It was gay June weather, in a deep green English park: a park in the
south of England, near the sea, where parks are deepest and greenest,
and June weather, when it is n't grave, is gaiest. Blackbirds were
dropping their liquid notes, thrushes were singing, hidden in the
trees. Here and there, in spaces enclosed by hurdles, sheep browsed or
drowsed, still faintly a-blush from recent shearing. The may was in
bloom, the tardy may, and the laburnum. The sun shone ardently, and
the air was quick with the fragrant responses of the earth.
A hundred yards up the avenue, Anthony Craford stopped his fly, a
shabby victoria, piled with the manifold leather belongings of a
traveller, and dismounted.
"I 'll walk the rest of the way," he said to the flyman, giving him his
fare. "Drive on to the house. The servants will take charge of the
luggage."
"Yes, sir," answered the flyman, briskly, and flicked his horse:
whereat, displaying a mettle one was by no means prepared for, the
horse dashed suddenly off in a great clattering gallop, and the ancient
vehicle behind him followed with a succession of alarming leaps and
lurches.
"See," declaimed a voice, in a sort of whimsical recitative,
"See how the young cabs bound,
As to the tabor's sound,--"
a full-bodied baritone, warm and suave, that broke, at the end, into a
note or two of laughter.
Anthony turned.
On the greensward, a few paces distant, stood a man in white flannels:
rather a fat man, to avow the worst at once, but, for the rest,
distinctly a pleasant-looking; with a smiling, round, pink face,
smooth-shaven, and a noticeable pair of big and bright blue eyes.
"Hello. Is that you, old Rosygills?" Anthony said, with a phlegm that
seemed rather premeditated.
"Now, what a question," protested the other, advancing to meet him. He
walked with an odd kind of buoyant, measured step, as if he were
keeping time to a silent dance-tune. "All I can tell you is that it's
someone very nice and uncommonly like me. You should know at your age
that a person's identity is quite the most mysterious mystery under
heaven. You really must n't expect me to vouch for mine. How-d'ye-do?"
He extended, casually, in the manner of a man preoccupied, a plump,
pink left hand. With his right hand he held up and flaunted, for
exhibition, a drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the
subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they
beauties?" he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour,
nothing less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer Blogrim's
chalk-pit. If eyes were made for seeing, see and admire--admire and
confess your admiration."
He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with
composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets,"
he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "_would n't_ the apathetic man
admire you?"
And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent of
the grateful prima-donna.
"They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a
Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off
again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine
art, and worth a rational being's consideration,--in those days, and in
just that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced
in deep tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you
no soul for the loveliness of flowers?"
Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall
and well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so
affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that
it was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who
actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps,
carried with it certain obligations--an obligation of fastidious
dressing, for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously
dressed indeed, in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that
bespoke a practised hand beside a discerning taste. But his general
air, none the less,--the expression of his figure and his motions, as
well as of his face and voice,--was somehow that of an indolent
melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago
perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to
the perception with a regret that was half amusement.
His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt
and a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel
cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly
a man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way
debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never
to be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call
"the flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age
of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful,
and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the
smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation
a composer and singer of songs, and--"contrapuntally," as he would
explain--Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of
business.
Anthony sighed.
"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the
transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming.
The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled
from the skies."
Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain
malicious satisfaction.
"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you
must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly
unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these
three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my
image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony
turned up to-morrow,' said I."
"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the
cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."
"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a
proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it
aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in
critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked.
"No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "_I 'll_ set out for the
house; and _you_ (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk
and gambol round about me. Come on."
And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of
delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the
gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were
stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a
house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood--I was on the point
of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English
neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?--for its quaintness, and in some
measure too, perhaps, for its history:--Craford Old Manor, a red-brick
Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses,
rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like
minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the
Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that
they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a
terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews
clipped to fantastic patterns: the house so placed withal, that, while
its north front faced the park, its south front, ivy-covered, looked
over a bright lawn and bright parterres of flowers, down upon the long
green levels of Rowland Marshes, and away to the blue sea beyond,--the
blue sea, the white cliffs, the yellow sands.
Anthony and Adrian, arm in arm, sauntered on without speaking, till
they attained the crest of a sweeping bit of upland, and the house and
the sea came in view. Here they halted, and stood for a minute in
contemplation of the prospect.
