which lasted right through the
pudding, perhaps because it was trifle, and Harold did not feel inclined
to lose a mouthful by rash interruptions.
After lunch John was taken all over the house and all round the garden
and congratulated time after time upon the wisdom he had shown in buying
Ambles: he was made to feel that property set him apart from other men
even more definitely than dramatic success.
"Of course, Daniel was famous in his way," Hilda said. "But what did he
leave me?"
John, remembering the L120 a year in the bank and the collection of
stuffed humming birds at the pantechnicon, the importation of which to
Ambles he was always dreading, felt that Hilda was not being
ungratefully rhetorical.
"And of course," Laurence contributed, "a vicar feels that his
glebe--the value of which by the way has just gone down another L2 an
acre--is not his own."
"Yes, you see," Edith put in, "if anything horrid happened to Laurence
it would belong to the next vicar."
Again the glances of husband and wife played together in mid-air like
butterflies.
"And so," Laurence went on, "when you tell us that you hope to buy this
twenty-acre field we all realize that in doing so you would most
emphatically be consolidating your property."
"Oh, I'm sure you're wise to buy," said Hilda, weightily.
"It would make Ambles so much larger, wouldn't it?" suggested Edith.
"Twenty acres, you see ... well, really, I suppose twenty acres would be
as big as from...."
"Come, Edith," said her husband. "Don't worry poor John with comparative
acres--we are all looking at the twenty-acre field now."
The fierce little Kerry cows eyed the prospective owner peacefully,
until Harold hit one of them with a slug from his air-gun, when they all
began to career about the field, kicking up their heels and waving their
tails.
"Don't do that, my boy," John said, crossly--for him very crossly.
A short cut to Galton lay across this field, which John, though even
when they were quiet he never felt on really intimate terms with cows,
had just decided to follow.
"Darling, that's such a cruel thing to do," Hilda expostulated. "The
poor cow wasn't hurting you."
"It was looking at me," Harold protested.
"There is a legend about Francis of Assisi, Harold," his Uncle Laurence
began, "which will interest you and at the same time...."
"Sorry to interrupt," John broke in, "but I must be getting along. This
telegram.... I'll be back for tea."
He hurried off and when everybody called out to remind him of the short
cut across the twenty-acre field he waved back cheerfully, as if he
thought he was being wished a jolly walk; but he took the long way
round.
It was a good five miles to Galton in the opposite direction from the
road by which he had driven up that morning; but on this fine autumn
afternoon, going down hill nearly all the way through a foreground of
golden woods with prospects of blue distances beyond, John enjoyed the
walk, and not less because even at the beginning of it he stopped once
or twice to think how jolly it would be to see Miss Hamilton and Miss
Merritt coming round the next bend in the road. Later on, he did not
bother to include Miss Merritt, and finally he discovered his fancy so
steadily fixed upon Miss Hamilton that he was forced to remind himself
that Miss Hamilton in such a setting would demand a much higher standard
of criticism than Miss Hamilton on the promenade deck of the _Murmania_.
Nevertheless, John continued to think of her; and so pleasantly did her
semblance walk beside him and so exceptionally mild was the afternoon
for the season of the year that he must have strolled along the greater
part of the way. At any rate, when he saw the tower of Galton church he
was shocked to find that it was already four o'clock.