"Ah, it was an enemy said that," laughed Sir Henry, submitting with a good grace to some more remarks of the same kind, and escaping from them as soon as he could.
"I heard of your haul of ash," he said. "A man in the Air Board told me. Magnificent!"
"You may thank her." The Squire indicated his secretary. "I knew nothing about it."
"And you"re still hunting?" Sir Henry turned to Elizabeth. "May I join your walk if you"re going through the woods?" Captain Dell was introduced. "You want my opinion on your deal? Well, I"m an old forester, and I"ll give it you with pleasure. I used to shoot here, year after year, with the Squire, in our young days--isn"t that so, Mannering? I know this bit of country by heart, and I think I could help you to bag a few more ash."
Elizabeth"s blue eyes appealed with all proper deference to the Squire.
"Won"t you come?"
He shook his head.
"I"m tired of timber. Do what you like. I"ll sit here and read till you come back."
Sir Henry"s shrug was perceptible, but he held his peace, and the three walked away. The Squire, finding a seat on a fallen tree, took a book out of his pocket and pretended to read it.
"n.o.body can be as important as Chicksands looks!" he said to himself angrily. Even the smiling manner which ignored their six months"
quarrel had annoyed him hugely. It was a piece of condescension--an impertinence. Oh, of course Chicksands was the popular man, the greatest power in the county, looked up to, and listened to by everybody. The Squire knew very well that he himself was ostracized, even hated; that there had been general chuckling in the neighbourhood over his rough handling by the County Committee, and that it would please a good many people to see all his woods commandeered and "cut clean."
Six months before, his inborn pugnacity would only have amused itself with the situation. He was a rebel and a litigant by nature.
Smooth waters had never attracted him.
Yet now--though he would never have admitted it--he was often conscious of a flagging will and a depressed spirit. The loneliness of his life, due entirely to himself, had, during Elizabeth Bremerton"s absence, begun sharply to find him out. He had no true fatherly relation with any of his children. Desmond loved him--why, he didn"t know. He didn"t believe any of the others cared anything at all about him. Why should they?
The Squire"s eyes followed the three distant walkers, Elizabeth, graceful and vigorous, between the other two. And the conviction gripped him that all the pleasure, the _liveableness_ of life--such as still remained possible--depended for him on that central figure.
He looked back on his existence before her arrival at Mannering, and on what it had been since. Why, she had transformed it!
How could he cage and keep her?--the clever, gracious creature! For the first time in his life he was desperately, tremulously humble.
He placed no dependence at all on his name or his possessions.
Elizabeth was not to be bought.
But management--power--for the things she believed in--_they_ might tempt her. He would give them to her with both hands, if only she would settle down beside him, take a freehold of that chair and table in the library, for life!
He looked back gloomily to his clumsy proposal about her mother, and to her remarks about Pamela. It would be indeed intolerable if his children got in his way! The very notion put him in a fever.
If that tiresome fellow, Dell, had not interrupted them the night before, what would have happened?
He had all the consciousness of a man still in the prime of life, in spite of his white hair; for he had married at twenty-one, and had never--since they grew up--seemed to himself very much older than his elder children. He had but a very dim memory of his wife.
Sometimes he felt as if, notwithstanding the heat of boyish pa.s.sion which had led him to marry her, he had never really known her. There were moments when he had an uncomfortable suspicion that for some years before her death she had silently but irrevocably pa.s.sed judgment upon him, and had withdrawn her inner life from him.
Friends of hers had written to him after her death of beautiful traits and qualities in her of which he himself had known nothing.
In any case they were not traits and qualities which appealed in the long run to a man of his pursuits and temperament. He was told that Pamela had inherited some of them.
A light rustling sound in the wood. He looked up to see Elizabeth coming back towards him unaccompanied. Captain Dell and Sir Henry seemed to have left her.
A thrill of excitement ran through him. They were alone in the depths of the spring woodland. What better opportunity would he ever have?
