Secret Bread Part 7

"Must you go home and change? It'll give us so little time. It's dark at eight, and we have to be in to supper then, anyway."

Hilaria hesitated, still slightly leaning forward like a great full-petalled blossom heavy with approaching night.

"I suppose I could manage.... Papa goes on to give a French lesson before he comes home.... It would be awful if it tore though.... All right, I'll risk it, but you'll all have to simply lug me over the stiles. Fancy if I stuck in one all night!" Her laugh, husky as her voice, gurgled out, and Mr. Eliot looked up from the packet of books he was sorting at the end of the room.

"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.

"Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?" And with this adroit carrying of the war into enemy's country she deflected Mr.

Eliot's interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task.

A few minutes later, having stopped to spend her week's pocket-money--only threepence--on a paper twist full of jumbles, she might have been seen going in the direction of home, walking, for her, sedately, and looking very lady-like with the important bulk of the crinoline swelling out the mantle that made all women, from behind, seem at least fifty. A few people who saw her said to themselves that Eliot's maid seemed to be growing up at last, but they did not see her when, arrived at the stile she would have pa.s.sed severely by had she been going home, she flung her s...o...b..g over it and, boldly tilting up the c.u.mbrous hoops, scrambled over it herself, with a flashing display of frilled cambric trousers and white legs terminating in kid boots.

CHAPTER XI

THE PLACE ON THE MOOR

The nearest way to the hollow on the moor that Hilaria had made her own was a tiny track so overgrown with brambles and gorse as hardly to be worthy the name, and on this particular evening, out of care for her strange garb, she took a path which curved with some semblance of smoothness in a wider arc. Thus Ishmael and Killigrew, who had got away in advance of the others of the "Ring," came to the hollow before her and, climbing up behind it, flung themselves on a boulder where they could watch all approaches. It was a wonderful place, that which Hilaria's feminine instinct for the right atmosphere had led her to choose. The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the h.o.a.r rocks.

They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by freakish G.o.ds; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-cl.u.s.tered buds just breaking into a dense snow of blossom. Periwinkles trailed down upon the turf, and the closely set stonecrop made a reddish bloom on the lower boulders, amidst bronze-hued moss, pale fragile scales of lichen, and glossy leaved fibrous-rooted ivy, that all went to pattern their sullen grey with delicate arabesques. The strongest note of colour was in the wild hyacinths, that, where the earth had been disturbed at some time and so given them a chance, made drifts of a deep blue that seemed almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky.

The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame, thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers--here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a low-hanging mist.

Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils dilating rather like a rabbit's, as they always did if he were moved by anything--a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light.

"Why d'you suppose she don't like Doughty?" asked Killigrew.

"I dunno ...; he is rather a swine, anyway."

"Yes, but how does she know that?"

This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer beyond a feeble "Oh, well, because he is."

"If he's been a cad to her--" muttered Killigrew, vengefully.

"I don't know how he can have been; she's only seen him with us. But I don't know what you'd do about it if he had; you can't lick him; he's twice your size and weight."

"Would you never fight unless you were sure of winning?" demanded Killigrew scornfully. Ishmael thought a minute.

"I think it is that I never fight until I'm sure of winning," he said at last; "if I found I wasn't strong enough I wouldn't go in and be beaten; I'd train hard till I was and then fight."

"But that might take ages and you'd forget what you wanted to fight the chap about."

"I don't think I'd forget, if I'd wanted to fight him. I might, though, I suppose...."

"You're all wrong, you know," opined Killigrew; "'tisn't the winning that really matters ... sounds silly, but I don't know how to explain it."

"Sounds like something the Parson would say--my Parson," said Ishmael on one of his flashes of intuition; and then they both laughed, for Killigrew was one of those rare creatures, a born pagan--or rather heathen, which is not quite the same thing. The pagan has beliefs of his own; the true heathen denies the need for any, through sheer lack of interest.

"D'you think girls are so very different from us ...?" went on Killigrew after a moment's silence. "The sort of things they really want to do and think about?"

