'To one that has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to gaze upon the fair
And open face of heaven--to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.'
It is the next day. John Talbot has spent a very happy morning. He is a countryman at heart. Fate has put him into the Foreign Office, and made him a great man's secretary, and tied him by the leg to London for ten months out of the twelve; but the country, whose buttercups brightened his childhood, keeps his heart--the country, with its little larks upsoaring from its brown furrows; with its green and its russet gowns; with its good, sweet, innocent noises, and its heavenly smells. He has been lying on the flat of his back on the sward, with his hands under his head, staring in luxurious idleness up at the sky, and listening to the robin's song--in August scarcely anybody but the redbreast sings--and to the pleasant swish of the wind among the lime-tops. Lying there alone on the flat of his back--that is to say, at first. Afterwards he has plenty of company. Not, indeed, that either his host or his fellow-guests trouble him much. From the lair he has chosen he has a view of his lady's window. It is true that he looks but seldom towards it, nor do its carefully closed casements and drawn curtains hold out much hope of a descent of the sleeping goddess within. Lady Roupell lets it be understood that she does not wish to be seen or spoken to till luncheon; and the rest are dispersed, he neither knows nor cares whither. And yet he has companions. They are in the act of being escorted out to walk by their nurses when they catch sight of him. In an instant they bear down upon him as fast as their fat legs will carry them.
'Just think!' cries Lily, beginning to shout at the top of her voice long before she reaches him--'just think what Franky has been doing! Is not he a naughty boy? He took the water-can and emptied it over Nanny's skirt! She says she will ask mammy to whip him!'
'Which mammy will most certainly decline to do,' says Talbot sotto voce to himself.
He has raised himself on his elbow, the more safely to receive their onslaught. He is aware of an idiosyncrasy of Miss Harborough's--that of narrating hideous crimes as having been committed by her little brother, which have in reality been executed by herself.
'If it was Franky who upset the water-can, how is it that it is your frock which is wet?' asks he judicially.
She does not answer, beyond putting her head affectedly on one side, and rubbing her shoulder against her ear.
'Are you sure that it was not you, and not Franky?'
Instantly, with the greatest ease and affability, she acknowledges that it was she; and the nurses at that moment coming up, she is about to be walked off for chastisement, when weakly interceded for by Talbot, who has the further lunacy to request that both children may be left in his charge. After that he has a very eventful morning. He is in turn a pony, a giraffe, a hyaena, a flamingo (unhappily for him the little Harboroughs have lately visited the Zoological Gardens), a rabbit (about the natural history and domestic life of which animal he hears some very startling facts), and the captain of a robber band. Finally, he has to take part in a terrible game--the one most dreaded by their family of all in the little Harborough repertoire--Ingestre Hall destroyed by fire, done with bricks. And the odd thing is that he likes it--likes it better than Downing Street and the great statesman.
When the luncheon gong sounds he can hardly realise that it is two o'clock. He is so much dishevelled by his transmigrations--which, indeed, have been as numerous as Buddha's--that, after having repaired the injuries to his toilette, he finds that everybody is already in the dining-room--finds the inevitable chair left vacant for him beside Lady Betty. He has sat by Lady Betty through so many luncheons and dinners that it has lost the gloss of novelty, and they speak to each other scarcely more than a husband and wife would do. It is her voice that he hears prevailing over those of the rest of the company as he enters the room, for she has not Cordelia's gift.
'Lambton? Are they any relation to Lord Durham?'
'I do not think so,' replies the hostess carelessly. 'Their father was a small squire in these parts, who over-farmed himself, and died very much out at elbows. And their mother--well, their mother was nothing but a very poor creature' (with a shrug), 'who was always fancying herself ill, and whom nobody believed until she proved it by dying! Ha! ha! Poor soul! I do not think that anybody cried much, except Peggy; she cried her eyes out.'
'Not quite out,' thinks Talbot, remembering the severe blue darts that shot at him over-night; and to his own soul, at this testimony to her tender-heartedness, he says, 'Nice Peggy!'
'Which was Peggy?' asks Mr. Harborough, looking up from his cutlet; 'the big one? Yes? I like Peggy. I do not know when I have seen such a good-looking girl.'
