CHAPTER IV

They had been walking along the narrow hilly road that branched off from the broad highway between the little town of Framsby and the villages of Dean Grange, Beastlington, and Elfrisleigh, and now they were standing on the ridge of the Down that overlooked the lovely valley of the Wadron. The day was one toward the end of April, when everything in nature, including men and women and healthy girls, feels stirred with the impulses of the Spring, and while all fancy they are living only in the joy of the present, they are yet giving their thoughts to the future. Everything in nature was showing signs of thinking of the future. The early flowers were looking after themselves, doing their best to offer allurements to the insects which they trusted to carry their love tokens for them from stamen to pistil; and the pale butterflies became messenger Cupids all unconsciously. But the birds were doing their own love-making. Every bough was vocal, every brake quivered in harmony. In that green lane there was the furtive flutter of wings. Some nests had been built and padded for the eggs, and here and there a stranger looking carefully through the interspaces among the glossy leaves could see the glitter of the beady eye of a hiding blackbird, and, with greater pains, the mottling of a thrush’s throat. Love-making and home-making on all sides—this is what the Spring meant, and it was probably because she was so closely in touch with the season and its instincts that one of the girls had spoken out some of the thoughts that made her warm as though her thoughts were infants of the Spring, to be cherished very close to her body.

They stood at that part of the road which bridged one of the tributary streams that went down to the Wadron, losing itself for many yards where it crept among the bosky slopes nearest to the road, but making its course apparent by many a twinkle of quick water, and now and again by a crystal pool, overflowing among mossy stones and cascading where there was a broad steep rock. Again it disappeared among the wilderness of bramble, but when one looked for its continuation, its glistening, not directly downward, but many yards to one side, gave one a glad surprise.

And all its course was marked by primroses. The park through which it flowed was carpeted with primroses, and all the distance of the valley was tinted with ten thousand tufts. Only on one of the high banks of the parkland, where the pines stood in groups, was the brown earth covered with a haze of bluebells. Close though this bank was to the road, it was picked over with rabbit burrows, and when the girls came near there was a scurrying of brown and a flicker of white among the bluebells and the ferns.

“It is getting wilder and wilder,” said Rosa.

“Thank goodness!” added Priscilla. “It was the wisest thing that ever the owner did, to die and keep every one out of it for all these years.”

“Yes, so far as we are concerned,” said Rosa. “We have got more out of the place than any one else.”

“You would have been a visitor to the Manor in any case,” said Priscilla; “but what chance would I have had? Well, I might have come in under the shelter of your wing, not otherwise.”

“Perhaps the son’s wife might not have been so stuck up as the rest of the people in our neighbourhood,” remarked Rosa, consolingly.

Priscilla laughed.

“I think I should take their—their—standoffishness more to heart if you were not here, Rosa,” said Priscilla, thoughtfully “What shall I do when you go away?”

“Go away? I heard nothing about my going away.”

“I hear a good deal about it to-day from the birds, and the sheep, and all the other voices of the Spring. They have talked about nothing else all the morning.”

Rosa looked at her anxiously for some moments. Then she gave a sound that had something of contempt in it, crying, “What rot! My dear girl, you know as well as I do that I have no intention of going away—that I do not bother my head with any notion of—of that sort of thing. I am quite content to remain here. It would take a lot of coaxing to carry me away. Come along now, I don’t trust strangers, and I certainly don’t trust April weather, and I certainly don’t trust that cloud that puts a black cap on Beacon Hill. If we are to get our baskets full in time we would do well not to wait here sentimentalizing.”

She led the way on the road by the park fence, and Priscilla was still behind her when they went round the curve, where the road had been widened in front of the pillars that supported a pair of well-worn entrance gates. Lodges were on each side, picturesque sexagonal cottages, their shape almost undiscernible through the straggling mass of the creepers that covered them.

“Do you remember the pheasants’ eggs?” whispered Rosa, when they had gone through the gates and had just passed the lodges.

“I am trying my best to forget them,” replied Priscilla. “How awful it would be if I accidentally spoke of that omelette in the hearing of some one who would mention it to Mr. Dunning!”

“It would be awful!” acquiesced Rosa.

Their exchange of confidences related to the hospitality of the wife of one of the keepers, who occupied the lodge on the right. One day during the previous year the girls had been drenched in the park, and while they were drying their clothes the good woman, who had been a cook at the Manor, made them an omelette, using pheasants’ eggs, of which quite a number were in her larder awaiting consumption.