CHAPTER XIV
Elizabeth was coming back in that flushed mood when an able man or woman who begins to feel the tide of success or power rising beneath them also begins to remind himself or herself of all the old commonplaces about Fate or Chance. Elizabeth"s Greek reading had steeped her in them. "Count no man happy till his death"; "Count nothing finished till the end"; tags of this kind were running through her mind, while she smiled a little over the compliments that Sir Henry had been paying her.
He could not express, he said, the relief with which he had heard of her return to Mannering. "Don"t, please, go away again!" Everybody in the county who was at all responsible for its war-work felt the same. Her example, during the winter, had been invaluable, and the skill with which she had brought the Squire into line, and set the Squire"s neglected estate on the road to food-production, had been--in Sir Henry"s view--nothing short of a miracle.
"Yes, a miracle, my dear lady!" repeated Sir Henry warmly. "I know the p.r.i.c.kliness of our good friend there! I speak to you confidentially, because I realize that you could not possibly have done what you have done unless you had won the Squire"s confidence--his complete confidence. Well, that"s an achievement, I can tell you--as bad as storming a redoubt. Go on--don"t let go!
What you are doing here--the kind of work you are doing--is of national importance. G.o.d only knows what lies before us in the next few months!"
And therewith a sudden sobering of the ruddy countenance and self-important manner. For a few seconds, from his mind and Elizabeth"s there vanished all consciousness of the English woodland scene, and they were looking over a flayed and ravaged country where millions of men stood ranged for battle.
Sir Henry sighed.
"Thank G.o.d, Arthur is still at home--doing some splendid work, they tell me, at the War Office, but, of course, pining to be off to France again. I hear from him that Desmond is somewhere near Armentieres. Well, good-bye--I tied my horse to the gate, and must get home. Stick to it! Say good-bye to the Squire for me--I shall be over again before long. If there is anything I can do for you--count upon me. But _we_ count upon you!"
Astonishing effusion!--from an elderly gentleman who, at the beginning of things, had regarded her as elderly gentlemen of great local position do regard young women secretaries who are earning their own living. Sir Henry"s tone was now the tone of one potentate to another; and, as we have seen, it caused Elizabeth to tame her soul with Greek, as she walked back through the wood to rejoin the Squire.
When she perceived him waiting for her, she wished with some fervour that she were not alone. She had tried to keep Captain Dell with her, but he had pleaded an urgent engagement at a village near the farther end of the wood. And then Sir Henry had deserted her. It was annoying--and unforeseen.
The Squire observed her as she came up--the light, springing step, the bunch of primroses in her belt. He closed the book, of which he had not in truth read a word.
"You have been a long time?"
"But I a.s.sure you it was well worth while!" She paused in front of him, a little out of breath, leaning on her measuring-pole. "We found ten or twelve more ash--some exactly of the size they want."
"Who are "they"?"
"The Air Board," said Elizabeth, smiling.
"The fellows that wrote me that letter? I didn"t want their thanks."
Elizabeth took no notice. She resumed--
"And Sir Henry went into the figures of that contract with Captain Dell. He thinks the Captain has done very well, and that the prices are very fair--very good, in fact."
"All the same, I don"t mean to accept their blessed contract."
"Oh, but I thought it was settled!" cried Elizabeth in distress. She sat down on a dry stump a little way off, and the Squire actually enjoyed the sight of her discomfiture.
"Why on earth should I allow these people, not only to make a hideous mess of my woods, and murder my trees, but to take three years--_three years_--over the disgusting business, before they get it all done and clear up the mess? One year is the utmost I will allow."
Elizabeth looked consternation.
"But think of the labour difficulties," she pleaded. "The contractor can"t get the men. Of course, he _wants_ to cut and move the trees as soon as he can, so as to get his money back."
"That"s his affair," said the Squire obstinately. "I want to get my woods in a decent state again, so that I mayn"t be for ever reminded that I sold them--betrayed them--for filthy lucre."