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Elizabeth's Campaign

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #13573 · 518,208 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Elizabeth's Campaign

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward

Illustrator: C. Allan Gilbert


        
Release date: October 1, 2004 [eBook #13573]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ELIZABETH'S CAMPAIGN ***

ELIZABETH'S CAMPAIGN

by

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Author of _Lady Rose's Daughter_, _Missing_, etc.

Frontispiece in Color by C. Allan Gilbert

1918







[Illustration: ELIZABETH]




     TO THE DEAR AND GALLANT
             MEMORY
               OF
            T. S. A.
  PASSCHENDAELE, OCTOBER 11, 1917




FOREWORD

This book was finished in April 1918, and represents
the mood of a supremely critical moment in the war.

M. A. W.




ELIZABETH'S CAMPAIGN




CHAPTER I


'Remember, Slater, if I am detained, that I am expecting the two
gentlemen from the War Agricultural Committee at six, and Captain
Mills of the Red Cross is coming to dine and sleep. Ask Lady
Chicksands to look after him in case I am late--and put those
Tribunal papers in order for me, by the way. I really must go
properly into that Quaker man's case--horrid nuisance! I hope to be
back in a couple of hours, but I can't be sure. Hullo, Beryl! I
thought you were out.'

The speaker, Sir Henry Chicksands, already mounted on his cob
outside his own front door, turned from his secretary, to whom he
had been giving these directions, to see his only daughter hurrying
through the inner hall with the evident intention of catching her
father before he rode off.

She ran down the steps, but instead of speaking at once she began to
stroke and pat his horse's neck, as though doubtful how to put what
she had to say.

'Well, Beryl, what's the matter?' said her father impatiently. The
girl, who was slender and delicate in build, raised her face to his.

'Are you--are you really going to Mannering, father?'

'I am--worse luck!'

'You'll handle him gently, won't you?' There was anxiety in the
girl's voice. 'But of course you will--I know you will.'

Chicksands shrugged his shoulders.

'I shall do my best. But you know as well as I do that he's a queer
customer when it comes to anything connected with the war.'

The girl looked behind her to make sure that the old butler of the
house had retired discreetly out of earshot.

'But he can't quarrel with _you_, father!'

'I hope not--for your sake.'

'Must you really tackle him?'

'Well, I thought I was the person to do it. It's quite certain
nobody else could make anything of it.'

Privately Beryl disagreed, but she made no comment.

'Aubrey seems to be pretty worried,' she said, in a depressed tone,
as she turned away.

'I don't wonder. He should have brought up his father better. Well,
good-bye, dear. Don't bother too much.'

She waved her hand to him as he made off, and stood watching him
from the steps--a gentle, attaching figure, her fair hair and the
pale oval of her face standing out against the panelled hall behind
her.

Her father went his way down a long winding hill beyond his own
grounds, along a country road lined with magnificent oaks, through a
village where his practised eye noted several bad cottages with
disapproval, till presently he slackened his horse's pace, as he
passed an ill-looking farm about half a mile beyond the village.

'Not a decent gate in the whole place!' he said to himself with
disgust. 'And the farm buildings only fit for a bonfire. High time
indeed that we made Mannering sit up!'

He paused also to look over the neighbouring hedge at some fields
literally choked with weeds.

'And as for Gregson--lazy, drunken fellow! Why didn't he set some
village women on? Just see what they've done on my place! Hullo,
here he is! Now I'm in for it!' For he saw a slouching man coming
rapidly towards him from the farmyard, with the evident intention
of waylaying him. The man's shabby, untidy dress and blotched
complexion did not escape Sir Henry's quick eye. 'Seems to have
been making a night of it,' was his inward comment.

'Good-day, Sir Henry,' said the farmer, laying a hand on Chicksands'
bridle, 'I wanted a word with you, sir. I give you fair warning, you
and your Committee, you'll not turn me out without a fight! I was
never given no proper notice--and there are plenty as 'll stand by
me.'

The voice was thick and angry, and the hand shook. Sir Henry drew
his horse away, and the man's hold dropped.

'Of course you had every notice,' said Sir Henry drily.

'I hadn't,' the man persisted. 'If the letters as they talk of were
sent, I never saw 'em. And when the Committee came I was out--on
business. Can't a man be out on his lawful business, Sir Henry,
instead of dancin' attendance on men as know no better than he? The
way this Government is doing things--you might as well live under
the Czar of Russia as in this country. It's no country this for
free men now, Sir Henry.'

'The Czar of Russia has come to grief, my man, for the same reason
that you have,' said Sir Henry, gathering up the reins, 'for
shirking his duty. All very well before the war, but now we can't
afford this kind of thing.'

'And so you've told the Squire to turn me out?' said the man
fiercely, his hands on his sides.

'You've had no notice from Mr. Mannering yet?'

'Not a word.'

'But you've heard from the Inspection Committee?'

The man nodded.

'But it's not they as can turn me out, if the Squire don't agree.'

There was a note of surly defiance in his voice.

'I don't know about that,' said Sir Henry, whose horse was getting
restive. 'My advice to you, Gregson, is to take it quietly, pull
yourself together, and get some other work. There's plenty going
nowadays.'

'Thank you for nothing, Sir Henry. I've got plenty to advise
me--people as I set more store by. I've got a wife and children,
sir, and I shan't give in without a fuss--you may be sure of that.
Good-day to you.'

Sir Henry nodded to him and rode off.

'He'll go, of course,' reflected the rider. 'Our powers are quite
enough. But if I can't get Mannering to send the notice, it'll be a
deal more trouble. Hullo, here's some one else! This is another pair
of boots!'

He had scarcely turned the corner beyond the farm when another man
came running down the sloping field, calling to him. Sir Henry
pulled up his horse again. But his aspect had changed, and his voice
took another note.

'Did you want to speak to me, Adam? A nice day, isn't it?'

'I saw you, Sir Henry, from the top of the field, talking to Gregson
in the road, and I thought perhaps you'd let me have a few words
with you. You know, sir, this is awfully hard lines.'

Sir Henry looked impatient, but the man who had spoken to him was a
fine specimen of young manhood--broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, with a
natural dignity of manner, not at all a person to be brushed aside.

'I'm sure you can't defend Gregson, Adam,' said Sir Henry, 'you--one
of the best farmers in the district! I wish they had put you on the
Inspection Committee.'

'Well, they didn't,' said the other, perhaps with a slight emphasis.
'And there's many of us feel, I can assure you, as I do. Gregson's a
poor creature, but he hasn't had quite fair play, Sir Henry--that's
what we feel. And he's been fifteen years on his place.' The man
spoke hesitatingly, but strongly. There was a queer, suppressed
hostility in his pleasant blue eyes.

'Fifteen years too long,' interrupted Sir Henry. 'I tell you, Adam,
we can't afford now to let men like Gregson spoil good land while
the country's likely to go hungry! The old happy-go-lucky days are
done with. I wonder whether even you recognize that we're fighting
for our lives?'

'I know we are, Sir Henry. But if the war makes slaves of us what
good will it do if we do win it?'

Sir Henry laughed. 'Well, Adam, you were always a Radical and I was
always a Conservative. And I don't like being managed any more than
you do. But look at the way I'm managed in my business!--harried up
and down by a parcel of young fellows from the Ministry that often
seem to me fools! But we've all got to come in. And this country's
worth it!'

'You know I'm with you there, sir. But why don't you get at the
Squire himself? What good have he or his agent ever been to anybody?
You're a landlord worth living under; but--'

'Ah! don't be in too great a hurry, Adam, and you'll see what you
will see!' And with a pleasant salute, his handsome face twitching
between frowns and smiles, Sir Henry rode on. 'What trade unionists
we all are--high and low! That man's as good a farmer as Gregson's a
vile one. But he stands by his like, as I stand by mine.'

Then his thoughts took a different turn. He was entering a park,
evidently of wide extent, and finely wooded. The road through it had
long fallen out of repair, and was largely grass-grown. A few sheep
were pasturing on it, and a few estate cottages showed here and
there. Sir Henry looked about him with quick eyes. He understood
that the Inspection Sub-Committee, constituted under the Corn
Production Act, and on the look-out for grass-land to put under the
plough, had recommended the ploughing up of all this further end of
Mannering Park. It carried very few sheep under its present
management; and the herd of Jersey cattle that used to graze it had
long since died out. As for the game, it had almost gone--before the
war. No use, either for business or play!

Then--on this early autumn day of 1917--Sir Henry fell to musing on
the vast changes coming over England in consequence of the war. 'Who
would ever have believed that we--_we_ should put ourselves to
school as we have done? Military service, rations, food-prices, all
our businesses "controlled," and now our land looked after! How much
of it has come to stay? Well, it won't affect me much! Ah! is that
the Rector?'

For a hundred yards ahead of him he perceived a clerical figure,
spare and tall, in a wideawake hat, swinging towards him. The
September sun was westering, and behind the approaching man lay
broad stretches of wood, just showing here and there the first
bronze and purple signs of autumn.

The Rector, recognizing the solitary rider, waved his hand in
welcome, and Sir Henry pulled up. The two men, who were evidently
personal friends, exchanged greetings.

'You're going to the Hall, Sir Henry?' said the Rector.

Sir Henry described his business.

The Rector shook his head reflectively.

'You haven't announced yourself, I hope?'

'No, I took that simple precaution. I suppose he's already pretty
savage?'

'With whom? The Committee? Yes, you won't find him easy to deal
with. But just at present there's a distraction. His new secretary
arrived some weeks ago, and he now spends his whole time, from
morning till night, dictating to her and showing her his things.'

'Secretary? A woman? Good heavens! Who is she?'

'A great swell, I understand. Oxford First Class in Mods, Second in
Greats. I've only just seen her. A striking-looking person.'

'Why isn't she in France, or doing munition work?' growled Sir
Henry.

'I don't know. I suppose she has her reasons. She seems patriotic
enough. But I've only exchanged a few words with her, at a very
hurried luncheon, at which, by the way, there was a great deal too
much to eat. She and Pamela disappeared directly afterwards.'

'Oh, so Pamela's at home? What's the name of the new woman? I
suppose she's to chaperon Pamela?'

'I shouldn't wonder. Her name is Miss Bremerton.'

'Beryl declares that Pamela is going to be a beauty--and clever
besides. She used to be a jolly child. But then they go to school
and grow up quite different. I've hardly seen her for a year and a
half.'

'Well, you'll judge for yourself. Good luck to you! I don't envy you
your job.'

'Good Lord, no! But you see I'm Chairman of this blessed show, and
they all fixed on me to bell the cat. We want a hundred acres of the
Park, a new agent, notices for three farmers, etcetera!'

The Rector whistled. 'I shall wait, on tiptoe, to see what happens!
What are your powers?'

'Oh, tremendous!'

'So you have him? Well, good-day.'

And the Rector was passing on. But Sir Henry stooped over his
horse's neck--'As you know, perhaps, it would be very inconvenient
to my poor little Beryl if Mannering were to make a quarrel of it
with me.'

'Ah, I gathered that she and Aubrey were engaged,' said the Rector
cordially. 'Best congratulations! Has the Squire behaved well?'

'Moderately. He declares he has no money to give them.'

'And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie
sale!' said the Rector with a laugh. 'And now I suppose the new
secretary will add fuel to the flame. I saw Pamela for a minute
alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was "just as much gone on Greek
things as father," and they were like a pair of lunatics when the
new vases came down.'

'Oh, blow the secretary!' said Sir Henry with exasperation. 'And
meanwhile his daughters can't get a penny out of him for any war
purpose whatever! Well, I must go on.'

They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which
soon brought him in sight of a distant building--low and
irregular--surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes
of the park.

'Dreadfully ugly place,' he said to himself, as the house grew
plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste
than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to
son. That's something.'

And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he
allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his
own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous
American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of
an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to
be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.

'Yet compared to a Mannering, what do I mean to the people here?
You scarcely begin to take root in this blessed country under half a
century. Mannering is exceedingly unpopular; the people think him a
selfish idler; but if he chose he could whistle them back with a
hundredth part of the trouble it would take me! And if Aubrey wanted
to go into Parliament, he'd probably have his pick of the county
divisions. Curious fellow, Aubrey! I wonder exactly what Beryl sees
in him?'

His daughter's prospects were not indeed very clear to a mind that
liked everything cut and dried. Aubrey Mannering was the Squire's
eldest son; but the Squire was not rich, and had been for years past
wasting his money on Greek antiquities, which seemed to his
neighbours, including Sir Henry Chicksands, a very dubious
investment. If Aubrey should want to sell, who was going to buy such
things at high prices after the war? No doubt prices at
Christie's--for good stuff--had been keeping up very well. That was
because of war profits. People were throwing money about now. But
when the war industries came to an end? and the national bills had
to be paid?

'The only thing that can't go down is land,' thought Sir Henry, with
the cheerful consciousness of a man who had steadily year by year
increased what had originally been a very modest property to
something like a large estate.

Mannering had plenty of that commodity. But how far had he dipped
the estate? It must be heavily mortgaged. By decent management
anybody, no doubt, might still bring it round. 'But Aubrey's not the
man. And since he joined up at the beginning of the war the Squire
won't let him have a voice in anything. And now Desmond--by George,
the twins are nineteen this month!--Desmond'll be off directly. And
then his father will be madder than ever.'

By this time the ugly house was near at hand, and the thick woods
which surrounded it had closed about the horse and rider.

'Splendid timber,' thought Sir Henry, as he rode through it,
measuring it with a commercial eye, 'but all past its prime, and
abominably neglected.... Hullo! that looks like Pamela, and the new
woman--the secretary!'

For two ladies were coming down the drive towards him, with a big
white and tan collie jumping round them. One of them, very tall and
erect, was dressed in a dark coat and skirt, reasonably short, a
small black toque, and brown boots and leggings. The close-fitting
coat showed a shapely but quite substantial figure. She carried a
stick, and walked with a peculiarly rapid and certain step. The
young girl beside her seemed by comparison a child. She wore a white
dress, in keeping with the warm September day, and with it a dark
blue sports coat, and a shady hat. Her dress only just passed her
knees, and beneath it the slender legs and high heels drew Sir
Henry's disapproving eye. He hated extravagance in anything. Beryl
managed to look fashionable, without looking _outré_, as Pamela did.
But he reined up to greet her with ready smiles.

'Well, Pamela, jolly to see you at home again! My word, you've
grown! Shall I find your father in?'

'Yes, we left him in the library. May I introduce Miss
Bremerton--Sir Henry Chicksands.' The girl spoke with hurried
shyness, the quick colour in her cheeks. The lady beside her bowed,
and Sir Henry took off his hat. Each surveyed the other. 'A
strong-minded female!' thought Sir Henry, who was by no means
advanced in his views of the other sex.

'The strong-minded female,' however, was not, it seemed, of the
talkative kind. She remained quite silent while Pamela and Sir Henry
exchanged some family gossip, with her ungloved hand caressing the
nose of the collie, who was pressing against her with intrusive
friendliness. But her easy self-possession as contrasted with
Pamela's nervousness was all the time making an impression on Sir
Henry, as was also the fact of her general good looks. Not a
beauty--not at all; but, as the Rector had said, 'striking.'

As for Pamela, what was the matter with the child? Until Beryl's
name was mentioned, there was not a smile to be got out of her. And
it was a very fleeting one when it came. Desmond's name fared a
little better. At that the girl did at last raise her beautiful
eyes, which till then she had hardly allowed to be seen, and there
was a ray in them.

'He's here on leave,' she said; 'a few days. He's just got his
Commission and been accepted for the artillery. He goes into camp
next week. He thinks he'll be out by January.'

'We must certainly manage to see him before he goes,' said Sir Henry
heartily. Then turning to Miss Bremerton with the slightly
over-emphatic civility of a man who prides himself on his manners in
all contingencies, he asked her if she was already acquainted with
the Mannering neighbourhood.

Miss Bremerton replied that it was quite unknown to her. 'You'll
admire our trees,' said Sir Henry. 'They're very fine.'

'Are they?' said the lady rather absently, giving a perfunctory
glance to the woods sloping away on her right towards a little
stream winding in the hollow. Sir Henry felt a slight annoyance. He
was a good fellow, and no more touchy as to personal dignity than
the majority of men of his age and class. But he was accustomed to
be treated with a certain deference, and in Miss Bremerton's manner
there was none whatever.

'Well, good-bye, Pamela. I mustn't miss your father. When are you
coming over to see Beryl?'

'How am I to get there?' said the girl with a sudden laugh.

'Oh, I see, you've got no petrol allowance?'

'How should we? Nobody's doing any war work here.'

There was an odd note in the speaker's voice.

'Why don't you join Beryl in her canteen work?' said Sir Henry
abruptly.

'I don't know.'

'She wants help badly. She passes your gate on her way to Fallerton.
She could pick you up, and bring you back.'

'Yes,' said Pamela. There was a pause.

'Well, good-bye, dear,' said Sir Henry again, and with a ceremonious
bow to Pamela's companion, he rode on--meditating on many things.

       *       *       *       *       *

'The Squire's in, Sir Henry, but--well, he's very busy.'

'Never mind, Forest. I must see him. Can you find some one to take
my horse round?'

The grey-haired butler looked perplexed.

'I've only got my own small boy, Sir Henry. There's two more of our
men gone this morning. I don't know if you'll trust him. He's a good
boy.'

'Send him along, Forest. My beast's a lamb--you know him. But look
here, Forest'--Sir Henry dismounted, bridle in hand. 'Don't give the
Squire notice that I'm here, if you can help it, till you announce
me.'

The butler, who, in spite of his grey hair, was a square-set,
vigorous-looking fellow, might be said, in reply, to have given the
Squire's visitor a wink. At any rate a look of understanding passed
between the two. The butler went quickly back into the house, and
re-emerged with a boy, who was the small image of his father, to
whom Sir Henry cheerfully gave up his cob. But as Forest led the way
through the outer hall he stopped to say:

'The Squire's not alone, sir. There was a gentleman arrived just as
Miss Pamela went out. But I don't think he'll stay long.'

