True Tilda Part 43

"And your sister's?"

"She's called Tilda; but she--she isn't really--"

Farmer Tossell was not listening.

"You'll have to sleep with us to-night. Oh," he went on, misinterpreting the boy's glance behind him (he was really seeking for Tilda, to explain), "there's always room for one or two more at Inistow: that's what you might call our motto; and the Old Woman dotes on children. She ought to--havin' six of her own, besides nine of my first family."

The wagon had reached a short break in the ascent--you might liken it to a staircase landing--where the road ran level for about fifty yards before taking breath, so to speak, for another stiff climb. Here a by-road led off to the right, and here they turned aside.

The road ran parallel, or roughly parallel, with the line of the cliffs, between low and wind-trimmed hedges, over which, from his perch beside Farmer Tossell, the boy looked down across a narrow slope of pasture to the sea. The fog had lifted. Away and a little above the horizon the sun was dropping like a ball of orange flame in a haze of gold; and nearer, to the right of the sunset, lay the Island as if asleep on the waves, with glints of fire on the pointed cliffs at its western end, and all the rest a lilac shadow resting on the luminous water.

He gazed, and still gazed. He heard no longer, though the farmer was speaking. There was indeed some excuse, for the young men and girls had started another hymn, and were singing with all their voices.

But he did not even listen.

The road rose and dipped. . . . They came to a white-painted gate, which one of the young men sprang down to open. The last glow of the sunset fell on its bars, and their outline repeated itself in dazzling streaks on the sky as the horses wheeled to the left through the gateway, and the boy turned for a last look. But Holmness had disappeared. A brown ridge of stubble hid it, edged and powdered with golden light.

Turning from the sea, the wagons followed a rutted cart-track that wound downhill in a slow arc between an orchard hedge and an open meadow dotted with cattle. High beyond the orchard rose a cl.u.s.ter of elms, around which many rooks were cawing, and between the elms a blue smoke drifted. There too the grey roof of the farmhouse crept little by little into sight; and so they came to a second gate and the rick-yard; and beyond the ricks was a whitewashed doorway, where a smiling elderly woman stood to welcome them. This was Mrs. Tossell, forewarned many minutes since by their singing.

She had come straight from preparing the feast, and her face was yet flushed with the heat of the kitchen fire. The arrival of the extra mouths to be fed did not put her out in the least. But she looked the children over with eyes at once benevolent and critical--their clothes and their faces--and said frankly that they wanted a wash, which was only too evident, the _Evan Evans_ being a peculiarly grimy boat, even for a collier.

"The sooner the better," agreed Tilda with the utmost alacrity.

"Well, and I'm glad you take it like that," said their hostess, nodding approval. She called "Hepsy! Hepsy!" and an elderly serving-woman answered the summons. "Run, Hepsy, and fill the wash-house boiler," she commanded.

Within twenty minutes two long wash-trays stood ready and steaming--one for Tilda in the wash-kitchen itself, the other for Arthur Miles in a small outhouse adjoining; and while the children revelled in this strange new luxury, Mrs. Tossell bethought her of certain garments in a press upstairs--a frock and some underclothing long since outgrown by Sabina, a threadworn shirt and a suit that had formerly habited Obed, her youngest, all preserved and laid away on the principle (as she put it) that "Store is no Sore."

It was Chrissy, the pretty girl, who carried his clean garments to Arthur Miles; and he, being caught naked in the wash-tub, blushed furiously. But Chrissy was used to brothers, and took stock of him composedly.

"My!" she exclaimed, "what pretty white skin you've got!" And with that her quick eyes noted the mark on his shoulder. "Well, I never--but that's funny!"

"What's funny?" asked the boy.

"I'll tell you later, in the kitchen," she promised, and went off to Tilda.

The kitchen was of n.o.ble size--far larger even than the refectory at Holy Innocents' Orphanage--and worthy of the feast Mrs. Tossell had arrayed there to celebrate the sheep-bringing. The table, laden with hot pies, with dishes of fried rasher and hog's-puddings, black-puddings, sausages, with cold ham and cold ribs of beef, with apple tarts, junkets, jellies, syllabubs, frumenties, with mighty tea-pots and flagons of cider, ran close alongside the window-seat where the children were given their places, and whence, turning their heads, they looked out upon a garden set with clipped box-trees, and bordered with Michaelmas daisies, and upon a tall dove-cote of many holes and ledges crowded with pigeons settling down to their night's rest. On the outside of the table ran an unbacked bench, and at top and bottom stood two ample elbowed chairs for the farmer and his wife; but Mrs. Tossell had surrendered hers to a black-coated man whom all addressed as "Minister," though in talk among themselves they spoke of him rather as The Rounder. Before the company sat he delivered a long grace with much unction. Tilda--a child of the world, and accustomed to take folks as she found them--eyed him with frank curiosity; but in Arthur Miles his black coat and white tie awoke a painful a.s.sociation of ideas, and for a while the child sat nervous and gloomy, without appet.i.te to eat . . .

Tilda for once was un.o.bservant of him. The Minister, with his long thin neck, straggling black beard, weak, eloquent mouth and black, shining eyes--the eyes of a born visionary--failed, as well they might, to suggest a thought of Dr. Gla.s.son. She was hungry, too, and her small body glowing deliciously within her clean garments. Amid all this clatter of knives and forks, these laughing voices, these cheerful, innocent faces, who could help casting away care?

