My friend, if cause doth wrest thee,
Ere folly hath much oppressed thee,
Far from acquaintance kest thee
Where country may digest thee...
Thank God that so hath blessed thee,
And sit down, Robin, and rest thee.
--THOMAS TUSSER.
It came without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to
crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine. The New York doctors called it
overwork, and he lay in a darkened room, one ankle crossed above
the other, tongue pressed into palate, wondering whether the next
brain-surge of prickly fires would drive his soul from all anchorages.
At last they gave judgment. With care he might in two years return to
the arena, but for the present he must go across the water and do no
work whatever. He accepted the terms. It was capitulation; but the
Combine that had shivered beneath his knife gave him all the honours
of war: Gunsberg himself, full of condolences, came to the steamer and
filled the Chapins' suite of cabins with overwhelming flower-works.
“Smilax,” said George Chapin when he saw them. “Fitz is right. I'm dead;
only I don't see why he left out the 'In Memoriam' on the ribbons!”
“Nonsense!” his wife answered, and poured him his tincture. “You'll be
back before you can think.”
He looked at himself in the mirror, surprised that his face had not been
branded by the hells of the past three months. The noise of the decks
worried him, and he lay down, his tongue only a little pressed against
his palate.
An hour later he said: “Sophie, I feel sorry about taking you away from
everything like this. I--I suppose we're the two loneliest people on
God's earth to-night.”
Said Sophie his wife, and kissed him: “Isn't it something to you that
we're going together?”
They drifted about Europe for months--sometimes alone, sometimes with
chance met gipsies of their own land. From the North Cape to the Blue
Grotto at Capri they wandered, because the next steamer headed that way,
or because some one had set them on the road. The doctors had warned
Sophie that Chapin was not to take interest even in other men's
interests; but a familiar sensation at the back of the neck after one
hour's keen talk with a Nauheimed railway magnate saved her any trouble.
He nearly wept.
“And I'm over thirty,” he cried. “With all I meant to do!”
“Let's call it a honeymoon,” said Sophie. “D' you know, in all the six
years we've been married, you've never told me what you meant to do with
your life?”
“With my life? What's the use? It's finished now.” Sophie looked up
quickly from the Bay of Naples. “As far as my business goes, I shall
have to live on my rents like that architect at San Moritz.”
“You'll get better if you don't worry; and even if it takes time, there
are worse things than--How much have you?”
“Between four and five million. But it isn't the money. You know it
isn't. It's the principle. How could you respect me? You never did, the
first year after we married, till I went to work like the others. Our
tradition and upbringing are against it. We can't accept those ideals.”
“Well, I suppose I married you for some sort of ideal,” she answered,
and they returned to their forty-third hotel.
In England they missed the alien tongues of Continental streets that
reminded them of their own polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one
tongue, speciously like American to the ear, but on cross-examination
unintelligible.
“Ah, but you have not seen England,” said a lady with iron-grey hair.
They had met her in Vienna, Bayreuth, and Florence, and were grateful
to find her again at Claridge's, for she commanded situations, and knew
where prescriptions are most carefully made up. “You ought to take an
interest in the home of our ancestors as I do.”
“I've tried for a week, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, “but I never get any
further than tipping German waiters.”
“These men are not the true type,” Mrs. Shouts went on. “I know where
you should go.”
Chapin pricked up his ears, anxious to run anywhere from the streets
on which quick men, something of his kidney, did the business denied to
him.
“We hear and we obey, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, feeling his unrest as
he drank the loathed British tea.
Mrs. Shonts smiled, and took them in hand. She wrote widely and
telegraphed far on their behalf till, armed with her letter of
introduction, she drove them into that wilderness which is reached from
an ash-barrel of a station called Charing Cross. They were to go to
Rockett's--the farm of one Cloke, in the southern counties--where, she
assured them, they would meet the genuine England of folklore and song.
Rocketts they found after some hours, four miles from a station, and,
so far as they could judge in the bumpy darkness, twice as many from a
road. Trees, kine, and the outlines of barns showed shadowy about them
when they alighted, and Mr. and Mrs. Cloke, at the open door of a deep
stone-floored kitchen, made them slowly welcome. They lay in an attic
beneath a wavy whitewashed ceiling, and, because it rained, a wood fire
was made in an iron basket on a brick hearth, and they fell asleep to
the chirping of mice and the whimper of flames.
When they woke it was a fair day, full of the noises, of birds, the
smell of box lavender, and fried bacon, mixed with an elemental smell
they had never met before.
“This,” said Sophie, nearly pushing out the thin casement in an attempt
to see round the corner, “is--what did the hack-cabman say to the
railway porter about my trunk--'quite on the top?'”
“No; 'a little bit of all right.' I feel farther away from anywhere than
I've ever felt in my life. We must find out where the telegraph office
is.”
“Who cares?” said Sophie, wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire
the illustrated weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard.
But there was no rest for the alien soul till he had made sure of the
telegraph office. He asked the Clokes' daughter, laying breakfast, while
Sophie plunged her face in the lavender bush outside the low window.
“Go to the stile a-top o' the Barn field,” said Mary, “and look across
Pardons to the next spire. It's directly under. You can't miss it--not
if you keep to the footpath. My sister's the telegraphist there.
But you're in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams
directly to this door from Pardons village.”
“One has to take a good deal on trust in this country,” he murmured.
Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night's wheels,
at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still
orchard about the half-timbered house.
“What's the matter with it?” she said. “Telegrams delivered to the Vale
of Avalon, of course,” and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of
engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name
of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house
where the stile stood against the skyline, and, “I wonder what we shall
find now,” said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.
It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps
of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts
leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of
white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling
shrilly.
“No roads, no nothing!” said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers.
“I thought all England was a garden. There's your spire, George, across
the valley. How curious!”
They walked toward it through an all-abandoned land. Here they found
the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh
fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant
kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead
stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At
the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge,
and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes
beyond--old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the
walls of a ruined house.
“All this within a hundred miles of London,” he said. “Looks as if it
had had nervous prostration, too.” The footpath turned the shoulder of
a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had
once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic
holm-oaks.
“A house!” said Sophie, in a whisper. “A Colonial house!”
Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick
Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over its pillared door. The
hound had gone off on his own foolish quests. Except for some stir in
the branches and the flight of four startled magpies; there was neither
life nor sound about the square house, but it looked out of its long
windows most friendlily.
“Cha-armed to meet you, I'm sure,” said Sophie, and curtsied to the
ground. “George, this is history I can understand. We began here.” She
curtsied again.
The June sunshine twinkled on all the lights. It was as though an old
lady, wise in three generations' experience, but for the present sitting
out, bent to listen to her flushed and eager grandchild.
“I must look!” Sophie tiptoed to a window, and shaded her eyes with her
hand. “Oh, this room's half-full of cotton-bales--wool, I suppose! But I
can see a bit of the mantelpiece. George, do come! Isn't that some one?”
She fell back behind her husband. The front door opened slowly, to show
the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an ancient of days
clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on breast and shoulders.
