TWO PRISONERS
By the middle of June Miss Susan had departed to visit friends in the
south of England, escorting her niece as far as London, where she was
to spend some weeks with General and Mrs. Morven. The motor was in
hospital at Brodfield, and Owen, the chauffeur, had absolutely nothing
to do; no gardening, no greenhouse, no car. Miss Parrett was now the
undisputed ruler of Ottinge--manor and village--and he kept out of
her way in a crafty, not to say cowardly, fashion; when at home, Miss
Susan and her niece had intervened as buffers between him and Miss
Parrett’s despotic rudeness. Doubtless her bullying and browbeating
were a legacy from her burly grandfather, the Hoogly Pilot; indeed,
she was positively so insulting with regard to repairs, his bill for
petrol, and the extraordinary--the incredible quantity he wasted, that
sooner than face her and have rows, he more than once paid for it out
of his own pocket! But do not let it be for a moment supposed that the
chauffeur was afraid of the old lady; he was afraid of himself--afraid
that if she became altogether insupportable, he might lose, in one and
the same moment, his temper, and his situation!
When Bella Parrett reigned alone, it was a sore time for the Manor,
and especially for Joss. The old lady did not care for any animals or
pets, save a venerable green and blue parrot--her own contemporary.
She had accepted Joss, a gift from Mr. Woolcock, as she was assured
that, having no man living at the Manor, a dog was a necessity in
case of robbers, but chiefly because Miss Parrett half suspected that
the Martingales--neighbours of the Woolcocks--were anxious to possess
the said amusing little puppy. Joss was often in disgrace; but what
could one expect of an idle young dog, without companions, education,
or pursuits? When Susan was at home all went well; she looked after
him and screened his failings, and took him out--though her sister
frequently expostulated, and said--
“Now, I won’t have the creature attaching himself to you, Susan; he
must learn to know that he is _my_ dog!”
All the same, she never troubled about “her dog’s” food or sleeping
quarters, and it was actually Susan who paid for his licence!
Now Susan was absent, also his good friend Aurea--and Joss was in
confinement and deep disgrace; even before his friends’ departure he
had been under a black cloud. His youthful spirits were uncontrollable;
Joss had inherited the keen sporting instincts of his father, with the
intellectual faculties of his accomplished mother, Colette, the poodle,
and was both bold and inquisitive. Recently, the wretched animal had
chewed off the tail of a magnificent tiger-skin, and concealed it,
no one knew where! Miss Parrett hoped he had eaten it--as it was
cured with arsenic--but more likely it had been stored in one of his
many bone larders. He had poked his nose into a valuable jar, upset,
and smashed it! he had come in all wet and muddy from a rat-hunting
excursion in the river, and recouped his exhausted energies by a
luxurious siesta in Miss Parrett’s own bed--and there was also a
whispered and mysterious communication respecting the disappearance of
a best and most expensive _front_, which had undoubtedly gone to the
same limbo as the tiger’s tail!
“The brute is worse than a dozen monkeys,” declared his furious
mistress, and he was accordingly bestowed on a farmer, who lived miles
away near Catsfield, merely to return, accompanied by a piece of rope,
the same evening. After this, the word “poison” was breathed; but
luckily for Joss, Ottinge did not possess a chemist. Finally he was
condemned to a fare of cold porridge, and solitary confinement in an
empty stable--being suffered to roam loose at night after the house was
closed.
The chauffeur and the brown dog had a good deal in common; they were
both young and both captives in their way. Oh, those long, endless
summer days, when the young man hung about the yard, with nothing to
do, awaiting orders, unable to undertake any job in case the car should
be wanted. When he called each morning for Miss Parrett’s instructions,
and to ask if she would require the motor, the invariable reply was
that “she would let him know _later_.”
The first time they met, Miss Parrett had taken a dislike to the
chauffeur, and this dislike had recently been increased by an
outrage of more recent date. She had seen Owen, her paid servant, in
convulsions of laughter at her expense; yes, laughing exhaustively at
his mistress! This was on the occasion of a ridiculous and distressing
incident which had taken place one sultry afternoon in the garden. The
Rector and his daughter were helping Susan to bud roses--a merry family
party; the chauffeur was neatly trimming a box border, Hogben raking
gravel, Miss Parrett herself, hooded like a hawk, was poking and
prowling around. All at once she emerged from a tool-shed, bearing in
triumph a black bottle, which she imprudently shook.
“I’d like to know what _this_ is?” she demanded, in her shrillest pipe.