"The sea," said Adrian, disengaging his arm, that he might be free to
use it as a pointer, and then pointing with it, "the sea has put on her
bluest frock, to honour your return. And behold, decked in the hues of
Iris, that gallant procession of cliffs, like an army with banners,
zigzagging up from the world's rim, to bid you welcome. Oh, you were
clearly not unexpected. If no smoke rises from yonder chimneys,--if
your ancestral chimney-stone is cold,--that's merely because, despite
the season, we 're having a spell of warmish weather, and we 've let
the fires go out. 'T is June. Town 's full; country 's depopulated.
In Piccadilly, I gather from the public prints, vehicular traffic is
painfully congested. Meanwhile, I 've a grand piece of news for your
private ear. Guess a wee bit what it is."
"Oh, I 'm no good at guessing," said Anthony, with languor, as they
resumed their walk.
"Well--what will you give me, then, if I 'll blurt it out?" asked
Adrian, shuffling along sidewise, so that he might face his companion.
"My undivided attention--provided you blurt it briefly," Anthony
promised.
"Oh, come," Adrian urged, swaying his head and shoulders. "Betray a
little curiosity, at least."
"Curiosity is a vice I was taught in my youth to suppress," said
Anthony.
"A murrain on your youth," cried Adrian, testily. "However, since
there 's no quieting you otherwise, I suppose, for the sake of peace, I
'd best tell you, and have done with it. Well, then,"--he stood off,
to watch the effect of his announcement,--"Craford's Folly is let."
"Ah?" said Anthony, with no sign of emotion.
Adrian's face fell.
"Was there ever such inhumanity?" he mourned. "I tell him that--thanks
to my supernatural diligence in his affairs--his own particular
millstone is lifted from his neck. I tell him that a great white
elephant of a house, which for years has been eating its head off, and
keeping him poor, is at last--by my supernatural diligence--converted
into an actual source of revenue. And 'Ah?' is all he says, as if it
did n't concern him. Blow, blow, thou winter wind,--thou art not so
unkind as Man's ingratitude."
"Silence," Anthony mentioned, "is the perfectest herald of joy."
"Pish, tush," said Adrian. "A fico for the phrase. I 'll bet a
shilling, all the same,"--and he scanned Anthony's countenance
apprehensively,--"that you 'll be wanting money?"
"It's considered rather low," Anthony generalised, "to offer a bet on
what you have every ground for regarding as a certainty."
"A certainty?" groaned Adrian. He tossed his plump arms heavenwards.
"There it is! He 's wanting money."
And his voice broke, in something like a sob.
"Do you know," he asked, "how many pounds sterling you 've had the
spending of during the past twelvemonth? Do you know how many times
your poor long-suffering bankers have written to me, with tears in
their eyes, to complain that your account was overdrawn, and would I be
such a dear as to set it right? No? You don't? I could have sworn
you did n't. Well, I do--to my consternation. And it is my duty to
caution you that the estate won't stand it--to call that an estate," he
divagated, with a kind of despairing sniff, "which is already, by the
extravagances of your ancestors, shrunken to scarcely more than three
acres and a cow. You 're wanting money? What do you _do_ with your
money? What secret profligacy must a man be guilty of, who squanders
such stacks of money? Burst me, if I might n't as well be steward to a
bottomless pit. However, Providence be praised,--and my own
supernatural diligence,--I 'm in command of quite unhoped-for
resources. Craford New Manor is let."
"So you remarked before," said Anthony, all but yawning.
"And shall again, if the impulse seizes me," Adrian tartly rejoined.
"The circumstance is a relevant and a lucky one for the man you 're
fondest of, since he's wanting money. If it were n't that the new
house is let, he 'd find my pockets in the condition of Lord Tumtoddy's
noddle. However, the saints are merciful, I 'm a highly efficient
agent, and the biggest, ugliest, costliest house in all this
countryside is let."
"Have it so, dear Goldilocks," said Anthony, with submission. "I 'll
ne'er deny it more."
"There would be no indiscretion," Adrian threw out, "in your asking
whom it's let to."
"Needless to ask," Anthony threw back. "It's let to a duffer, of
course. None but a duffer would be duffer enough to take it."
"Well, then, you 're quite mistaken," said Adrian, airily swaggering.
"It's let to a lady."
"Oh, there be lady duffers," Anthony apprised him.
"It's very ungallant of you to say so." Adrian frowned disapprobation.
"This lady, if you can bear to hear the whole improbable truth at once,
is an Italian lady."
"An Italian lady? Oh?" Anthony's interest appeared to wake a little.
Adrian laughed.
"I expected that would rouse you. A Madame Torrebianca."
"Ah?" said Anthony; and his interest appeared to drop.
"Yes--la Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca. Is n't that a romantic name?