'Who is he?'

'Can't say, sir. He's lodging in the village, and comes to see the
Squire's collections sometimes.'

They were now in a long passage running along the eastern front of
the house to a large room which had been added to its southern end,
in order to hold the Squire's library and collections. Midway the
butler turned.

'You've heard, Sir Henry, about Mr. Desmond?'

'Yes, Miss Pamela told me.'

'Mr. Desmond says he'll be in France by January. He's as pleased as
possible, but it's a deal sooner than Mr. Mannering hoped.'

'Well, we've all got to take our chance in this war,' said Sir Henry
gravely. 'And the artillery is a bit safer than the infantry. You
know my son Arthur's a gunner.'

'I hope he's all right, sir?'

'Well, he's still on light work. He comes home this week for a bit.
He was gassed at Ypres a year and a half ago, and had a bullet taken
out of his chest about two months since. But he is nearly fit
again.'

The butler expressed his sympathy with a complete absence of shyness
or servility, then threw open a door at the end of the passage,
announcing, 'Sir Henry Chicksands, sir.'

'_D-mn_!' said a voice loudly within.

Sir Henry gave an involuntary start. Another look passed between
him and Forest, amused or interrogative on the visitor's part,
non-committal on the butler's.

       *       *       *       *       *

The library of Mannering Hall as Sir Henry Chicksands entered it
presented a curious spectacle. It was a long, barn-like room,
partly lined with books, and partly with glass cases, in which
Greek vases, Tanagra figures, and other Greek and Etruscan
antiquities, all carefully marked and labelled, were displayed. A
few large tables stood at intervals on the shabby carpet, also
laden with books and specimens. They conveyed an impression of
dust and disorder, as though no housemaid had been allowed to
touch them for weeks--with one exception. A table, smaller than
the rest, but arranged with scrupulous neatness, stood at one side
of the room, with a typewriter upon it, certain books, and a rack
for stationery. A folded duster lay at one corner. Pens, pencils,
a box of clips, and a gum-pot stood where a careful hand had
placed them. And at a corner corresponding to the duster was a
small vase of flowers--autumnal roses--the only flowers in the
room.

But the various untidy accumulations, most of which seemed to be of
old standing, had been evidently just added to by some recent
arrivals. Four large packing-cases, newly opened, took up much of
what free space was left on the floor. The straw, paper, and
cottonwool, in which their contents had been packed, had been tossed
out with a careless or impatient hand, and littered the carpet.
Among the litter stood here and there some Greek vases of different
sizes; in particular, a superb pair, covered with figures; beside
which stood the owner of Mannering, talking to an apparently young
man with an eye-glass, who was sitting on the floor closely
examining the vases. The Squire turned a furrowed brow towards his
approaching visitor, and putting down a small bronze he had been
holding raised a warning hand.

'How do you do, Chicksands? Very sorry, but I'm much too filthy to
touch. And I'm horribly busy! These things arrived last night, and
Mr. Levasseur has kindly come over to help me unpack them. Don't
know if you've met him. Mr. Levasseur--Sir Henry Chicksands.'

The man on the floor looked up carelessly, just acknowledging Sir
Henry's slight inclination. Sir Henry's inner mind decided against
him--at once--instinctively. What was a stout fellow, who at any
rate _looked_ as though he were still of military age, doing with
nonsense of this sort, at four o'clock in the day, when England
wanted every able-bodied man she possessed, either to fight for her
or to work for her? At the same time the reflection passed rapidly
through his mind that neither the man nor the name had come up--so
far as he could remember--before the County Tribunal of which he was
Chairman.

'Well, Chicksands, what do you want with me?' said the Squire
abruptly. 'Will you take a chair?' And he pointed to one from which
he hastily removed a coat.

'I have some confidential business to talk to you about,' said Sir
Henry, with a look at the dusty gentleman among the straw.

'Something you want me to do that I'll be bound I shan't want to do!
Is that it?' said Mannering with vivacity.

He stood with his hands on a table behind him, his long spare frame
in a nervous fidget, his eyes bright and hostile, and a spot of red
on either thin cheek. Beside Chicksands, who was of middle height,
solidly built, and moderately stout, with mental and physical
competence written all over him, the Squire of Mannering seemed but
the snippet of a man. He was singularly thin, with a slender neck,
and a small head covered with thick hair, prematurely white, which
tumbled over his forehead and eyes. He had the complexion of a girl,
disproportionately large nose, very sharply and delicately cut as to
bridge and nostril, and a mouth and chin which seemed to be in
perpetual movement. He looked older than Sir Henry, who was verging
on sixty, but he was in fact just over fifty.

Sir Henry smiled a little at the tone of the Squire's question, but
he answered good-humouredly.

'I believe, when we've talked it over, you won't think it
unreasonable. But I've come to explain.'

'I know, you want me to give Gregson notice. But I warn you I'm not
the least inclined to do anything of the kind.' And the speaker
crossed his arms, which were very long and thin, over a narrow
chest, while his eyes restlessly countered those of Sir Henry.

Chicksands paused a moment before replying.

'I have a good many papers here to show you,' he said at last,
mildly, drawing a large envelope half-way from the inner pocket of
his coat to illustrate his words, and then putting it back again.
'But I really can't discuss them except with yourself.'

The Squire's eyes shot battle.

'It's the war, of course,' he said with emphasis; 'it's all the war.
I'm told to do things I don't want to do, which affect my personal
freedom, and other people's, because of a war I don't believe in,
never asked for, and don't approve of. Here's Levasseur now, a
clever fellow, cleverer than either you or me, Chicksands, and he's
no more patriotic than I am. You talk to him!'

'Thank you, I'm too busy,' said Sir Henry sharply, his face
stiffening. 'Where can you see me, Mannering? I'm rather pressed for
time. Is the smoking-room free?' And with a marked avoidance of any
concern with the gentleman on the floor, who had by now risen to his
feet, Sir Henry made an impatient movement towards a door at the
further end of the library which stood ajar.

Levasseur looked amused. He was a strongly-built, smooth-shaven
fellow, with rather long hair, and the sallow look of the
cigarette-smoker. His eyes were sleepy, his expression indolent or
good-natured.

'Oh, I'll make myself scarce with the greatest pleasure,' he said
civilly. 'I can stroll about the park till you're ready for me
again,' he added, turning to the Squire. 'Lovely day--I'll take a
book and some cigarettes.' And diving into an open box which stood
near he filled his cigarette-case from it, and then looked round him
for a book. 'Where's that copy of the _Anthology_? That'll do
nicely.'

The Squire burst into a laugh, observing Sir Henry.

'He's over military age, Chicksands.'

'I suppose so,' said Sir Henry stiffly.

'But only by six months, when the Act passed. So he's _just_ escaped
you.'

'I've really no concern whatever with Mr. Levasseur's affairs.' Sir
Henry had flushed angrily. 'Is it to be here, or the smoking-room?'

'Ta-ta! See you again presently,' said Levasseur. 'Ah, there's the
book!' And diving to the floor for a hat and a book lying beside it,
he made off, lighting a cigarette, with a laughing backward glance
towards the Squire and his companion.

'Well, now, what is it?' said Mannering, throwing himself with an
air of resignation into a low arm-chair, and taking out a pipe.
'Won't you smoke, Chicksands?'

'Thank you, I've had my morning's allowance. Hullo! Who did that?
What an awfully fine thing!'

For suddenly, behind the Squire's head, Chicksands had become aware
of an easel, and on it a charcoal sketch, life-size, of a boy, who
seemed about eighteen or nineteen, in cricketing dress.

The Squire looked round.

'What, that sketch of Desmond? Haven't you seen it? Yes, it's jolly
good. I got Orpen to do it in July.'

Now that Sir Henry had once perceived the drawing it seemed to him
to light up the whole place. The dress was the dress of the Eton
Eleven; there was just a suggestion of pale blue in the sash round
the waist. But the whole impression was Greek in its manly freedom
and beauty; above all in its sacrifice of all useless detail to one
broad and simple effect. Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with
its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over
the future--the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the
embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have
looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar
with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had
hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture
since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like
merry scorn of fate.

Sir Henry was conscious of a lump in his throat. He had lost his
youngest son in the retreat from Mons, and two nephews on the Somme.

'It's wonderful,' he said, not very clearly. 'I envy you such a
possession.'

The Squire made no reply. He sat with his long body hunched up in
the deep chair, a pair of brooding eyes fixed on his visitor.

'Well, what is it?' he said again, in a voice that was barely civil.




CHAPTER II


Sir Henry had been talking some time. The Squire had not interrupted
him much, but the papers which Sir Henry had presented to him from
time to time--Government communications, Committee reports, and the
like--were mostly lying on the floor, where, after a perfunctory
glance at them, he had very quickly dropped them.

'Well, that's our case,' said Sir Henry at last, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and leaning back in his chair, 'and I assure you
we've taken a great deal of trouble about it. We shouldn't ask you
or anybody else to do these things if it wasn't vitally necessary
for the food-supply of the country. But we're going to have a narrow
squeak for it next spring and summer, and we _must_ get more food
out of the land.'

Whereupon, in a manner rather provokingly reminiscent of a public
meeting, Sir Henry fell into a discourse on submarines, tonnage, the
food needs of our Allies, and the absolute necessity for undoing and
repairing the havoc of Cobdenism--matters of which the newspapers of
the day were commonly full. That the sound of his own voice was
agreeable to him might have been suspected.

Mr. Mannering roughly broke in upon him.

'What was that you said about ploughing up the park?'

'We ask you to break up fifty acres of it near the Fallerton end,
and perhaps some other bits elsewhere. This first bit is so far
from the house you'll never notice it; and the land ought to do very
well if it's properly broken and trampled down.'

The Squire sat up and began to tick things off on the fingers of his
left hand.

'Let me understand. You want me to give three of my farmers notice
to quit--Gregson first of all--for bad farming; you ask me to plough
up fifty acres of my park; and you have the goodness to suggest that
I should cut some of my woods.'

Sir Henry realized that possibly a strain on his temper was coming,
but he felt sure he could stand it.

'That is what we suggest--for your own advantage and the country's.'

'And pray who are "_we_"? I don't yet understand that clearly.'

'"We,"' said Sir Henry patiently, 'are the County War Agricultural
Committee, formed for the express purpose of getting more food out
of the land, and so making these islands self-supporting.'

'And if I refuse, what can you do?'

'Well, I'm afraid,' said Sir Henry, smiling uncomfortably, 'we can
act without you.'

'You can turn out my farmers, and plough my land, as you please?'

'Our powers are very wide.'

'Under--what do you call the beastly thing?--"Dora"--the Defence of
the Realm Act?'

Sir Henry nodded.

The Squire rose and began to pace up and down, his hands under his
coat-tails, his long spider legs and small feet picking their way in
and out of the piles and boxes on the floor. At last he turned
impetuously.

'Look here, Chicksands, I shall not give that man warning!'

Sir Henry surveyed the lanky figure standing opposite to him.

'I should be very sorry, Mannering, to see you take that course,' he
said, smiling and amiable as before. 'In some ways, of course, I am
no more in love with some of the Government's proceedings than you
are. We landlords may have to defend ourselves. I want, if I may say
so, to keep your influence intact for the things that really matter.
You and I, and all the other Brookshire landlords, may have, at some
point, to act together. But we shall resist unreasonable demands
much more easily if we accept the reasonable ones.'

The Squire shook his head. The suave tone of the speaker had clearly
begun to rasp his nerves.

'No! You and I have really nothing in common. You may take it from
me that I shall not give these men notice. What happens then?'

'The Government steps in,' said Sir Henry quietly.

'And turns them out? Very well, let them. And the park?'

'We are, of course, most anxious to consult you.'

'Excuse me, that's nonsense! I refuse--that's flat.'

Sir Henry shrugged his shoulders. His tone became a trifle colder.

'I can't believe that you will refuse. You can't deny--no sensible
man could--that we've simply got to grow more food at home. The
submarines have settled that for us.'

'Who brought the submarines upon us? The politicians! No
politicians, no war! If it hadn't been for a pack of idiots called
diplomats making mischief abroad, and a pack of incompetents called
politicians unable to keep their heads at home, there'd have been no
war. It's Russia's war--France's war! Who asked the country whether
it wanted a war? Who asked _me_?' The Squire, standing opposite to
Sir Henry, tapped his chest vehemently.

'The country is behind the war,' said Chicksands firmly.

'How do we know? How do you know? I've as much right to an opinion
as you, and I tell you the country is sick and tired of the war. We
are all dying of the war! We shall all be paupers because of the
war! What is France to me, or Belgium? We shall have lost men,
money, security--half the things that make life worth living--for
what?'

'Honour!' said Sir Henry sharply, as he got on his feet.

'_Honour_!' sneered Mannering--'what's honour? It means one thing to
me and another to you. Aubrey bangs me over the head with it. But
I'm like the Doctor in the Punch and Judy show--he thinks he's
knocked me flat. He hasn't. I've a new argument every time he comes.
And as for my daughters, they think me a lunatic--a stingy lunatic
besides--because I won't give to their Red Cross shows and bazaars.
I've nothing to give. The income tax gentlemen have taken care of
that.'

'Yet you spend on this kind of thing!' Sir Henry pointed to the
vases. He had grown a little white.

'Of course I can. That's permanent. That's something to mend the
holes that the soldiers and the politicians are making. When the
war's become a nightmare that nobody wants to remember, those little
things'--he pointed to a group of Greek bronzes and terra-cottas on
a table near--'will still be the treasures of the world!'

In the yeasty deep of Sir Henry's honest mind emotions were rising
which he knew now he should not long be able to control. He took up
his hat and stick.

'I'm sorry, Mannering, that I have not been able to convince you.
I'm sorry for your point of view--and I'm sorry for your sons.'

The words slipped out of his mouth before he knew.

The Squire bounded.

'My sons! The one's a fire-eater, with whom you can't argue. The
other's a child--a babe--whom the Government proposes to murder
before he has begun to live.'

Sir Henry looked at the speaker, who had been violently flushed a
minute earlier, and was now as pale as himself, and then at the
sketch of Desmond, just behind the Squire. His eyes dropped; the
hurry in his blood subsided.

'Well, good-bye, Mannering. I'll--I'll do what I can to make things
easy for you.'

The Squire laughed angrily.

'You'll put on the screws politely? Thank you? But still it will be
_you_ who'll be putting the screw on, who'll be turning out my
farmers, and ploughing up my land, and cutting down my trees.
Doesn't it strike you that--well, that--under the circumstances--it
will be rather difficult for Aubrey and Beryl to keep up their
engagement?'

The Squire was sitting on the edge of the table, his thin legs
crossed, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. Sir Henry coloured
hotly.

'You gave your consent to their engagement, Mannering.'

'Yes, but I propose to withdraw it,' said the Squire coolly.

Sir Henry's indignation kept him cool also.

'You can't play ducks and drakes with young people's lives like
that. Even you can't do that.'

'I can. I can withdraw my consent.'

'Because you mean to fight the County War Committee, of which I am
Chairman?'

'Precisely. The situation is too difficult,' said the Squire with
sparkling eyes. 'The young people will no doubt see it for
themselves.'

'Pshaw! Nonsense!' cried Sir Henry, finally losing his temper.
'Aubrey is long since of age and his own master.'

'Perhaps, but he is an extravagant fellow, who likes money and
spends it. And if he is his own master, I am the master of the
estate; there is no entail.'

Chicksands laughed aloud.

'So because I come on a mission to try and save you friction and
trouble, you are going to avenge yourself on your son and my
daughter?'

'I merely point out the properties,' said the Squire provokingly,
his legs dangling.

There was a pause. Sir Henry broke it with dignity, as he turned
away.

'I think we had better break off this discussion. I cannot--I do
not--believe you will carry out what you say. But if you do, I shall
stand by the young people.'

'No doubt!' said the Squire, who seemed to bristle from head to
foot. 'Well, good-bye, Sir Henry. Sorry your visit has not been more
agreeable. Forest will look after you.' And ringing the bell
vehemently as he passed the fireplace, the Squire walked rapidly to
the door and threw it open.

Chicksands passed through it, speechless with indignation and, if
the truth were told, bewilderment.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Squire shut the door upon his adversary, and then, with his
hands on his sides, exploded in a fit of laughter.

'I always knew I must be rude to the old boy some time,' he said,
with the glee of a mischievous child. 'But, ye gods, how his
feathers drooped! He looked like a plucked cockatoo as he went out.'

He stood thinking a moment, and then with a look of sudden
determination he went to his writing-table and sat down to it.
Drawing a writing-pad towards him, he wrote as follows:

     'MY DEAR AUBREY--Your future father-in-law has just been
     insulting and harrying me in ways which no civilized State had
     ever heard of before the war. He is the Chairman of a
     ridiculous body that calls itself the County War Agricultural
     Committee, that lays absurd eggs in the shape of sub-Committees
     to vex landlords. They have been going about among my farmers
     and want me to turn out three of them. I decline, so I suppose
     they'll do it for me. And they're going to plough up a lot of
     the park--without my leave. And Chicksands is the head and
     front of the whole business. He came here to-day to try and
     coax me into submission. But I would neither be coaxed nor
     bullied. I've broken with him; and if my children stand by me
     properly, they'll break with him too. I really don't see how
     you're going to marry Beryl after this. At least, I shall
     certainly not help you to do it, and if you defy me you must
     take the consequences. The whole world's gone mad. My only
     consolation is that I have just got some new Greek things, and
     that Levasseur's helping me unpack them. However, it's no good
     talking to you about them. You wasted all your time at
     Cambridge, and I doubt whether you could construe a bit of
     Euripides to save your life.

     'Of course if you want to talk this over, you had better run
     down. I have got a new secretary--came here six weeks ago--a
     topping young woman--who reads Greek like a bird. But her
     quantities are not always what they should be. Good-bye.--Your
     affectionate father,

     'EDMUND MANNERING.'

