"It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground,
Half-prankt with spring with sommer half imbrowned."
Scene: An old baronial hall, showing grey over the woods near to the
banks of a tributary of the silvery Tweed.
It wasn't the month for the Michaelmas daisies, for it was November.
And when the chrysanthemums opened their great eyes, and turned their
faces upwards to meet the light, they felt quite put about to see those
flowers still in bloom. They would have been angry, but it is not in
the nature of our garden, or indeed of our wild flora and hedgerow pets,
to be so. For flowers are ever meek, albeit they are lovely, and
methinks that meekness and beauty, hand in hand, are inexpressibly
charming.
No, the chrysanthemums were not angry, but they could not help saying to
each other--
"Why have the Michaelmas daisies not gone to sleep? Is not their time
gone by, and is not this our month in which to bloom and beautify the
garden landscape?"
Little Effie came trotting round. It was quite early yet. The sun had
just got high enough to peep over the almost leafless linden trees. And
wherever his beams fell on bush or brake or fern, he melted the
hoar-frost, and resolved it into drops of dew, in each of which a
miniature rainbow might have been seen. But round at the back of the
big stone mansion, where its shadow fell athwart the old-fashioned
terraced lawn, the hoar-frost still lay thick and fast.
Out from among the shrubbery somewhere came Effie Lyle. She might, as
likely as not, have dropped out of a yew tree for anything any one knew
to the contrary.
She stood for a moment looking up at the blue sky,--her own eyes were
quite as blue,--her pretty lips half-parted in a smile, and her golden
hair somewhat dishevelled, afloat on her shoulders; as fresh and pure as
the morning itself she was, the one thing that had been wanting to
complete the beauty of the wildery in which she stood.
Effie glanced down at the chrysanthemums with love and admiration, at
the pure white ones, and the pink-and-white, and the crimson, and the
bright, bright yellow; she gently smoothed their gorgeous petals that
looked so like nodding plumes.
"I love you all," she cried, "and I am going to kiss the Michaelmas
daisies!"
But these grew on such long, long stalks--for they had to creep high to
meet the sun--that Effie had to stand on tiptoe, and bend down their
mauve clusters to her face.
A momentary sadness crept over her, because one of her pet flowers had
left a drop of dew on her cheek.
"Why are my darlings crying?" she said. "Oh, I know!" she added, after
a second's thought. "Because they soon must die. The wicked frost will
kill my pets, and then--oh yes, then, I'll have the chrysanthemums to
love."
An additional ray of sunshine seemed to fall over these flowers when she
said this. But a chill crept over the daisies, and their petals began
to fold, as fold the wings of insects when night begins to fall.
The gardens around Grayling House were indeed a wildery, yet not a
wilderness. It was the pleasure of their owner to let all growing
things have a good deal of their own way. For he loved nature even more
than art. So in summer time the big lawn that stretched down as far as
the quiet river's bank--where the trailing willows kissed the water, and
the splendidly bedecked kingfishers darted in and out from sunshine and
shade--was carpeted with flowers, buttercups and daisies and nodding
plumes of grasses, and clover white and red. Yet the sun had such
access to this lawn, despite the bordering trees, that those wild things
never grew high, but spread and spread, and intertwined, as if they
really loved each other, and would not be parted for the world. A
favourite lawn this for bees of every size and colour, and for a
thousand strangely-shaped and gaudily-coloured beetles, which on cloudy
days were content to climb up and down the grass stems and take exercise
as acrobats do, but who, when the sun burst out, opened the little
cupboards on their shoulders, where their wings had been carefully
stowed away from the wet, unfolded these gauzy appendages, and flew away
in search of wild adventures.
There were paths through this wildery that seemed to lead nowhere, and
as often as not made pretence of taking you straight back towards the
house again, but landed you at last perhaps in a greenwood glade, with
broad-leaved sycamores, and elms around, in which blackbirds fluted in
spring, thrushes piped, and the chaffinch tried to drown the notes of
every other bird with his mad merry melody. And here perhaps was a
rockery, with a fountain playing and a streamlet trickling away
riverwards, through the greenest of grass. On this rockery dwelt ferns
that loved moisture, and creeping saxifrages, with pretty flowerets of
deepest crimson, but not a bit bigger than a bee's head.