Now and again her eyes wandered around the great kitchen--up to the oaken roof, almost black with age, and the hams, sides of bacon, bundles of potherbs, bags of simples, dangling from its beams; across to the old jack that stretched athwart the wall to the left of the fireplace--a curious apparatus, in old times (as Chrissy explained to her) turned by a dog, but now disused and kept only as a relic; to the tall settle on the right with the bars beneath the seat, and behind the bars (so Chrissy averred) a couple of live geese imprisoned, and quietly sitting on their eggs amid all this uproar; to the great cave of the fireplace itself, hung with pothooks and toothed cramps, where a fire of logs burned on a hearthstone so wide that actually--yes, actually--deep in its recess, and behind the fire, were set two smoke-blackened seats, one in each farther angle under the open chimney.

Before the feast had been twenty minutes in progress the farmer looked up and along the table and called for lights. His eyes, he explained, were not so young as they had been. Roger--tallest of the young men-- jumped up and lit two oil-lamps that hung from the beams. The lamps had immense reflectors above them, made of tin; but they shone like silver, and Tilda took them for silver.

"That's cheerfuller!" shouted Farmer Tossell with a laugh of great contentment, and fell-to again.

But as the light wavered and anon grew steady, Chrissy leaned over Tilda, touched Arthur Miles on the shoulder, and pointed to the wall opposite. Tilda stared also, following the direction of her finger.

The lamp-light, playing on the broad chimney-piece with its bra.s.s candlesticks and china ornaments, reached for a yard or so up the wall, and then was cut off by the shadow of the reflectors. But in that illuminated s.p.a.ce, fronting the children, stood out a panel of plaster, moulded in high relief, overlaid with a wash of drab-coloured paint.

The moulding was of a coat-of-arms--a shield surrounded by a foliated pattern, and crossed with the same four diamond device as was tattooed on Miles Arthur's shoulder--this with two antlered stags, collared, with hanging chains for supporters; above it a cap of maintenance and a stag's head coupe for crest; and beneath a scroll bearing some words which Tilda could not decipher. She glanced at Chrissy, alert at once and on the defensive. She had recognised the four diamonds, but all the rest was a mere mystery to her.

"He's got just that mark on his shoulder," said Chrissy, meeting her gaze and nodding towards the shield.

"Has he?" said Tilda disingenuously.

But she was jealous already, and by habit distrustful of her s.e.x.

"Didn't you know? I noticed it, just now, when he was stripped. And I thought for a moment . . . you two coming and asking for Sir Miles.

. . . But I'm always supposing some secret or other. Mother says it comes of muzzing my head with books, and then putting two and two together and making 'em five. . . . It's fanciful, of course"--here Chrissy sighed--"things don't happen like that in real life. . . . But there's always been stories about Sir Miles; and when I saw the mark--it _is_ queer, now--"

But Tilda kept a steady face, her eyes fixed on the escutcheon.

"What does it mean?" she asked. "I don't know about these things."

"Why it's Sir Miles's coat-of-arms; of the Chandons, that is. Inistow Farm used to belong to them--belonged to them for hundreds of years, right down to the time Miss Sally bought it. Father farmed it under them for thirty years before that, and his father, and his grandfather, and his great-greats--back ever so long. He was terribly put out when it changed hands; but now he says 'Thank the Lord' when he talks of it."

"Changed hands?" Tilda found herself echoing.

"Yes. Inistow has belonged to Miss Sally these five years now. I thought maybe you'd be knowing all about her and Sir Miles--coming like this and inquiring for them. She's a good one, is Miss Sally; but when a woman sees a man poor--well, of course, that's her revenge."

"Is--is Sir Miles _poor?_"

Tilda's hopes were tottering, falling about her, she hardly knew how or why. Vaguely she had been building up a fabric of hope that she was helping Arthur Miles home to a splendid inheritance. Such things happened, almost as a matter of course, in the penny fiction to which her reading had been exclusively confined. To be sure, they never happened--they were wildly unlikely to happen--in the world of her own limited experience. But in the society to which the boy belonged by his gentle manners and his trick of speech, which could only come as a birthright--in that rarefied world where the ladies wore low gowns, with diamonds around their necks, and the gentlemen dined in fine linen with wide shirt-fronts--all life moved upon the machinery of romance.

The books said so; and after that romance she had been pursuing, by degrees more consciously, from fugitive hints almost to certainty that a few hours would give it into her grasp. And now--

"Is--is he poor?" she repeated. She could not understand it.

The story-books always conducted the long-lost heir to rank and wealth in the end.

"Well, he don't _spend_ money, they say," answered Chrissy. "But n.o.body knows for certain. His tenants never see him. He's always abroad: he's abroad now--"

"Abroad?"

This was worse and worse.

"Or else shut up at Meriton--that's the great house--with a lot of nasty chemicals, trying to turn copper pennies into gold, they say."

Tilda caught at this hope.

"P'r'aps 'e'll manage it, one of these days."

"That's silly. Folks have been trying it for hundreds of years, and it'll never be done."

"And 'Olmness? 'As Miss Sally bought 'Olmness too?"

"No; he wouldn't part with it, for some reason. But father rents the grazing from him; same as before, when th' island belonged to Inistow Farm. There's a tale--"

But Tilda was not to hear the tale, for just now Mrs. Tossell pushed back her chair, and at her signal the feast ended. All left the table, and exchanged their benches for the settle or for chairs which they drew in a wide semicircle around the fireplace. Across the warm chord of this semicircle the sheep-dogs, stretched before the blaze, looked up lazily, and settled themselves to doze again. 'Dolph, lying a little apart (for they declined to take notice of him), copied their movements in an ingratiating but not very successful attempt to appear bred to the manner.

Tilda remarked that the company took their new positions with some formality. The shepherd alone comported himself carelessly, slouching around to the back of the fire, where he lit a clay pipe from the embers and seated himself on one of the ingle-ends, so that his tobacco smoke had a clear pa.s.sage up the chimney. Then, almost before the children knew what was happening, the Minister gave out a hymn.

All sang it l.u.s.tily, and when it was ended all dropped on their knees.