MISS URSULA WINWOOD, hatless, but with a cotton sunshade swinging over
her shoulder, and with a lean, shiny, mahogany-coloured Sussex spaniel
trailing behind, walked in her calm, deliberate way down the long
carriage drive of Drane's Court. She was stout and florid, and had no
scruples as to the avowal of her age, which was forty-three. She had
clear blue eyes which looked steadily upon a complicated world of
affairs, and a square, heavy chin which showed her capacity for dealing
with it. Miss Ursula Winwood knew herself to be a notable person, and
the knowledge did not make her vain or crotchety or imperious. She took
her notability for granted, as she took her mature good looks and her
independent fortune. For some years she had kept house for her widowed
brother, Colonel Winwood, Conservative Member for the Division of the
county in which they resided, and helped him efficiently in his
political work. The little township of Morebury--half a mile from the
great gates of Drane's Court--felt Miss Winwood's control in diverse
ways. Another town, a little further off, with five or six millions of
inhabitants, was also, through its newspapers, aware of Miss Winwood.
Many leagues, societies, associations, claimed her as President,
Vice-President, or Member of Council. She had sat on Royal Commissions.
Her name under an appeal for charity guaranteed the deserts of the
beneficiaries. What she did not know about housing problems, factory
acts, female prisons, hospitals, asylums for the blind, decayed
gentlewomen, sweated trades, dogs' homes and Friendly Societies could
not be considered in the light of knowledge. She sat on platforms with
Royal princesses, Archbishops welcomed her as a colleague, and Cabinet
Ministers sought her counsel.
For some distance from the porch of the red-brick, creeper-covered
Queen-Anne house the gravel drive between the lawns blazed in the
afternoon sun. For this reason, the sunshade. But after a while came an
avenue of beech and plane and oak casting delectable shade on the drive
and its double edging of grass, and the far-stretching riot of flowers
beneath the trees, foxgloves and canterbury bells and campanulas and
delphiniums, all blues and purples and whites, with here and there the
pink of dog-roses and gorgeous yellow splashes of celandine. On
entering the stately coolness, Miss Winwood closed her sunshade and
looked at her watch, a solid timepiece harboured in her belt. A knitted
brow betrayed mathematical calculation. It would take her five minutes
to reach the lodge gate. The train bringing her venerable uncle,
Archdeacon Winwood, for a week's visit would not arrive at the station
for another three minutes, and the two fat horses would take ten
minutes to drag from the station the landau which she had sent to meet
him. She had, therefore, eight minutes to spare. A rustic bench invited
repose. Graciously she accepted the invitation.
Now, it must be observed that it was not Miss Winwood's habit to waste
time. Her appointments were kept to the minute, and her appointment
(self-made on this occasion) was the welcoming of her uncle, the
Archdeacon, on the threshold of Drane's Court. But Miss Winwood was
making holiday and allowed herself certain relaxations. Her brother's
health having broken down, he had paired for the rest of the session
and gone to Contrexeville for a cure. She had therefore shut up her
London house in Portland Place, Colonel Winwood's home while Parliament
sat, and had come to her brother's house, Drane's Court, her home when
her presence was not needed in London. She was tired; Drane's Court,
where she had been born and had lived all her girlhood's life, was
restful; and the seat in the shade of the great beech was cunningly
curved. The shiny, mahogany-coloured spaniel, prescient of siesta,
leaped to her side and lay down with his chin on her lap and blinked
his yellow eyes.
She lay back on the seat, her hand on the dog's head, looking
contentedly at the opposite wilderness of bloom and the glimpses,
through the screen of trees and shrubs, of the sunlit stretches of park
beyond. She loved Drane's Court. Save for the three years of her
brother's short married life, it had been part of herself. A Winwood, a
very younger son of the Family--the Family being that of which the Earl
of Harpenden is Head (these things can only be written of in capital
letters)--had acquired wealth in the dark political days of Queen Anne,
and had bought the land and built the house, and the property had never
passed into alien hands. As for the name, he had used that of his wife,
Viscountess Drane in her own right,--a notorious beauty of whom, so
History recounts, he was senilely enamoured and on whose naughty
account he was eventually run through the body by a young Mohawk of a
paramour. They fought one spring dawn in the park--the traditional spot
could be seen from where Ursula Winwood was sitting.