“Certainly,” said George, half aloud. “Father Time himself. This is
where he lives, Sophie.”
“We came,” said Sophie weakly. “Can we see the house? I'm afraid that's
our dog.”
“No, 'tis Rambler,” said the old man. “He's been at my swill-pail
again. Staying at Rocketts, be ye? Come in. Ah! you runagate!”
The hound broke from him, and he tottered after him down the drive. They
entered the hall--just such a high light hall as such a house
should own. A slim-balustered staircase, wide and shallow and once
creamy-white, climbed out of it under a long oval window. On either side
delicately moulded doors gave on to wool-lumbered rooms, whose sea-green
mantelpieces were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low
relief.
“What's the firm that makes these things?” cried Sophie, enraptured.
“Oh, I forgot! These must be the originals. Adams, is it? I never
dreamed of anything like that steel-cut fender. Does he mean us to go
everywhere?”
“He's catching the dog,” said George, looking out. “We don't count.”
They explored the first or ground floor, delighted as children playing
burglars.
“This is like all England,” she said at last. “Wonderful, but no
explanation. You're expected to know it beforehand. Now, let's try
upstairs.”
The stairs never creaked beneath their feet. From the broad landing
they entered a long, green-panelled room lighted by three full-length
windows, which overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden, and
wooded slopes beyond.
“The drawing-room, of course.” Sophie swam up and down it. “That
mantelpiece--Orpheus and Eurydice--is the best of them all. Isn't it
marvellous? Why, the room seems furnished with nothing in it! How's
that, George?”
“It's the proportions. I've noticed it.”
“I saw a Heppelwhite couch once”--Sophie laid her finger to her flushed
cheek and considered. “With two of them--one on each side--you wouldn't
need anything else. Except--there must be one perfect mirror over that
mantelpiece.”
“Look at that view. It's a framed Constable,” her husband cried.
“No; it's a Morland--a parody of a Morland. But about that couch,
George. Don't you think Empire might be better than Heppelwhite? Dull
gold against that pale green? It's a pity they don't make spinets
nowadays.”
“I believe you can get them. Look at that oak wood behind the pines.”
“'While you sat and played toccatas stately, at the clavichord,'” Sophie
hummed, and, head on one side, nodded to where the perfect mirror
should hang.
Then they found bedrooms with dressing-rooms and powdering-closets, and
steps leading up and down--boxes of rooms, round, square, and octagonal,
with enriched ceilings and chased door-locks.
“Now about servants. Oh!” She had darted up the last stairs to the
chequered darkness of the top floor, where loose tiles lay among broken
laths, and the walls were scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop
records. “They've been keeping pigeons here,” she cried.
“And you could drive a buggy through the roof anywhere,” said George.
“That's what _I_ say,” the old man cried below them on the stairs. “Not a
dry place for my pigeons at all.”
“But why was it allowed to get like this?” said Sophie.
“Tis with housen as teeth,” he replied. “Let 'em go too far, and there's
nothing to be done. Time was they was minded to sell her, but none would
buy. She was too far away along from any place. Time was they'd ha'
lived here theyselves, but they took and died.”
“Here?” Sophie moved beneath the light of a hole in the roof.
“Nah--none dies here excep' falling off ricks and such. In London they
died.” He plucked a lock of wool from his blue smock. “They was no
staple--neither the Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all
of 'em. Dead they be seventeen year, for I've been here caretakin'
twenty-five.”
“Who does all the wool belong to downstairs?” George asked.
“To the estate. I'll show you the back parts if ye like. You're from
America, ain't ye? I've had a son there once myself.” They followed him
down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward
the wall. “Plenty room here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot
and three men at each end wouldn't brish the paint. If I die in my bed
they'll 'ave to up-end me like a milk-can. 'Tis all luck, dye see?”
He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies,
larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a
farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled
out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields
behind.
“Somehow,” said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient
well-curb--“somehow one wouldn't insult these lovely old things by
filling them with hay.”
George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak
weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs,
stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels
of house-leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and
the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph
office for two and a half hours.
“But why,” said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken
fields,--“why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do
they never tell?”
“You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?” he answered.
“Yes--and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether
those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don't you like us
exploring things together--better than Pompeii?”
George turned once more to look at the view. “Eight hundred acres go
with the house--the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is
one of 'em.”
“I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?”
George laughed. “That's one of the things you're expected to know. He
never told me.”
The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for
a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to
lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie
asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that,
as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and
acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks
and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It
was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his wife in the dairy,
the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o' nights by the big fire,
when the two had been half the day exploring about the house, where
old Iggulden, of the blue smock, cackled and chuckled to see them. The
motives that swayed the characters were beyond their comprehension; the
fates that shifted them were gods they had never met; the sidelights
Mrs. Cloke threw on act and incident were more amazing than anything in
the record. Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs.
Shonts.
“But why--why--why--did So-and-so do so-and-so?” Sophie would demand
from her seat by the pothook; and Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her
knees, “For the sake of the place.”
“I give it up,” said George one night in their own room. “People don't
seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The
way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.”
“Poor old thing!” They had been walking round the farms as usual before
tea. “No wonder they loved it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it.
Jane Elphick married the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The
octagonal room with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was
hers. Now what did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?” said
Sophie.
“About the Torrell cousins and the uncle who died in Java. They lived at
Burnt House--behind High Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.”
“No; Burnt House is under High Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale
Anstey,” Sophie corrected.
“Well, old man Cloke said--”
Sophie threw open the door and called down into the kitchen, where the
Clokes were covering the fire: “Mrs. Cloke, isn't Burnt House under High
Pardons?”
“Yes, my dear, of course,” the soft voice answered absently. A cough.
“I beg your pardon, Madam. What was it you said?”
“Never mind. I prefer it the other way,” Sophie laughed, and George
re-told the missing chapter as she sat on the bed.
“Here to-day an' gone to-morrow,” said Cloke warningly. “They've
paid their first month, but we've only that Mrs. Shonts's letter for
guarantee.”
“None she sent never cheated us yet. It slipped out before I thought.
She's a most humane young lady. They'll be going away in a little. An'
you've talked a lot too, Alfred.”
“Yes, but the Elphicks are all dead. No one can bring my loose talking
home to me. But why do they stay on and stay on so?”
In due time George and Sophie asked each other that question, and put it
aside. They argued that the climate--a pearly blend, unlike the hot
and cold ferocities of their native land--suited them, as the thick
stillness of the nights certainly suited George. He was saved even the
sight of a metalled road, which, as presumably leading to business,
wakes desire in a man; and the telegraph office at the village of Friars
Pardon, where they sold picture post-cards and peg-tops, was two walking
miles across the fields and woods.
For all that touched his past among his fellows, or their remembrance
of him, he might have been in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had
been very largely spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had
no wish to leave this present of God. The unhurried meals, the
foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft
sky under which they walked together and reckoned time only by their
hunger or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the
miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms--Griffons,
Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where Iggulden of
the blue smock-frock would waylay them, and they would ransack the old
house once more; the long wet afternoons when they tucked up their
feet on the bedroom's deep window-sill over against the apple-trees, and
talked together as never till then had they found time to talk--these
things contented her soul, and her body throve.