Having finished the epistle he read it over with a complacent
countenance, put it up and stamped it. Then he looked at his watch.

'What a long time that young woman's been away! I told her to take
two hours off, but of course I didn't mean it. That was just my
excessive politeness. D-mn my politeness. It's always getting in my
way. I forget that women are naturally lazy. I daresay she was a bit
fagged. But if she's interested in her work, what does that matter?
I wonder whether she's looked out all these references?'

And walking over to the one neat table In the room he surveyed it.
There were some sheets lying on it mostly covered with an excellent
Greek script, which he turned over. Suddenly he swooped on one of
them.

'Hullo! That line's wrong. Won't scan. Trusted to her memory, I
suppose. Didn't look it up. And yesterday I caught her out in her
accents. Women play the devil with accents. But she writes a pretty
Greek. Eh? What?' For he had become aware of the re-entry of
Levasseur, who was standing at his elbow.

''Fraid I can't stay now,' said that person. 'I've promised to pick
up some wounded at the station to-night.'

'You--wounded!--what do you mean?' said the Squire, turning upon
him.

Levasseur's large, thin-lipped mouth showed what seemed an habitual
grin.

'I'd been getting so unpopular, it was becoming a nuisance. Line of
least resistance, you understand. Now everybody's quite civil again.
And I like chauffing.'

'A mere bit of weakness!' grumbled the Squire. 'Either you keep out
of the war, or you go into it. You'd better go off to a camp now,
and get trained--and shot--as quickly as possible--get done with
it.'

'Oh no,' laughed the other. 'I'm all for middle courses. If they'll
let me go on with my book, I don't mind driving a few poor fellows
now and then!'

The Squire looked at him critically.

'The fact is you're too well fed, Levasseur, or you look it. That
annoys people. Now I might gorge for a month, and shouldn't put on a
pound.'

'I suppose your household is rationed?'

'Not it! We eat what we want. Just like the labourers. I found an
old labourer eating his dinner under a hedge yesterday. Half a pound
of bread at the very least, and he gets as much for his supper, and
nearly as much for his breakfast. "I shall eat it, Squire, as long
as I can get it. There's nowt else _packs_ ye like bread." And quite
right too. Good word "pack."'

'What'll he do when he can't get it?' laughed Levasseur, taking up
his hat.

'Stuff! This food business is all one big _blague_. Anyway the
Government got us into the war; they're jolly well bound to feed us
through it. They will, for their own necks' sake. Well, good-night.'

Levasseur nodded in response, with the same silent, aimless grin,
and disappeared through the garden door of the library.

'Queer fellow!' thought the Squire. 'But he's useful. I shall get
him to help catalogue these things as he did the others. Ah, there
you are!'

He turned with a reproachful air as the door opened.

The westerly sun was coming strongly into the library, and shone
full on the face and figure of the Squire's new secretary as she
stood in the door-way. He expected an apology for an absence just
five minutes over the two hours; but she offered none.

'Pamela asked me to tell you, Mr. Mannering, that tea was ready
under the verandah.'

'Afternoon tea is an abominable waste of time!' said the Squire
discontentedly, facing her with a Greek pot under each arm.

'Do you think so? To me it's always the pleasantest meal in the
day.'

The voice was musical and attractive, but its complete
self-possession produced a vague irritation in the Squire. With his
two former secretaries, a Cambridge man and a spectacled maiden
with a London University degree, he had been accustomed to play the
tyrant as must as he pleased. Something had told him from the very
beginning that he would not be able to tyrannize over this newcomer.

But his quick masterful temper was already trying to devise ways of
putting her down. He beckoned her towards the table where she had
left her work, and she went obediently.

'You've got that line wrong.' He pointed to a quotation from the
_Odyssey_. 'Read it, please!'

She read it. He stopped her triumphantly.

'No, no, you can't make that long!' He pointed to one of the Greek
words.

Her fair skin flushed.

'But indeed you can!' she said eagerly. 'Merry quotes three parallel
passages. I have them in one of my notebooks.' And she began to
search her table. Mannering stopped her ungraciously.

'Of course there's always some learned fool behind every bad
reading. Anyway, what do you say to those accents?' He pointed
severely to another line of her Greek. This time Miss Bremerton's
countenance changed.

'Oh dear, what a blunder!' she said in distress, as she bent over
her pages. 'I assure you I don't often do anything as bad as that.'

Mannering was secretly delighted. His manner became at once all
politeness.

'Don't worry yourself, please. We all make mistakes.... You have a
beautiful Greek handwriting.'

Miss Bremerton took the compliment calmly--did not indeed seem to
hear it. She was already scratching out the offending words with a
sharp penknife, and daintily rewriting them. Then she looked up.

'Pamela asked me to go back to her. And I was to say, will you come,
or shall she send tea here?'

'Oh, I'll come, I'll come. I've got something to say to Pamela,'
said the Squire, frowning. And he stalked in front of her along the
library passage, his brilliant white hair gleaming in its shadows.
It was well perhaps that he did not see the amusement which played
round Elizabeth Bremerton's handsome mouth as she pursued him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tea was laid on a flagged walk under a glazed pergola running along
part of the southern wall of the house. Here Pamela was sitting
waiting, with a basket of knitting on her knee which she put out of
sight as soon as she heard her father's step. She had taken off her
hat, and her plentiful brown hair was drawn in a soft wave across
her forehead, and thickly coiled behind a shapely head. She was very
young, and very pretty. Perhaps the impression of youth
predominated, youth uncertain of itself, conscious rather of its own
richness and force than of any definite aims or desires. Her
expression was extremely reserved. A veil seemed to lie over her
deep, heavy-lidded eyes, and over features that had now delicacy and
bloom, but promised much more--something far beyond any mere girlish
prettiness. She was tall and finely made, and for the school
tableaux in which she had frequently helped she had been generally
cast for such parts as 'Nausicaa among her maidens,' 'Athene
lighting the way for Odysseus and Telemachus,' 'Dante's Beatrice,'
or any other personage requiring dignity, even a touch of majesty.
Flowing skirts, indeed, at once made a queen of her. It was evident
that she was not at her ease with her father; nor, as yet, with her
father's new secretary.

The contrast between this lady and Pamela Mannering was obvious at
once. If Pamela suggested romance, Elizabeth Bremerton suggested
efficiency, cheerfulness, and the practical life. Her grandmother
had been Dutch, and in Elizabeth the fair skin and yellow-gold hair
(Rembrandt's 'Saskia' shows the type) of many Dutch forebears had
reappeared. She was a trifle plump; her hair curled prettily round
her temples; her firm dimpled chin and the fair complexion of her
face and neck were set off, evidently with intention, by the plain
blouse of black silky stuff, open at the neck, and showing a modest
string of small but real pearls. The Squire, who had a wide
knowledge of jewels, had noticed these pearls at once. It seemed to
him--vaguely--that lady secretaries should not possess real pearls;
or if they did possess them, should carefully keep them to
themselves.

He accepted a cup of tea from his daughter, and drank it absently
before he asked:

'Where's Desmond?'

'He went to lunch at Fallerton--at the camp. Captain Byles asked
him. I think afterwards he was going to play in a match.'

The same thought passed through the minds of both father and
daughter. 'This day week, Desmond will be gone.' In Pamela it
brought back the dull pain of which she was now habitually
conscious--the pain of expected parting. In her father it aroused an
equally habitual antagonism--the temper, indeed, of ironic
exasperation in which all his thinking and doing were at the moment
steeped. He looked up suddenly.

'Pamela, I have got something disagreeable to say to you.'

His daughter turned a startled face.

'I have had a quarrel with Sir Henry Chicksands, and I do not wish
you, or Desmond, or any of my children, to have any communication
henceforth with him, or with any of his family!'

'Father, what _do_ you mean?'

The girl's incredulous dismay only increased the Squire's
irritation.

'I mean what I say. Of course your married sisters and Aubrey will
do what they please, though I have warned Aubrey how I shall view it
if he takes sides against me. But you and Desmond are under my
control--you, at any rate. I forbid you to go to Chetworth, and your
friendship with Beryl must be given up.'

'Father!' cried his daughter passionately, 'she is my best friend,
and she is engaged to Aubrey.'

'If they are wise, they will break it off. Family quarrels are
awkward things. And if Aubrey has any feeling for his father, he
will be as angry as I am.'

'What _has_ Sir Henry been doing, father?'

'Taking my own property out of my hands, my dear, giving notice to
my farmers, and proposing to plough up my park, without my consent.
That's all--just a trifle. But it's a trifle I shall fight!'

The Squire struck the arm of his chair with a long and bony hand.

'Why, it's only because they _must_!' said the girl half scornfully,
her breath fluttering. 'Think what other people put up with,
father. And what they do! And we do _nothing_!'

Every word was said with difficulty, torn out of her by the shock of
her father's statement. The Squire stared at her threateningly a
little, then quieted down. He did not want a wrangle with Pamela, to
whom in general he was not unkind, while keeping a strict rule over
her.

'Do nothing? What should we do? As if the war did not bleed us at
every turn already. I warn you all I shan't be able to pay the
income tax next year. Mannering will be sold up.' And thrusting his
hands again into his pockets, he looked gloomily before him, over a
piece of ill-kept garden, to the sloping park and blue interlacing
hills that filled the distance.

Elizabeth Bremerton put down her teacup, glanced at the father and
daughter, and went discreetly away, back to the library and her
work.

Pamela hesitated a little, but at last moved nearer to him, and put
a hand on his arm.

'Father! I dreadfully want you to let me do something!'

'Eh, what?' said Mannering, rousing himself. 'Don't try and coax me,
child. It doesn't answer.'

'I don't want to coax you,' said the girl proudly withdrawing her
hand. 'It's a very simple thing. Will you let me go and do day work
at the new Hospital, just across the park? They want some help in
the housework. There are fifty wounded men there.'

'Certainly not,' said Mannering firmly. 'You are too young. You have
your education to think of. I told you I engaged Miss Bremerton to
give you two hours' classics a day. When we've arranged these pots,
she'll be free. You must also keep up your music. You have no time
for housemaiding. And I don't approve of housemaiding for my
daughter.'

'The nicest girls I know are doing _anything_--scrubbing, washing
up, polishing bath-taps, making swabs, covering splints,' said
Pamela in a low voice. 'There are two of the Joyce girls at this
hospital, just my age. Of course they don't let you do any
nursing--for months.'

'Lord Entwhistle may do what he likes with his girls. I propose to
do what I think best with mine,' said Mannering as he rose.

Then the girl's passion broke out.

'It's _horrible_, father, that you won't do anything for the war, or
let me do anything. Oh, I'm _glad_'--she clenched her hands as she
stood opposite him, her beautiful head thrown back--'I'm thankful,
that you can't stop Desmond!'

Mannering looked at her, frowned, turned abruptly, and went away
whistling.

Pamela was left alone in the September evening. She betook herself
to an old grass-grown walk between yew hedges at the bottom of the
Dutch garden, and paced it in a tumult of revolt and pain. Not to go
to Chetworth again! not to see Beryl, or any of them! How cruel! how
monstrously unjust!

'I shan't obey!--why should I? Beryl and I must manage to see each
other--of course we shall! Girls aren't the slaves they used to be.
If a thing is unjust, we can fight it--we ought to fight
it!--somehow. Poor, poor Beryl! Of course Aubrey will stick to her,
whatever father does. He would be a cur if he didn't. Desmond and I
would never speak to him again!... Beryl'll have Arthur to help
her, directly. Oh, I _wish_ I had a brother like Arthur!' Her face
softened and quivered as she stood still a moment, sending her
ardent look towards the sunset. 'I think I shall ask him to advise
me.... I don't suppose he will.... How provoking he used to be! but
awfully kind too. He'll think I ought to do what father tells me.
How can I! It's wrong--it's abominable! Everybody despises us. And
Desmond's dying to be off--to get away from it all--like Aubrey. He
hates it so--he almost hates coming home! It's _humiliating_, and
it's not our fault!'

Such cries and thoughts ran through her as she walked impetuously up
and down, in rebellion against her father, unhappy for her girl
friend, and smarting under the coercion put upon her patriotism and
her conscience. For she had only two months before left a school
where the influence of a remarkable head-mistress had been directed
towards awakening in a group of elder girls, to which Pamela
belonged, a vivid consciousness of the perils and sufferings of the
war--of the sacredness of the cause for which England was fighting,
of the glory of England, and the joy and privilege of English
citizenship. In these young creatures the elder woman had kindled a
flame of feeling which, when they parted from her and their school
life--so she told them--was to take practical effect in work for
their country, given with a proud and glad devotion.

But Pamela, leaving school at the end of July for the last time,
after a surfeit of examinations, had been pronounced 'tired out' by
an old aunt, a certain Lady Cassiobury, who came for long periodical
visits to Mannering, and made a show of looking after her
motherless niece. Accordingly she had been packed off to Scotland
for August to stay with a school friend, one of a large family in a
large country house in the Highlands. And there, roaming amid lochs
and heather, with a band of young people, the majority of the men,
of course, in the Army--young officers on short leave, or
temporarily invalided, or boys of eighteen just starting their cadet
training--she had spent a month full of emotions, not often
expressed. For generally she was shy and rather speechless, though
none the less liked by her companions for that. But many things sank
deep with her; the beauty of mountain and stream; the character
of some of the boys she walked and fished with--unnoticed
sub-lieutenants, who had come home to get cured of one wound, and
were going out again to the immediate chance of another, or worse;
the tales of heroism and death of which the Scotch countryside was
full. Her own mood was tuned thereby to an ever higher and more
tragic key. Nobody indeed of the party was the least tragic.
Everybody walked, fished, flirted, and laughed from morning till
night. Yet every newspaper, every post, brought news of some death
that affected one or other of the large group; and amid all the
sheer physical joy of the long days in the open, bathed in sun and
wind, there was a sense in all of them--or almost all of them--that
no summer now is as the summers of the past, that behind and around
the laughter and the picnicking there lay the Shadow that darkens
the world.

One gorgeous evening of gold and purple she was sitting by a
highland stream with a lad of twenty, throwing ducks and drakes into
the water. She was not at all in love with him; but, immature as she
was, she could not help seeing that he was a good deal in love with
her. He had been in uproarious spirits all the afternoon, and then
somehow he had contrived to find this moment alone with her.

'Well, it'll be good-bye to-morrow, or perhaps to-night,' he had
said, as he flung yet another stone into the river, and she clapped
her hands as she counted no less than six skips along the smooth
water.

'And then no leave for a long time?'

'Well, I'd been ten months without any before.'

'Perhaps we'll meet here again--next year.'

'I don't expect it,' he said quietly.

Her startled eyes met his full.

'It'll be worse fighting this winter than last--it'll go on getting
worse till the end. I don't look to coming back.'

His tone was so cheerful and matter-of-fact that it confused her.

'Oh, Basil, don't talk like that!' was all she could find to say.

'Why not? Of course it's better not to talk about it. Nobody does.
But just this afternoon--when it's been so jolly--here with you, I
thought I'd like to say a word. Perhaps you'll remember--'

He threw another stone, and on the moor beyond the stream she heard
the grouse calling.

'Remember what?'

'That I was quite willing,' he said simply. 'That's all. It's worth
it.'

She could say nothing, but presently her hand dropped its pebble and
found its way into his, and he had held it without saying a word for
a little while. Then after dinner, with no good-bye to her, he had
disappeared by the night train to the south.

And that had been the spirit of all of them, those jolly, rampagious
lads, plain or handsome, clever or slow. Two of them were dead
already. But the one who had thrown ducks and drakes was still, so
far as she knew, somewhere in the Ypres salient, unscathed.

And after that she had come home to the atmosphere created by her
father's life and character, in this old house where she was born,
and in the estate round about it. It was as though she had only just
realized--begun to realize--her father's strangeness. His
eccentricities and unpopularity had meant little to her before. Her
own real interests had lain elsewhere; and her mind had been too
slow in developing to let her appreciate his fundamental difference
from other people.

At any rate her father's unpopularity had been lately acute, and
Pamela herself felt it bitterly, and shrank from her neighbours and
the cottage people. When Desmond came home with a D.S.O., or a
Victoria Cross, as of course he would, she supposed it would be all
right. But meanwhile not a single thing done for the war!--not a
_sou_ to the Red Cross, or to any war funds! And hundreds spent on
antiquities--thousands perhaps--getting them deeper and deeper into
debt. For she was quite aware that they were in debt; and her own
allowance was of the smallest. Two hundred and fifty a year, too,
for Miss Bremerton!--when they could barely afford to keep up the
garden decently, or repair the house. She knew it was two hundred
and fifty pounds. Her father was never reticent about such things,
and had named the figure at once.

'Why wasn't Miss Bremerton doing something for the war? _Greek_
indeed! when there was this fearful thing going on!' And in the
evening air, as the girl turned her face towards the moonrise, she
seemed to hear the booming of the Flanders guns.

And now Miss Bremerton was to do the housekeeping, and to play tutor
and chaperon to her. Pamela resented both. If she was not to be
allowed to scrub in a hospital, she might at least have learnt some
housekeeping at home, for future use. As for the Greek lessons, it
was not easy for her to be positively rude to any one, but she
promised herself a good deal of passive resistance on that side. For
if nothing else was possible, she could always sew and knit for the
soldiers. Pamela was not very good at either, but they did something
to lessen the moral thirst in her.

Ah, there was the library door. Miss Bremerton coming out--perhaps
to propose a lesson! Pamela took to flight--noiseless and
rapid--among the bosky corners and walks of the old garden.

Elizabeth emerged, clearly perceiving a gleam of vanishing white in
the far distance. She sighed, but not at all sentimentally. 'It's
silly how she dislikes me,' she thought. 'I wonder what I can do!'