His wife bursts into a laugh.
'I knew that Ralph would admire her. Did not I tell you so?' turning to Talbot. 'She is just his style; they cannot be too big for Ralph; he admires by avoirdupois weight.'
'As to that, my dear,' retorts Mr. Harborough tranquilly, 'we all know that you are not much in the habit of commending your own sex; but I think you will find that I am not alone in my opinion.'
There is a moment's silence. Men are cowardly things. Not one of them is found to take up the cudgels for poor Margaret.
'She would be good-looking perhaps if she were bled,' pursues Lady Betty; 'she looks so aggressively healthy!'
'You cannot make the same complaint of poor Prue, at any rate,' says Lady Roupell, in a voice that betrays some slight signs of dissatisfaction with her guest's observations, for she likes her Lambtons.
'No; she is a high-coloured little skeleton!' rejoins Betty, looking with pensive ill-nature at her plate. 'What a pity that they cannot strike a balance! The one is as much too small as the other is too big; they are like a shilling and sixpence!'
And having thus peaceably demolished the sisters, whom nobody defends, she passes smilingly to another subject.
After luncheon Talbot is lounging before the hall door, with a cigarette, thinking, with a sort of subdued disgust (engendered, perhaps, by the fragment of conversation but now related) of himself, his surroundings, and his life in general, when he is joined by his hostess, dressed for walking--as villainously dressed as only a female millionnaire dares be: a frieze jacket like a man's, a billycock hat set on the top of her cap, and a stout stick in her hand. She tells him that she is going down to the farm to see how the stacks are getting on, and he strolls along aimlessly beside her. He knows that he ought not--he knows that his unwritten laws bind him for all the afternoon to the side of the hammock where Lady Betty is swinging; and yet he goes on strolling along by the side of an old woman to whom no laws, either God's straight or man's crooked ones, bind him, simply opening his nostrils to the pungent perfume of the hot bracken, and his eyes to the sight of the gentle doves watching him from under Queen Elizabeth's oak.
Arrived at the farm, he is slowly making up his mind to return to his duty, when his companion addresses him:
'Will you go a message for me?'
'With all the pleasure in life,' replies he, a slight misgiving crossing his mind as to how he will be received on his return after so prolonged a truancy.
'It is only just to run over to the Lambtons'.'
'The Lambtons'?'
'Yes--Peggy and Prue.'
'Of course, of course; but--but how am I to find them?'
'I thought you knew the way; I took you there last year. You cannot miss it; a hundred yards down the road'--(pointing)--'just outside the park; a little old red house. You cannot miss it.'
She is turning away back to her ricks and her reapers when he recalls her.
'But what am I to say when I get there?'
'Pooh?' she says, laughing; 'what a head I have! I forgot the message. Tell Peggy we are all coming down to-morrow afternoon, Sunday, as usual; and bid her have plenty of muffins for us.'
As he walks along the road he ponders with himself whether, if Margaret looks at him with the unaccountable austerity of last night, he shall ever be able to give her that insolent order for unlimited muffins.
Lady Roupell was right. There is no missing the way. He almost wishes that there was. He has rung the bell--how much too loudly! It seems as if it would never stop clanging. And yet the odd thing is that he has produced no result by his violence; nor does the stout Annian door show any signs of rolling back on its hinges. He stares up at the face of the house; every window wide open, and above each a little century-and-a-half-old decoration of Cupids and cornucopias, and apples and grapes; a broken arch over the relentless door, and on either hand of it a great bush of traveller's joy, with its pretty welcoming name; and a Virginia creeper, in its dazzling decay, showing the stained and faded red brick what red can be. Is that one of the windows of the drawing-room on the right-hand side--that window into which he has so much difficulty in hindering himself from looking--with the green earthenware cruches and the odd-shaped majolica pot crammed with corn marigolds on the window-ledge? It is certainly very strange. He rings again, more mildly, but still very distinctly, without any further result than before. A third time; the same silence. A ridiculous idea crosses his mind that perhaps Margaret has seen from an upper window who her visitor is, and has forbidden any of her household to admit him; and, though he dismisses it as incredible, he is so disheartened by it, and by his thrice-repeated failures to attract attention, that he is turning away towards the entrance-gate, when, at last, something happens. A figure appears, flying round the corner of the house; a figure so out of breath, so dishevelled, so incoherent, that it is some seconds before he recognises in it the younger Miss Lambton--the 'high-coloured little skeleton,' as his gentle lady had sweetly baptized her. High-coloured she is now with a vengeance!