“It was a nice omelette,” said Priscilla, “but it made me feel that old Mr. Wingfield mightn’t have been so wise after all in allowing the place to remain unoccupied for so long.”

Signs of neglect were to be observed on all sides—not by any means the neglect that suggests the Court of Chancery or an impoverished owner; merely the neglect that is the result of the absence of any one interested in the maintenance of tidiness. The broad carriage drive was a trifle green, where fresh gravel was needed, and the grass borders had become irregular. The enormous bough that had broken away from the trunk of one of the elms of the avenue was lying just where it had fallen, sprawling halfway across the drive, and much of the timber shielding of a sapling had been broken down by some animal and remained unmended, so that the bark of the young tree had been injured. These tokens that some one had been saying “What does it matter?” a good many times within the year, were not the only ones to be seen within the grounds; and when Priscilla pointed them out to Rosa, she too said, “What does it matter? Who is there to make a row? You don’t expect them to keep the place tidy for us?”

Priscilla said that nothing was further from her expectations, but still she thought—but of course beggars can’t be choosers, and after all a primrose by the river’s brim was still a yellow primrose, and a joy to the cottage hospital.

“And a black cloud is a beast of a thing when it bursts,” added Rosa, pointing to the menace in the distance, above the balloon-like foliage of the immemorial elms.

Priscilla shook her head.

“We’ll do it,” she cried; “yes, if we hurry. I don’t want to get this frock wet, so we’ll rush for the primroses and shelter at the house. It will be an April shower, but we’ll dodge it.”

“No fear,” acquiesced Rosa.

Down they plunged among the trees of the long slope, at the bottom of which the trout stream curled among the mossy stones, spreading its delicate white floss over some, and threading the narrows with a cord of silk, and then spattering the ferns on each side of a rock that met its advance too abruptly.

In a few minutes the girls were among the primroses. They were like the yellow pattern upon a green carpet at this place, only one could not see the carpet for the pattern. When the two serviceable baskets were packed with primroses there did not seem to be a clump the less in this garden that appeared to be the very throne of Spring itself—the throne and the golden treasury of the millionaire Spring.

And all the time that they were filling their baskets the blackbirds were making music among the bracken on the opposite slope, and once a great thrush came down with a wild winnowing of wings to a bramble that swung above the ripples of the water. It sounded its cackling note of alarm, and before it had ceased a cuckoo was heard as it flew from among a clump of chestnuts, gorgeous in drapery, to where a solitary ash, not yet green, stood far away from the billowy foliage of the slope.

And then the sunlit land became aware of a shadow sweeping up the valley. The rumble of thunder came from the distance.

“We’re in for it!” cried Rosa, springing up from the carpet where she had been kneeling.

“We’ll be in for it, as fast as we make ourselves—in the porch at least,” shouted Priscilla, catching up her basket and making a run for the zig-zag track up the bank. She was followed by Rosa with all speed, but before they got to the carriage drive at the top the first drops were making kettledrums of the crowns of their straw hats, and once again the organ of the orchestra was beginning to peal.

They gathered up their print skirts and ran like young does for the shelter of the house. It was an example of dignified Georgian, with a pillared porch and square windows. People said there was no nonsense about Overdean Manor; and others remarked that that was a pity. The front was masked by trees from the carriage drive. Some people said that it was just as well that this was so; it gave the horses a chance. No horse could maintain a trot in view of so dignified a front.

But it had an ample porch, and into its sheltering embrace the two girls plunged with only breath enough left for their laughter.

“Not a dozen drops,” they gasped, pinching each other’s blouses at their arms. “Actually not a dozen drops—practically dry—but hot—oh, goodness, wasn’t it hot!” And now they were going to have it in earnest.