Then her eye was caught by the tea-table still standing out in the
golden dusk, which had now turned damp and chilly. Careless of
Pamela not to have sent it away! Elizabeth examined it. Far too many
cakes--too much sugar, too much butter, too much everything! And all
because the Squire, who seemed to have as great a need of economy as
anybody else, if not more, to judge from what she was beginning to
know about his affairs, was determined to flout the Food
Controller, and public opinion! What about the servants? she
wondered.

Perceiving a little silver bell on the table she rang it and waited.
Within a couple of minutes Forest emerged from the house. Elizabeth
hesitated, then plunged.

'Take away the tea, please, Forest. And--and I should like to
consult you. Do you think anybody wants as much tea and cakes in
war-time?' She pointed to the table.

Forest paused as he was lifting the silver tray, and put it down
again. He looked at the table; then he looked at the lady opposite.

'We servants, Miss, have never been asked what _we_ think. Mr.
Mannering--that's not his way.'

'But I may ask it, mayn't I, Forest?'

Forest's intelligent face flamed.

'Well, if we've really to speak out what we think, Miss--that's Cook
and me--why, of course, the feeding here--well, it's a scandal!
that's what it is. The Master will have it. No change, he says, from
what it used to be. And the waste--well, you ask Cook! _She_ can't
help it!'

'Has she been here long, Forest?'

'Fifteen years.'

'And you?'

'Twenty-two, Miss.'

'Well, Forest,' Miss Bremerton approached him confidingly, 'don't
you think that you, and Cook, and I--you know Mr. Mannering wishes
me to do the housekeeping--well, that between us we could do
something?'

Forest considered it.

'I don't see why not, Miss,' he said at last, with caution. 'You can
reckon on me, that's certain, and on Cook, that's certain too. As
for the young uns, we can get round them! They'll eat what they're
given. But you'll have to go careful with the Squire.'

Miss Bremerton smiled and nodded. They stood colloguing in the
twilight for ten minutes more.




CHAPTER III


'I say, Pamela, who _is_ this female, and why has she descended on
us?'

The speaker was Desmond Mannering. He was sitting on the edge of a
much dilapidated arm-chair in the room which had been the twins'
"den" from their childhood, in which Pamela's governess even, before
the girl's school years, was allowed only on occasional and
precarious footing. Here Pamela dabbed in photography, made
triumphant piles of the socks and mittens she kept from her father's
eye, read history, novels, and poetry, and wrote to her school
friends and the boys she had met in Scotland. Ranged along the
mantelpiece were numbers of snapshots--groups and single
figures--taken by her, with results that showed her no great
performer.

At the moment, however, Pamela was engaged in marking Desmond's
socks. She was very jealous of her sisterly prerogative in the
matter of Desmond's kit, and personal affairs generally. Forest was
the only person she would allow to advise her, and one or two
innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had
produced a good deal of irritation.

Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance.

'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell
Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war
charities.'

'You mean because she costs so much?'

'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily.

'My hat!--and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond
indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash.
There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden.
The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off,
Forest tells me?'

'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather
pinched lips.

'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of
good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.'

'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I
liked.'

'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd
spent eighteen hundred at that sale.'

'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela
fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.'

Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure
in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind
his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a
year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the
mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In
both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as
indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any
suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a
soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way
to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in
a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at
school:

               This grew; I gave commands;
          Then all smiles stopped together.

Had her mother been happy? That her children could never know.

Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared. It was impossible for
him to frown for long on any subject. He was very sorry for 'old
Pam.' His father's opinions and behaviour were too queer for words.
He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like
Pamela. But then he wasn't going to be long at home. He was going
off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him
with a restless and impatient delight. At the same time he was more
tolerant of his father than Pamela was, though he could not have
told why.

'Desmond, give me your foot,' Pamela presently commanded.

The boy bared his foot obediently, and held it out while Pamela
tried on a sock she had just finished knitting on a new pattern.

'I'm not very good at it,' sighed Pamela. 'Are you sure you can wear
them, Dezzy?'

'Wear them? Ripping!' said the boy, surveying his foot at different
angles. 'But you know, Pam, I can't take half the things you want me
to take. What on earth did you get me a Gieve waistcoat for?'

'How do you know you won't be going to Mesopotamia?'

'Well, I don't know; but I don't somehow think it's very likely.
They get their drafts from Egypt, and there's lots of artillery
there.'

Pamela remembered with annoyance that Miss Bremerton had gently
hinted the same thing when the Gieve waistcoat had been unpacked in
her presence. It was true, of course, that she had a brother
fighting under General Maude. That, no doubt, did give her a modest
right to speak.

'How old do you think she is?' said Desmond, nodding in the
direction of the library.

'Well, she's over thirty.'

'She doesn't look it.'

'Oh, Desmond, she does!'

'Let's call her the New Broom--Broomie for short,' said Desmond.
'Look here, Pam, I wish you'd try and like her. I shall have a
dreadful hump when I get to camp if I think she's going to make you
miserable.'

'Oh, I'll try,' said the girl with dreary resignation. 'You know I'm
not to see Beryl again?' She looked up.

Her brother laughed.

'Don't I see you keeping to that! If Aubrey's any good he'll marry
her straight away. And then how can father boycott her after that?'

'He will,' said Pamela decisively.

'And if father thinks I'm going to give up Arthur, he's jolly well
mistaken,' said the boy with energy. 'Arthur's the best fellow I
know, and he's been just ripping to me.'

The young face softened and glowed as though under the stress of
some guarded memory. Pamela, looking up, caught her brother's
expression and glowed too.

'Beryl says he isn't a bit strong yet. But he's moving heaven and
earth to get back to the front.'

'Well, if they don't give him enough to do he'll be pretty sick.
He's no good at loafing.'

There was silence a little. Outside a misty sunshine lay on the
garden and the park and in it the changing trees were beginning to
assume the individuality and separateness of autumn after the
levelling promiscuity of the summer. The scene was very English and
peaceful; and between it and the two young creatures looking out
upon it there were a thousand links of memory and association.
Suddenly Desmond said:

'Do you remember that bother I got into at Eton, Pam?'

Pamela nodded. Didn't she remember it? A long feud with another
boy--ending in a highly organized fight--absolute defiance of tutor
and housemaster on Desmond's part--and threatened expulsion. The
Squire's irritable pride had made him side ostentatiously with his
son, and Pamela could only be miserable and expect the worst. Then
suddenly the whole convulsion had quieted down, and Desmond's last
year at Eton had been a very happy one. Why? What had happened?
Pamela had never known.

'Well, Arthur heard of it from "my tutor." He and Arthur were at
Trinity together. And Arthur came over from Cambridge and had me out
for a walk, and jawed me, jawed "my tutor," jawed the Head, jawed
everybody. Oh, well no good going into the rotten thing,' said
Desmond, flushing, 'but Arthur was awfully decent anyway.'

Pamela assented mutely. She did not want to talk about Arthur
Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She
did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there
was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too
important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news,
which of course might come any day, that he was going to be married.
She had known him from her childhood, had romped and sparred with
him. He was the gayest, most charming companion; yet he carried with
him, quite unconsciously, something that made it delightful to be
smiled at or praised by him, and a distress when you did not get on
with him, and were quite certain that he thought you silly or
selfish. There was a rumour which reached Mannering after the second
battle of Ypres that he had been killed. The Chicksands' household
believed it for twenty-four hours.

Then he was discovered--gassed and stunned--in a shell-hole, and
there had been a long illness and convalescence. During the
twenty-four hours when he was believed to be dead, Pamela had spent
the April daylight in the depths of the Mannering woods, in tangled
hiding-places that only she knew. It was in the Easter holidays. She
was alone at Mannering with an old governess, while her father was
in London. The little wrinkled Frenchwoman watched her in silence,
whenever she was allowed to see her. Then when on the second morning
there came a telegram from Chetworth, and Pamela tore it open,
flying with it before she read it to the secrecy of her own room,
the Frenchwoman smiled and sighed. 'Ca, c'est l'amour!' she said to
herself, 'assurément c'est l'amour!' And when Pamela came down
again, radiant as a young seraph, and ready to kiss the apple-red
cheek of the Frenchwoman--the rarest concession!--Madame Guérin did
not need to be told that Arthur Chicksands was safe and likely to be
sound.

But the Frenchwoman's inference was premature. During the two years
she had been at school, Pamela had thought very little of Arthur
Chicksands. She was absorbed in one of those devotions to a
woman--her schoolmistress--very common among girls of strong
character, and sometimes disastrous. In her case it had worked well.
And now the period of extravagant devotion was over, and the girl's
mind and heart set free. She thought she had forgotten Arthur
Chicksands, and was certain he must have forgotten her. As it
happened they had never met since his return to the front in the
autumn of 1915--Pamela was then seventeen and a schoolgirl--or, as
she now put it, a baby. She remembered the child who had hidden
herself in the woods as something very far away.

And yet she did not want to talk about 'Arthur,' as she had always
called him, and there was a certain tremor and excitement in her
mind about him. The idea of being prevented from seeing him was
absurd--intolerable. She was already devising ways and means of
doing it. It was really not to be expected that filial obedience
should reign at Mannering.

       *       *       *       *       *

The twins had long left the subject of the embargo on Chetworth, and
were wrangling and chaffing over the details of Desmond's packing,
when there was a knock at the door.

Pamela stiffened at once.

'Come in!'

Miss Bremerton entered.

'Are you very busy?'

'Not at all!' said Desmond politely, scurrying with his best Eton
manners to find a chair for the newcomer. 'It's an awful muddle, but
that's Pamela!'

Pamela aimed a sponge-bag at him, which he dodged, and Elizabeth
Bremerton sat down.

'I want to hold a council with you,' she said, turning a face just
touched with laughter from one to the other. 'Do you mind?'

'Certainly not,' said Desmond, sitting on the floor with his hands
round his knees. 'What's it about?' And he gave Pamela's right foot
a nudge with his left by way of conveying to her that he thought her
behaviour ungracious. Pamela hurriedly murmured, 'Delighted.'

'I want to tell you about the servants,' said Elizabeth. 'I can't do
anything unless you help me.'

'Help you in what?' said Desmond, wondering.

'Well, you know, it's simply scandalous what you're all eating in
this house!' exclaimed Elizabeth, with sudden energy. 'You ought to
be fined.' She frowned, and her fair Dutch complexion became a
bright pink.

'It's quite true,' said Pamela, startled. 'I told father, and he
laughed at me.'

'But now even the servants are on strike,' said Elizabeth. 'It's
Forest that's been preaching to them. He and Cook have been drawing
up a week's _menu_, according to the proper scale. But--'

'Father won't have it,' said Pamela decidedly.

'An idea has occurred to me,' was Elizabeth's apologetic reply.
'Your father doesn't come in to lunch?'

'Happy thought!' cried Desmond. 'Send him in a Ritz luncheon, while
the rest of you starve. Easy enough for me to say as I'm off--and
soldiers aren't rationed! We may be as greedy pigs as we like.'

'What do you say?' Elizabeth looked at Pamela. The girl was
flattered by the deference shown her, and gradually threw herself
into the little plot. How to set up a meatless day for the
household, minus the Squire, and not be found out; how to restrict
the bread and porridge allowance, while apparently outrunning
it--knotty problems! into which the twins plunged with much laughter
and ingenuity. At the end of the discussion, Elizabeth said with
hesitation, 'I don't like not telling Mr. Mannering, but--'

'Oh no, you can't tell him' said Pamela, in her most resolute tone.
'Besides, it's for the country!'

'Yes, it's the country!' echoed Elizabeth. 'Oh, I'm so glad you
agree with me. Forest's splendid!'

'I say, Broomie's not bad,' thought Desmond. Aloud he said,
'Forest's a regular Turk in the servants' hall--rules them all with
a rod of iron.'

Elizabeth laughed. 'He tells me there was a joint of cold beef last
night for supper, and he carried it away bodily back into the
larder. And they all supped on fried potatoes, cheese, oatcake and
jam! So then I asked him whether anybody minded, and he said the
little kitchen-maid cried a bit, and said she "was used to her
vittles and her mother would be dreadfully put out." "'_Mother_!'
says I, 'haven't you got _a young man_!' And then I give her a real
talking to about the war. 'You back your young man,' I said, 'and
there's only one way as females can do it--barring them as is in
munitions. Every bit of bread you don't eat is helping to kill
Boches. And what else is your young man doin'? Where do you say he
is? Wipers? You ask him. He'll tell you!' So then we were all nice
and comfortable--and you needn't bother about us downstairs. _We're_
all right!"'

'Good old Forest!' laughed Desmond, delighted. 'I always knew he was
the real boss here. Father thinks he is, but he can't do without
Forest, and the old boy knows it.'

'Well, so that's agreed,' said Elizabeth demurely, as she rose. 'I
naturally couldn't do anything without you, but so long as your
father gets everything that he's accustomed to--'

'I don't see quite what you're going to do about dinner--late
dinner, I mean?' said Pamela pensively.

Elizabeth beamed at her.

'Well, I became a vegetarian last week, except for very occasional
break-outs. Fish is a vegetable!'

'I see,' reflected Pamela. 'We can break out now and then at dinner,
when father's got his eye on us--'

'And be pure patriots at lunch,' laughed Miss Bremerton, as she
opened the door. 'Au revoir! I must go back to work.'

She vanished. The brother and sister looked at each other.

Desmond gave his opinion.

'I believe she's a good sort!'

'"Wait and see,"' said Pamela pompously, and returned to her
packing.

       *       *       *       *       *

The preceding conversation took place during a break in Elizabeth's
morning occupations. She had been busily occupied in collecting and
copying out some references from Pausanias, under the Squire's
direction. He meanwhile had been cataloguing and noting his new
possessions, which, thanks to the aid of his henchman Levasseur, had
been already arranged. And they made indeed a marvellous addition to
the Mannering library and its collections. At the end of the room
stood now a huge archaic Nikê, with outstretched peplum and soaring
wings. To her left was the small figure, archaic also, of a
charioteer, from the excavations at Delphi, amazingly full of life
in spite of hieratic and traditional execution. But the most
conspicuous thing of all was a mutilated Erôs, by a late Rhodian
artist--subtle, thievish, lovely, breathing an evil and daemonic
charm. It stood opposite the Nikê, 'on tiptoe for a flight.' And
there was that in it which seemed at moments to disorganize the
room, and lay violent and exclusive hold on the spectator.

Elizabeth on returning to her table found the library empty. The
Squire had been called away by his agent and one of the new
officials of the county, and had not yet returned. She expected him
to return in a bad--possibly an outrageous temper. For she gathered
that the summons had something to do with the decree of the County
War Agricultural Committee that fifty acres, at least, of Mannering
Park were to be given back to the plough, which, indeed, had only
ceased to possess them some sixty years before. The Squire had gone
out pale with fury, and she looked anxiously at her work, to see
what there might be in it to form an excuse for a hurricane.

She could find nothing, however, likely to displease a sane man. And
as she was at a standstill till he came back, she slipped an
unfinished letter out of her notebook, and went on with it. It was
to a person whom she addressed as 'my darling Dick.'

    'I have now been rather more than a month here. You can't
    imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I
    have struck. There might be no war--as far as Mannering is
    concerned. The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like
    Mrs. Partington. He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the
    _Lanchester Mail_, which attacks the Government, the Army--as
    far as it dare--and "secret diplomacy." It comes out about once
    a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on
    it. Desmond Mannering--that's the gunner-son who came on leave a
    week ago and is just going off to an artillery camp--and I,
    conspire through the butler--who is a dear, and a patriot--to
    get the _Times_; but the Squire never sees it. Desmond reads it
    in bed in the morning, I read it in bed in the evening, and
    Pamela Mannering, Mr. Desmond's twin, comes in last thing, in
    her dressing-gown, and steals it.

    'I seem indeed to be living in the heart of a whirlwind, for the
    Squire is fighting everybody all round, and as he is the least
    reticent of men, and I have to write his letters, I naturally,
    even by now, know a good deal about him. Shortly put, he is in a
    great mess. The estate is riddled with mortgages, which it would
    be quite easy to reduce. For instance, there are masses of
    timber, crying to be cut. He consults me often in the naïvest
    way. You remember that I trained for six months as an
    accountant. I assure you that it comes in extremely useful now!
    I can see my way a little where he can't see it at all. He
    glories in the fact that he was never any good at arithmetic or
    figures of any kind, and never looked at either after "Smalls."
    The estate of course used to be looked after in the good
    old-fashioned way by the family lawyers. But a few years ago
    the Squire quarrelled with these gentlemen, recovered all his
    papers, which no doubt went back to King Alfred, and resolved to
    deal with things himself. There is an office here, and a small
    attorney from Fallerton comes over twice or three times a week.
    But the Squire bosses it. And you never saw anything like his
    accounts! I have been trying to put some of them straight--just
    those that concern the house and garden--after six weeks'
    acquaintance! Odd, isn't it? He is like an irritable child with
    them. And his agent, who is seventy, and bronchitic, is the
    greatest fool I ever saw. He neglects everything. _His_ accounts
    too, as far as I have inspected them, are disgraceful. He does
    nothing for the farmers, and the farmers do exactly as they
    please with the land.

    'Or did! For now comes the rub. Government is interfering,
    through the County Committee. They are turning out three of Mr.
    Mannering's farmers by force, because he won't do it himself,
    and ploughing up the park. I believe the steam tractor comes
    next week. The Squire has been employing some new lawyers to
    find out if he can't stop it somehow. And each time he sees them
    he comes home madder than before.

    'Of course it all comes from a passionate antagonism to the war.
    He is not a pacifist exactly--he is not a conscientious
    objector. He is just an individualist gone mad--an egotistical,
    hot-tempered man, with all the ideas of the old _régime_, who
    thinks he can fight the world. I am often really sorry for
    him--he is so preposterous. But the muddle and waste of it all
    drives me crazy--you know I always was a managing creature.