Had you wished to return from this delightful lonesome glade--and sooner
or later you would be sure to wish to go back, notwithstanding its
beauty--you would probably have taken a wrong turning, and after a while
found yourself in a rose-covered, heather-roofed, rustic summer-house,
with a little window opening over the river itself, and seats and
lounges inside.
Here, on a summer's day, if possessed of a nice book, you would have
found it a pleasure indeed to enjoy a rest. Not that you would have
read much, had the book been ever so nice, for as soon as you had got
fairly settled, and animated nature around you had got used to your
presence, there would have been quite a deal to watch and wonder at.
Bright-eyed birds, who had sung in the boughs till their throats were
dry, would have come down to slake their thirst and bathe and plash in
the sandy-bottomed shallows, scaring the gladsome minnows away into
deeper, darker water, where under the weeds lived fate in the shape of a
gruesome pike, with terrible teeth and eyes that never closed. Or while
you were trying to read, a rabbit or even a hare would come hopping
along, and stand up to stare at you. A weasel would sneak past bent on
no good. A beautiful squirrel would leap to the ground, and run around
on the moss, with his wondrous tail like a train behind him. Bees and
beetles would go droning past, or come in by the door, and fly out
through the open window, making the great spider that had his web in the
corner move his horizontal jaws in hungry expectancy. Meanwhile every
now and then a glad fish would leap up and ripple the stream, and the
stream itself would keep on chatter-chattering, and telling the nodding,
listening trees such a long story in so drowsy a monotone, about where
it had been, and where it was going, and what it had seen, that
presently you would get listening to the story yourself, and nodding
like the trees till the book would drop out of your grasp, and _you_
would be at the back of the north wind.
When you wakened at last, you would be unable for a time to tell where
you were, till on looking out you saw the trees again, and the green
moss, with the squirrel on it still seeming to look for something, and
the tall crimson foxgloves smiling at you through the greenery of ferns;
then you would remember that you had fallen asleep while trying to read
on a summer's day in a cosy, drowsy summer cot by the banks of one of
the most lovely streams that roll their waters into the silvery Tweed.
But at the time our story opens autumn, not summer, was reigning in the
lovely wildery round Grayling House.
The leaves were nearly all gone off the trees, except from the oaks,
those sturdiest children of our soil. Their leaves were withered and
yellow, but would remain on for months to come. The oak and the beech
are the wisest of all our broad-leaved trees; they put not forth their
green leaves till spring sunshine has warmed the air, and long after the
powdery snow has begun to fall, and other trees are bare and shivering
in the blast, they still are clothed in their weather-stained garments
of leaves.
Effie stooped once more to kiss and caress the chrysanthemums, then she
hurried away, because she had heard her brother's voice calling,--
"Effie, Effie, Effie!"
"Coming, Leonard--coming--coming--coming!" was Effie's reply, as she ran
round through the shrubbery to the terraced lawn behind.
"Come and see me jump from winter into spring," cried Leonard, making a
bound like a young antelope right off the lowest terrace, still white
and crisp with frost, to the lawn where the grass was wet with dew, and
green.
"Oh, Leonardie, Leonardie!" said Effie, pouting with her rosy lips, "why
so cruel as to call me away from my flowers to see you jump?"
"_You_ couldn't do it, Effet," said Leonard, nodding his head.
"Oh, I could! You see now."
Next moment both were at it, running up and running down, leaping from
winter into spring, bounding up from sunshine into shade, and keeping up
the merry game till the cheeks of each were as red as roses, and their
eyes as bright as drops of dew.
As handsome a boy was Leonard at the age of ten as one could wish to
see. Twins the two were, though he was the taller, as became his sex,
and I do not think they had been one hour parted since the bells of the
village church were set ringing to announce the double birth.
Leonard threw himself down to rest on the frosty grass, and Effie stood
laughingly looking down at him.
The boy was a young Scot, and wore that most picturesque of all
costumes, the garb of old Gaul, but he was not afraid of getting his
bare knees frozen as he lay there. In fact, I do not think that Leonard
was afraid of anything.
As I have said the lad was a Scot, there is little need to add that
Grayling House and the beautiful river that went wimpling by it were on
the _northern_ side of the Tweed.