“Have you realized,” she asked one morning, “that we've been here
absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?”
“Have you counted them?” he asked.
“Did you like them?” she replied.
“I must have. I didn't think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I
should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I've only had two or
three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”
“Climate, all climate.” Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as
she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes's
barn.
“One must take hold of things though,” he said, “if it's only to keep
one's hand in.” His eyes did not flicker now as they swept the empty
fields. “Mustn't one?”
“Lay out a Morristown links over Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire
it.”
“No, I'm not as English as that--nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the
farms here could be made to pay.”
“Well, I'm Anastasia in the 'Treasure of Franchard.' I'm content to be
alive and purr. There's no hurry.”
“No.” He smiled. “All the same, I'm going to see after my mail.”
“You promised you wouldn't have any.”
“There's some business coming through that's amusing me. Honest. It
doesn't get on my nerves at all.”
“Want a secretary?”
“No, thanks, old thing! Isn't that quite English?”
“Too English! Go away.” But none the less in broad daylight she returned
the kiss. “I'm off to Pardons. I haven't been to the house for nearly a
week.”
“How've you decided to furnish Jane Elphick's bedroom?” he laughed, for
it had come to be a permanent Castle in Spain between them.
“Black Chinese furniture and yellow silk brocade,” she answered, and
ran downhill. She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a
ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she
passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house at the back of
Friars Pardon. The old man was not to be found, and she knocked at
his half-opened door, for she needed him to fill her idle forenoon. A
blue-eyed sheep-dog, a new friend, and Rambler's old enemy, crawled out
and besought her to enter.
Iggulden sat in his chair by the fire, a thistle-spud between his knees,
his head drooped. Though she had never seen death before, her heart,
that missed a beat, told her that he was dead. She did not speak or cry,
but stood outside the door, and the dog licked her hand. When he threw
up his nose, she heard herself saying: “Don't howl! Please don't begin
to howl, Scottie, or I shall run away!”
She held her ground while the shadows in the rickyard moved toward noon;
sat after a while on the steps by the door, her arms round the dog's
neck, waiting till some one should come. She watched the smokeless
chimneys of Friars Pardon slash its roofs with shadow, and the smoke of
Iggulden's last lighted fire gradually thin and cease. Against her will
she fell to wondering how many Moones, Elphicks, and Torrells had been
swung round the turn of the broad Mall stairs. Then she remembered the
old man's talk of being “up-ended like a milk-can,” and buried her face
on Scottie's neck. At last a horse's feet clinked upon flags, rustled
in the old grey straw of the rickyard, and she found herself facing
the vicar--a figure she had seen at church declaiming impossibilities
(Sophie was a Unitarian) in an unnatural voice.
“He's dead,” she said, without preface.
“Old Iggulden? I was coming for a talk with him.” The vicar passed in
uncovered. “Ah!” she heard him say. “Heart-failure! How long have you
been here?”
“Since a quarter to eleven.” She looked at her watch earnestly and saw
that her hand did not shake.
“I'll sit with him now till the doctor comes. D'you think you could
tell him, and--yes, Mrs. Betts in the cottage with the wistaria next the
blacksmith's? I'm afraid this has been rather a shock to you.”
Sophie nodded, and fled toward the village. Her body failed her for a
moment; she dropped beneath a hedge, and looked back at the great house.
In some fashion its silence and stolidity steadied her for her errand.
Mrs. Betts, small, black-eyed, and dark, was almost as unconcerned as
Friars Pardon.
“Yiss, yiss, of course. Dear me! Well, Iggulden he had had his day in my
father's time. Muriel, get me my little blue bag, please. Yiss, ma'am.
They come down like ellum-branches in still weather. No warnin' at all.
Muriel, my bicycle's be'ind the fowlhouse. I'll tell Dr. Dallas, ma'am.”
She trundled off on her wheel like a brown bee, while Sophie--heaven
above and earth beneath changed--walked stiffly home, to fall over
George at his letters, in a muddle of laughter and tears.
“It's all quite natural for them,” she gasped. “They come down like
ellum-branches in still weather. Yiss, ma'am.' No, there wasn't anything
in the least horrible, only--only--Oh, George, that poor shiny stick of
his between his poor, thin knees! I couldn't have borne it if Scottie
had howled. I didn't know the vicar was so--so sensitive. He said he was
afraid it was ra--rather a shock. Mrs. Betts told me to go home, and
I wanted to collapse on her floor. But I didn't disgrace myself. I--I
couldn't have left him--could I?”
“You're sure you've took no 'arm?” cried Mrs. Cloke, who had heard the
news by farm-telegraphy, which is older but swifter than Marconi's.
“No. I'm perfectly well,” Sophie protested.
“You lay down till tea-time.” Mrs. Cloke patted her shoulder. “THEY'll
be very pleased, though she 'as 'ad no proper understandin' for twenty
years.”
“They” came before twilight--a black-bearded man in moleskins, and a
little palsied old woman, who chirruped like a wren.
“I'm his son,” said the man to Sophie, among the lavender bushes. “We
'ad a difference--twenty year back, and didn't speak since. But I'm his
son all the 'same, and we thank you for the watching.”
“I'm only glad I happened to be there,” she answered, and from the
bottom of her heart she meant it.
“We heard he spoke a lot o' you--one time an' another since you came. We
thank you kindly,” the man added.
“Are you the son that was in America?” she asked.
“Yes, ma'am. On my uncle's farm, in Connecticut. He was what they call
rood-master there.”
“Whereabouts in Connecticut?” asked George over her shoulder.
“Veering Holler was the name. I was there six year with my uncle.”
“How small the world is!” Sophie cried. “Why, all my mother's people
come from Veering Hollow. There must be some there still--the Lashmars.
Did you ever hear of them?”
“I remember hearing that name, seems to me,” he answered, but his face
was blank as the back of a spade.
A little before dusk a woman in grey, striding like a foot-soldier, and
bearing on her arm a long pole, crashed through the orchard calling for
food. George, upon whom the unannounced English worked mysteriously,
fled to the parlour; but Mrs. Cloke came forward beaming. Sophie could
not escape.
“We've only just heard of it;” said the stranger, turning on her. “I've
been out with the otter-hounds all day. It was a splendidly sportin'
thing--”
“Did you--er--kill?” said Sophie. She knew from books she could not go
far wrong here.
“Yes, a dry bitch--seventeen pounds,” was the answer. “A splendidly
sportin' thing of you to do. Poor old Iggulden--”
“Oh--that!” said Sophie, enlightened.
“If there had been any people at Pardons it would never have happened.
He'd have been looked after. But what can you expect from a parcel of
London solicitors?”
Mrs. Cloke murmured something.
“No. I'm soaked from the knees down. If I hang about I shall get
chilled. A cup of tea, Mrs. Cloke, and I can eat one of your sandwiches
as I go.” She wiped her weather-worn face with a green and yellow silk
handkerchief.