    'But one thing is certain--that he is a most excellent scholar.
    I knew I had got rusty, but I didn't know how rusty till I came
    to work for him. He has a wonderful memory--seems to know every
    Greek author by heart--and a most delicate and unerring taste. I
    thought I should find a mere dabbler--an amateur. And it takes
    all I know to do the drudgery work he gives me. And then he is
    always coming down upon me. It delights him to find me out in a
    howler--makes him, in fact, quite good-tempered for twenty
    minutes.

    'As to the rest of the family, there is a charming boy and
    girl--twins of nineteen, the boy just off to an artillery camp
    after his cadet training; the girl extremely pretty and
    distinguished, and so far inclined to think me an intruder and a
    nuisance. How to get round her I don't exactly know, but I
    daresay I shall manage it somehow. If she would only set up a
    love-affair I could soon get the whip-hand of her!

    'Then there is the priceless butler, with whom I have already
    made friends. I seem to have a taste for butlers, though I've
    never lived with one. He is fifty-two and a volunteer, in stark
    opposition to the Squire, who jeers at him perpetually. Forest
    takes it calmly, seems even in a queer way to be attached to his
    queer master. But he never misses a drill for anybody or any
    weather, and when he's out, the under-housemaid "buttles" for
    him like a lamb. The fact is, of course, that he's been here for
    twenty years, and the Squire couldn't get on for a day without
    him, or thinks he couldn't. So that his position is, as you may
    say, strongly entrenched, and counter-attacks are useless.

    'The married daughters--Mrs. Gaddesden, who, I think, is an
    Honourable, and Mrs. Strang--are coming to-morrow to see their
    brother before he goes into camp. The Squire doesn't want them
    at all. Ah, there he comes! I'll finish later...'

       *       *       *       *       *

The Squire came in--to use one of the Homeric similes of which he
was so fond--'like a lion fresh from a slain bull, bespattered with
blood and mire.' He had gone out pale, he returned crimson, rubbing
his hands and in great excitement. And it was evident that he had by
now formed the habit of talking freely to his secretary. For he went
up to her at once.

'Well, now they know what to expect!' he said, his eyes glittering,
and all his thick hair on his small peaked head standing up in a
high ridge, like the crest of a battle-helmet.

'Who are "they"?' asked Elizabeth, smiling, as she quietly pushed
her letter a little further under the blotting-paper.

'The County Council idiots--no, the Inspector fellow they're sending
round.'

'And what did you tell him?'

'That I should resist their entry. The gates of the park will be
locked. And my lawyers are already preparing a case for the High
Court. Well--eh!--what?'--the speaker wound up impatiently, as
though waiting for an immediate and applauding response.

Elizabeth was silent. She bent over the Greek book in front of her,
as though looking for her place.

'You didn't think I was going to take it lying down!' asked the
Squire, in a raised voice. Her silence suggested to him afresh all
the odious and tyrannical forces by which he felt himself
surrounded.

Elizabeth turned to him with a cheerful countenance.

'I don't quite understand what "it" means,' she said politely.

'Nonsense, you do!' was the angry reply. 'That's so like a woman.
They always want to catch you out; they never see things simply and
broadly. You'd like to make yourself out a fool--[Greek: nêpia]--and
you're not a fool!'

And with his hands in his pockets he made two or three long strides
up to the Nikê, at the further end of the room, and back, pulling up
beside her again, as though challenging her reply.

'I assure you, sir, I wasn't trying to catch you out,' Elizabeth
began in her gentlest voice.

'Don't call me "sir." I won't have it!' cried the Squire, almost
stamping.

Then Elizabeth laughed outright.

'I'm sorry, but when I was working in the War Trade Department I
always called the head of my room "sir."'

'That's because women _like_ kow-towing--[Greek: doulosunên
anechesthai]!' said the Squire. Then he threw himself into a chair.
'Now let's talk sense a little.'

Elizabeth's attentive look, and lips quivering with amusement which
she tried in vain to suppress, and he was determined not to see,
showed her more than willing.

'I suppose you think--like that fellow I've just routed--that it's
a uestion of food production. It isn't! It's a question of
_liberty_--_versus_ bondage. If we can only survive as slaves, then
wipe us out! That's my view.'

'Wasn't there a bishop once who said he would rather have England
free than sober?' asked Elizabeth.

'And a very sensible man,' growled the Squire, 'though in general
I've no use for bishops. Now you understand, I hope? This is going
to be a test case. I'll make England ring.'

'Are you sure they can't settle it at once, under the Defence of the
Realm Act?'

'Not they!' said the Squire triumphantly. 'Of course, I'm not
putting up a frontal defence. I'm outflanking them. I'm proving that
this is the worst land they could possibly choose. I'm offering them
something else that they don't want. Meanwhile the gates shall be
locked, and if any one or anything breaks them down--my lawyers are
ready--we apply for an injunction at once.'

'And you're not--well, nervous?' asked Miss Bremerton, with a
charming air of presenting something that might have been
overlooked.

'Nervous of what?'

'Isn't the law--the new law--rather dreadfully strong?'

'Oh, you think I shall end in the county gaol?' said the Squire
abruptly. 'Well, of course'--he took a reflective turn up and
down--'I've no particular wish just now for the county gaol. It
would be an infernal nuisance--in the middle of this book. But I
mean to give them as much trouble as I can. I'm all right so far.'

He looked up suddenly, and caught an expression on his secretary's
face which called him to order at once, though he was not meant to
see it. Contempt?--cold contempt? Something like it.

The Squire drew himself up.

'You've made the arrangements, I suppose, for to-morrow?'

He spoke curtly, as the master of the house to a dependent.

Elizabeth meekly replied that she had done everything according to
his directions. Mrs. Gaddesden was to have the South rooms.

'I said the East rooms!'

'But I thought--' Elizabeth began, in consternation.

'You thought wrong,' said the Squire cuttingly. 'Do not trouble
yourself. I will tell Forest'

Elizabeth coloured crimson, and went on with her work. The Squire
rang the bell. But before Forest could answer it, there was a quick
step in the passage, and Desmond came bursting in.

'Pater, I say! it's too fine! You can't frowst all day at this
nonsense. Come out, and let's shoot those roots of Milsom's. He told
me yesterday there were five or six coveys in his big field alone.
Of course everybody's been poaching for all they're worth. But
there's some left. Forest'll get us some sandwiches. He says he'll
come and load for you. His boy and the garden boy'll do for
beaters.'

The Squire stood glumly hesitating, but with his eye on his son.

'Look here,' said Desmond, 'I've only got two days!'

Elizabeth could not help watching the boy--his look at his father,
the physical beauty and perfection of him. The great Victory at the
end of the room with her outstretched wings seemed to be hovering
above him.

'Well, I don't mind,' said the Squire slowly.

Desmond gave a laugh of triumph, twined his arm in that of his
father, and dragged him away.

       *       *       *       *       *

     'DEAR BELOVED DICK--I must just finish this before dinner. Oh,
     how I like to think of you at Baghdad, with trees and shade,
     and civilized quarters again, after all you've gone through.
     Have you got my letters, and those gauze things I sent you for
     the hot weather? They tell me here they're right. But how's one
     to know? Meanwhile, my dear, here are your mother and sister on
     their knees to you, just to be told what you want. Try and want
     something!--there's a dear.

     'Mother's fairly well--I mean as well as we can expect after
     such an illness. My salary here enables me to give her a proper
     trained nurse, and to send Jean to school. As to the rest,
     don't trouble about me, old man. Sometimes I think it was my
     pride more than anything else that was hurt a year ago. Anyway
     I find in myself a tremendous appetite for work. In spite of
     his oddities, Mr. Mannering is a most stimulating critic and
     companion. My work is interesting, and I find myself steeped
     once more in the most fascinating, the most wonderful of all
     literatures! What remains unsatisfied in me is the passion
     which you know I have always had for setting things
     straight--organizing, tidying up! Not to speak of other
     passions--for work directly connected with the war, for
     instance--which have had to be scrapped for a time. I can't
     bear the muddle and waste of this place. It gets on my nerves.
     Perhaps, if I stay, I may get a chance. I have made a small
     beginning--with the food. But I won't bother you with it.

     'Above all, I must try and make friends with the twins.
     Desmond would be easy, but he's going. Pamela will be more
     difficult. However, I shall do my best. As I have already said,
     if she would only set up a flirtation--a nice one--that I could
     aid and abet!

     'What will the married sisters be like? Desmond and Pamela say
     very little. All I know is that Alice--that's Mrs.
     Gaddesden--is to have a fire in her room all day, though the
     weather now is like July. To judge from her photographs, she is
     fair, rather pretty, stout and lethargic. Whereas Margaret is
     as thin almost as her father, and head-over-ears in war
     charities. She lives, says Pamela, on arrowroot and oatcake, to
     set an example, and her servants leave her regularly every
     month.

     'Well, we shall see. I run on like this, because you say you
     like to be gossipped to; and I am just a little lonely
     here--sometimes. Good-night, and good-bye.--Your devoted
     sister,

     'ELIZABETH.'




CHAPTER IV


'Come in!' said Alice Gaddesden in a languid tone. From the knock,
sharp and loud, on her bedroom door, she guessed that it was her
sister Margaret who wished to see her. She did not wish, however, to
see Margaret at all. Margaret, who was slightly the elder, tired and
coerced her. But she had no choice.

Mrs. Strang entered briskly.

'My dear Alice! what a time of day to be in bed! Are you really
ill?'

Mrs. Gaddesden grew red with annoyance.

'I thought I had told you, Margaret, that Dr. Crother advised me
more than a year ago not to come down till the middle of the
morning. It rests my heart.'

Mrs. Strang, who had come up to the bedside, looked down upon her
sister with amused eyes. She herself was curiously like the Squire,
even as to her hair, which was thick and fair, and already
whitening, though she was not yet thirty. Human thinness could
hardly have been carried further than she and the Squire achieved
it. She had her father's nose also. But the rest of her features
were delicately regular, and her quick blue eyes were those of a
woman who told no falsehoods herself, and had little patience with
other people's.

'My dear Alice, why do you believe doctors? They always tell you
what you want to hear. I am sure you told Dr. Crother exactly what
to say,' said Margaret, laughing, as she placed a chair by the
bedside.

'Oh, of course I know you think everybody's a sham who isn't as
strong as yourself!' said Mrs. Gaddesden, sinking back on her
pillows with a soft sigh of resignation. 'Though I think you _might_
have remembered the horribly hard work I've been doing lately.'

'Have you?' Mrs. Strang wrinkled her brow, as though in an effort to
recollect. 'Oh, yes, I know. I have always been getting notices
lately with your name on them, at the end of a long tail beginning
with a Duchess, and stuffed with Countesses. And I always
think--there's Alice doing the work, and the Countesses getting the
glory. Do you really do the work?'

And Margaret, who did not often see her sister, and was of a
genuinely inquiring turn of mind, turned upon her a penetrating
look.

'Well, of course,' said Mrs. Gaddesden, a little confused, 'there
are always the secretaries.'

'Ah-ha!' Mrs. Strang laughed--one might almost say crowed. 'Yes,
indeed, if it weren't for the secretaries! By the way, what do you
think about the specimen here?'

Mrs. Gaddesden lost her languid air at once. She sat up among her
pillows, a reasonably pretty woman, not without some likeness to
Pamela, in points that did not matter.

'My dear Margaret,' she said, with emphasis, 'this has got to be
watched!--_watched_, I tell you.'

Mrs. Strang opened her eyes wide.

'What on earth do you mean?'

Alice Gaddesden smiled.

'Well, of course, you're much cleverer than I am, but I really do
see further in practical matters than you do. Haven't you noticed,'
she bent forward, looking mysterious and intent, 'how _already_
father depends upon her, how she's beginning to run the whole
show--and she hasn't been here much more than six weeks? My dear
Margaret, with a secretary like that you _never_ can tell!'

'Well,' said Mrs. Strang coolly, 'and what then?'

'Oh, well, of course, if you're prepared to see a person like
that--in our mother's place!'

'"A person like that"--how dreadfully old-fashioned you are, Alice!
She's a lady; she's much more highly educated than you or I, and if
she gets her way, she'll perhaps keep father out of some of the
scrapes he seems bent on. You know this business of the park is
perfectly mad!'

For the first time in this conversation Margaret Strang's face was
grave. And when it was grave, some people would have called it fine.

'And just think what it'll cost,' said Mrs. Gaddesden despondently,
'even if he had a case--which he probably hasn't--and if he were to
win it. There'll be no money left for Aubrey or any of us soon.'

'But of course he hasn't a case, and of course he can't win!' cried
Margaret Strang. 'It's not that I care about--or the money--it's the
disgrace!'

'Yes,' murmured Alice doubtfully.

'When you think--'

Mrs. Strang paused; her bright blue eyes, alive with thoughts, were
fixed absently on her sister. She seemed to see a number of shabby
streets, where she was accustomed to work, with little shabby shops,
and placards on them--'No butter,' 'No milk,' and apples marked 4d.
each.

'Think what?' said Alice.

Mrs. Strang's mind returned to Alice, and Alice's very elaborate and
becoming _negligée_.

'Only that, in my opinion, it's the duty of every landowner to
produce every ounce of food he can, and to do what he's told! And
father not only sets a shocking example, but he picks this absurd
quarrel with the Chicksands. What on earth is Aubrey to do? Or poor
Beryl?'

'Well, he comes to-night,' said Alice, 'so I suppose we shall hear.
I can't make Aubrey out,' she added reflectively.

'Nobody can. I was talking to a brother-officer of his last week, a
man who's awfully fond of him. He told me Aubrey did his work very
well. He was complimented by Headquarters on his School only last
month. But he's like an automaton. Nobody really knows him, nobody
gets any forwarder with him. He hardly speaks to anybody except on
business. The mess regard him as a wet blanket, and his men don't
care about him, though he's a capital officer. Isn't it strange,
when one thinks of what Aubrey used to be five years ago?'

Alice agreed. Perhaps he was still suffering from the effects of his
wound in 1915.

'Anyway he can't give Beryl up,' said Margaret with energy, 'if he's
a man of honour!'

Alice shrugged her shoulders.

'Then he'll give up the estate, according to father.'

'Desmond would give it back to him, if there's anything left of it,
or if he wants it.'

'Margaret!'

'You think I don't care about the family--that there should always
be a Mannering of Mannering? Yes, I do care, but there are so many
other things now to care about,' added Mrs. Strang slowly.

'Who's making me late now?' said Alice, looking at her watch.

Margaret took the hint and departed.

       *       *       *       *       *

That same evening, in the September dusk, a dog-cart arrived at the
Hall, bringing Major Mannering and a Gladstone bag.

Pamela and Desmond rushed out to meet him. Their elder sisters were
dressing for dinner, and the Squire was in the library with
Elizabeth. The twins dragged the newcomer into their own den, and
shut the door upon him. There Desmond gave him a breathless survey
of the situation, while Pamela sat on a stool at his feet, and put
in explanatory words at intervals. Their father's extraordinary
preparations for waging war against the County Committee; his
violence on the subject of the Chicksands; Beryl's despairing
letters to Pamela; a letter from Arthur Chicksands to Desmond,--all
these various items were poured out on the newcomer, with an
eagerness and heat which showed the extreme interest which the twins
took in the situation.

Meanwhile Aubrey Mannering sat listening almost in silence. He was a
delicately built, distinguished-looking man, who carried a large
scar on his forehead, and had lost a finger of the left hand. The
ribbons on his breast showed that he was both an M.C. and a
D.S.O.--distinctions won at the second battle of Ypres and on the
Somme. While the twins talked, his eyes travelled from one to the
other, attentive, but curiously aloof.

He was saying to himself that Pamela was extremely pretty, and
Desmond a splendid fellow. Then--in a moment--while he looked at his
young brother, a vision, insistent, terrible, passed ghost-like
between him and the boy. Again and again he tried to shake it off,
and again and again it interposed.

'Oh, Aubrey, what will you do?' said Pamela despairingly, leaning
her head against her brother's knee.

Her voice recalled him. He laid his hand upon her beautiful hair.

'Well, dear, there's only one thing, of course, for me to do--to
stick to Beryl and let father do his worst.'

'Hurrah!' said Desmond. 'That's all right. And of course you know,
Aubrey, that if father tries any hankey-pankey with the estate, and
leaves it to me, I shall give it back to you next day.'

Aubrey smiled. 'Father'll live another twenty years, old man. Will
there be any England then, or any law, or any estates to leave?'

The twins looked at him in amazement. Again he recovered himself
quickly.

'I only meant that, in times like these, it's no good planning
anything twenty years ahead. We've got to win the war, haven't
we?--that's the first thing. Well, now, I must go and clean up.
Who's here?'

'Alice and Margaret,' said Pamela. 'And father's new secretary.'

'You never told me about him,' said Aubrey indifferently, as he
rose.

'"Him" indeed!' laughed Desmond. 'Nothing of the sort!'

Aubrey turned a puzzled look upon him.

'What! a lady?'

Desmond grinned.

'First Class in Mods, and an awful swell. Father can't let her out
of his sight. Says he never had anybody so good.'

'And she'll end by bossing us all,' put in Pamela. 'She's begun it
already. Now you really must go and dress.'

       *       *       *       *       *

When the eldest son of the house entered the drawing-room, he found
everybody gathered there but his father and the Rector, who was
coming to dine. He was at once seized on by his married sisters, who
saw him very rarely. Then Pamela led him up to a tall lady in pale
blue.

'My eldest brother--Miss Bremerton.'