Ursula and her brother were proud of the romantic episode, and would
relate it to guests and point out the scene of the duel. Happy and
illusory days of Romance now dead and gone! It is not conceivable that,
generations hence, the head of a family will exhibit with pride the
stained newspaper cuttings containing the unsavoury details of the
divorce case of his great-great-grandmother.
This aspect of family history seldom presented itself to Ursula
Winwood. It did not do so this mellow and contented afternoon.
Starlings mindful of a second brood chattered in the old walnut trees
far away on the lawn; thrushes sang their deep-throated bugle-calls;
finches twittered. A light breeze creeping up the avenue rustled the
full foliage languorously. Ursula Winwood closed her eyes. A bumble-bee
droned between visits to foxglove bells near by. She loved bumble-bees.
They reminded her of a summer long ago when she sat, not on this
seat--as a matter of fact it was in the old walled garden a quarter of
a mile away--with a gallant young fellow's arms about her and her head
on his shoulder. A bumble-bee had droned round her while they kissed.
She could never hear a bumble-bee without thinking of it. But the
gallant young fellow had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen
eighty-five, and Ursula Winwood's heart had been buried in his sandy
grave. That was the beginning and end of her sentimental history. She
had recovered from the pain of it all and now she loved the bumble-bee
for invoking the exquisite memory. The lithe Sussex spaniel crept
farther on her lap and her hand caressed his polished coat. Drowsiness
disintegrated the exquisite memories. Miss Ursula Winwood fell asleep.
The sudden plunging of strong young paws into her body and a series of
sharp barks and growls awakened her with a start, and, for a second,
still dazed by the drowsy invocation of the bumble-bee, she saw
approaching her the gallant fellow who had been pierced through the
heart by a Soudanese spear in eighteen eighty-five. He was dark and
handsome, and, by a trick of coincidence, was dressed in loose
knickerbocker suit, just as he was when he had walked up that very
avenue to say his last good-bye. She remained for a moment tense,
passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties. Then clear awake,
and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and
catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer,
sudden interest at the newcomer. He was young, extraordinarily
beautiful; but he staggered and reeled like a drunken man. The spaniel
barked his respectable disapproval. In his long life of eighteen months
he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in
kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane's Court had
been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a
trespasser. With unparalleled moral courage he told him exactly what he
thought of him. But the trespasser did not hear. He kept on advancing.
Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up. The young man threw
out his hands towards her, tripped over the three-inch-high border of
grass, and fell in a sprawling heap at her feet.
He lay very still. Ursula Winwood looked down upon him. The shiny brown
spaniel took up a strategic position three yards away and growled, his
chin between his paws. But the more Miss Winwood looked, and her blue
eyes were trained to penetrate, the more was she convinced that both
she and the dog were wrong in their diagnosis. The young man's face was
deadly white, his cheeks gaunt. It was evidently a grave matter. For a
moment or so she had a qualm of fear lest he might be dead. She bent
down, took him in her capable grip and composed his inert body
decently, and placed the knapsack he was wearing beneath his head. The
faintly beating heart proved him to be alive, but her touch on his brow
discovered fever. Kneeling by his side, she wiped his lips with her
handkerchief, and gave herself up to the fraction of a minute's
contemplation of the most beautiful youth she had ever seen. So there
he lay, a new Endymion, while the most modern of Dianas hung over him,
stricken with great wonderment at his perfection.
In this romantic attitude was she surprised, first by the coachman of
the landau and pair as he swung round the bend of the drive, and then
by the Archdeacon, who leaned over the door of the carriage. Miss
Winwood sprang to her feet; the coachman pulled up, and the Archdeacon
alighted.
