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Actions and Reactions
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.