A lady like the heroine of some splendid old Italian story,--like
Pompilia, like Francesca,--like Kate the Queen, when her maiden was
binding her tresses. Young, and dark, and beautiful, and altogether
charming."
"H'm. And not a duffer? An adventuress, then, clearly," said Anthony.
"You 'll never get the rent."
"Nothing of the sort," Adrian asserted, with emphasis. "A lady of the
highest possible respectability. Trust me to know. A scrupulous
Catholic, besides. It was partly because we have a chapel that she
decided to take the house. Father David is hand and glove with her.
And rich. She gave the very best of banker's references. 'Get the
rent,' says he--as if I had n't got my quarter in advance. I let
furnished--what? Well, that's the custom--rent payable quarterly in
advance. And cultivated. She's read everything, and she prattles
English like you or me. She had English governesses when she was a
kiddie. And appreciative. She thinks I 'm without exception the
nicest man she 's ever met. She adores my singing, and delights in all
the brilliant things I say. She says things that are n't half bad
herself, and plays my accompaniments with really a great deal of
sympathy and insight. And Tony dear,"--he laid his hand impressively
on Tony's arm, while his voice sank to the pitch of deep emotion,--"she
has a cook--a cook--ah, me!"
He smacked his lips, as at an unutterable recollection.
"She brought him with her from Italy. He has a method of preparing
sweetbreads--well, you wait. His name is Serafino--and no wonder. And
she has the nicest person who was ever born to live with her: a Miss
Sandus, Miss Ruth Sandus, a daughter of the late Admiral Sir Geoffrey
Sandus. She 's a dove, she 's a duck, she 's a darling; she 's
completely won my heart. And I"--he took a few skipping steps, and
broke suddenly into song--
"'And I, and I have hers!'
We dote upon each other. She calls me her Troubadour. She has the
prettiest hands of any woman out of Paradise. She 's as sweet as
remembered kisses after death. She 's as sharp as a needle. She 's as
bright as morning roses lightly tipped with dew. She has a house of
her own in Kensington. And she's seventy-four years of age."
Anthony's interest appeared to wake again.
"Seventy-four? You call that young?" he asked, with the inflection of
one who was open to be convinced.
Adrian bridled.
"You deliberately put a false construction on my words. I was alluding
to Miss Sandus, as you 're perfectly well aware. Madame Torrebianca is
n't seventy-four, nor anything near it. She's not twenty-four. Say
about twenty-five and a fraction. With such hair too--and such
frocks--and eyes. Oh, my dear!" He kissed his fingers, and wafted the
kiss to the sky. "Eyes! Imagine twin moons rising over a tropical--"
"_Allons donc_," Anthony repressed him. "Contain yourself. Where is
Madame Torrebianca's husband?"
"Ah," said Adrian, with a sudden lapse of tone. "Where is Madame
Torrebianca's husband? That's the question. Where?" And he winked
suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you
that, you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with
uncongenial and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the
country, like this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you
the secretest secrets of the sages, and I should be making my
everlasting fortune--oh, but money hand over fist--as the oracle of a
general information bureau, in Bond Street, or somewhere. I should be
a millionaire, and a celebrity, and a regular cock-of-the-walk. Where
is Madame Torrebianca's husband? Ay! Gentle shepherd, tell me where?"
"Ah?" wondered Anthony, off his guard. "A mysterious disappearance?"
"Bravo!" crowed Adrian, gleefully. "I am not only witty myself, but
the cause of wit in others." He patted Anthony on the shoulder. "A
mysterious disappearance. The _mot_ is capital. That's it, to a
hair's breadth. Oft thought before, but ne'er so well expressed. The
gentleman (as the rude multitude in their unfeeling way would put it)
is dead."
"On the whole," mused Anthony, looking him up and down with a
reflective eye, "you 're an effulgent sort of egotist, as egotists go;
but you yield much cry for precious little wool."
"Yes, dead," Adrian repeated, pursuing his own train of ideas. "Donna
Susanna is a widow, a poor lone widow, a wealthy, eligible widow. You
must be kind to her."
"Why don't you marry her?" Anthony enquired.
"Pooh," said Adrian.
"Why don't you?" Anthony insisted. "If she 's really rich? You don't
dislike her--you respect her--perhaps, if you set your mind to it, you
could even learn to love her. She 'd give you a home and a position in
the world; she 'd make a sober citizen of you; and she 'd take you off
my hands. You know whether you 're an expense--and a responsibility.
Why don't you marry her? You owe it to me not to let such an occasion
slip."