They had it in earnest, but only as a spectacle. They were glowing after their race, but the porch contained no seats, and so they leant against the pillars and looked out at the rollicking Spring storm. It came with all the overdone vehemence of a practical jester—a comical bellow and a swirl and a swish; the topmost branches began complaining of their ill-treatment, bending and waving at first gracefully, then wildly—panic-stricken. Then the rain came—a comical flood suggesting the flinging of buckets of water—the rough play of grooms in the stable yard. The air became dark where the first swish of the rain swept by—dark and silent among the trees, while that madcap wind rushed on and made its fun on the fringe of the plantation. Out of the darkness a flash, and out of the distance a bombastic roar of thunder, but not the thunder of a storm that meant devastation; it was more like the laughter of good-humoured gods over some boy’s joke—something that had to do with the bursting of a cistern, or the turning on of a standpipe in the centre of a score of unsuspecting gentlemen wearing tall hats. The girls joined in the laughter of that boisterous thunder; but only for a moment. They became aware of an extraordinary pause—the suspicious silence of a room where the schoolboys are in hiding and ready to jump out on you. Then came the sound of a mighty rushing in the air that was not the rushing of the wind. Half-a-dozen rooks whirled in a badly-balanced flight across the tops of the nearest trees, cawing frantically; and the next instant they were seen by the girls like fish in the tanks of an aquarium. The world had become a world of waters. They were looking out upon a solid wall of water, and a hurricane of hail made up the plate glass in front of the tank.

They watched its changes for the five minutes that it lasted, and the lightning became more real and the thunder more in earnest. Then it went slamming away into the distance, leaving the big sweep of the carriage drive in front of the house the glistening lake of a minute, and transforming the Georgian mansion into an Alpine mountain of innumerable rushing torrents. It seemed as if a thousand secret springs of water had been set free in a moment, and all rushing down through their runnels to the valley.

“It will all be over in a few minutes, now; but wasn’t it a squelcher while it lasted!” cried Rosa, taking a cautious step outside to look round for the rainbow.

“I knew that we could just dodge it if we were slippy,” said Priscilla. “I wish we had some place to sit down.”

“Not worth while. We’ll be off in a minute.”

But it soon became plain that they would not be off quite so soon. When the thunderstorm with its wild blustering had departed, it left behind it, not the blue sky that might reasonably have been expected, but a tame flock of clouds that lumbered onward, discharging their contents upon the earth beneath with no great show of spirit, but with the depressing persistency of the mediocre.

“Hopeless!” sighed Priscilla.

“Horrid!” exclaimed Rosa.

After a few more minutes of waiting, the word “hungry” followed in alliterative sequence from both of them.

“If we could get round to Mrs. Pearce we might have some bread and butter,” suggested Rosa. (Mrs. Pearce was the name of the caretaker, and her premises were naturally at the other side of the Georgian mansion.)

“If we made a rush for the lodge we might have some plovers’ eggs,” said Priscilla.

Rendered desperate and, consequently, courageous by the thought of such dainties, one of the pair suggested the possibility of attracting the attention of the caretaker by ringing the door bell. The idea was a daring one, but they felt that their situation was so desperate as to make a desperate remedy pardonable, if reasonably formulated.

Hallo! there was no need to pull the bell; looking about for the handle, they found that the hall door was ajar to the extent of four or five inches.

“Careless of Mrs. Pearce! We must speak seriously to her about this,” said Rosa.

“When we have eaten her bread and butter,” whispered Priscilla, with a sagacious nod.

They passed into the great square hall, with its imposing pillars supporting the beams of the ceiling, and then they stopped abruptly, for they found themselves confronted by a vivid smell of tobacco smoke.

“Has Mother Pearce been indulging?” whispered Rosa.

“Oh, dear, no; it’s not that sort of tobacco,” replied the sagacious Priscilla. “No; it only means that Mr. Dunning has been paying a visit of inspection.”

(Mr. Dunning was the agent of the estate.)

They passed without further hesitation through the tobacco barrier, and seeing one of the doors open just beyond, they pushed through it and entered the room which they knew to be the library. They had been in the house more than once, before the days of its emptiness, and so knew their way about it.

“Hallo! we’re in luck,” said Rosa, pointing to where the table was laid with a cloth and plates, bread, cheese, biscuits, lettuce, and actually plovers’ eggs. There was, however, only one knife and fork, only one glass, and only one bottle—it was a bottle of hock, and Rosa hastened to read its label—Liebfraumilch.

“Mr. Dunning is here on business and is having a scratch lunch,” said Priscilla. “Liebfraumilch is a lovely wine, taking it year in and year out. Of course there are exceptionally good years of Liebfraumilch; but taking it all round it is a good sound wine.”