“Yes, my lady!” Mrs. Cloke ran and returned swiftly.
“Our land marches with Pardons for a mile on the south,” she explained,
waving the full cup, “but one has quite enough to do with one's own
people without poachin'. Still, if I'd known, I'd have sent Dora, of
course. Have you seen her this afternoon, Mrs. Cloke? No? I wonder
whether that girl did sprain her ankle. Thank you.” It was a formidable
hunk of bread and bacon that Mrs. Cloke presented. “As I was sayin',
Pardons is a scandal! Lettin' people die like dogs. There ought to be
people there who do their duty. You've done yours, though there wasn't
the faintest call upon you. Good night. Tell Dora, if she comes, I've
gone on.”
She strode away, munching her crust, and Sophie reeled breathless into
the parlour, to shake the shaking George.
“Why did you keep catching my eye behind the blind? Why didn't you come
out and do your duty?”
“Because I should have burst. Did you see the mud on its cheek?” he
said.
“Once. I daren't look again. Who is she?”
“God--a local deity then. Anyway, she's another of the things you're
expected to know by instinct.”
Mrs. Cloke, shocked at their levity, told them that it was Lady
Conant, wife of Sir Walter Conant, Baronet, a large landholder in the
neighbourhood; and if not God; at least His visible Providence. George
made her talk of that family for an hour.
“Laughter,” said Sophie afterward in their own room, “is the mark of the
savage. Why couldn't you control your emotions? It's all real to her.”
“It's all real to me. That's my trouble,” he answered in an altered
tone. “Anyway, it's real enough to mark time with. Don't you think so?”
“What d'you mean?” she asked quickly, though she knew his voice.
“That I'm better. I'm well enough to kick.”
“What at?”
“This!” He waved his hand round the one room. “I must have something to
play with till I'm fit for work again.”
“Ah!” She sat on the bed and leaned forward, her hands clasped. “I
wonder if it's good for you.”
“We've been better here than anywhere,” he went on slowly. “One could
always sell it again.”
She nodded gravely, but her eyes sparkled.
“The only thing that worries me is what happened this morning. I want to
know how you feel about it. If it's on your nerves in the least we can
have the old farm at the back of the house pulled down, or perhaps it
has spoiled the notion for you?”
“Pull it down?” she cried. “You've no business faculty. Why, that's
where we could live while we're putting the big house in order. It's
almost under the same roof. No! What happened this morning seemed to be
more of a--of a leading than anything else. There ought to be people at
Pardons. Lady Conant's quite right.”
“I was thinking more of the woods and the roads. I could double the
value of the place in six months.”
“What do they want for it?” She shook her head, and her loosened hair
fell glowingly about her cheeks.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars. They'll take sixty-eight.”
“Less than half what we paid for our old yacht when we married. And we
didn't have a good time in her. You were--”
“Well, I discovered I was too much of an American to be content to be a
rich man's son. You aren't blaming me for that?”
“Oh, no. Only it was a very businesslike honeymoon. How far are you
along with the deal, George?”
“I can mail the deposit on the purchase money to-morrow morning, and we
can have the thing completed in a fortnight or three weeks--if you say
so.”
“Friars Pardon--Friars Pardon!” Sophie chanted rapturously, her dark
gray eyes big with delight. “All the farms? Gale Anstey, Burnt House,
Rocketts, the Home Farm, and Griffons? Sure you've got 'em all?”
“Sure.” He smiled.
“And the woods? High Pardons Wood, Lower Pardons, Suttons, Dutton's
Shaw, Reuben's Ghyll, Maxey's Ghyll, and both the Oak Hangers? Sure
you've got 'em all?”
“Every last stick. Why, you know them as well as I do.” He laughed.
“They say there's five thousand--a thousand pounds' worth of
lumber--timber they call it--in the Hangers alone.”
“Mrs. Cloke's oven must be mended first thing, and the kitchen roof. I
think I'll have all this whitewashed,” Sophie broke in, pointing to
the ceiling. “The whole place is a scandal. Lady Conant is quite right.
George, when did you begin to fall in love with the house? In the
greenroom—that first day? I did.”
“I'm not in love with it. One must do something to mark time till one's
fit for work.”
“Or when we stood under the oaks, and the door opened? Oh! Ought I to go
to poor Iggulden's funeral?” She sighed with utter happiness.
“Wouldn't they call it a liberty now?” said he.
“But I liked him.”
“But you didn't own him at the date of his death.”
“That wouldn't keep me away. Only, they made such a fuss about the
watching”--she caught her breath--“it might be ostentatious from that
point of view, too. Oh, George”--she reached for his hand--“we're two
little orphans moving in worlds not realized, and we shall make some bad
breaks. But we're going to have the time of our lives.”
“We'll run up to London to-morrow, and see if we can hurry those English
law solicitors. I want to get to work.”
They went. They suffered many things ere they returned across the fields
in a fly one Saturday night, nursing a two by two-and-a-half box of
deeds and maps--lawful owners of Friars Pardon and the five decayed
farms therewith.
“I do most sincerely 'ope and trust you'll be 'appy, Madam,” Mrs. Cloke
gasped, when she was told the news by the kitchen fire.
“Goodness! It isn't a marriage!” Sophie exclaimed, a little awed; for to
them the joke, which to an American means work, was only just beginning.
“If it's took in a proper spirit”--Mrs. Cloke's eye turned toward her
oven.
“Send and have that mended to-morrow,” Sophie whispered.
“We couldn't 'elp noticing,” said Cloke slowly, “from the times you
walked there, that you an' your lady was drawn to it, but--but I don't
know as we ever precisely thought--” His wife's glance checked him.
“That we were that sort of people,” said George. “We aren't sure of it
ourselves yet.”
“Perhaps,” said Cloke, rubbing his knees, “just for the sake of saying
something, perhaps you'll park it?”
“What's that?” said George.
“Turn it all into a fine park like Violet Hill”--he jerked a thumb to
westward--“that Mr. Sangres bought. It was four farms, and Mr. Sangres
made a fine park of them, with a herd of faller deer.”
“Then it wouldn't be Friars Pardon,” said Sophie. “Would it?”
“I don't know as I've ever heard Pardons was ever anything but wheat an'
wool. Only some gentlemen say that parks are less trouble than tenants.”
He laughed nervously. “But the gentry, o' course, they keep on pretty
much as they was used to.”
“I see,” said Sophie. “How did Mr. Sangres make his money?”
“I never rightly heard. It was pepper an' spices, or it may ha' been
gloves. No. Gloves was Sir Reginald Liss at Marley End. Spices was Mr.
Sangres. He's a Brazilian gentleman--very sunburnt like.”
“Be sure o' one thing. You won't 'ave any trouble,” said Mrs. Cloke,
just before they went to bed.