He looked at her with curiosity, and was glad when, after the
arrival of his father and the Rector, it fell to him to take the new
secretary in to dinner. His father's greeting to him had been
decidedly cool--the greeting of a man who sees a fight impending and
wishes to give away nothing to his opponent. In fact the two men had
never been on really cordial terms since August 1914, when Aubrey
had thrown up his post in the Foreign Office to apply for one of the
first temporary commissions in the New Army. The news came at a
moment when the Squire was smarting under the breakdown of a
long-cherished scheme of exploration in the Greek islands, which was
to have been realized that very autumn--a scheme towards which his
whole narrow impetuous mind had been turned for years. No more
Hellenic or Asia Minor excavations! no more cosmopolitan
_Wissenschaft_! On that fatal August 4 a whole world went down
submerged beneath the waves of war, and the Squire cared for no
other. His personal chagrin showed itself in abuse of the bungling
diplomats and 'swashbuckler' politicians who, according to him, had
brought us into war. So that when Aubrey applied for a commission,
the Squire, mainly to relieve his own general irritation, had
quarrelled with him for some months, and was only outwardly
reconciled when his son came home invalided in 1915.

During the summer of 1917, Aubrey, after spending three days' leave
at Mannering, had gone on to stay at Chetworth with the Chicksands
for a week. The result of that visit was a letter to his father in
which he announced his engagement to Beryl. The Squire could make
then no open opposition, since he was still on friendly terms with
Sir Henry, who had indeed done him more than one good turn. But in
reply to his son's letter, he stood entirely on the defensive, lest
any claim should be made upon him which might further interfere with
the passion of his life. He was not, he said, in a position to
increase Aubrey's allowance--the Government robbers had seen to
that--and unless Beryl was prepared to be a poor man's wife he
advised them to wait till after the war. Then Sir Henry had ridden
over to Mannering with a statement of what he was prepared to do for
his daughter, and the Squire had given ungracious consent to a
marriage in the spring. Chicksands knew his man too well to take
offence at the Squire's manners, and Beryl was for a time too
timidly and blissfully happy to be troubled by them.

'You have been here a few weeks,' said the newcomer to Elizabeth,
when the party had settled down at table.

'About six weeks. It seems longer!' smiled Elizabeth.

'You are doing some work for my father?'

Elizabeth explained herself. Major Mannering listened attentively.

'So what you do for him is literary--and historical?'

'Oh no--I do accounts, and write letters too.'

'Accounts? I thought there was a housekeeper?'

'She went a month ago to the W.A.A.C.'s. Please!--do you mind?' And
to his amazement, as he was putting out his hand automatically to a
piece of bread lying on his left, Miss Bremerton's hand holding a
fork neatly intercepted him, and moved the bread away.

'It's our "Self-denying Ordinance,"' explained the lady, colouring a
little. 'The bread appears because--because your father doesn't
think rations necessary. But no one touches it, and Forest collects
it afterwards--for breakfast.'

A smile broke on Aubrey's grave and pensive face.

'I see. Mayn't I really have any?'

Elizabeth hesitated.

'Well, perhaps, as a guest, and a soldier. Yes, I think you may.'
And she would have restored her prey had not her neighbour stopped
her.

'Not at all. As a soldier I obey orders. My hat! how you've drilled
them all!' For, looking round the table, he saw that not a single
guest had touched the bread lying to their left.

'That's Pamela and Mr. Desmond! They've given everybody a _menu_ for
three days.'

'Good heavens--not my father!'

'Oh no, _no_! We don't think he suspects anything, and he has
everything he likes.'

'And my married sisters?' Elizabeth hesitated again.

'Well, Mrs. Gaddesden is rather afraid of being starved. Mrs.
Strang, on the other hand, thinks we're wickedly extravagant!'

Her neighbour was so much amused that conversation flowed on easily
thenceforward; and Desmond opposite whispered to Pamela:

'Just look at Broomie! She's actually making Aubrey talk.'

The Major's rôle, however, was on the whole that of listener. For
Elizabeth meant to talk--meant to explain herself to the son and
heir, and, if she could, to drive him to an interest in the family
affairs. To her trained, practical mind the whole clan seemed by now
criminally careless and happy-go-lucky. The gardens were neglected;
so was the house; so was the estate. The gardens ought to have been
made self-supporting; there were at least a third too many servants
in the house; and as for the estate, instead of being a
profit-making and food-producing concern, as it should have been, it
was a bye-word for bad management and neglected land. She did not
pretend to know much about it yet; but what she did know roused her.
England was at grips with a brutal foe. The only weapon that could
defeat her was famine--the sloth and waste of her own sons. This
woman, able, energetic, a lover of her country, could not conceal
her scorn for such a fatal incompetence. Naturally, in talking to
the eldest son, she made the agent her scapegoat for the sins of the
owner. The Squire's responsibility was carefully masked. But Aubrey
Mannering perfectly understood what she would be at. She was a
clever woman who wanted things improved. Well, let her improve
them. It did not matter to him.

But she appeared to him as a somewhat special type of the modern
woman, with her advanced education and her clear brain; and for a
time he observed her curiously. The graceful dress, pale blue with
touches of black, which exactly became her fair skin, the bright
gold of her hair, and the pleasant homeliness of her face--her
general aspect indeed--attracted him greatly. She might know Greek;
at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she
incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a
background of bright pots and pans, mopping tiled floors.

But presently he ceased to pay much attention to her. His dreamy
sense became aware of the scene as a whole; the long table; his
father's fantastic figure at the head of it; Alice Gaddesden
elaborately dressed and much made up on the one side, his sister
Margaret in a high black gown, erect and honest, on the other;
Desmond and Pamela together, chatting and chaffing with the Rector.
It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the
family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain
great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck
school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the
beautiful Hogarth head--their best possession--that was so like
Pamela. The furniture of the room was of many different
dates--incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly. The Mannerings of
the past had not been an artistic lot.

Nor had the room--the house indeed--many tender associations for
him. His childhood had not been very happy. He had never got on with
his father, and his mother, who had been the victim of various long
illnesses during his boyhood, had never, unluckily, meant much to
him. He knew that he was of a very old stock, which had played a
long and considerable part in the world; but the fact brought him no
thrill. 'That kind of thing is played out,' he thought. Let his
father disinherit him--he was quite indifferent.

Then, as he fell silent beside his father's new secretary, the table
vanished. He saw instead the wide Picardy flats, a group of poplars,
a distant wood, and in front a certain hollow strewn with dead and
dying men--one figure, in front of the rest, lying face downwards.
The queer twisted forms, the blasted trees, the inexorable
horror--the whole vision swept over him again, as it had done in the
schoolroom. His nerves shrank and trembled under it.

Beryl--poor little Beryl! What a wretch he had been to propose to
her--in a moment of moral and physical weakness, when it had seemed
a simple thing to accept her affection and to pledge his own! But if
she stood by him, he must stand by her. And he had had the kindest
letter from Sir Henry, and some sweet tremulous words from her.
Suppose she offered to release him? His heart leapt guiltily at the
thought. What, indeed, had a man so haunted and paralysed to give to
a girl like Beryl? It was an outrage--it ought to cease.

But as to his father, that was simple enough.

The Squire and his eldest son retreated to the library after dinner,
and all the rest of the party waited uneasily to see what would
happen. Elizabeth did her best to keep things going. It might have
been noticed--it was noticed by at least two of the persons
present--that quite unobtrusively, she was already the mistress of
the house. She found a stool and a fire-screen for Mrs. Gaddesden;
she held some wool for Mrs. Strang to wind; and a backgammon board
was made ready for the Squire, in case he returned.

But he did not return. Aubrey came back alone, and found them all
hanging on his entrance. Pamela put down her knitting and looked at
him anxiously; so did the elder sisters. He went up absently to the
chimney-piece, and stood leaning against it.

'Well?' said Pamela in a low voice, as she came to sit on a stool
near him.

He smiled, but she saw that he was pale.

'Can you take me over to Chetworth to-morrow--early--in the
pony-cart?'

'Yes, certainly.'

'Half-past ten?'

'Right you are.'

No more was said. Aubrey turned at once to Alice Gaddesden and
proposed a round game. He played it with much more spirit than
usual, and Desmond's antics in 'Animal Grab' put all serious notions
to flight.

But when the game was over, and Forest brought in the candles,
Margaret tried to get some information.

'You found the father reasonable?' she said to her brother in an
undertone, as they stood together by the fire.

'Oh, yes,' was the indifferent answer, 'from his own point of view.'

And when he had lit their candles for his sisters, he excused
himself at once on the ground of being dog-tired after a long day.
The door closed upon him.

The family gathered together in a group, while the Rector and
Elizabeth talked about the village at the further end of the room.

'They've quarrelled!' said Margaret decisively.

Alice Gaddesden, because it was Margaret's opinion, disagreed. There
was nothing to show it, she said. Aubrey had been quite calm.
Desmond broke out, 'Did you ever see Aubrey anything else?' Pamela
said nothing, but she slipped out to tell Forest about the
pony-cart.

Meanwhile the Rector had looked at his watch, and came up to take
his leave.

'Has the Squire gone to bed?' he said cheerfully. 'I daresay. He
works so hard. Give him my fare-wells.'

And he went off, quite aware, both from his knowledge of the family
and of the Squire's recent actions, that there were storms brewing
in the old house, but on the whole thinking more of the new
secretary than of his old friends. A charming woman!--most capable!
For the first time he might get some attention paid to the village
people. That child with the shocking bow-legs. Poor little Pamela
had tried to do her best. But this woman would see to it; she knew
how to get things done.

Meanwhile, as the rest of the party dispersed, Forest brought a
message to Elizabeth. 'The Squire would be glad if you would spare
him a few minutes, Miss, in the library. He won't keep you long.'

Elizabeth went unwillingly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The library was in darkness, except for one small lamp at the
further end, and the Squire was walking up and down. He stopped
abruptly as he saw his secretary.

'I won't keep you, Miss Bremerton, but do you happen to know at all
where my will is?'

'Your will, Mr. Mannering?' said Elizabeth in amazement. 'No,
indeed! I have never seen it.'

'Well, it's somewhere here,' said the Squire impatiently. 'I should
have thought in all your rummagings lately you must have come across
it. I took it away from those robbers, my old solicitors, and I
wasn't going to give it to the new man--don't trust him particularly
not to talk. So I locked it up here--somewhere. And I can't find
it.' And he began restlessly to open drawer after drawer, which
already contained piles of letters and documents, neatly and
systematically arranged, with the proper dockets and sub-headings,
by Elizabeth.

'Oh, it can't be there!' cried Elizabeth. 'I know everything in
those drawers. Surely it must be in the office?' By which she meant
the small and hideously untidy room on the ground floor into which
masses of papers of all dates, still unsorted, had been carted down
from London.

'It isn't in the office!' He was, she saw, on the brink of an
outburst. 'I put it somewhere in this room my own self! And I should
have thought by now you knew the geography of this place as well as
I do!'

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. The big room indeed
was still full to her of unexplored territory, with _caches_ of all
kinds in it, new and ancient, waiting to be discovered. She looked
round her in perplexity, not knowing where to begin. A large part of
the room was walled with glass cases, holding vases, bronzes, and
other small antiquities, down to about a yard from the floor, and
the space below being filled by cupboards and drawers. Elizabeth
made a vague movement towards a particular set of cupboards which
she knew she had not yet touched, but the Squire irritably stopped
her.

'It's certainly not there. That bit of the room hasn't been
disturbed since the Flood! Now those drawers'--he pointed--'might be
worth looking at.'

She hurried towards them. But the Squire, instead of helping her in
her search, resumed his walk up and down, muttering to himself. As
for her, she was on the verge of laughter, the laughter that comes
from nerves and fatigue; for she had had a long day's work and was
really tired. The first drawer she opened was packed with papers, a
few arranged in something like order by her predecessor, the London
University B.A., but the greater part of them in confusion. They
mostly related to a violent controversy between the Squire and
various archæological experts with regard to some finds in the Troad
a year or two before the war, in which the Squire had only just
escaped a serious libel suit, whereof indeed all the preliminaries
were in the drawer.

On the very top of the drawer, however, was a conveyance of a small
outlying portion of the Mannering estate, which the Squire had sold
to a neighbour only a year before this date. Hopeless! If that was
there, anything might be anywhere!

Was she to spend the night searching for the needle in this bottle
of hay? Elizabeth's face began to twitch with uncomfortable
merriment. Should she go and knock up the housekeeper and instal her
as chaperon, or take a stand, and insist on going to bed like a
reasonable woman?

She hunted through three drawers. The Squire meanwhile paced
incessantly, sometimes muttering to himself. Every time he came
within the circle of lamplight his face was visible to Elizabeth,
wrinkled and set, with angry eyes; and she saw him as a person
possessed by a stubborn demon of self-will. Once, as he passed her,
she heard him say to himself, 'Of course I can write another at
once--half a sheet will do.'

She replaced the third drawer. Was the Squire to have a monopoly of
stubbornness? She thought not. Waves of indefinite but strong
indignation were beginning to sweep through her. Why was the Squire
hunting for his will? What had he been saying to his son--his son
who bore on his breast and on his body the marks of his country's
service?

She rose to her feet.

'I can't find anything, Mr. Mannering. And I think, if you will
allow me, I will go to bed.'

He looked at her darkly.

'I see. You are a person who stickles for your hours--you won't do
anything extra for me.' There was a sneer in his tone.

Elizabeth felt her cheeks suddenly burn. In the dim light she looked
amazingly tall, as she stood straightened to her full height,
confronting this man who really seemed to her to be only half sane.

'I think I have done a great deal for you, Mr. Mannering. But if you
don't think so we had better end my engagement!'

His countenance changed at once. He eagerly apologized. He was
perfectly aware of her extraordinary merits, and should be entirely
lost without her help. The fact was he had had a painful scene, and
was overdone.

Elizabeth received his explanation very coldly, only repeating, 'May
I go to bed?'

The Squire drew his hand across his eyes.

'It is not very late--not yet eleven.' He pointed to the grandfather
clock opposite. 'If you will only wait while I write something?'--he
pointed to a chair. 'Just take a book there, and give me a quarter
of an hour, no more--I want your signature, that's all. We won't
look any further for the will. I can do all I want by a fresh
document. I have been thinking it over, and can write it in ten
minutes. I know as much about it as the lawyers--more. Now do oblige
me. I am ashamed of my discourtesy. I need not say that I regard you
as indispensable--and--I think I have been able to do something for
your Greek.'

He smiled--a smile that was like a foam-flake on a stormy sea. But
he could put on the grand manner when he chose, and Elizabeth was to
some extent propitiated. After all he and his ways were no longer
strange to her. Very unwillingly she seated herself again, and he
went rapidly to his writing-table.

Then silence fell, except for the scratching of the Squire's pen.
Elizabeth sat pretending to read, but in truth becoming every moment
the prey of increasing disquiet. What was he going to ask her to
sign? She knew nothing of his threat to his eldest son--nothing,
that is, clear or direct, either from himself or from the others;
but she guessed a good deal. It was impossible to live even for a
few weeks in close contact with the Squire without guessing at most
things.

In the silence she became aware of the soft autumn wind--October
had just begun--playing with a blind on a distant window. And
through the window came another sound--Desmond and Pamela, no doubt,
still laughing and talking in the schoolroom.

The Squire rose from his seat.

'I shall be much obliged,' he said formally, 'if you will kindly
come here. We shall want another witness, of course. I will call
Forest.'

Elizabeth approached, but paused a yard or two from him. He saw her
in the light--her gold hair and brilliant dress illuminated against
the dark and splendid background of the Nikê in shadow.

She spoke with hesitation.

'I confess I should like to know, Mr. Mannering, what it is you are
asking me to sign.'

'That doesn't matter to a witness. It is nothing which will in any
way compromise you.'

'No--but'--she drew herself up--'I should blame myself if I made it
easier for you to do something you would afterwards regret.'

'What do you mean?'

She summoned all her courage.

'Of course I must know something. You have not kept your affairs
very secret. I guess that you are angry with your son, with Major
Mannering. If this thing you ask me to sign is to hurt--to injure
him--if it is--well, then--I refuse to sign it!'

And with a sudden movement she threw both her hands behind her back
and clasped them there.

'You refuse?'

'If you admit my description of that paper.' She motioned towards it
as it lay on the writing-table.

'I have no objection whatever to your knowing what it is--as you
seem determined to know,' he said sarcastically. 'It is a codicil
revoking my will in favour of my eldest son, and leaving all the
property of which I die possessed, and which is in my power to
bequeath, to my younger son Desmond. What have you to do with that?
What possible responsibility can you have?'

Elizabeth wavered, but held her ground, though in evident distress.

'Only that--if I don't sign it--you would have time to consider it
again. Mr. Mannering--isn't it--isn't it--very unjust?'

The Squire laughed.

'How do you know that in refusing you are not unjust to Desmond?'

'Oh no!' she said fervently. 'Mr. Desmond would never wish to
supplant his brother--and for such a reason. And especially--' she
paused.

There were tears rising in her throat.

'Especially--what? Upon my word, you claim a rather remarkable
knowledge of my family--in six weeks!'

'I do know something of Desmond!' Her voice showed her agitation.
'He is the dearest, the most generous boy. In a few months he will
be going out--he will be saying good-bye to you all.'

'And then?'

'Is this a time to make him unhappy--to send him out with something
on his mind?--something that might even--'

'Well, go on!'

'Might even make him wish'--her voice dropped--'not to come back.'

There was silence. Then the Squire violently threw down the pen he
was holding on the table beside him.

'Thank you, Miss Bremerton. That will do. I bid you good-night!'

Elizabeth did not wait to be told twice. She turned and fled down
the whole length of the library. The door at the further end closed
upon her.

'A masterful young woman!' said the Squire after a moment, drawing a
long breath. Then he took up the codicil, thrust it into a drawer of
his writing-table, lit a cigarette, and walked up and down smoking
it. After which he went to bed and slept remarkably well.

Elizabeth cried herself to sleep. No comforting sprite whispered to
her that she had won the first round in an arduous campaign. On the
contrary, she fully expected dismissal on the morrow.




