"Is that you--from the other side of the county?" she called.
"Yes, me--from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.
"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It"s two months and four days. Summer"s gone!"
"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."
"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won"t let me play with it, but I can feel it"s behaving badly. Hit it!"
I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."
"It"s even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant hors.e.m.e.n of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
"Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it?
There"s still light enough upstairs."
I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She swung a light door inward.
"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven"t even heard them to-day."
She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children"s chairs. A doll"s house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child"s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
"Surely they"ve only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet-- quick feet through a room beyond.
"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children, where are you?"
The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of pa.s.sages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child"s frock against some darkening window at the end of a pa.s.sage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
"No, I haven"t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."
"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden."
I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the pa.s.sages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child"s law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.
"And now we"ll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn"t arrive at manners somehow when one lives alone and is considered--h"m--peculiar." Then with very pretty scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight"s much pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.
I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
"Where do you get these beautiful short f.a.ggots from?" I asked idly. "Why, they are tallies!"
"Of course," she said. "As I can"t read or write I"m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I"ll tell you what it meant."
I pa.s.sed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.
"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons," said she. "I don"t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It"s out of date now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them"s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn"t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He"s a greedy, ignorant man--very greedy or--he wouldn"t come here after dark."
"Have you much land then?"
"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man--and a highway robber."
"But are you sure I sha"n"t be----?"
"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn"t any children."
"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they"ll come out for me."
There was a murmur of voices--Madden"s and a deeper note--at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.
"If--if you please, Miss, I"ll--I"ll be quite as well by the door." He clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
"Well?"
"About that new shed for the young stock--that was all. These first autumn storms settin" in ... but I"ll come again, Miss." His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.
"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed--m"m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?"
"I--fancied p"raps that if I came to see you--ma--man to man like, Miss.
But----"
His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again --from without and firmly.
"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already.
Dunnett"s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks--even in Mr.
Wright"s time. And _he_ used cake. You"ve sixty-seven and you don"t cake.
You"ve broken the lease in that respect. You"re dragging the heart out of the farm."
"I"m--I"m getting some minerals--superphosphates--next week. I"ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I"ll go down to the station to-morrow about "em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight.... That gentleman"s not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.
I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady"s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year"s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.
I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half- reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.
I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.
What time pa.s.sed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.