"Oh! I see your point of view!" and Lavendar twinkled again.
"I can tell you in five sentences exactly what you have heard about us. Will you say whether I am right? If you refuse I"ll put you in the witness box and then you"ll be forced to speak!"
"Very well; proceed."
"One: We are clever, good conversationalists, and as cold as icicles."
"Yes."
"Two: We dress beautifully and use extravagant means to compa.s.s our ends in this direction."
"Yes."
"Three: We keep our overworked husbands under strict discipline."
"Yes! I say,--I don"t like this game."
"Neither do I, but it"s very much played,--"
"Four: We prefer hotels to home life and don"t bring up our children well."
"Yes."
"Five: We interfere with the proper game laws by bagging English husbands instead of staying on our own preserves. That"s about all, I think. Were not those rumours tolerably familiar to you in the ha"penny papers and their human counterparts?"
Lavendar was so amused by this direct storming of his opinion that he could hardly keep his laughter within bounds. "I"ve heard one other criticism," he said, "that you were all pretty and all had small feet and hands! I am now able to declare that to be a base calumny and to hope that all the others will prove just as false!" Then Robinette laughed too; eyes, lips, cheeks! When Lavendar looked at her he wished that his father would keep him at Stoke Revel for a month.
The sun was going down now, and the rising tide came swelling up from the sea, lifting itself and silently swelling the volume of the river, in a way that had something awful about it. The whole current of the great stream was against it, but behind was the force of the sea and so it filled and filled with hardly a ripple, as the heart is filled with a new desire. Up from the mouth of the river came a faint breeze bringing the taste of the ocean into the deeply wooded creeks. It had freshened into a little wind, as they drew up at the boat-house, that flapped Robinette"s blue cape about her, and dyed the colour in her cheeks to a livelier tint. As they walked up the narrow pathway to the house a deep silence fell between them that neither attempted to break.
At the top of the hill, she paused to take breath, and look across the river. It was half dark already there, on the other side in the deep shadow of the hill; and a lamp in the window of the cottage shone like a star beside the faintly green shape of the budding plum tree.
As Robinette entered the door of the Manor House she took out her little gold-meshed purse and handed Mark Lavendar a penny.
"It"s none too much," she said, meeting his astonished gaze with a smile. "I should have had to pay it on the public ferry, and you were ever so much nicer than the footman!"
Lavendar put the penny in his waistcoat pocket and has never spent it to this day. It is impossible to explain these things; one can only state them as facts. Another fact, too, that he suddenly remembered, when he went to his room, was, that the moment her personality touched his he was filled with curiosity about her. He had met hundreds of women and enjoyed their conversation, but seldom longed to know on the instant everything that had previously happened to them.
VIII
SUNDAY AT STOKE REVEL
On Sundays, the Stoke Revel household was expected to appear at church in full strength, visitors included.
"We meet in the hall punctually at a quarter to eleven," it was Miss Smeardon"s duty to announce to strangers. "Mrs. de Tracy always prefers that the Stoke Revel guests should walk down together, as it sets a good example to the villagers."
"What Nelson said about going to church with Lady Hamilton!" Lavendar had once commented, irrepressibly, but the allusion, rather fortunately, was lost upon Miss Smeardon. Mark began to picture the familiar Sunday scene to himself; Miss Smeardon in the hall at a quarter to eleven punctually, marshalling the church-goers; and Mrs.
Loring,--she would be late of course, and come fluttering downstairs in some bewitching combination of flowery hat and floating scarf that no one had ever seen before. What a lover"s opportunity in this lateness, thought the young man to himself; but one could enjoy a walk to church in charming company, though something less than a lover.
It was Mrs. de Tracy"s custom, on Sunday mornings, to precede her household by half an hour in going to the sanctuary. No infirmities of old age had invaded her iron const.i.tution, and it was nothing to her to walk alone to the church of Stoke Revel, steep though the hill was which led down through the ancient village to the yet more ancient edifice at its foot. During this solitary interval, Mrs. de Tracy visited her husband"s tomb, and no one knew, or dared, or cared to enquire, what motive encouraged this pious action in a character so devoid of tenderness and sentiment. Was it affection, was it duty, was it a mere form, a tribute to the greatness of an owner of Stoke Revel, such as a nation pays to a dead king? Who could tell?
The graveyard of Stoke Revel owned a yew tree, so very, very old that the count of its years was lost and had become a fable or a fairy tale. It was twisted, gnarled, and low; and its long branches, which would have reached the ground, were upheld, like the arms of some dying patriarch, by supports, themselves old and moss-grown. Under the spreading of this ancient tree were graves, and from the carved, age-eaten porch of the church, a path led among them, under the green tunnel, out into the sunny s.p.a.ce beyond it. The Admiral lay in a vault of which the door was at the side of the church, for no de Tracy, of course, could occupy a mere grave, like one of the common herd; and here walked the funereal figure of Mrs. de Tracy, fair weather or foul, nearly every Sunday in the year.
In justice to Mrs. de Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar"s custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred to enjoy them in the temple of nature, generally taking a long walk before lunch. But to-day he had announced his intention of coming to service, and well Mrs. de Tracy, versed in men and in human nature, knew why. Robinette would be there, and Lavendar followed, as the bee follows a basket of flowers on a summer day. As Mrs. de Tracy, like the Stoic that she was, accepted all the inevitable facts of life,--birth, death, love, hate (she had known them all in her day), she accepted this one also. But in that atrophy of every feeling except bitterness, that atrophy which is perhaps the only real solitude, the only real old age, her animosity was stirred. It was as though a dead branch upon some living tree was angry with the spring for breathing on it. As she returned, herself unseen in the shadow of the yew tree, she saw Lavendar and Robinette enter together under the lych-gate, the figure of the young woman touched with sunlight and colour, her lips moving, and Lavendar smiling in answer. In the clashing of the bells--bells which shook the air, the earth, the ancient stones, the very nests upon the trees--their voices were inaudible, but in their faces was a young happiness and hope to which the solitary woman could not blind herself.
