I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.
"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.
"Perhaps they"re only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested."
"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It"s the only thing that makes life worth living--when they"re fond of you, isn"t it? I daren"t think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"
"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."
"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn"t quite the same thing."
"Then have you never---?" I began, but stopped abashed.
"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see _them_. I only hear them just as I do when I"m awake."
"It"s difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us haven"t the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.
"I"ve heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a dead person"s face in a dream. Is that true?"
"I believe it is--now I come to think of it."
"But how is it with yourself--yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.
"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.
"Then it must be as bad as being blind."
The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent hors.e.m.e.n one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.
"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.
"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.
"Ah! So"ve I, but I don"t suppose it"s allowed. ... Where d"you live?"
"Quite the other side of the county--sixty miles and more, and I must be going back. I"ve come without my big lamp."
"But it"s not dark yet. I can feel it."
"I"m afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone to set me on my road at first? I"ve utterly lost myself."
"I"ll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world, I don"t wonder you were lost! I"ll guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won"t you, till you"re out of the grounds?
It isn"t foolish, do you think?"
"I promise you I"ll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.
We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day"s journey; pa.s.sed under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had seen.
"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures.
"And you like the lead-figures too? There"s the old azalea garden behind.
They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads, but I mustn"t leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but--he has seen them."
A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.
"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come again," and disappeared within the house.
The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates, where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child- murder.
"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"
"The child yonder."
"Our young gentleman in blue?"
"Of course."
"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"
"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"
"Yes, Sir. And did you "appen to see them upstairs too?"
"At the upper window? Yes."
"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"
"A little before that. Why d"you want to know?"
He paused a little. "Only to make sure that--that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about, though I"m sure you"re driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can"t miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn"t _our_ custom, not with----"
"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.
"Oh, it"s quite right with the rest of "em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."
He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live--much less to "go about talking like carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
Hawkin"s Old Farm appeared to be the survey t.i.tle of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high- walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a gra.s.s way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children, oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leaf.a.ge like a rabbit as she drew nearer.
"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"
"Yes, it"s me from the other side of the county."
"Then why didn"t you come through the upper woods? They were there just now."