CHAPTER V


It was a misty but warm October day, and a pleasant veiled light lay
on the pillared front of Chetworth House, designed in the best taste
of a fastidious school. The surroundings of the house, too, were as
perfect as those of Mannering were slatternly and neglected. All the
young men had long since gone from the gardens, but the old
labourers and the girls in overalls who had taken their places,
under the eye of a white-haired gardener, had been wonderfully
efficient so far. Sir Henry supposed he ought to have let the lawns
stand for hay, and the hedges go unclipped; but as a matter of fact
the lawns had never been smoother, or the creepers and yew hedges
more beautifully in order, so that even the greatest patriot fails
somewhere.

Beryl Chicksands was walking along a stone-flagged path under a yew
hedge, from which she commanded the drive and a bit of the road
outside. Every now and then she stopped to peer into the sunlit haze
that marked the lower slopes of the park, and the delicate hand that
shaded her eyes shook a little.

Aubrey was coming--and she was going seriously to offer to give him
up--to try to persuade him indeed to break it off. Since her first
agitated letter to him begging him not to think of her, but to
decide only what was best for his own future, she had received a few
words from him.

     'DEAREST BERYL--Nothing has happened to interfere with what we
     promised each other last summer--nothing at all! My poor father
     seems to be half out of his mind under the stress of war. If he
     does what he threatens, it will matter very little to me; but
     of course _you_ must consider it carefully, for I shall have
     uncommonly little in the worldly way to offer you. Your father
     has written very kindly, and your dear little note is just like
     you. But you must consider.

     'I sometimes doubt whether my father _will_ do what he
     threatens, but we should have to take the risk. Anyway we shall
     meet directly, and I am always, and unalterably, your devoted

     'AUBREY.'

That had been followed by a boyish note from Desmond--dear, jolly
fellow!

     'My father's clean daft! Don't bother, my dear Beryl. If he
     tries to leave me this funny old place, instead of Aubrey,
     well, there are two can play at that game. I wouldn't touch it
     with a barge-pole. You and A. have only got to stick it a
     little, and it'll be all right.

     'I've given him a bit of my mind about the park and the farm.
     He stands it from me and only chaffs. That's because he always
     treats me like a baby.

     'Very sorry I can't come on Tuesday with Aubrey, but there's
     some good-bye calls I must pay. Hope Arthur will be about. I
     want awfully to see him. Hard luck his being hit like that,
     after all the rest. Snipers are beasts!

     '_P.S._--You can't think what a brainy young woman father's got
     for his new secretary. And she's not half bad either. Pamela's
     rather silly about her, but she'll come round.'

Beryl paid small attention to the postscript. She had heard a good
deal from Pamela about the newcomer, but it did not concern her. As
to the business aspect of the Squire's behaviour, Beryl was well
aware that she was an heiress. Aubrey would lose nothing financially
by giving up the Mannering estate to marry her. Personally she cared
nothing about Mannering, and she had enough for both. But still
there was the old name and place. How much did he care about it? how
much would he regret it? Supposing his extraordinary father really
cut him off?

Beryl felt she did not know. And therewith came the recurrent
pang--how little she really knew about the man to whom she was
engaged! She adored him. Every fibre in her slight sensitive body
still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first
felt his arm about her. But since--how often there had been moments
when she had been conscious of a great distance between them--of
something that did not fit--that jarred!

For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen
when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in
the world. On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye
to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her
mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing
unexpectedly much of the people about her. Then when he was badly
wounded in some fighting near Festubert, in May 1915, and came home
for two months' leave, he seemed like a stranger, and Beryl had not
known what to be at with him. She was told that he had suffered
very much--it had been a severe thigh wound implicating the sciatic
nerve--and that he had been once, at least, very near to death. But
when she tried to express sympathy with what he had gone through, or
timidly to question him about it, her courage fled, her voice died
in her throat. There was something unapproachable in her old
playfellow, something that held her, and indeed every one else, at
bay.

He was always courteous, and mostly cheerful. But his face in repose
had an absent, haunted look, the eyes alert but fixed on vacancy,
the brow overcast and frowning. In the old days Aubrey's smile had
been his best natural gift. To win a smile from him in her
childhood, Beryl would have done anything--have gone on her knees up
the drive, or offered up the only doll she cared for, or gone
without jam for a week. Now when he came home invalided, she had the
same craving; but what she craved for came her way very rarely. He
would laugh and talk with her as with other people. But that
exquisite brightness of eye and lip, which seemed to be for one
person only, and, when it came, to lift that person to the seventh
heaven, she waited for in vain.

Then he went back to France, and in due course came the Somme.
Aubrey Mannering went through the whole five months without a
scratch. He came back with a D.S.O. and a Staff appointment for a
short Christmas leave, everybody, except his father, turning out to
welcome him as the local hero. Then, for a time, he went to
Aldershot as the head of an Officers' School there, and was able to
come down occasionally to Chetworth or Mannering.

During that first Christmas leave he paid several visits to
Chetworth, and evidently felt at home there. To Lady Chicksands,
whom most people regarded as a tiresome nonentity, he was
particularly kind and courteous. It seemed to give him positive
pleasure to listen to her garrulous housekeeping talk, or to hold
her wool for her while she wound it. And as she, poor lady, was not
accustomed to such attention from brilliant young men, his three
days' visit was to her a red-letter time. With Sir Henry also he was
on excellent terms, and made just as good a listener to the details
of country business as to Lady Chicksands' domestic tales.

And yet to Beryl he was in some ways more of a riddle than ever. He
talked curiously little about the war--at least to her. He had a way
of finding out, both at Chicksands and Mannering, men who had lost
sons in France, and when he and Beryl took a walk, it seemed to
Beryl as though they were constantly followed by friendly furtive
looks from old labourers who passed them on the road, and nodded as
they went by. But when the daily war news was being discussed he had
a way of sitting quite silent, unless his opinion was definitely
asked. When it was, he would answer, generally in a rather
pessimistic spirit, and escape the conversation as soon as he could.
And the one thing that roused him and put him out of temper was the
easy complacent talk of people who were sure of speedy victory and
talked of 'knock-out' blows.

Then six months later, after the capture of the Messines Ridge, in
which he took part, he reappeared, and finding his father,
apparently, almost intolerable, and Pamela and Desmond away, he
migrated to Chetworth. And there he and Beryl were constantly
thrown together. He never talked to her with much intimacy; he
certainly never made love to her. But suddenly she became aware that
she had grown very necessary to him, that he missed her when she was
away, that his eyes lit up when she came back. A special relation
was growing up between them. Her father perceived it; so did her
brother Arthur; and they had both done their best to help it on.
They were both very fond of Aubrey; and nothing could be more
natural than that she should marry one who had been her neighbour
and playmate from childhood.

The thing drifted on, and one day, in the depths of a summer
beechwood, some look in the girl's eyes, some note of tremulous and
passionate sweetness, beyond her control, in her deep quiet voice,
touched something irrepressible in him, and he turned to her with a
face of intense, almost hungry yearning, and caught her
hands--'Dear--dearest Beryl, could you--?'

The words broke off, but her eyes spoke in reply to his, and her
sudden whiteness. He drew her to him, and folded her close.

'I don't think I ought'--the faltering, broken voice startled
her--'I don't know whether I can make you happy. Dear, dear little
Beryl!'

At that she put up her mouth instinctively, only to shrink back
under the energy of his kiss. Then they had walked on together, hand
in hand; but she remembered that, even before they left the wood,
something seemed to have dimmed the extraordinary bliss of the first
moment--some restlessness in him--some touch of absent-mindedness,
as though he grudged himself his own happiness.

And so it had been ever since. He had resumed his work at
Aldershot, and owing to certain consequences of the wound in 1915
was not likely, in spite of desperate efforts on his own part, to be
sent back to the front. His letters varied just as his presence did.
Something always seemed to be kept back from her--was always beyond
her reach. Sometimes she supposed she was not clever enough, that he
found her inadequate and irresponsive. Sometimes, with a sudden,
half-guilty sense of disloyalty to him, she vaguely wondered whether
there was some secret in his life--some past of which she knew
nothing. How could there be? A man of stainless and brilliant
reputation--modest, able, foolhardily brave, of whom all men spoke
warmly; of a sensitive refinement too, which made it impossible to
think of any ordinary vulgar skeleton in the background of his life.

Yet her misgivings had grown and grown upon her, till now they were
morbidly strong. She did not satisfy him; she was not making him
happy; it would be better for her to set him free. This action of
his father's offered the opportunity. But as she thought of doing
it--_how_ she would do it, and how he might possibly accept it--she
was torn with misery.

She and her girl-friend Pamela were very different. She was the
elder by a couple of years, and much more mature. But Pamela's
undeveloped powers, the flashes of daring, of romance, in the
awkward reserved girl, the suggestion in her of a big and splendid
flowering, fascinated Beryl, and in her humility she never dreamt
that she, with her delicate pensiveness, the mingled subtlety and
purity of her nature, was no less exceptional. She had been brought
up very much alone. Her mother was no companion for her, and the
brother nearest her own age and nearest her heart had been killed at
the opening of the war. Arthur and she were very good friends, but
not altogether congenial. She was rather afraid of him--of his
critical temper, and his abrupt intolerant way, with people or
opinions he disliked. Beryl was quite aware of his effect on Pamela
Mannering, and it made her anxious. For she saw little chance for
Pamela. Before the war, Arthur in London had been very much sought
after, in a world where women are generally good-looking, and
skilled besides in all the arts of pursuit. His standards were
ridiculously high. His women friends were many and of the best. Why
should he be attracted by anything so young and immature as Pamela?

       *       *       *       *       *

At last! A pony-cart coming up from the lodge, with two figures in
it--Aubrey and Pamela. So poor Pam had at last got hold of something
in the nature of an animal!

Beryl gripped the balustrading which bordered one side of the path,
and stood watching intently--a slender creature, in a broad purple
hat, shading her small, distinguished face.

Presently, as the visitors approached the house, she waved to them,
and they to her. They disappeared from view for a minute. Then a
man's figure emerged alone from a garden door opening on the flagged
path.

He came towards her with outstretched hands, looked round him
smiling to see that no one was in sight, and then kissed her. Beryl
knew she ought to have resisted the kiss; she had meant to do it;
but all the same she submitted.

'Your father met us at the door. Arthur has carried Pamela off
somewhere. Very sporting of them, wasn't it? So I've got you alone!
How nice you look! And what a jolly place this is!'

He first looked her up and down with admiring eyes, and then made a
gesture towards the beautiful modern house, and the equally
beautiful and modern gardens in which it stood, with their still
unspoilt autumn flowers, their cunning devices in steps and
fountains and pergolas.

'How on earth do you keep it so trim?' He put a hand through her
arm, and drew her on towards the wood-walk which opened beyond the
formal garden and the lawn.

'With two or three old men, and two girls from the village,' said
Beryl. 'Father doesn't mind what he gives up so long as it isn't the
garden.'

'It's his pet vice!' laughed Aubrey--'his public-house, like my
father's Greek pots. I say--you've heard of the secretary?'

It seemed to Beryl that he was fencing with her--delaying their real
talk. But she accepted his lead.

'Yes, Desmond seems to like her. I don't gather that Pamela cares
very much about her.'

'Oh, Pamela takes time. But what do you think the secretary did last
night?'

'What?' They had paused under a group of limes clad in a glory of
yellow leaf, and she was looking up in surprise at the unusual
animation playing over the features of the man beside her.

'She refused to sign a codicil to my father's will, disinheriting
me, and came to tell me so this morning! You should have heard her!
Very formal and ceremonious--very much on her dignity! But such a
brick!'

Mannering's deep-set eyes under his lined thinker's brow shone with
amusement. Beryl, with the instinctive jealousy of a girl in love,
was conscious of a sudden annoyance that Miss Bremerton should have
been mixed up in Aubrey's personal affairs.

'What _do_ you mean?'

Aubrey put an arm round her shoulder. She knew she ought to shake it
off, but the pressure of it was too welcome. They strolled on.

'I had my talk with father last night. I told him he was absurd, and
I was my own master. That you were perfectly free to give me
up--that I had begged you to consider it--but I didn't think you
would,' he smiled down upon her, but more gravely; 'and failing
dismissal from you, we should be married as soon as it was
reasonably possible. Was that right, darling?'

She evaded the question.

'Well--and then?'

'Then he broke out. Sir Henry of course was the _bête noire_. You
can imagine the kind of things he said, I needn't repeat them. He is
in a mood of perfectly mad opposition to all this war legislation,
and it is not the least good arguing with him. Finally he told me
that my allowance would be stopped, and Mannering would be left to
Desmond, if we married. "All right!" I said, "I daresay, if he and I
survive you, Desmond will let me look round sometimes." Not very
respectful, perhaps, but by that time I was fed up. So then I wished
him good-night, and went back to the drawing-room. In a few minutes
he sent for Miss Bremerton--nobody knew why. I was dog-tired, and
went to bed, and didn't I sleep!--nine good hours. Then this
morning, just after breakfast, when I was strolling in the garden
with a cigarette waiting for Pamela, who should come out but Miss
Bremerton! Have you seen her?'

'Only in the distance.'

'Well, she's really a very fine creature, not pretty exactly--oh,
not pretty at all--but wonderfully well set up, with beautiful hair,
and a general look of--what shall I say?--dignity, refinement,
knowing her own mind. You feel she would set you down in a moment if
you took the smallest liberty. I could not think what she wanted.
But she came up to me--of course we had made acquaintance the night
before--"May I speak to you, Major Mannering? I wish to say
something private. Shall we walk down to the kitchen garden?" So we
walked down to the kitchen garden, and then she told me what had
happened after dinner, when my father sent for her. She told it very
stiffly, rather curtly in fact, as though she were annoyed to have
to bother about such unprofessional things, and hated to waste her
time. "But I don't wish, I don't intend," she said, "to have the
smallest responsibility in the matter. So after thinking it over, I
decided to inform you--and Mr. Desmond too, if you will kindly tell
him--as to what I had done. That is all I have to say," with her
chin very much in the air! "I did it, of course, because I did not
care to be mixed up in _any_ private or family affairs. That is not
my business." I was taken aback, as you can imagine! But, of course,
I thanked her--'

'Why, she couldn't have done anything else!' said Beryl with
vivacity.

'I don't know that. Anybody may witness anything. But she seems to
have guessed. Of course my father never keeps anything to himself.
Anyway she didn't like being thanked at all. She turned back to the
house at once. So then I asked her if she knew what had happened to
the precious codicil. And she flushed up and said, with the manner
of an icicle, "Mr. Mannering sent me to the drawer this morning,
where he had put it away. It was lying on the top, and I saw it."
"Signed?" I said. "No, not signed." Then she began to hurry, and I
thought I had offended her in some way. But it dawned upon me,
presently, that she was really torn between her feeling of chivalry
towards me--she seems to have a kindness for soldiers! her brother
is fighting somewhere--and her professional obligations towards my
father. Wasn't it odd? She hated to be indiscreet, to give him away,
and yet she could not help it! I believe she had been awake half the
night. Her eyes looked like it. I must say I liked her very much. A
woman of a great deal of character! I expect she has a rough time of
it!'

'But of course,' said Beryl, 'it may be all signed and witnessed by
now!'

'Most probably!' The Major laughed. 'But _she_ did her best anyway,
and I shan't ask her any more questions. We had better take it for
granted. My father is as obstinate as they make 'em. Well now, dear
Beryl, have you--have you thought it over?'

He pointed to a seat, and sat down by her. The brightness of his
look had passed away. The thin, intellectual face and lined brow had
resumed the expression that was familiar to Beryl. It was an
expression of fatigue--not physical now, for he had clearly
recovered his health, but moral; as though the man behind it were
worn out by some hidden debate with his own mind, into which he fell
perpetually, when left to himself. It was the look which divided him
from her.

'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I've been thinking a great deal.' She
stopped; then lifting her eyes, which were grey and fringed with
dark lashes--beautiful eyes, timid yet passionately honest--she
said, 'You'd better give me up, Aubrey!'

He made a restless movement, then took her hands and raised them to
his lips.

'I don't feel like it!' he said, smiling. 'Tell me what you mean.'

She looked down, plucking at the fringed belt of her sports coat.
Her lips trembled a little.

'I don't think, Aubrey, I can make you happy! I've been feeling
often--that I don't seem to make much difference to you. And now
this is very serious--giving up Mannering. _You_ may mind it much
more than you think. And if--'

'If what? Go on!'

She raised her eyes again and looked at him straight.

'If I can't make up?'

The colour flooded into his face, as though, far within, something
stirred 'like a guilty thing surprised.' But he said tenderly:

'I don't care _that_, Beryl'--he snapped his fingers--'for Mannering
in comparison with you.'

Her breath fluttered a little, but she went on resolutely. 'But I
must say it--I must tell you what I feel. It seems the right
opportunity. So often, Aubrey, I don't seem to understand you! I say
the wrong thing. I'm not clever. I haven't any deep thoughts--like
you or Arthur. It would be terrible if you married me, and then--I
felt you were disappointed.'

He moved a little away from her and, propping his chin on his hands,
looked gravely through the thinning branches of the wood.

'I wonder why you say that--I wonder what I've done!'

'Oh, you've done nothing!' cried Beryl. 'It's only I
feel--sometimes--that--that you don't let me know things--share
things. You seem sometimes so sad--and I can't be any help--you
won't let me! That's what I mind so much--so dreadfully!'

He was silent a moment. Then without any attempt at caresses, he
said, 'I wonder, Beryl, whether you--whether you--ever realize--what
we soldiers have _seen_? No!--thank God!--you don't--you can't.'

She pressed her hands to her eyes, and shuddered.

'No, of course I can't--of course I can't!' she said passionately.

Then, while her eyes were still hidden, there passed through
his worn features a sharp spasm, as of some uncontrollable
anguish--passed and was gone.

He turned towards her, and she looked up. If ever love, all-giving,
self-forgetting, was written on a girl's face, it was written on
Beryl's then. Her wild-rose colour came and went; her eyes were full
of tears. She had honestly made her attempt, but she could not carry
it through, and he saw it. Some vague hope--of which he was
ashamed--died away. Profoundly touched, he put out his arms, and
making nothing of her slight resistance, gathered her close to him.

