A girl stood on the shingle that fringes Millbourne Bay, gazing at the
red roofs of the little village across the water. She was a pretty
girl, small and trim. Just now some secret sorrow seemed to be
troubling her, for on her forehead were wrinkles and in her eyes a look
of wistfulness. She had, in fact, all the distinguishing marks of one
who is thinking of her sailor lover.
But she was not. She had no sailor lover. What she was thinking of was
that at about this time they would be lighting up the shop-windows in
London, and that of all the deadly, depressing spots she had ever
visited this village of Millbourne was the deadliest.
The evening shadows deepened. The incoming tide glistened oilily as it
rolled over the mud flats. She rose and shivered.
'Goo! What a hole!' she said, eyeing the unconscious village morosely.
'_What_ a hole!'
* * * * *
This was Sally Preston's first evening in Millbourne. She had arrived
by the afternoon train from London--not of her own free will. Left to
herself, she would not have come within sixty miles of the place.
London supplied all that she demanded from life. She had been born in
London; she had lived there ever since--she hoped to die there. She
liked fogs, motor-buses, noise, policemen, paper-boys, shops, taxi-cabs,
artificial light, stone pavements, houses in long, grey rows, mud,
banana-skins, and moving-picture exhibitions. Especially moving-picture
exhibitions. It was, indeed, her taste for these that had caused her
banishment to Millbourne.
The great public is not yet unanimous on the subject of moving-picture
exhibitions. Sally, as I have said, approved of them. Her father, on
the other hand, did not. An austere ex-butler, who let lodgings in
Ebury Street and preached on Sundays in Hyde Park, he looked askance
at the 'movies'. It was his boast that he had never been inside a
theatre in his life, and he classed cinema palaces with theatres as
wiles of the devil. Sally, suddenly unmasked as an habitual frequenter
of these abandoned places, sprang with one bound into prominence as
the Bad Girl of the Family. Instant removal from the range of
temptation being the only possible plan, it seemed to Mr Preston that
a trip to the country was indicated.
He selected Millbourne because he had been butler at the Hall there,
and because his sister Jane, who had been a parlour-maid at the
Rectory, was now married and living in the village.
Certainly he could not have chosen a more promising reformatory for
Sally. Here, if anywhere, might she forget the heady joys of the
cinema. Tucked away in the corner of its little bay, which an
accommodating island converts into a still lagoon, Millbourne lies
dozing. In all sleepy Hampshire there is no sleepier spot. It is a
place of calm-eyed men and drowsy dogs. Things crumble away and are not
replaced. Tradesmen book orders, and then lose interest and forget to
deliver the goods. Only centenarians die, and nobody worries about
anything--or did not until Sally came and gave them something to worry
about.
* * * * *
Next door to Sally's Aunt Jane, in a cosy little cottage with a
wonderful little garden, lived Thomas Kitchener, a large, grave,
self-sufficing young man, who, by sheer application to work, had
become already, though only twenty-five, second gardener at the Hall.
Gardening absorbed him. When he was not working at the Hall he was
working at home. On the morning following Sally's arrival, it being a
Thursday and his day off, he was crouching in a constrained attitude in
his garden, every fibre of his being concentrated on the interment of a
plump young bulb. Consequently, when a chunk of mud came sailing over
the fence, he did not notice it.
A second, however, compelled attention by bursting like a shell on the
back of his neck. He looked up, startled. Nobody was in sight. He was
puzzled. It could hardly be raining mud. Yet the alternative theory,
that someone in the next garden was throwing it, was hardly less
bizarre. The nature of his friendship with Sally's Aunt Jane and old
Mr Williams, her husband, was comfortable rather than rollicking. It
was inconceivable that they should be flinging clods at him.
As he stood wondering whether he should go to the fence and look over,
or simply accept the phenomenon as one of those things which no fellow
can understand, there popped up before him the head and shoulders of a
girl. Poised in her right hand was a third clod, which, seeing that
there was now no need for its services, she allowed to fall to the
ground.
'Halloa!' she said. 'Good morning.'
She was a pretty girl, small and trim. Tom was by way of being the
strong, silent man with a career to think of and no time for bothering
about girls, but he saw that. There was, moreover, a certain alertness
in her expression rarely found in the feminine population of
Millbourne, who were apt to be slightly bovine.
'What do you think _you're_ messing about at?' she said, affably.
Tom was a slow-minded young man, who liked to have his thoughts well
under control before he spoke. He was not one of your gay rattlers.
Besides, there was something about this girl which confused him to an
extraordinary extent. He was conscious of new and strange emotions. He
stood staring silently.
'What's your name, anyway?'
He could answer that. He did so.
'Oh! Mine's Sally Preston. Mrs Williams is my aunt. I've come from
London.'
Tom had no remarks to make about London.
'Have you lived here all your life?'
'Yes,' said Tom.
'My goodness! Don't you ever feel fed up? Don't you want a change?'
Tom considered the point.
'No,' he said.
'Well, _I_ do. I want one now.'
'It's a nice place,' hazarded Tom.
'It's nothing of the sort. It's the beastliest hole in existence. It's
absolutely chronic. Perhaps you wonder why I'm here. Don't think I
_wanted_ to come here. Not me! I was sent. It was like this.' She
gave him a rapid summary of her troubles. 'There! Don't you call it a
bit thick?' she concluded.
Tom considered this point, too.
'You must make the best of it,' he said, at length.
'I won't! I'll make father take me back.'
Tom considered this point also. Rarely, if ever, had he been given so
many things to think about in one morning.
'How?' he inquired, at length.
'I don't know. I'll find some way. You see if I don't. I'll get away
from here jolly quick, I give you _my_ word.'
Tom bent low over a rose-bush. His face was hidden, but the brown of
his neck seemed to take on a richer hue, and his ears were undeniably
crimson. His feet moved restlessly, and from his unseen mouth there
proceeded the first gallant speech his lips had ever framed. Merely
considered as a speech, it was, perhaps, nothing wonderful; but from
Tom it was a miracle of chivalry and polish.