Now the news of the purchase was told to Mr. and Mrs. Cloke alone at 8
P.M. of a Saturday. None left the farm till they set out for church next
morning. Yet when they reached the church and were about to slip aside
into their usual seats, a little beyond the font, where they could see
the red-furred tails of the bellropes waggle and twist at ringing time,
they were swept forward irresistibly, a Cloke on either flank (and yet
they had not walked with the Clokes), upon the ever-retiring bosom of a
black-gowned verger, who ushered them into a room of a pew at the head
of the left aisle, under the pulpit.
“This,” he sighed reproachfully, “is the Pardons' Pew,” and shut them
in.
They could see little more than the choir boys in the chancel, but to
the roots of the hair of their necks they felt the congregation behind
mercilessly devouring them by look.
“When the wicked man turneth away.” The strong, alien voice of the
priest vibrated under the hammer-beam roof, and a loneliness unfelt
before swamped their hearts, as they searched for places in the
unfamiliar Church of England service. The Lord's Prayer “Our Father,
which art”--set the seal on that desolation. Sophie found herself
thinking how in other lands their purchase would long ere this have been
discussed from every point of view in a dozen prints, forgetting that
George for months had not been allowed to glance at those black and
bellowing head-lines. Here was nothing but silence--not even hostility!
The game was up to them; the other players hid their cards and waited.
Suspense, she felt, was in the air, and when her sight cleared, saw,
indeed, a mural tablet of a footless bird brooding upon the carven
motto, “Wayte awhyle--wayte awhyle.”
At the Litany George had trouble with an unstable hassock, and drew the
slip of carpet under the pewseat. Sophie pushed her end back also, and
shut her eyes against a burning that felt like tears. When she opened
them she was looking at her mother's maiden name, fairly carved on a
blue flagstone on the pew floor:
Ellen Lashmar. ob. 1796. ætat 27.
She nudged George and pointed. Sheltered, as they kneeled, they looked
for more knowledge, but the rest of the slab was blank.
“Ever hear of her?” he whispered.
“Never knew any of us came from here.”
“Coincidence?”
“Perhaps. But it makes me feel better,” and she smiled and winked away
a tear on her lashes, and took his hand while they prayed for “all women
labouring of child”--not “in the perils of childbirth”; and the sparrows
who had found their way through the guards behind the glass windows
chirped above the faded gilt and alabaster family tree of the Conants.
The baronet's pew was on the right of the aisle. After service its
inhabitants moved forth without haste, but so as to block effectively a
dusky person with a large family who champed in their rear.
“Spices, I think,” said Sophie, deeply delighted as the Sangres closed
up after the Conants. “Let 'em get away, George.”
But when they came out many folk whose eyes were one still lingered by
the lychgate.
“I want to see if any more Lashmars are buried here,” said Sophie.
“Not now. This seems to be show day. Come home quickly,” he replied.
A group of families, the Clokes a little apart, opened to let them
through. The men saluted with jerky nods, the women with remnants of a
curtsey. Only Iggulden's son, his mother on his arm, lifted his hat as
Sophie passed.
“Your people,” said the clear voice of Lady Conant in her ear.
“I suppose so,” said Sophie, blushing, for they were within two yards of
her; but it was not a question.
“Then that child looks as if it were coming down with mumps. You ought
to tell the mother she shouldn't have brought it to church.”
“I can't leave 'er behind, my lady,” the woman said. “She'd set the
'ouse afire in a minute, she's that forward with the matches. Ain't you,
Maudie dear?”
“Has Dr. Dallas seen her?”
“Not yet, my lady.”
“He must. You can't get away, of course. M-m! My idiotic maid is coming
in for her teeth to-morrow at twelve. She shall pick her up--at Gale
Anstey, isn't it?--at eleven.”
“Yes. Thank you very much, my lady.”
“I oughtn't to have done it,” said Lady Conant apologetically, “but
there has been no one at Pardons for so long that you'll forgive my
poaching. Now, can't you lunch with us? The vicar usually comes too.
I don't use the horses on a Sunday”--she glanced at the Brazilian's
silver-plated chariot. “It's only a mile across the fields.”
“You--you're very kind,” said Sophie, hating herself because her lip
trembled.
“My dear,” the compelling tone dropped to a soothing gurgle, “d'you
suppose I don't know how it feels to come to a strange county--country
I should say--away from one's own people? When I first left the
Shires--I'm Shropshire, you know--I cried for a day and a night. But
fretting doesn't make loneliness any better. Oh, here's Dora. She did
sprain her leg that day.”
“I'm as lame as a tree still,” said the tall maiden frankly. “You ought
to go out with the otter-hounds, Mrs. Chapin. I believe they're drawing
your water next week.”
Sir Walter had already led off George, and the vicar came up on the
other side of Sophie. There was no escaping the swift procession or the
leisurely lunch, where talk came and went in low-voiced eddies that
had the village for their centre. Sophie heard the vicar and Sir Walter
address her husband lightly as Chapin! (She also remembered many women
known in a previous life who habitually addressed their husbands as
Mr. Such-an-one.) After lunch Lady Conant talked to her explicitly of
maternity as that is achieved in cottages and farm-houses remote from
aid, and of the duty thereto of the mistress of Pardons.
A gate in a beech hedge, reached across triple lawns, let them out
before tea-time into the unkempt south side of their land.
“I want your hand, please,” said Sophie as soon as they were safe among
the beech boles and the lawless hollies. “D'you remember the old maid in
'Providence and the Guitar' who heard the Commissary swear, and hardly
reckoned herself a maiden lady afterward? Because I'm a relative of
hers. Lady Conant is--”
“Did you find out anything about the Lashmars?” he interrupted.
“I didn't ask. I'm going to write to Aunt Sydney about it first. Oh,
Lady Conant said something at lunch about their having bought some land
from some Lashmars a few years ago. I found it was at the beginning of
last century.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, 'Really, how interesting!' Like that. I'm not going to push
myself forward. I've been hearing about Mr. Sangres's efforts in that
direction. And you? I couldn't see you behind the flowers. Was it very
deep water, dear?”
George mopped a brow already browned by outdoor exposures.
“Oh no--dead easy,” he answered. “I've bought Friars Pardon to prevent
Sir Walter's birds straying.”
A cock pheasant scuttered through the dry leaves and exploded almost
under their feet. Sophie jumped.
“That's one of 'em,” said George calmly.
“Well, your nerves are better, at any rate,” said she. “Did you tell 'em
you'd bought the thing to play with?”
“No. That was where my nerve broke down. I only made one bad break--I
think. I said I couldn't see why hiring land to men to farm wasn't as
much a business proposition as anything else.”
“And what did they say?”
“They smiled. I shall know what that smile means some day. They don't
waste their smiles. D'you see that track by Gale Anstey?”
They looked down from the edge of the hanger over a cup-like hollow.
People by twos and threes in their Sunday best filed slowly along the
paths that connected farm to farm.
“I've never seen so many on our land before,” said Sophie. “Why is it?”
“To show us we mustn't shut up their rights of way.”
“Those cow-tracks we've been using cross lots?” said Sophie forcibly.
“Yes. Any one of 'em would cost us two thousand pounds each in legal
expenses to close.”
