Great Possessions Part 11

She turned from him, laughing, and went indoors to Mrs. Delaport Green's room.

She found that lady writing letters, and the floor was scattered with them, six deep round the table. She put her hand to her face as Molly came in.

"There are no possible trains," said Molly, "so I'm afraid you must bear it. Sir Edmund advises us to go by an early train to-morrow: he thinks to-day you would be better here, as there won't be a dentist left in London."

"I am very brave at bearing pain, fortunately," was the answer, "and I am trying, even now, to get on with my letters. I think I shall go to Eastbourne to-morrow; there are always good dentists in those places. I love the churches there, and the air will brace my nerves. I might have gone to Brighton only Tim is there. Will you"--she paused a moment--"will you come to Eastbourne too?"

Mrs. Delaport Green was not disposed to have Molly with her. She was exceedingly annoyed at the _debacle_ of her visit to Groombridge--a visit which she was describing in glowing terms in her letters to all her particular friends. It would be unpleasant to have Molly's critical eyes upon her; she liked, and was accustomed to, people with a very different expression.

Molly, however, ignoring very patent hints with great calmness and firmness, told her that she intended to stay with her for just as long as it was necessary before finding some one to live with in a little flat in London. She felt the possibility, at first, of Mrs. Delaport Green's becoming insolent, but she was presently convinced that she had mastered the situation. They agreed to go to Eastbourne together next day, and then to look for a flat for Molly in London. The suggestion that Mrs. Delaport Green might help Molly to choose the furniture proved very soothing indeed.

Molly went down-stairs again to let Sir Edmund know they were not going to leave till next morning, and to find out if he had succeeded in speaking to Lady Groombridge.

As she pa.s.sed through the hall, she saw that he was sitting with Lady Rose by a window opening on to the terrace. She was pa.s.sing on, being anxious not to interrupt them, but Rose held out her hand.

"I've hardly seen you this morning. Do come and sit with us." And then, as Molly rather shyly sat down by her side on a low sofa, Lady Rose went on:

"I was just telling Sir Edmund a very beautiful thing that has happened, only it is very sad for dear Lord Groombridge and for her. They have only had the news this morning, but it is not a secret, and it is very wonderful. You know that this place was to go to a cousin, quite a young man, and they liked him very much. They did mind his being a Roman Catholic, but they were very good about it, and now he has written that he has actually been ordained a priest, and that he will not have the property or the Castle as he is going to be just an ordinary parish priest working amongst the poor. It is wonderful, isn't it? They say the next brother is a very ordinary young man--not like this wonderful one--and so they are very much upset to-day, poor dears. They knew he was studying for the priesthood, but they did not realise that the time for his Ordination had really come."

Molly murmured shyly something that sounded sympathetic, and then, looking at Sir Edmund, ventured to say:

"Mrs. Delaport Green would like to stay till the early train to-morrow.

But have you seen Lady Groombridge?"

"Yes; it's all right--or rather, it's all wrong--but she won't tell Groombridge to-day, and she will be quite fairly civil, I think."

"And this news," said Rose gently, "will make them both think less of that unfortunate affair last night."

Molly rose and moved off with an unusually genial smile.

CHAPTER XI

THE THIN END OF A CLUE

Edmund Grosse later on in the morning strolled down to the stables. He had been there the day before, but he had still something to say to the stud-groom, an old friend of his, who had the highest respect for the baronet's judgment.

Edmund loved a really well-kept stable, where hardly a straw escapes beyond the plaited edges, where the paint is renewed and washed to the highest possible pitch of cleanliness, and where a perpetual whish of water and clanking of pails testify to a constant cleaning of cobblestone yard and flagged pavement.

In the middle of Groombridge Castle stable-yard there was an oval of perfect turf, and that was surrounded by soft, red gravel; then came alternate squares of pavement and cobble-stones, on to which opened the wide doors of coach-houses and stables and harness-rooms, and the back gate of the stud-groom's house.

An old, white-haired, ruddy-faced man standing on the red gravel smiled heartily when Sir Edmund appeared. The man was in plain clothes, with a very upright collar and a pearl horseshoe-pin in his tie; his figure was well-built, but showed unmistakably that his knees had been fixed in their present shape by constant riding.

He touched his hat.

"How's the mare to-day, Akers?" asked Sir Edmund.

"Nicely, nicely; it's a splendid mash that, Sir Edmund. Old Hartley gave me the recipe for that. He was stud-groom here longer than I have been, in the old lord's day. He had hoped to have had his son to follow him, but the lad got wild, and it couldn't be."

The old man sighed, and changed the conversation. "Will you come round again, sir?"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I don't mind if I do. But you've got a son of your own about the stable, haven't you?" he asked, as they turned towards the other side of the yard.

"I had two, Sir Edmund," was the brief and melancholy answer. "Jimmy's here, but the lad I thought most on, he went and enlisted in the war, and he couldn't settle down again after that. Jimmy, he'll never rise to my place--it would not be fair, and I wouldn't let his lordship give it a thought--but the other one might have done it."

Sir Edmund felt some sympathy for the stay-at-home, whom he knew. "He seems a cheerful, steady fellow."

"He's steady enough, and he's cheerful enough," said his father, in a tone of great contempt; "but the other lad had talent--he had talent."

Both men had paused in the interest of their talk.