The answer was instantaneous, for the liquor being “up,” there was a
loud explosion, a wild shriek, and in a second Miss Parrett’s identity
was completely effaced by the contents of a bottle of porter. The too
inquisitive lady presented a truly humiliating spectacle. Hood, face,
hands, gown, were covered with thick cream-coloured foam; it streamed
and dripped, whilst she gasped and gurgled, and called upon “Susan!”
and “Aurea!”
As the stuff was removed from her eyes by the latter--anxiously kind,
but distinctly hysterical--almost the first object to catch the old
lady’s eye was the chauffeur, at a little distance, who, such was his
enjoyment of the scene, was actually holding his sides! He turned away
hastily, but she could see that his shoulders were shaking, and told
herself then that she would never forgive him. She bided her time to
award suitable punishment for his scandalous behaviour--and the time
arrived.
The malicious old woman enjoyed the conviction that she was holding
this too independent chauffeur a prisoner on the premises, precisely
as she kept the detestable Joss tied up in the stables. Joss rattled
and dragged at his chain, and occasionally broke into melancholy howls,
whilst the other paced to and fro in the red-tiled yard, thinking
furiously and smoking many more cigarettes than were good for him.
Accustomed from childhood to a life of great activity, to be, perforce,
incarcerated hour after hour, awaiting the good--or evil--pleasure of
an old woman who was afraid to use her motor, exasperated Wynyard to
the last degree. The car was ready, he was ready; usually about six
o’clock Miss Parrett would trot out in her hood and announce in her
bleating voice--
“Owen, I shall not require the car to-day!”
Sometimes she would look in on a humble, fawning culprit in the stable,
and say, as she contemplated his beseeching eyes--
“Hah! you bad dog, you _bad_ dog! I wish to goodness you were dead--and
you shall wish it yourself before I’ve done with you!”
It was not impossible that these amiable visitations afforded Miss
Parrett a delicious, and exquisite satisfaction.
* * * * *
The Drum Inn closed at ten o’clock, and even before the church clock
struck, the Hogbens had retired; but the former Hussar officer,
accustomed to late hours, and with the long summer night seducing him,
found it impossible to retire to his three-cornered chamber--where the
walls leant towards him so confidentially, and the atmosphere reeked of
dry rot. No, he must breathe the sweet breath of the country, have some
exercise, and walk himself weary under the open sky.
Mrs. Hogben--who had now absolute confidence in her lodger, and told
him all her most private family affairs--entrusted him with the
door-key, that is to say, she showed him the hole in which--as all the
village knew--it was concealed. Sometimes it was one in the morning
when the chauffeur crept upstairs in stockinged feet, accompanied by
Joss--yes, _Joss_! There were a pair of them, who had equally enjoyed
their nocturnal wanderings. The dog slept on a bit of sacking, in his
confederate’s room, till Mrs. Hogben was astir, then he flew back to
the Manor, and crept through the same hole in the yew hedge by which,
in answer to a welcome whistle, he had emerged the preceding evening.
Behold him sitting at the kitchen door when the kitchen-maid opened it,
the personification of injured innocence--a poor, neglected, hungry
animal, who had been turned out of doors for the whole long night.
These were delightful excursions: over meadows and brooks, through deep
glens and plantations, the two black sheep scoured the country, and, as
far as human beings were concerned, appeared to have earth and heaven
to themselves. Wynyard roamed hither and thither as the freak took him,
and surrendered himself to the intoxication that comes of motion in the
open air--a purely animal pleasure shared with his companion.
They surprised the dozing cattle, and alarmed astonished sheep, sent
families of grazing rabbits scuttling to their burrows; they heard the
night-jar, the owl, and the corn-crake; bats flapped across their path,
and in narrow lanes the broad shoulders of Wynyard broke the webs of
discomfited spiders. The extraordinary stillness of the night was what
impressed the young man; sometimes, from a distance of four or five
miles, he could hear, with startling distinctness, the twelve measured
strokes of Ottinge church clock.
During these long, aimless rambles, what Joss’ thoughts were, who
can say? Undoubtedly he recalled such excursions in ecstatic dreams.
Wynyard, for his part, took many pleasure trips into the land of
fancy, and there, amidst its picturesque glamour and all its doubts,
distractions, and hopes, his sole companion was Aurea! Nothing but the
hope of her return sustained and kept him day after day, pacing the
Manor yard, in a sense _her_ prisoner! His devotion would have amazed
his sister; she could not have believed that Owen, of all people,
would have been so enslaved by a girl, could have become a dumb, humble
worshipper, satisfied to listen to her laugh, to catch a radiant glance
of her dark eyes, and, when he closed the door of the car, to shield
her dainty skirt with reverent fingers.