Presently in the lukewarm air within, Robinette was finding the church"s immemorial smell of prayer-books, ha.s.socks, decaying wood, damp stones, matting, school-children, and altar flowers, a harmonious and suggestive one if not pleasant. What an ancient air it was, she thought; breathed and re-breathed by slow generations of Stoke Revellers during their sleepy devotions! The very light that entered through the dim stained gla.s.s seemed old and dusty, it had seen so much during so many hundred years, seen so much, and found out so many secrets! Soon the clashing of the bells ceased and upon the still reverberating silence there broke the small, snoring noises of a rather ineffectual organ, while the amiable curate, Rev. Tobias Finch, made his appearance, and the service began.
Mrs. de Tracy had entered the pew first, naturally; Miss Smeardon sat next, then Robinetta. Lavendar occupied the pew in front, alone, and through her half-closed eyelids Robinetta could see the line of his lean cheek and bony temple. He had not wished to sit there at all and he was so unresigned as to be badly in need of the soothing influences of Morning Prayer. Robinetta was beginning to wonder dreamily what manner of man this really was, behind his plain face and non-committal manner, when the m.u.f.fled slam of a door behind, startled her, followed as it was by a quick step upon the matted aisle. Then without further warning, a big, broad-shouldered boy, in the uniform of a British midshipman, thrust himself into the pew beside her, hot and breathless after running hard. Mrs. Loring guessed at once that this must be Carnaby de Tracy, the young hopeful and heir of Stoke Revel of whom Mr. Lavendar had so often spoken, but the startling and unconventional nature of his appearance was not at all what one expected in a member of his family. Robinette stole more than one look at him as the offertory went round; a robust boy with a square chin, a fair face burnt red by the sun, a rollicking eye and an impudent nose; not handsome certainly, indeed quite plain, but he looked honest and strong and clean, and Robinette"s frolicsome youth was drawn to his, all ready for fun. Carnaby hitched about a good deal, dropped his hymn-book, moved the ha.s.sock, took out his handkerchief, and on discovering a huge hole, turned crimson.
Service over, the congregation shuffled out into the sunshine, and Mrs. de Tracy, after a characteristically cool and disapproving recognition of her grandson, became occupied with villagers.
Lavendar made known young Carnaby to Mrs. David Loring, but the midshipman"s light grey eyes had discovered the pretty face without any a.s.sistance.
"This lady is your American cousin, Carnaby," said Mark. "Did you know you had one?"
"I don"t think I did," answered the boy, "but it"s never too late to mend!" He attempted a bow of finished grown-upness, failed somewhat, and melted at once into an engaging boyishness, under which his frank admiration of his new-found relative was not to be hidden. "I say, are you stopping at Stoke Revel?" he asked, as though the news were too good to be true. "Jolly! Hullo--" he broke off with animation as the ca.s.socked figure of the Rev. Tobias Finch fluttered out from the porch--"here"s old Toby! Watch Miss Smeardon now! She expects to catch him, you know, but he says he"s going to be a celly--celly-what-d"you-call-"em?"
"Celibate?" suggested Lavendar, with laughing eyes.
"The very word, thank you!" said Carnaby. "Yes: a celibate. Not so easily nicked, good old Toby--you bet!"
"Do the clergymen over here always dress like that?" inquired Robinetta, trying to suppress a tendency to laugh at his slang.
"Ca.s.sock?" said Carnaby. "Toby wouldn"t be seen without it. High, you know! Bicycles in it. Fact! Goes to bed in it, I believe."
"Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!" said Lavendar. "Restrain these flights of imagination! Don"t you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?"
Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday.
"Do you get enough to eat here?" asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in the drawing-room before lunch.
"Of course I have enough, Middy," answered Robinetta with unconscious reservation. She had rejected "Carnaby" at once as a name quite impossible: he was "Middy" to her almost from the first moment of their acquaintance.
"Enough?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "_I_ don"t! I"d never be fed if it weren"t for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky." Bates was the butler, Mrs.
Smith the housekeeper, and Cooky her satellite. "n.o.body gets enough to eat in this house!" added Carnaby darkly, "except the dog."
At the lunch-table, the antagonism natural between a hot-blooded impetuous boy and a grandmother such as Mrs. de Tracy became rather painfully apparent. He had already been hauled over the coals for his arrival on Sunday and his indecorous appearance in church after service had begun.
"It does not appear to me that you are at all in need of sick-leave,"
said Mrs. de Tracy suspiciously.
Carnaby, sensitive for all his robustness, flushed hotly, and then became impertinent. "My pulse is twenty beats too quick still, after quinsy. If you don"t believe the doctor, ma"am, it"s not my fault."
"Carnaby has committed indiscretions in the way of growing since I last saw him," Lavendar broke in hastily. "At sixteen one may easily outgrow one"s strength!"
"Indeed!" said Mrs. de Tracy, frigidly. The situation was saved by the behaviour of the lap-dog, which suddenly burst into a pa.s.sion of barking and convulsive struggling in Miss Smeardon"s arms. His enemy had come, and Carnaby had fifty ways of exasperating his grandmother"s favourite, secrets between him and the bewildered dog. Rupert was a Prince Charles of pedigree as unquestioned as his mistress"s and an appearance dating back to Vand.y.k.e, but Carnaby always addressed him as "Lord Roberts," for reasons of his own. It annoyed his grandmother and it infuriated the dog, who took it for a deadly insult.