"My dear Uncle Edward"--she wrung his hand--"I'm so glad to see you. Do
help me grapple with an extraordinary situation."
The Archdeacon smiled humorously. He was a spare man of seventy, with
thin, pointed, clean-shaven face, and clear blue eyes like Miss
Winwood's. "If there's a situation, my dear Ursula, with which you
can't grapple," said he, "it must indeed be extraordinary."
She narrated what had occurred, and together they bent over the
unconscious youth. "I would suggest," said she, "that we put him into
the carriage, drive him up to the house, and send for Dr. Fuller."
"I can only support your suggestion," said the Archdeacon.
So the coachman came down from his box and helped them to lift the
young man into the landau; and his body swayed helplessly between Miss
Winwood and the Archdeacon, whose breeches and gaiters were smeared
with dust from his heavy boots. A few moments afterwards he was carried
into the library and laid upon a sofa, and Miss Winwood administered
restoratives. The deep stupor seemed to pass, and he began to moan.
Miss Winwood and the housekeeper stood by his side. The Archdeacon, his
hands behind his back, paced the noiseless Turkey carpet. "I hope,"
said he, "your doctor will not be long in coming."
"It looks like a sunstroke," the housekeeper remarked, as her mistress
scrutinized the clinical thermometer.
"It doesn't," said Miss Winwood bluntly. "In sunstroke the face is
either congested or clammy. I know that much. He has a temperature of
103."
"Poor fellow!" said the Archdeacon.
"I wonder who he is," said Miss Winwood.
"Perhaps this may tell us," said the Archdeacon.
From the knapsack, carelessly handled by the servant who had brought it
in, had escaped a book, and the servant had laid the book on the top of
the knapsack. The Archdeacon took it up.
"Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Urn Burial. On the flyleaf,
'Paul Savelli.' An undergraduate, I should say, on a walking tour."
Miss Winwood took the book from his hands--a little cheap reprint. "I'm
glad," she said.
"Why, my dear Ursula?"
"I'm very fond of Sir Thomas Browne, myself," she replied.
Presently the doctor came and made his examination. He shook a grave
head. "Pneumonia. And he has got it bad. Perhaps a touch of the sun as
well." The housekeeper smiled discreetly. "Looks half-starved, too.
I'll send up the ambulance at once and get him to the cottage hospital."
Miss Winwood, a practical woman, was aware that the doctor gave wise
counsel. But she looked at Paul and hesitated. Paul's destiny, though
none knew it, hung in the balance. "I disapprove altogether of the
cottage hospital," she said.
"Eh?" said the doctor.
The Archdeacon raised his eyebrows. "My dear Ursula, I thought you had
made the Morebury Cottage Hospital the model of its kind."
"Its kind is not for people who carry about Sir Thomas Browne in their
pocket," retorted the disingenuous lady. "If I turned him out of my
house, doctor, and anything happened to him, I should have to reckon
with his people. He stays here. You'll kindly arrange for nurses. The
red room, Wilkins,--no, the green--the one with the small oak bed. You
can't nurse people properly in four-posters. It has a south-east
aspect"--she turned to the doctor--"and so gets the sun most of the
day. That's quite right, isn't it?"
"Ideal. But I warn you, Miss Winwood, you may be letting yourself in
for a perfectly avoidable lot of trouble."
"I like trouble," said Miss Winwood.
"You're certainly looking for it," replied the doctor glancing at Paul
and stuffing his stethoscope into his pocket. "And in this case, I can
promise you worry beyond dreams of anxiety."
The word of Ursula Winwood was law for miles around. Dr. Fuller, rosy,
fat and fifty, obeyed, like everyone else; but during the process of
law-making he had often, before now, played the part of an urbane and
gently satirical leader of the opposition.
She flashed round on him, with a foolish pain through her heart that
caused her to catch her breath. "Is he as bad as that?" she asked
quickly.
