The Shuttle Part 21

"There is not much to be seen from the road," he said. "Would you like to see more of it?"

His manner was civil enough, but not the correct one for a servant.

He did not say "miss" or touch his cap in making the suggestion. Betty hesitated a moment.

"Is the family at home?" she inquired.

"There is no family but--his lordship. He is off the place."

"Does he object to trespa.s.sers?"

"Not if they are respectable and take no liberties."

"I am respectable, and I shall not take liberties," said Miss Vanderpoel, with a touch of hauteur. The truth was that she had spent a sufficient number of years on the Continent to have become familiar with conventions which led her not to approve wholly of his bearing. Perhaps he had lived long enough in America to forget such conventions and to lack something which centuries of custom had decided should belong to his cla.s.s. A certain suggestion of rough force in the man rather attracted her, and her slight distaste for his manner arose from the realisation that a gentleman's servant who did not address his superiors as was required by custom was not doing his work in a finished way. In his place she knew her own demeanour would have been finished.

"If you are sure that Lord Mount Dunstan would not object to my walking about, I should like very much to see the gardens and the house," she said. "If you show them to me, shall I be interfering with your duties?"

"No," he answered, and then for the first time rather glumly added, "miss."

"I am interested," she said, as they crossed the gra.s.s together, "because places like this are quite new to me. I have never been in England before."

"There are not many places like this," he answered, "not many as old and fine, and not many as nearly gone to ruin. Even Stornham is not quite as far gone."

"It is far gone," said Miss Vanderpoel. "I am staying there--with my sister, Lady Anstruthers."

"Beg pardon--miss," he said. This time he touched his cap in apology.

Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew that he had offered to take her over the place because he was in a sense glad to see her again. Why he was glad he did not profess to know or even to ask himself. Coa.r.s.ely speaking, it might be because she was one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet with, and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the ma.s.s of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in every line of face and pose something intensely more interesting and compelling than girlhood. Also, since the night they had come together on the ship's deck for an appalling moment, he had liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural wealth she represented. He led her first to the wood from which she had seen him emerge.

"I will show you this first," he explained. "Keep your eyes on the ground until I tell you to raise them."

Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her that she was being guided along a narrow path between trees. The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were singing in the boughs above her. In a few minutes he stopped.

"Now look up," he said.

She uttered an exclamation when she did so. She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant branches. The glow shining through and between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.

"There is nothing lovelier," he said in a low voice, "in all England."

Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself. He was standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.

"You--you love it!" she said.

"Yes," but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.

She was rather moved.

"Have you been keeper here long?" she asked.

"No--only a few years. But I have known the place all my life."

"Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?"

"In his way--yes."

He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master. He was perhaps not on particularly good terms with him. He led her away and volunteered no further information. He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative. He did not once refer to the circ.u.mstance of their having met before. It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-cla.s.s pa.s.senger on a ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck. He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.

But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget. They wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken bal.u.s.trades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners. Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty. Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one. They scarcely broke the silence themselves. The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.

"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with indrawn breath, "if it were mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.

Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous spot she pa.s.sed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality. When at last they pa.s.sed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing a gra.s.sed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all. It was a great place, stately in its ma.s.ses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung.

To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master--rolling acres, great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.

"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"

Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he had looked before.

"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest. It belonged to Mount Dunstans then."

"And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like this!"

"They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the surly liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."

It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master's house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.

Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.

"I am very much obliged to you," she began, and then paused a second.

A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary circ.u.mstances such hesitation would have been totally out of place. She had occupied the man's time for an hour or more, he was of the working cla.s.s, and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend his time in one's service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom demanded. Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too courteous, surly face. She felt slightly irritated by her own unpractical embarra.s.sment as she put her hand into the small, latched bag at her belt.

"I am very much obliged, keeper," she said. "You have given me a great deal of your time. You know the place so well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything so beautiful--and so sad. Thank you--thank you." And she put a goldpiece in his palm.

His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she did not know--because something in the simple act annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her hesitance had been absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible that he had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the money with a grim steadiness.

"Thank you, miss," he said, and touched his cap in the proper manner.

He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting jacket. Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.

"Hang it all," he said, "I can't take this, you know. I suppose I ought to have told you. It would have been less awkward for us both. I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself."

A pause was inevitable. It was a rather long one. After it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking more annoyed than confused.

"Yes," she said. "You ought to have told me, Lord Mount Dunstan."

He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.

"Why shouldn't you take me for a keeper? You crossed the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from you by barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him tramping over a n.o.bleman's estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to the conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause for embarra.s.sment."