“But we don't want to,” she said.
“The whole community would fight if we did.”
“But it's our land. We can do what we like.”
“It's not our land. We've only paid for it. We belong to it, and it
belongs to the people--our people they call 'em. I've been to lunch with
the English too.”
They passed slowly from one bracken-dotted field to the next--flushed
with pride of ownership, plotting alterations and restorations at each
turn; halting in their tracks to argue, spreading apart to embrace two
views at once, or closing in to consider one. Couples moved out of their
way, but smiling covertly.
“We shall make some bad breaks,” he said at last.
“Together, though. You won't let anyone else in, will you?”
“Except the contractors. This syndicate handles this proposition by its
little lone.”
“But you might feel the want of some one,” she insisted.
“I shall--but it will be you. It's business, Sophie, but it's going to
be good fun.”
“Please God,” she answered flushing, and cried to herself as they went
back to tea. “It's worth it. Oh, it's worth it.”
The repairing and moving into Friars Pardon was business of the most
varied and searching, but all done English fashion, without friction.
Time and money alone were asked. The rest lay in the hands of beneficent
advisers from London, or spirits, male and female, called up by Mr. and
Mrs. Cloke from the wastes of the farms. In the centre stood George and
Sophie, a little aghast, their interests reaching out on every side.
“I ain't sayin' anything against Londoners,” said Cloke, self-appointed
clerk of the outer works, consulting engineer, head of the immigration
bureau, and superintendent of woods and forests; “but your own people
won't go about to make more than a fair profit out of you.”
“How is one to know?” said George.
“Five years from now, or so on, maybe, you'll be lookin' over your first
year's accounts, and, knowin' what you'll know then, you'll say: 'Well,
Billy Beartup'--or Old Cloke as it might be--'did me proper when I was
new.' No man likes to have that sort of thing laid up against him.”
“I think I see,” said George. “But five years is a long time to look
ahead.”
“I doubt if that oak Billy Beartup throwed in Reuben's Ghyll will be fit
for her drawin’-room floor in less than seven,” Cloke drawled.
“Yes, that's my work,” said Sophie. (Billy Beartup of Griffons,
a woodman by training and birth, a tenant farmer by misfortune of
marriage, had laid his broad axe at her feet a month before.) “Sorry if
I've committed you to another eternity.”
“And we shan't even know where we've gone wrong with your new carriage
drive before that time either,” said Cloke, ever anxious to keep the
balance true with an ounce or two in Sophie's favour. The past four
months had taught George better than to reply. The carriage road winding
up the hill was his present keen interest. They set off to look at it,
and the imported American scraper which had blighted the none too sunny
soul of “Skim” Winsh, the carter.
But young Iggulden was in charge now, and under his guidance, Buller and
Roberts, the great horses, moved mountains.
“You lif' her like that, an' you tip her like that,” he explained to the
gang. “My uncle he was roadmaster in Connecticut.”
“Are they roads yonder?” said Skim, sitting under the laurels.
“No better than accommodation roads. Dirt, they call 'em. They'd suit
you, Skim.”
“Why?” said the incautious Skim.
“Cause you'd take no hurt when you fall out of your cart drunk on a
Saturday,” was the answer.
“I didn't last time neither,” Skim roared.
After the loud laugh, old Whybarne of Gale Anstey piped feebly, “Well,
dirt or no dirt, there's no denyin' Chapin knows a good job when he
sees it. 'E don't build one day and dee-stroy the next, like that nigger
Sangres.”
“SHE's the one that knows her own mind,” said Pinky, brother to Skim
Winsh, and a Napoleon among carters who had helped to bring the grand
piano across the fields in the autumn rains.
“She had ought to,” said Iggulden. “Whoa, Buller! She's a Lashmar. They
never was double-thinking.”
“Oh, you found that? Has the answer come from your uncle?” said Skim,
doubtful whether so remote a land as America had posts.
The others looked at him scornfully. Skim was always a day behind the
fair. Iggulden rested from his labours. “She's a Lashmar right enough.
I started up to write to my uncle--at once--the month after she said her
folks came from Veering Holler.”
“Where there ain't any roads?” Skim interrupted, but none laughed.
“My uncle he married an American woman for his second, and she took
it up like a—like the coroner. She's a Lashmar out of the old Lashmar
place, 'fore they sold to Conants. She ain't no Toot Hill Lashmar, nor
any o' the Crayford lot. Her folk come out of the ground here, neither
chalk nor forest, but wildishers. They sailed over to America--I've got
it all writ down by my uncle's woman--in eighteen hundred an' nothing.
My uncle says they're all slow begetters like.”
“Would they be gentry yonder now?” Skim asked.
“Nah--there's no gentry in America, no matter how long you're there.
It's against their law. There's only rich and poor allowed. They've
been lawyers and such like over yonder for a hundred years but she's a
Lashmar for all that.”
“Lord! What's a hundred years?” said Whybarne, who had seen
seventy-eight of them.
“An' they write too, from yonder--my uncle's woman writes--that you can
still tell 'em by headmark. Their hair's foxy-red still--an' they throw
out when they walk. He's in-toed-treads like a gipsy; but you watch, an'
you'll see 'er throw, out--like a colt.”
“Your trace wants taking up.” Pinky's large ears had caught the sound
of voices, and as the two broke through the laurels the men were hard at
work, their eyes on Sophie's feet.
She had been less fortunate in her inquiries than Iggulden, for her Aunt
Sydney of Meriden (a badged and certificated Daughter of the Revolution
to boot) answered her inquiries with a two-paged discourse on
patriotism, the leaflets of a Village Improvement Society, of which she
was president, and a demand for an overdue subscription to a Factory
Girls' Reading Circle. Sophie burned it all in the Orpheus and Eurydice
grate, and kept her own counsel.
“What I want to know,” said George, when Spring was coming, and the
gardens needed thought, “is who will ever pay me for my labour? I've put
in at least half a million dollars' worth already.”
“Sure you're not taking too much out of yourself?” his wife asked.
“Oh, no; I haven't been conscious of myself all winter.” He looked at
his brown English gaiters and smiled. “It's all behind me now. I believe
I could sit down and think of all that--those months before we sailed.”
“Don't--ah, don't!” she cried.
“But I must go back one day. You don't want to keep me out of business
always--or do you?” He ended with a nervous laugh.
Sophie sighed as she drew her own ground-ash (of old Iggulden's cutting)
from the hall rack.
“Aren't you overdoing it too? You look a little tired,” he said.
“You make me tired. I'm going to Rocketts to see Mrs. Cloke about Mary.”
(This was the sister of the telegraphist, promoted to be sewing-maid at
Pardons.) “Coming?”
“I'm due at Burnt House to see about the new well. By the way, there's a
sore throat at Gale Anstey--”
“That's my province. Don't interfere. The Whybarne children always have
sore throats. They do it for jujubes.”
“Keep away from Gale Anstey till I make sure, honey. Cloke ought to have
told me.”
“These people don't tell. Haven't you learnt that yet? But I'll obey, me
lord. See you later!”