"As bad as that," said the doctor, with grave significance. "How he
managed to get here is a mystery!" Within a quarter-of-an-hour the
unconscious Paul, clad in a suit of Colonel Winwood's silk pyjamas, lay
in a fragrant room, hung with green and furnished in old, black oak.
Never once, in all his life, had Paul Kegworthy lain in such a room.
And for him a great house was in commotion. Messages went forth for
nurses and medicines and the paraphernalia of a luxurious sick-chamber,
and-the lady of the house being absurdly anxious--for a great London
specialist, whose fee, in Dr. Fuller's quiet eyes, would be amusingly
fantastic.
"It seems horrible to search the poor boy's pockets," said Miss
Winwood, when, after these excursions and alarms the Archdeacon and
herself had returned to the library; "but we must try to find out who
he is and communicate with his people. Savelli. I've never heard of
them. I wonder who they are."
"There is an historical Italian family of that name," said the
Archdeacon.
"I was sure of it," said Miss Winwood.
"Of what?"
"That his people--are--well--all right."
"Why are you sure?"
Ursula was very fond of her uncle. He represented to her the fine
flower of the Church of England--a gentleman, a scholar, an ideal
physical type of the Anglican dignitary, a man of unquestionable piety
and Christian charity, a personage who would be recognized for what he
was by Hottentots or Esquimaux or attendants of wagon-lits trains or
millionaires of the Middle West of America or Parisian Apaches. In him
the branch of the family tree had burgeoned into the perfect cleric.
Yet sometimes, the play of light beneath the surface of those blue
eyes, so like her own, and the delicately intoned challenges of his
courtly voice, exasperated her beyond measure. "It's obvious to any
idiot, my dear," she replied testily. "Just look at him. It speaks for
itself."
The Archdeacon put his thin hand on her plump shoulder, and smiled. The
old man had a very sunny smile. "I'm sorry to carry on a conversation
so Socratically," said he. "But what is 'it'?"
"I've never seen anything so physically beautiful, save the statues in
the Vatican, in all my life. If he's not an aristocrat to the finger
tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a
nunnery--which will distress you exceedingly. And then"--she waved a
plump hand--"and then, as I've mentioned before, he reads the Religio
Medici. The commonplace, vulgar young man of to-day no more reads Sir
Thomas Browne than he reads Tertullian or the Upanishads."
"He also reads," said the Archdeacon, stuffing his hand into Paul's
knapsack, against whose canvas the stiff outline of a book revealed
itself--"he also reads"--he held up a little fat duodecimo--"the
Chansons de Beranger."
"That proves it," cried Miss Winwood.
"Proves what?"
His blue eyes twinkled. Having a sense of humour, she laughed and flung
her great arm round his frail shoulders. "It proves, my venerable and
otherwise distinguished dear, that I am right and you are wrong."
"My good Ursula," said he, disengaging himself, "I have not advanced
one argument either in favour of, or in opposition to, one single
proposition the whole of this afternoon."
She shook her head at him pityingly.
The housekeeper entered carrying a double handful of odds and ends
which she laid on the library table--a watch and chain and cornelian
heart, a cigarette case bearing the initials "P.S.," some keys, a very
soiled handkerchief, a sovereign, a shilling and a penny. Dr. Fuller
had sent them down with his compliments; they were the entire contents
of the young gentleman's pockets.
"Not a card, not a scrap of paper with a name and address on it?" cried
Miss Winwood.
"Not a scrap, miss. The doctor and I searched most thoroughly."
"Perhaps the knapsack will tell us more," said the Archdeacon.
The knapsack, however, revealed nothing but a few toilet necessaries, a
hunk of stale bread and a depressing morsel of cheese, and a pair of
stockings and a shirt declared by the housekeeper to be wet through. As
the Beranger, like the Sir Thomas Browne, was inscribed "Paul Savelli,"
which corresponded with the initials on the cigarette case, they were
fairly certain of the young man's name. But that was all they could
discover regarding him.
"We'll have to wait until he can tell us himself," said Miss Winwood
later to the doctor.
"We'll have to wait a long time," said he.