“Vide auctioneer’s catalogue,” said Rosa. “But I decline to touch it, highly recommended though it is by a distinguished canootzer. I’ll have of that bread, however, une trauche, s’il vous plait, and I’ll poach a couple of those eggs, if I do get three months for it. How funny! Didn’t I say something about plovers’ eggs just now?”

“I’d be afraid to meddle with the eggs, but I’ll back you up in the matter of the bread and cheese; I’m fairly starving. On the whole, perhaps we would do well to hunt up Mrs. Pearce first. It’s as well to be ceremonial even in a house that you have broken into by stealth. If you take so much as a bite of that egg before we can start level, I’ll cut you up into such small slices.”

The knife which Priscilla had picked up for the purpose which she had but partly defined, fell from her hand. A sound had come from the big hooded chair in the shadow of the screen at the fireplace, and she had glanced round and seen, looking round the side of the chair at her, a man’s face.

The knife fell from her grasp at the startling sight. Rosa, following the direction of her gaze, turned round and saw the apparition; but she did not let fall the egg which she had taken up for critical inspection.

There was an awkward silence, but an effective tableau, had any one been present to see it. There was the large square room, with bookcases of the loveliest Chippendale design hiding all its walls, and at one side of the table stood a young woman, with a face beautifully rosy, and a mouth slightly open to complete the expression of astonishment that looked forth from her eyes; at the end of the table nearest the fireplace, another girl glancing over her shoulder at the man’s face that protruded beyond the line of downward slope at one side of the chair.

Perhaps the expression of astonishment on the man’s face was the strongest of the three. His mouth was quite wide open, and his eyes were staring curiously, with a look within them that suggested that he had not quite succeeded in taking in the details of the picture before him—that he had not succeeded in reconciling all that he saw with the actualities of life.

Both the girls perceived in a moment that he had just awakened; but this fact did not prevent their being paralysed for the moment—for several moments. The moments went on into minutes, until the whole thing had the note of the child’s game of “Who speaks first?”

It was this broadening of an impressive silence into a child’s comedy that was the saving of the situation. A smile, to which his open mouth lent itself quite readily, came over the young man’s face—he was a young man, and his face was still younger—and, after a maidenly hesitancy of a few seconds, the girls also smiled. His smile broadened into a grin, and both girls broke into a peal of laughter.

He pulled himself round in his chair and got upon his feet, still grinning, and then they saw that he was just what girls accustomed to tall men would call short, or what girls accustomed to short men would call medium-sized. He had very short hair of an indefinite shade of brown, and his mouth, when he grinned, was well proportioned, if it was designed to make a gap touching the lobe of each ear.

He stood up before them and shook himself out, as it seemed, after the manner of a newly awakened dog. Then he took in a reef or two (also speaking figuratively) of his mouth, and it became quite ordinary. He bowed as awkwardly as most men do in ordinary circumstances, and this fact was pleasing to the girls; no girl who is worth anything tolerates a man who makes a graceful bow.

“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said. “That is—for me; it can’t be the same for you—that is, of course it’s unexpected, but little enough of the pleasure. Only if I had known—you didn’t say you were coming, you know—maybe you are in the habit of coming every day.”

The girls shook their heads; both glanced toward the window. He followed their example.

“Gloriana!” he said, “it has been raining after all.”

“Yes,” said Priscilla. “It has been a thunderstorm—a terrible thunderstorm!”

“You don’t say so! Long ago?”

“Half an hour ago. You must have heard it—the hail was terrific!” continued Priscilla.

“Gloriana! I’m afraid I’ve given myself away. If I said I wasn’t asleep I suppose you wouldn’t believe me.”

He looked from one to the other as if to guess whether of the twain was the more charitable or the more likely to make a fool of herself by telling a lie that would take in no one. He could not make up his mind on either point; and so he illuminated the silence by another grin. The girls looked at each other; they could hardly be blamed; and they certainly were not blamed by him.

He became quite serious in a moment, and his mouth seemed actually normal.

“I think that I’m rather lucky, do you know, in awaking to find such visitors—my first visitors—the first people to give me a welcome in my house. Before I have slept a single night under its roof—only for a matter of half an hour, and that in the day—I have two visitors. I hope that you will let me bid you welcome and that you will welcome me. May we exchange cards? My name is Wingfield—Jack Wingfield. I am the grandson, you know. You didn’t take me for the grandfather, did you?”