She set off afoot, for within the three main roads that bounded the
blunt triangle of the estate (even by night one could scarcely hear the
carts on them), wheels were not used except for farm work. The footpaths
served all other purposes. And though at first they had planned
improvements, they had soon fallen in with the customs of their hidden
kingdom, and moved about the soft-footed ways by woodland, hedgerow, and
shaw as freely as the rabbits. Indeed, for the most part Sophie walked
bareheaded beneath her helmet of chestnut hair; but she had been plagued
of late by vague toothaches, which she explained to Mrs. Cloke, who
asked some questions. How it came about Sophie never knew, but after a
while behold Mrs. Cloke's arm was about her waist, and her head was on
that deep bosom behind the shut kitchen door.
“My dear! My dear!” the elder woman almost sobbed. “An' d'you mean
to tell me you never suspicioned? Why--why--where was you ever taught
anything at all? Of course it is. It's what we've been only waitin' for,
all of us. Time and again I've said to Lady--” she checked herself. “An'
now we shall be as we should be.”
“But--but--but--” Sophie whimpered.
“An' to see you buildin' your nest so busy--pianos and books--an' never
thinkin' of a nursery!”
“No more I did.” Sophie sat bolt upright, and began to laugh.
“Time enough yet.” The fingers tapped thoughtfully on the broad knee.
“But--they must be strange-minded folk over yonder with you! Have you
thought to send for your mother? She dead? My dear, my dear! Never
mind! She'll be happy where she knows. 'Tis God's work. An' we was only
waitin' for it, for you've never failed in your duty yet. It ain't
your way. What did you say about my Mary's doings?” Mrs. Cloke's face
hardened as she pressed her chin on Sophie's forehead. “If any of your
girls thinks to be'ave arbitrary now, I'll--But they won't, my dear.
I'll see they do their duty too. Be sure you'll 'ave no trouble.”
When Sophie walked back across the fields heaven and earth changed about
her as on the day of old Iggulden's death. For an instant she thought
of the wide turn of the staircase, and the new ivory-white paint that
no coffin corner could scar, but presently, the shadow passed in a pure
wonder and bewilderment that made her reel. She leaned against one of
their new gates and looked over their lands for some other stay.
“Well,” she said resignedly, half aloud, “we must try to make him feel
that he isn't a third in our party,” and turned the corner that looked
over Friars Pardon, giddy, sick, and faint.
Of a sudden the house they had bought for a whim stood up as she had
never seen it before, low-fronted, broad-winged, ample, prepared by
course of generations for all such things. As it had steadied her when
it lay desolate, so now that it had meaning from their few months of
life within, it soothed and promised good. She went alone and quickly
into the hall, and kissed either door-post, whispering: “Be good to me.
You know! You've never failed in your duty yet.”
When the matter was explained to George, he would have sailed at once to
their own land, but this Sophie forbade.
“I don't want science,” she said. “I just want to be loved, and there
isn't time for that at home. Besides,” she added, looking out of the
window, “it would be desertion.”
George was forced to soothe himself with linking Friars Pardon to the
telegraph system of Great Britain by telephone--three-quarters of a
mile of poles, put in by Whybarne and a few friends. One of these was
a foreigner from the next parish. Said he when the line was being run:
“There's an old ellum right in our road. Shall us throw her?”
“Toot Hill parish folk, neither grace nor good luck, God help 'em.” Old
Whybarne shouted the local proverb from three poles down the line. “We
ain't goin' to lay any axe-iron to coffin-wood here not till we know
where we are yet awhile. Swing round 'er, swing round!”
To this day, then, that sudden kink in the straight line across the
upper pasture remains a mystery to Sophie and George. Nor can they tell
why Skim Winsh, who came to his cottage under Dutton Shaw most musically
drunk at 10.45 P.M of every Saturday night, as his father had done
before him, sang no more at the bottom of the garden steps, where Sophie
always feared he would break his neck. The path was undoubtedly an
ancient right of way, and at 10.45 P.M. on Saturdays Skim remembered it
was his duty to posterity to keep it open--till Mrs. Cloke spoke to him
once. She spoke likewise to her daughter Mary, sewing maid at Pardons,
and to Mary's best new friend, the five-foot-seven imported London
house-maid, who taught Mary to trim hats, and found the country dullish.
But there was no noise--at no time was there any noise--and when Sophie
walked abroad she met no one in her path unless she had signified a wish
that way. Then they appeared to protest that all was well with them and
their children, their chickens, their roofs, their water-supply, and
their sons in the police or the railway service.
“But don't you find it dull, dear?” said George, loyally doing his best
not to worry as the months went by.
“I've been so busy putting my house in order I haven't had time to
think,” said she. “Do you?”
“No--no. If I could only be sure of you.”
She turned on the green drawing-room's couch (it was Empire, not
Heppelwhite after all), and laid aside a list of linen and blankets.
“It has changed everything, hasn't it?” she whispered.
“Oh, Lord, yes. But I still think if we went back to Baltimore--”
“And missed our first real summer together. No thank you, me lord.”
“But we're absolutely alone.”
“Isn't that what I'm doing my best to remedy? Don't you worry. I like
it--like it to the marrow of my little bones. You don't realize what her
house means to a woman. We thought we were living in it last year, but
we hadn't begun to. Don't you rejoice in your study, George?”
“I prefer being here with you.” He sat down on the floor by the couch
and took her hand.
“Seven,” she said, as the French clock struck. “Year before last you'd
just be coming back from business.”
He winced at the recollection, then laughed. “Business! I've been at
work ten solid hours to-day.”
“Where did you lunch? With the Conants?”
“No; at Dutton Shaw, sitting on a log, with my feet in a swamp. But
we've found out where the old spring is, and we're going to pipe it down
to Gale Anstey next year.”
“I'll come and see to-morrow. Oh, please open the door, dear. I want to
look down the passage. Isn't that corner by the stair-head lovely where
the sun strikes in?” She looked through half-closed eyes at the vista of
ivory-white and pale green all steeped in liquid gold.
“There's a step out of Jane Elphick's bedroom,” she went on--“and his
first step in the world ought to be up. I shouldn't wonder if those
people hadn't put it there on purpose. George, will it make any odds to
you if he's a girl?”
He answered, as he had many times before, that his interest was his
wife, not the child.
“Then you're the only person who thinks so.” She laughed. “Don't be
silly, dear. It's expected. I know. It's my duty. I shan't be able to
look our people in the face if I fail.”
“What concern is it of theirs, confound 'em!”
“You'll see. Luckily the tradition of the house is boys, Mrs. Cloke
says, so I'm provided for. Shall you ever begin to understand these
people? I shan't.”
“And we bought it for fun--for fun!” he groaned. “And here we are held
up for goodness knows how long!”
“Why? Were you thinking of selling it?” He did not answer. “Do you
remember the second Mrs. Chapin?” she demanded.
This was a bold, brazen little black-browed woman--a widow for
choice--who on Sophie's death was guilefully to marry George for his
wealth and ruin him in a year. George being busy, Sophie had invented
her some two years after her marriage, and conceived she was alone among
wives in so doing.