Presently there came a spell of bad weather, the rain sweeping across
the country in great grey gusts and eddying whirls, moaning and howling
through the village, making the venerable trees in Mrs. Hogben’s
orchard quite lively in their old age, lashing each other with their
hoary arms, in furious play.
It was impossible for Wynyard to spend the entire evening indoors over
Mrs. Hogben’s fire, listening to tales of when “she was in service,”
though he was interested to hear that Miss Alice Parrett as was--Mrs.
Morven--“was the best of the bunch, and there wasn’t a dry eye when she
was buried.” He also learned that Mr. Morven was rich for a parson,
and had once kept a curate, well paid, too; but the curate had been
terribly in love with Miss Aurea, and of course she wouldn’t look at
him--a little red-haired, rat-faced fellow! and so he had gone away,
and there was no more regular curate, only weekends, when Mr. Morven
went abroad for his holiday. And now and then Mrs. Hogben would fall
into heartrending reminiscences of her defunct pigs.
“Afore _you_ come, Jack, I kep’ pigs,” she informed him; “one a year. I
bought un at Brodfield--a nice little fellow--for fifteen shillings to
a pound, and fattened un up, being so much alone all day, I could never
help making sort of free with the pig, and petting un. He always knew
me, and would eat out of my hand, and was a sort of companion, ye see?”
“Yes,” assented Wynyard, though he did not see, for in his mind’s eye
he was contemplating Aurea Morven.
“Well, of course, he grew fat, and ready for the butcher, and when he
was prime, he had to go--but it just broke my heart, so it did; for
nights before I couldn’t sleep for crying,” here she became lachrymose;
“but it had to be, and me bound to be about when the men came, and the
cries and yells of him nigh drove me wild; though, of course, once he
was scalded and hung up, and a fine weight, it wor a nice thing to have
one’s own pork and bacon.”
Her companion nodded sympathetically.
“Howsomever, the last time I was so rarely fond of the pig, and his
screams and carryings-on cut me so _cruel_, that I made a vow, then and
there, I’d never own another, but take a lodger instead--and you, Jack,
be the _first_!”
“I’m sure I’m flattered,” rejoined Wynyard, with an irony entirely
wasted on his companion, who, with her skirt turned over her knees,
and her feet generously displayed, sat at the other side of the fire,
thoroughly enjoying herself.
“Tom is out,” he said, and this remark started her at once into another
topic, and a series of bitter complaints of Dilly Topham--Tom’s girl.
“The worst of it is, she’s mighty pretty, ain’t she?” she asked
querulously.
“She is,” he admitted. Dilly was a round-faced, smiling damsel, with
curly brown hair and expressive blue eyes--a flirt to her finger-tips.
It was also true that she did lead poor Tom a life, and encouraged a
smart young insurance agent, with well-turned, stockinged calves, and a
free-wheel bicycle.
“I’d never put up with her,” declared Mrs. Hogben, “only for her
grandmother.”
“Why her grandmother?” he questioned lazily.
“Bless your dear heart, old Jane Topham has been a miser all her
life. Oh, she’s a masterpiece, she is, and lives on the scrapings of
the shop; she hasn’t had a gown this ten year, but has a fine lump of
money in the Brodfield Bank, and Dilly is all she’s got left, and the
apple of her eye. Dilly will have a big fortune--only for that, I’d put
her to the door, with her giggling and her impudence, yes I would, and
that’s the middle and the two ends of it!”
When Wynyard had heard more than enough of Dilly’s doings and
misdoings, and the biographies and tragedies of his predecessors (the
pigs), he went over to the Drum, listened to discussions, and realised
the prominent characteristics of the English rustic--reluctance to
accept a new idea. Many talked as if the world had not moved for thirty
years, and evinced a dull-witted contentment, a stolid refusal to look
facts in the face; but others, the younger generation, gave him a new
perspective--these read the papers, debated their contents, and took a
keen interest in their own times.
Wynyard generally had a word with old Thunder, and played a game of
chess with Pither, the organist. Captain Ramsay was established in his
usual place--smoking, silent, and staring. So intent was his gaze,
so insistently fixed, that Wynyard invariably arranged to sit with
his back to him, but even then he seemed to feel the piercing eyes
penetrating the middle of his spine!
One evening Captain Ramsay suddenly rose, and shuffled out of his
corner--an usual proceeding, for he remained immovable till closing
time (ten o’clock). He came straight up to where Wynyard was bending
over the chess-board, considering a move, and laying a heavy hand on
his shoulder, and speaking in a husky voice, said--
“I say--_Wynyard_--don’t you know me?”