"My eldest son, Thomas, of whom I'm speaking, went to the war in the same ship as General Sir David Bright, and there's a thing I'd like to tell you about that, Sir Edmund. It never came into my head how curious a thing it was till yesterday--last night, I may say. Lady Rose Bright's lady's-maid come in with Lady Groombridge's lady's-maid to see my wife, and you'll excuse me if I do repeat some woman's gossip when you see why I do it. Well, the long and short of it was that it seems Lady Rose Bright has been left rather close as to fortune for a lady in her position, and the money's all gone off elsewhere. Then the maid said, Sir Edmund--whether truly or not I don't know, naturally--that there had been hopes that another will might be sent home from South Africa, but that nothing came of it. I felt, so to speak, puzzled while I was listening, and afterwards my wife says to me while we were alone, she says, 'Wasn't it our Thomas when he was on board ship wrote that he had put his name to a paper for Sir David Bright?'--witnessing, you'll understand she meant by that, sir--'and what's become of that paper I should like to know,' says she. So she up and went to her room and took out all Thomas's letters, and sure enough it was true."

Akers paused, and then very slowly extracted a fat pocket-book from his tight-fitting coat, and pulled out a letter beautifully written on thin paper. He held it with evident respect, and then, after a preparatory cough, he began to read:

"'I was sent for to-day, and taken up with another of our regiment to the state cabins by Sir David Bright's servant, and asked to put my name to a paper as witness to Sir David Bright's signature, and so I did.'"

Akers stopped, and looked across his gla.s.ses at Sir Edmund.

"I don't know if you will remember Sir David's servant, Sir Edmund; he was killed in the same battle as Sir David was, poor fellow. A big man with red hair--a Scotchman--you'd have known that as soon as he opened his mouth. He'd have chosen my boy from having known him here, in all probability."

"Yes, yes," said Grosse impatiently; "but how do you know that what he witnessed was a will?"

"Well, of course, I don't know, Sir Edmund, and of course the boy didn't know what was in the paper he witnessed; but the missus will have it that that paper was a will, and there'll be no getting it out of her head that the right will has been lost. I was wondering about it when I see you come into the yard, and I thought I'd just let you see the lad's letter. It could do no harm, and it might do good."

Edmund had been absolutely silent during this narrative, with his eyes fixed on the stud-groom's face.

"And where is Thomas now?" he asked, in a low voice.

"He's in North India somewhere, Sir Edmund, but that is his poor mother's trouble; we've not had a line from him these three months."

"Oh, I'll find him for you," said Edmund, and he was just going to ask what regiment Thomas was in when they were disturbed by the appearance of Billy emerging from the hunters' stable, and Edmund Grosse felt an unwarrantable contempt for a young man who dawdles away half the morning in the stable.

"Should I find you at six o'clock this evening?" he asked, in a low voice, of the stud-groom; and having been satisfied on that point, he strolled off and left Billy to talk of the horses.

Edmund Grosse felt for the moment as if the missing will were in his grasp, and he was quite sure now that he had never doubted its existence. What he had just heard was the very first thing approaching to evidence in favour of his own theory, which he had hitherto built up entirely on guess-work. Of course, the paper might have been some ordinary deed, some bit of business the General had forgotten to transact before starting. But, if so, he felt sure that it must have been business unknown to the brothers Murray, as they had discussed with Grosse every detail of Sir Edmund's affairs. One thing was certain: it would be quite as difficult after this to drive out of Edmund Grosse's head the belief that this paper was a will as it would be to drive it out of the head of Mrs. Akers.

Edmund was in excellent spirits at luncheon. In the afternoon he drove with Lady Groombridge and Rose and Molly to see a famous garden some eight miles off, the owners of which were away in the South. The original house to which the gardens belonged had been replaced by a modern one in Italian style at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

It was not interesting, and Lady Groombridge gave a sniff of contempt as she turned her back on it and her attention, and that of her friends, to the far more striking green walls beyond the wide terraced walk on the south side of the building.

In the midst of ordinary English country scenery, these gardens had been set by a great Frenchman who had caught the strange secret of the romance of utterly formal hedges. He could make of them a fitting framework for the glories of a court, or for sylvan life in Merrie England. There were miles of hedges; not yew, hornbeam had been chosen for this green, tranquil country. At one spot many avenues of hedges met together as if by accident, or by some rhythmic movement; it was a minuet of Nature's dancing, grown into formal lines but not petrified--every detail, in fact, alive with green leaves. If you stood in the midst of this meeting of the ways, the country round outside, seen in vistas between the hedges, was curiously glorified, more especially on one side where the avenues were shortened. There one saw larger glimpses of fields and woods and bits of common-land that seemed wonderfully eloquent of freedom and simplicity, nature and husbandry.

But if you had not seen those glimpses through the lines of strange, stately, regal dignity--the lines of those mighty hedges--you would not have been so startled by their charm. That was the triumph of the genius of Lenotre: he had seen that, framed in the sternest symbols of rule and order, one could get the freshest joy in the pictures of Nature's untouched handiwork. On the west side the avenues of hedges disappeared into distant vistas of wood, one only ending in a piece of most formal ornamental water. I don't know how it was, but it was difficult not to be infected by a curious sense of orgy, of human beings up to their tricks--love tricks, drinking and eating--perhaps murdering tricks--all done in some impish fantastic way, between those long hedges or behind them. If there were not something going on down one avenue you looked into, it was happening in another.

Somewhat of all this Edmund said to Molly as they strolled between the hedges which reached far above his head, but she felt that he was absent-minded while he did so. He had planned for himself a walk and a talk with Rose, but he had reckoned without his hostess, who had shown so unmistakably that she intended him to amuse Molly that it would have been discourteous to have done anything else. He had felt rather cross as he saw Lady Groombridge and Rose turn down one of the longest walks, one that seemed indeed to have no ending at all, with an air of finality, as if their _tete-a-tete_ were to be as long as the path before them, and as secret as the hedges could keep it. He would never have come out driving with three women if he had not hoped to get a talk alone with Rose. He told himself that Rose's avoidance of him was becoming quite an affectation, and after all, he asked himself, what had he done to be treated like this?

"Why, if I were trying to make love to her she could not be more absurd!