“You aren't going to bring her up again?” he asked anxiously.
“I only want to say that I should hate any one who bought Pardons ten
times worse than I used to hate the second Mrs. Chapin. Think what we've
put into it of our two selves.”
“At least a couple of million dollars. I know I could have made--” He
broke off.
“The beasts!” she went on. “They'd be sure to build a red-brick lodge
at the gates, and cut the lawn up for bedding out. You must leave
instructions in your will that he's never to do that, George, won't
you?”
He laughed and took her hand again but said nothing till it was time to
dress. Then he muttered: “What the devil use is a man's country to him
when he can't do business in it?”
Friars Pardon stood faithful to its tradition. At the appointed time was
born, not that third in their party to whom Sophie meant to be so kind,
but a godling; in beauty, it was manifest, excelling Eros, as in wisdom
Confucius; an enhancer of delights, a renewer of companionships and an
interpreter of Destiny. This last George did not realise till he met
Lady Conant striding through Dutton Shaw a few days after the event.
“My dear fellow,” she cried, and slapped him heartily on the back, “I
can't tell you how glad we all are. Oh, she'll be all right. (There's
never been any trouble over the birth of an heir at Pardons.) Now where
the dooce is it?” She felt largely in her leather-boundskirt and drew
out a small silver mug. “I sent a note to your wife about it, but my
silly ass of a groom forgot to take this. You can save me a tramp. Give
her my love.” She marched off amid her guard of grave Airedales.
The mug was worn and dented: above the twined initials, G.L., was the
crest of a footless bird and the motto: “Wayte awhyle--wayte awhyle.”
“That's the other end of the riddle,” Sophie whispered, when he saw her
that evening. “Read her note. The English write beautiful notes.”
The warmest of welcomes to your little man. I hope he will appreciate
his native land now he has come to it. Though you have said nothing we
cannot, of course, look on him as a little stranger, and so I am sending
him the old Lashmar christening mug. It has been with us since Gregory
Lashmar, your great-grandmother's brother--
George stared at his wife.
“Go on,” she twinkled, from the pillows.
--mother's brother, sold his place to Walter's family. We seem to have
acquired some of your household gods at that time, but nothing survives
except the mug and the old cradle, which I found in the potting-shed and
am having put in order for you. I hope little George--Lashmar, he will
be too, won't he?--will live to see his grandchildren cut their teeth on
his mug.
Affectionately yours,
ALICE CONANT.
P.S.--How quiet you've kept about it all!
“Well, I'm--”
“Don't swear,” said Sophie. “Bad for the infant mind.”
“But how in the world did she get at it? Have you ever said a word about
the Lashmars?”
“You know the only time--to young Iggulden at Rocketts--when Iggulden
died.”
“Your great-grandmother's brother! She's traced the whole
connection--more than your Aunt Sydney could do. What does she mean
about our keeping quiet?”
Sophie's eyes sparkled. “I've thought that out too. We've got back at
the English at last. Can't you see that she thought that we thought my
mother's being a Lashmar was one of those things we'd expect the English
to find out for themselves, and that's impressed her?” She turned
the mug in her white hands, and sighed happily. “'Wayte awhyle--wayte
awhyle.' That's not a bad motto, George. It's been worth it.”
“But still I don't quite see--”
“I shouldn't wonder if they don't think our coming here was part of a
deep-laid scheme to be near our ancestors. They'd understand that. And
look how they've accepted us, all of them.”
“Are we so undesirable in ourselves?” George grunted.
“Be just, me lord. That wretched Sangres man has twice our money. Can
you see Marm Conant slapping him between the shoulders? Not by a jugful!
The poor beast doesn't exist!”
“Do you think it's that then?” He looked toward the cot by the fire
where the godling snorted.
“The minute I get well I shall find out from Mrs. Cloke what every
Lashmar gives in doles (that's nicer than tips) every time a Lashmite is
born. I've done my duty thus far, but there's much expected of me.”
Entered here Mrs. Cloke, and hung worshipping over the cot. They showed
her the mug and her face shone. “Oh, now Lady Conant's sent it, it'll
be all proper, ma'am, won't it? 'George' of course he'd have to be, but
seein' what he is we was hopin'--all your people was hopin'--it 'ud be
'Lashmar' too, and that'ud just round it out. A very 'andsome mug quite
unique, I should imagine. 'Wayte awhyle--wayte awhyle.' That's true with
the Lashmars, I've heard. Very slow to fill their houses, they are. Most
like Master George won't open 'is nursery till he's thirty.”
“Poor lamb!” cried Sophie. “But how did you know my folk were Lashmars?”
Mrs. Cloke thought deeply. “I'm sure I can't quite say, ma'am, but I've
a belief likely that it was something you may have let drop to young
Iggulden when you was at Rocketts. That may have been what give us an
inkling. An' so it came out, one thing in the way o' talk leading to
another, and those American people at Veering Holler was very obligin'
with news, I'm told, ma'am.”
“Great Scott!” said George, under his breath. “And this is the simple
peasant!”
“Yiss,” Mrs. Cloke went on. “An' Cloke was only wonderin' this
afternoon--your pillow's slipped my dear, you mustn't lie that
a-way--just for the sake o' sayin' something, whether you wouldn't think
well now of getting the Lashmar farms back, sir. They don't rightly
round off Sir Walter's estate. They come caterin' across us more. Cloke,
'e 'ud be glad to show you over any day.”
“But Sir Walter doesn't want to sell, does he?”
“We can find out from his bailiff, sir, but”--with cold contempt--“I
think that trained nurse is just comin' up from her dinner, so 'm afraid
we'll 'ave to ask you, sir... Now, Master George--Ai-ie! Wake a litty
minute, lammie!”
A few months later the three of them were down at the brook in the Gale
Anstey woods to consider the rebuilding of a footbridge carried away by
spring floods. George Lashmar Chapin wanted all the bluebells on God's
earth that day to eat, and Sophie adored him in a voice like to the
cooing of a dove; so business was delayed.
“Here's the place,” said his father at last among the water
forget-me-nots. “But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told
you to have them down here ready.”
“We'll get 'em down _if_ you say so,” Cloke answered, with a thrust of
the underlip they both knew.
“But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here
for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen
two-by-four bits would be ample.”
“I don't know nothin' about that,” said Cloke.
“An' I've nothin' to say against larch--IF you want to make a temp'ry
job of it. I ain't 'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't
say I ever come creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you further in
than you set out--”
A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a
little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.
“All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp'ry job of it;
and by the time the young master's married it'll have to be done again.
Now, I've brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers
as we've ever drawed. You put 'em in an' it's off your mind for good an'
all. T'other way--I don't say it ain't right, I'm only just sayin' what
I think--but t'other way, he'll no sooner be married than we'll 'ave it
_all_ to do again. You've no call to regard my words, but you can't get
out of that.”
“No,” said George after a pause; “I've been realising that for some
time. Make it oak then; we can't get out of it.”