"Pooh," said Adrian. But he looked conscious, and he laughed a
deliriously conscious laugh. "What nonsense you do talk. I 'm too
young, I 'm far too young, to think of marrying."
"See him blush and giggle and shake his pretty curls," said Anthony,
with scorn, addressing the universe.
By this time they had skirted the house, and come round to the southern
front, where the sunshine lay unbroken on the lawn, and the smell of
the box hedges, strong in the still air, seemed a thing almost
ponderable: the low, long front, a mellow line of colour, with the
purple of its old red bricks and the dark green of its ivy, sunlit
against the darker green of the park, and the blue of the tender
English sky. The terrace steps were warm under their feet, as they
mounted them. In terra-cotta urns, at intervals upon the terrace
balustrade, roses grew, roses red and white; and from larger urns, one
at either side of the hall-door, red and white roses were espaliered,
intertwining overhead.
The hall-door stood open; but the hall, as they entered it from the
brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then,
little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined
itself:--"that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard
Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family
secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square
and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to
serve at need as guard-rooms," says the _County History_.
Square and spacious it was certainly, perhaps a hackneyed type none the
less: the ceiling and the walls panelled in dark well-polished oak; the
floor a pavement of broad stone flags, covered for the most part now by
a faded Turkey carpet; the narrow windows, small-paned and leaded, set
in deep stone embrasures; a vast fireplace jutting across a corner, the
Craford arms emblazoned in the chimney-piece above; and a wide oak
staircase leading to the upper storey. The room was furnished,
incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather shabbily, and I
daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs and settles,
all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books and
periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled
sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door,
lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The
rest of the room seemed twilit. Someone had been too wise to defeat
that good oak panelling by hanging pictures on it.
"Not a creature is stirring," said Adrian, "not even a mouse.
Sellers--oh, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!--is shut up
in the scullery, I suppose, torturing his poor defenceless fiddle.
That 's what it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith
will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his
morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it
is to be a pious butler. I 'm doubting whether there was anyone to
disembarrass that flyman of yours of your luggage. So he 's probably
driven off with it all to his humble, happy home. I see none of it
about. Never mind. There 'll be some of your old things in Mrs. W.'s
camphor-chest, perhaps; or if it comes to a pinch, I can lend you a
garment or so of my own,--and then won't Craford of Craford cut a
figure of fun! You will make her acquaintance . . . Let me see.
To-day is Wednesday. We 'll call on her to-morrow."
"On whom?" asked Anthony, looking blank.
"Have we been talking of Queen Berengaria?" Adrian, with his nose in
the air, enquired. "On _whom?_ says you. We 'll call to-morrow
afternoon."
"Not I," said Anthony.
"Not to-morrow?" Adrian raised his eyebrows, well-marked crescents of
reddish-brown above his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy
of almost childlike naïveté. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;--though
Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence,
anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat,
red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But
Friday, since you prefer it."
Anthony seated himself on the arm of a leather chair, and, with
calculated deliberation, produced his cigarette-case, selected a
cigarette, returned his cigarette-case to his pocket, took out his
matchbox, struck a match, and got his cigarette alight.
"No, dear Nimbletongue," he said at last, through a screen of smoke,
"not Friday, either." He smiled, shaking his head.
Disquiet began to paint itself in Adrian's mien.
"Name your own day." He waited, anxious, in suspense.
Anthony chuckled.
"My own day is no day. I have n't the faintest desire to make the good
woman's acquaintance, and I shall not call on her at all."
Adrian stretched out appealing hands.
"But Anthony--" he adjured him.
"No," said Anthony, with determination. "I 'm not a calling man. And
I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let
that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh,
don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces,
the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the
stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that
has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I
'll pay no calls. And as for making acquaintances--save me from those
I 've made already. In broad England I can recall but three
acquaintances who are n't of a killing sameness;--and one of those," he
concluded sadly, with a bow to his companion, "one of those is fat, and
grows old."
"Poor lad," Adrian commiserated him. "You are tired and overwrought.
Go to your room, and have a bath and a brush up. That will refresh
you. Then, at half-past four, you can renew the advantages of my
society at tea in the garden. Oh, you 'll find your room quite ready.
I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months. Shall
I send Wick?"
"Yes, if you will be so good," said Anthony. He rose, and moved
towards the staircase.
Adrian waited till he had reached the top.
Then, "You 'll meet her whether you like or not on Sunday. Where on
earth do you suppose she hears her Mass?" he called after him.
"Oh, hang," Anthony called back.
For, sure enough, unless she drove seven miles to Wetherleigh, where
could she hear her Mass, but as his guest, in the chapel of his house?