Actions and Reactions
Rudyard Kipling
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ACTIONS AND REACTIONS BY RUDYARD KIPLING
CONTENTS
An Habitation Enforced
The Recall
Garm--a Hostage
The Power of the Dog
The Mother Hive
The Bees and the Flies
With the Night Mail
The Four Angels
A Deal in Cotton
The New Knighthood
The Puzzler
The Puzzler Little Foxes
Gallio's Song
The House Surgeon
The Rabbi's Song
ACTIONS AND REACTIONS
AN HABITATION ENFORCED
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 rakes 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 shyly
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 it 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 pegtops, 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.
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