"Girls are quite different," said Ishmael firmly; "they talk awful rot; I've heard my sister and Phoebe--that's a girl at home."

"Yes, so does my sister--at least, she talks sort of clever stuff that's as bad. But how about Hilaria?" asked her admirer.

"Well, she's more sensible than most, because she wants to do things as though she weren't a girl, but I don't see how she's going to keep it up. She'll fall in love and then it'll all be over."

"You don't think much of girls, do you?"

"Oh, well ... they're all right, I suppose. I want to do things, and girls want to feel things. Oh, yes, Bunny, they're awfully different."

"From you, perhaps ... I dunno ... I say, d'you really want the old bishop to lay his paws on your head?"

"Yes," replied Ishmael, briefly.

"Well, so does Hilaria. She read me some stuff out of a book--ripping fine stuff it was--by a chap called Mallory. All about knights that were searching for a cup they thought had the blood of G.o.d in it or something of the sort. But she seemed to believe it."

"I believe it, too. Not that they lived like that book, but that there is the Blood ... Oh, what's the good of trying to explain to you? It's like you when you're painting and you try and make me see a lot of colours I can't."

"Hullo ... there she comes," cried Killigrew, with a sudden quickening of voice and aspect; "I say, it must be ghastly trying to walk in one of those things. Girls must be different or they wouldn't put up with them.

I'll go and help her. Come on, we'll have to sit down below now."

The two boys scrambled down the boulders and a.s.sisted Hilaria--the hem of whose white tarlatan skirts showed already the worse for her walk--over the hummocky patch of rocks and gorse that fringed the hollow. Laughing rather ruefully, she flung herself down, scattering her bonnet, shawl, and bag over the turf in the impetuous movement. The lowest rim of the crinoline promptly stood straight up from the ground like a hoop, displaying her long legs and the mult.i.tudinous petticoats lying limply upon them, and she was forced to adopt a change of position. Finally she settled herself with her feet tucked in under her and the obnoxious garment swelling out all round, as though she had just flopped down and made what the children call a "cheese."

"I say, where's the magazine?" asked Ishmael.

"In my bag; but you're not to 'look on.' Here are some jumbles, but we must keep the others' share for them. Did you get them all, Ishmael?"

For some reason best known to herself, she called him by his Christian name and Killigrew by his nickname of "Bunny," though she addressed the other boys in mannish fashion of surnames only.

"I told Polkinghorne minor and told him to let the others know."

"Did you remember to tell him we didn't want Doughty?"

"I think so ... at least I didn't say to ask him to come," confessed Ishmael, who had the worst head in the world for a message.

"Here they are," announced Killigrew; "I think there're only four of them ..." He screwed up his eyes to gaze, for he was short-sighted.

Ishmael gave a glance.

"There's five ..." he said apologetically; "I'm afraid he's there. I can see Polkinghorne and Carminow and Polkinghorne minor and Moss minor and--yes, it's Doughty. I hope you don't mind fearfully, Hilaria?"

She threw a queer little look at him. "It's not for me," she said slowly; "it's only that I don't think he likes you, Ishmael. He tried to tell me something funny about you the other day. He comes to papa for extra coaching in French, you know, and I had to give him tea...."

"About me--?" Ishmael stared blankly, then, more from some premonition than anything else, grew slowly and burningly red. The colour ebbed away, leaving him pale. "What was it?" he asked.

"Nothing. At least, I honestly don't know what. Papa shut him up. He said to him he was no gentleman to say such things before a _jeune fille_--" She broke off, feeling she had hardly improved matters. A deadly suspicion that had once before knocked on Ishmael's heart and been refused more than a second's glance for sheer incredibility pounded at him again, making the blood sing in his ears. Nothing heard at school or from the Parson--who had long perturbed himself as to the right moment for explanations--had started those first warning notes, but words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then meaningless to him--words that had since echoed back on to fuller knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that Ishmael spent a large part of his holidays with friends of the Parson's in Devon and Somerset, the conspiracy of secrecy, wise or unwise, could not have lasted so long. He stared at Hilaria and his fingers dug into the turf at either side of him.