It was very still and quiet all round Grayling House to-day, and the sky
was very bright and almost cloudless. There was not wind enough to bend
the course of the spiral wreaths of smoke that rose straight up into the
frosty air, higher than the dark-roofed pines, before it melted away
into a white haze across the woods.
High up yonder among the sturdy arms of the elms were many huge nests,
but the rooks were far away foraging in some farmer's field. In the
other trees many an old nest was visible that could not have been seen
in summer--nests of the chattering magpies, in the moss and
lichen-covered larches; nests of the tree-sparrows everywhere high or
low, great untidy wisps of weeds, with feathers sticking here and
strings hanging there, nests that any other bird except a sparrow would
feel ashamed to enter or go near. Then there were nests of the bold,
bright-voiced cheery chaffinch close to the trunk of beech or elm,
little gems of nests tricked out with lichens white and red, and looking
all over like shapely bits of coral; and nests of the missel-thrush, so
sturdily fixed between the tree forks that storm or tempest could not
blow them down.
"I say, Effet," said Leonard, looking up, "the birds are almost too
clever for me. I can count dozens of nests now up there that I couldn't
find in summer. Wait till spring comes--I'll be wiser then.
"Listen," he continued, "was that a mole?"
"No," said his sister, "it was only a sycamore leaf; I saw it falling."
"Hullo! here comes another, and another, and another." And off he flew,
cap in hand, to catch the leaves as they fell.
He soon tired, however.
"I say, Effet, I don't call this keeping a holiday. Let's have some
real fun."
"Shall we go to Castle Beautiful, and read a story to the menagerie?"
"No, not yet. Let us try to hook old Joe."
Old Joe was a monster pike, who lived in a monster pond or pool, big
enough almost to be called a lake, for it covered three acres of ground,
and one part of it, right in the centre, was said to be deep enough to
bury the village church and steeple. It was down at the bottom of this
deep dark hole that Joe lived.
Now it was somewhat funny, but nobody about Grayling House--with one
solitary exception, namely, Peter the butler, who had been at the
mansion, man and boy, for fifty years--could tell where this monster
pike had come from, or when or why he had come.
The facts are these: the loch was fed by springs, and the only outlet
for the water was a lead that had to pass over a big mill-wheel, that
ground oats and barley for every one in the parish. The pike could not
have come over the mill-wheel. Again, he had not been there ten years,
and as he weighed, to all appearance, full thirty pounds, he must have
been a monster when he got there.
Captain Lyle, Leonard's and Effie's father, believed he had scrambled
over the grass some dark, dewy night, and taken up his quarters in the
loch. This was strange if true, and it might have been, because, at the
time the pike first appeared, a tenant of the same kind was missed from
a deep tree-shaded pool in the river.
The country people, however, would not share the captain's belief.
There was something uncanny about the beast, they averred, and the less
any one had to do with him the better.
He was a very matter-of-fact pike, at all events; for no sooner had he
taken possession of his new quarters than he proceeded at once to turn
out all the old tenants. Or rather--to speak more to the point--he
turned them in, for he ate them. Captain Lyle had, years before the
reign of this king-pike, stocked the water with trout, and they had done
well, but now none were ever seen.
Sometimes the pike condescended to show himself, or even to take a bait,
when some person more daring and less superstitious than his fellows
tried to catch him. More than once he had been pulled above the water,
but disappeared again, hook and all, with a splash.
When he had swallowed a hook it was Joe's custom to sulk for a fortnight
at the bottom of his pool, and having duly digested the morsel of blue
steel, he appeared again livelier and more audacious than ever.
His size was reported to be something enormous by those who had raised
him. They said his head was as big as that of Farmer Kemp's great
mastiff-dog.
It was also said that Joe had once upon a time swallowed a sow and a
litter of young. This tale was always retailed to strangers who
happened to come to the district to fish. It was, in fact, a catch, for
Joe really had done this deed; but then the sow was a guinea pig, and
the young ones mere hop-o'-my-thumbs.
"Yes, Leonardie," said Effie, "let us go and try to hook old Joe."
So while Effie ran to the hall for the fishing tackle, her brother went
and dug some great garden worms, and half an hour afterwards they were
both in the middle of the lake, with the line sunk, and sitting
patiently in the little boat to see whether or not Joe would condescend
to bite.
Book 1--CHAPTER TWO.