'Oh! it is you, is it?' she cries pantingly. He has never been presented to her, nor have they ever exchanged a sentence; but, in great crises like the present, the social code goes to the wall. 'Oh, I wonder could you help us? we are in such trouble!' Her tone is so navre that his heart stands still. Peggy is dead, of course. 'The fox has got out!' pursues she, sobbing; 'got out of his house, and we do not know what has become of him!'
'The fox!' repeats he, relieved of his apprehensions, and with a flash of self-reproach--'of course it was a fox! of course it was not a badger!'
Surprise at this observation checks Prue's tears.
'No!' says she; 'who ever thought it was?'
And at that moment another tumultuous figure appears round the corner of the house. This time it is Margaret; Margaret nearly as breathless, as scarlet, as tearful as Prue. On catching sight of Talbot she pulls herself into a walk, and with a laudable, instantaneous struggle to look cold and neat and repellent, she holds out her hand.
'I hope you have not been waiting long,' she says formally. (The little unconquerable pants between each word betray her.) 'Did you ring often? I am afraid that there was nobody in the house; we were all, servants and all, about the fields and garden. Oh!' (nature and sorrow growing too strong for her) 'have you heard of our misfortune?'
'That I have,' replies Talbot, throwing as much sympathetic affection as that organ is capable of into his voice; 'and I am so sorry!'
'He has never been out except upon a chain in all his life, poor little fellow!' says Peggy, sinking dejectedly upon a large old-fashioned round stone ball, one of which ornaments each side of the door. 'He will know no more than a baby how to take care of himself!'
'Have you searched everywhere?'
'Everywhere.'
'The hen-house?'
'Yes.'
'Stables?'
'Yes.'
'Coach-house?'
'Yes.'
'Hayloft?'
'Yes.'
'Boot-hole?'
'Yes.'
'Cellar?' growing wild in his suggestions. 'Once I knew a hard-pressed fox run right into a cellar.'
'Even there.'
Talbot is at the end of his ingenuity. But at least there is one thing gained--she has spoken to him as to a fellow-sufferer.
This is no great advance perhaps, since were a new Deluge to cover the earth, which of us would not cling round the neck of a parricide if he were on a higher ledge of rock than we?
'If he is once away in the open,' says Margaret desperately, 'he is sure to get into a trap or be worried by a dog; he has no experience of life. Oh, poor little man!'
Her eyes brim up, and her voice breaks.
Prue has fallen, limp and whimpering, upon the other stone ball. Talbot stands between the mourners.
'Come,' says he stoutly, 'let us be doing something. Let us rout out every possible hole and corner once again; and if he does not turn up, I will go and tell the game-keepers and the farm-labourers to be on the look-out for him.'
Something in the manly energy of his tone puts new life into the dispirited girls, and the search recommences.
The procession is swelled by the three maids, with their aprons over their heads; by the stable-boy, and by Jacob with a pitchfork. It is led by Talbot, whose zeal sometimes degenerates into ostentation, as when he insists on exploring chinks into which the leanest lizard could not squeeze itself, and on running his stick through little heaps of mown grass where not a field-mouse could lie perdue.
The party has gradually dispersed in different directions, and Talbot finds himself alone in the tool-house, which has been already twice explored. In one corner stands a pile of pots of all sizes, reaching almost to the roof, and with its monotony enlivened by a miscellaneous stock of rakes, pea-sticks, and scythes leaning against it. The whole erection looks too solid to admit of its being a hiding-place for anything, but it is possible that there may be a hollow behind it.
After prying about for a few moments on his knees, he finds indeed an aperture, which has been hidden by a pendent bit of bass-matting--an aperture large enough to admit the passage of a small animal. To this aperture he applies his eye. What does he see? Two things like green lamps glaring at him from the darkness. Aha! he is here!