'Did you ever read _Sintram_, Beryl?'

'Yes, years ago.'

'Do you remember his black fits--how they came upon him
unexpectedly--and only Verena could help him? It's like that with me
sometimes. Things I've seen--horrible sufferings and death--come
back on me. I can't get over it--at least not yet. But I'll never
let it come really between us. And perhaps--some day'--he hesitated
and his voice dropped--'you shall help me--like Verena!'

She clung to him, not knowing what he meant, but fascinated by his
deep voice, and the warm shelter of his arms. He bent down to kiss
her, in the most passionate embrace he had ever given her.

Then he released her, and they both looked at each other with a new
shyness.

'So that's all right!' he said, smiling. 'You see you can't drop me
as easily as you think. I stick! Well, now, you take me as a
pauper--not exactly a pauper--but still--I've got to settle things
with your father, though!'

Beryl proposed that they should go and look for the others.

They went hand in hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir Henry meanwhile was engaged in the congenial occupation of
inspecting and showing his kitchen gardens. His son Arthur and
Pamela Mannering were following him round the greenhouses, finding
more amusement in the perplexities of Sir Henry's conscience than
interest in the show itself.

'You see they've brought in the chrysanthemums. Just in time! There
was a frost last night,' said Sir Henry, throwing open a door, and
disclosing a greenhouse packed with chrysanthemums in bud.

'My hat--what a show!' said his son.

'Not at all, Arthur, not at all,' said his father, annoyed. 'Not a
third of what we had last year.'

Arthur raised his eyebrows, and behind his father's back he and
Pamela exchanged smiles. The next house showed a couple of elderly
men at work pruning roses intended to flower in February and March.

'This is almost my favourite house,' exclaimed Sir Henry. 'Such a
wonderful result for so little labour!' He strolled on complacently.

'How long does this take you, Grimes?' Arthur inquired discreetly of
one of the gardeners.

'Oh, a good while, Mr. Arthur--what with the pruning, and the
syringing, and the manuring,' said the man addressed, stopping to
wipe his brow, for the day was mild.

Arthur's look darkened a little. He fell into a reverie, while
Pamela was conscious at every step of his tall commanding presence,
of the Military Cross on his khaki breast, and the pleasant,
penetrating eyes under his staff cap. Arthur, she thought, must be
now over thirty. Before his recent wound he had been doing some
special artillery work on the Staff of an Army Corps, and was a very
rising soldier. He was now chafing hotly against the ruling of his
Medical Board, who were insisting that he was not yet fit to go back
to France.

Pamela meanwhile was going through moments of disillusion. After
these two years she had looked forward to the meeting with such
eagerness, such hidden emotion! And now--what was there to have been
eager about? They seemed to be talking almost as strangers. The
soreness of it bewildered her.

Presently, as they were walking back to the house, leaving Sir
Henry in anxious consultation over the mushroom-house with the
grey-haired head gardener, her companion turned to her abruptly.

'I suppose _that's_ all right!' He pointed to some distant figures
on the fringe of a wood.

'Beryl and Aubrey? Yes--if Aubrey can make her see that she isn't
doing him any harm by letting him go on.'

'Good heavens! how could she do him any harm?'

'Well, there's Mannering. As if that mattered!' said the girl
scornfully. 'And then--Beryl's too dreadfully humble!'

'Humble! About what? No girl ought to be humble--ever!'

Pamela's eyes recovered their natural brilliance under his
peremptory look. And he, who had begun the walk with no particular
consciousness at all about his companion, except that she was a
nice, good-looking child, whom he had known from a baby, with equal
suddenness became aware of her in a new way.

'Why shouldn't we be humble, please?' she said, with a laugh.

'Because it's monstrous that you should. Leave that to us!'

'There wouldn't be much of it about, if we did!' The red danced in
her cheek.

'Much humility? Oh, you're quite mistaken. Men are much more humble
than you think. But we're human, of course. If you tempt us, you
soon put the starch into us.'

'Well, you must starch Beryl!' said Pamela, with emphasis. 'She will
think and say that she's not worthy of Aubrey, that she knows
she'll disappoint him, that she wouldn't mind his giving up
Mannering if only she were sure she could make him happy--and heaps
of things like that! I'm sure she's saying them now!'

'I never heard such nonsense in my life!' The masculine face beside
her was all impatience. 'One can't exactly boast about one's sister,
but you and I know very well what Beryl is worth!'

Pamela agreed fervently. 'Besides, Desmond would give it back.'

'Hm--' her companion demurred. 'Giving back isn't always easy. As to
pounds, shillings, and pence, if one must talk of them, it's lucky
that Beryl has her "bit." But I shouldn't wonder if your father
thought better of it after all.'

Pamela flushed indignantly.

'He all but signed a codicil to his will last night! He's in a
tearing hurry about it. He called in Miss Bremerton and wanted her
to witness it. And she refused. So father threw it into a drawer,
and nobody knows what has happened.'

'Miss Bremerton? The new secretary?' The tone expressed both
amusement and curiosity. 'Ah! I hear all sorts of interesting things
about her.'

Pamela straightened her shoulders defiantly.

'Of course she's interesting. She's terribly clever and up to date,
and all the rest of it. She's beginning to boss father, and very
soon she'll boss all the rest of us.'

'Perhaps you wanted it!' said Captain Chicksands, smiling.

'Perhaps we did,' Pamela admitted. 'But one needn't like it all the
same. Well, she's rationed us--that's one good thing--and father
really doesn't guess! And now she's begun to take an interest in
the farms! I believe she's walked over to the Holme Wood farm
to-day, to see for herself what state it's in. Father's in town. And
she's trying hard to keep father out of a horrible row with the
County Committee.'

'About ploughing up the park?'

Pamela nodded.

'Plucky woman!' said Arthur Chicksands heartily. 'I'm sure you help
her, Pamela, all you can?'

'I don't like being managed,' said the girl stubbornly, rather
resenting his tone.

A slight shade of sternness crossed the soldier's face.

'You know it's no good playing with this war,' he said drily. 'It's
as much to be won here as it is over seas. _Food_!--that'll be the
last word for everybody. And it's women's work as much as men's.'

She saw that she had jarred on him. But an odd jealousy--or perhaps
her hidden disappointment--drove her on.

'Yes, but one doesn't like strangers interfering,' she said
childishly.

The soldier threw her a side-glance, while his lip twitched a
little. So this was Pamela--grown-up. She seemed to him rather
foolish--and very lovely. There was no doubt about that! She was
going to be a beauty, and of a remarkable type. He himself was a
strong, high-minded, capable fellow, with an instinctive interest in
women, and a natural aptitude for making friends with them. He was
inclined, always, to try and set them in the right way; to help them
to some of the mental training which men got in a hundred ways, and
women, as it seemed to him, were often so deplorably without. But
this schoolmaster function only attracted him when there was
opposition. He had been quite sincere in denouncing humility in
women. It never failed to warn him off.

'Do you think she really wants to interfere?' he asked, smiling. 'I
expect it's only that she's got a bit of an organizing gift--like
the women who have been doing such fine things in the war.'

'There's no chance for me to do fine things in the war,' said Pamela
bitterly.

'Take up the land, and see! Suppose you and Miss Bremerton could
pull the estate together!'

Pamela's eyes scoffed.

'Father would never let me. No, I think sometimes I shall run away!'

He lifted his eyebrows, and she was annoyed with him for taking her
remark as mere bluff.

'You'll see,' she insisted. 'I shall do something desperate.'

'I wouldn't,' he said, quietly. 'Make friends with Miss Bremerton
and help her.'

'I don't like her enough,' she said, drawing quick breath.

He saw now she was in a mood to quarrel with him outright. But he
didn't mean to let her. With those eyes--in such a fire--she was
really splendid. How she had come on!

'I'm sorry,' he said mildly. 'Because, you know--if you don't mind
my saying so--it'll really take the two of you to keep your father
out of gaol. The Government's absolutely determined about this
thing--they can't afford to be anything else. _We're_ being
hammered, and gassed, and blown to pieces over there'--he pointed
eastward. 'It's the least the people over here can do--to play
up--isn't it?' Then he laughed. 'But I mustn't be setting you
against your father. I didn't mean to.'

Pamela shrugged her shoulders, in silence. She really longed to ask
him about his wound, his staff work, a thousand things; but they
didn't seem, somehow, to be intimate enough, to be hitting it off
enough. This meeting, which had been to her a point of romance
in the distance, was turning out to be just nothing--only
disappointment. She was glad to see how quickly the other pair were
coming towards them, and at the same time bitterly vexed that her
_tête-à-tête_ with Arthur was at an end.




CHAPTER VI


Meanwhile Elizabeth Bremerton was sitting pensive on a hill-side
about mid-way between Mannering and Chetworth. She had a bunch of
autumn berries in her hands. Her tweed skirt and country boots
showed traces of mud much deeper than anything on the high road; her
dress was covered with bits of bramble, dead leaves, and
thistledown; and her bright gold hair had been pulled here and there
out of its neat coils, as though she had been pushing through hedges
or groping through woods.

'It's perfectly _monstrous_!' she was thinking. 'It oughtn't to be
allowed. And when we're properly civilized, it won't be allowed. No
one ought to be free to ruin his land as he pleases! It concerns the
_State_. "Manage your land decently--produce a proper amount of
food--or out you go!" And I wouldn't have waited for war to say it!
Ugh! that place!'

And she thought with disgust of the choked and derelict fields, the
ruined gates and fences, the deserted buildings she had just been
wandering through. After the death of an old miser, who, according
to the tale she had heard in a neighbouring village, had lived there
for forty years, with a decrepit wife, both of them horribly
neglected and dirty, and making latterly no attempt to work the
farm, a new tenant had appeared who would have taken the place, if
the Squire would have rebuilt the house and steadings, and allowed a
reasonable sum for the cleansing and recovering of the land. But
the Squire would do nothing of the kind. He 'hadn't a farthing to
spend on expensive repairs,' and if the new tenant wouldn't take the
farm on the old terms, well, he might leave it alone.

The place had just been investigated by the County Committee, and a
peremptory order had been issued. What was the Squire going to do?

Elizabeth fell to thinking what _ought_ to be done with the Squire's
twelve thousand acres, if the Squire were a reasonable man. It was
exasperating to her practical sense to see a piece of business in
such a muddle. As a child and growing girl she had spent long
summers in the country with a Dorsetshire uncle who farmed his own
land, and there had sprung up in her an instinctive sympathy with
the rich old earth and its kindly powers, with the animals and the
crops, with the labourers and their rural arts, with all the
interwoven country life, and its deep rooting in the soil of history
and poetry.

Country life is, above all, steeped in common sense--the old,
ancestral, simple wisdom of primitive men. And Elizabeth, in spite
of her classical degree, and her passion for Greek pots, believed
herself to be, before everything, a person of common sense. She had
always managed her own family's affairs. She had also been the paid
secretary of an important learned society in her twenties not long
after she left college, and knew well that she had been a
conspicuous success. She had a great love, indeed, for any sort of
organizing, large and small, for putting things straight, and
running them. She was burning to put Mannering straight--and run it.
She knew she could. Organizing means not doing things yourself, but
finding the right people to do them. And she had always been good
at finding the right people--putting the round pegs into the round
holes.

All very well, however, to talk of running the Squire's estate! What
was to be done with the Squire?

Take the codicil business. First thing that morning he had sent her
to that very drawer to look for something, and there lay the
precious document--unsigned and unwitnessed--for any one to see. He
made no comment, nor of course did she. He would probably forget it
till the date of his son's marriage was announced, and then complete
it in a hurry.

Take the farms and the park. As to the farms there were two
summonses now pending against him with regard to 'farms in
hand'--Holme Wood and another--besides the action in the case of the
three incompetent men, Gregson at their head, who were being turned
out. With regard to ploughing up the park, all his attempts so far
to put legal difficulties in the way of the County Committee had
been quite futile. The steam plough was coming in a week. Meanwhile
the gates were to be locked, and two old park-keepers, who were
dithering in their shoes, had been told to defend them.

At bottom, Elizabeth was tolerably convinced that the Squire would
not land himself in gaol, cut off from his books and his bronzes,
and reduced to the company of people who had never heard of
Pausanias. But she was alarmed lest he should 'try it on' a little
too far, in these days when the needs of war and the revolutionary
currents abroad make the setting down of squires especially
agreeable to the plebeians who sit on juries or county committees.
Of course he must--he certainly would--climb down.

But somebody would have to go through the process of persuading
him! That was due to his silly dignity! She supposed that somebody
would be herself. How absurd! She, who had just been six weeks on
the scene! But neither of the married daughters had the smallest
influence with him; Sir Henry Chicksands had been sent about his
business; Major Mannering was out of favour, and Desmond and Pamela
were but babes.

Then a recollection flashed across the contriving mind of Elizabeth
which brought a decided flush to her fair skin--a flush which was
half amusement, half wrath. That morning a rather curious incident
had happened. After her talk with Major Mannering, and because the
morning was fine and the Squire was away, she had dragged a small
table out into the garden, in front of the library, and set to work
there on a part of the new catalogue of the collections, which she
and Mr. Levasseur were making. She did not, however, like Mr.
Levasseur. Something in her, indeed, disapproved of him strongly.
She had already managed to dislodge him a good deal from his former
intimacy with the Squire. Luckily she was a much better scholar than
he, though she admitted that his artistic judgment was worth having.

As a shelter from a rather cold north wind, she was sitting in full
sun under the protection of a yew hedge of ancient growth, which ran
out at right angles to the library, and made one side of a
quadrangular rose-garden, planted by Mrs. Mannering long ago, and
now, like everything else, in confusion and neglect.

Presently she heard voices on the other side of the hedge--Mrs.
Strang, no doubt, and Mrs. Gaddesden. She did not take much to
either lady. Mrs. Strang seemed to her full of good intentions, but
without practical ability to fit them. For Mrs. Gaddesden's type she
had an instinctive contempt, the contempt of the clever woman of
small means who has had to earn her own living, and to watch in
silence the poses and pretences of rich women playing at
philanthropy. But, all the same, she and the servants between them
had made Mrs. Gaddesden extremely comfortable, while at the same
time rationing her strictly. 'I really can be civil to anybody!'
thought Elizabeth complacently.

Suddenly, her own name, and a rush of remarks on the other side of
this impenetrable hedge, made her raise her head, startled, from her
work, eyes and mouth wide open.

It was Mrs. Gaddesden speaking.

'Yes, she's gone out. I went into the library just now to ask her to
look out a train for me. She's wonderfully good at Bradshaw. Oh, of
course, I admit she's a very clever woman! But she wasn't there.
Forest thinks she's gone over to Holme Wood, to get father some
information he wants. She asked Forest how to get this this morning.
My dear Margaret,' with great emphasis, 'there's no question about
it! If she chooses, she'll be mistress here before long. She's
steadily getting father into her hands. She was never engaged, was
she, to look after accounts and farms? and yet here she is, taking
everything on. He'll grow more and more dependent upon her, and
you'll see!--I believe he's been inclined for some time to marry
again. He wants somebody to look after Pamela, and set him free for
his hobbies. He'll very soon find out that this woman fills the
part, and that, if he marries her, he'll get a classical secretary
besides.'

Mrs. Strang's voice--a deep husky voice--interposed.

'Miss Bremerton's not a woman to be married against her will, that
you may be sure of, Alice.'

'No, but, my dear,' said the other impatiently, 'every woman over
thirty wants a home--and a husband. She'd get that here anyway,
however bad father's affairs may be. And, of course, a _position_.'

The voices passed on out of hearing. Elizabeth remained transfixed.
Then with a contemptuous shake of the head, and a bright colour, she
returned to her work.

But now, as she sat meditating on the hill-side, this absurd
conversation recurred to her. Absurd, and not absurd! 'Most women of
my sort can do what they have a mind to do,' she thought to herself,
with perfect _sang-froid_. 'If I thought it worth while to marry
this elderly lunatic--he's an interesting lunatic, though!--I
suppose I could do it. But it isn't worth while--not the least. I've
done with being a woman! What interests me is the bit of
_work_--national work! Men find that kind of thing enough--a great
many of them. I mean to find it enough. A fig for marrying!'

All the same, as she returned to her schemes both for regenerating
the estate and managing the Squire--schemes which were beginning to
fascinate her, both by their difficulty and their scale--she found
her thoughts oddly interfered with, first by recollections of the
past--bitter, ineffaceable memories--and then by reflections on the
recent course of her relations with the Squire.

He had greeted her that morning without a single reference to the
incidents of the night before, had seemed in excellent spirits, and
before going up to town had given her in twenty minutes, _à propos_
of some difficulty in her work, one of the most brilliant lectures
on certain points of Homeric archaeology she had ever heard--and she
was a connoisseur in lectures.

Intellectually, as a scholar, she both admired and looked upon
him--with reverence, even with enthusiasm. She was eager for his
praise, distressed by his censure. Practically and morally,
patriotically, above all, she despised him, thought him 'a worm and
no man'! There was the paradox of the situation and as full of
tingling challenge and entertainment as paradoxes generally are.

At this point she became aware of a group on the high road far to
her right. A pony-cart--a girl driving it--a man in khaki beside
her; with a second girl-figure and another khaki-clad warrior,
walking near.

She presently thought she recognized Pamela's pony and Pamela
herself. Desmond, who was going off that very evening to his
artillery camp, had told her that 'Pam' was driving Aubrey over to
Chetworth, and that he, Desmond, was 'jolly well going to see to it
that neither old Aubrey nor Beryl were bullied out of their lives by
father,' if he could help it. So no doubt the second girl-figure was
that of Beryl Chicksands, and the other gentleman in khaki was
probably Captain Chicksands, for whom Desmond seemed to cherish a
boyish hero-worship. They had been all lunching together at
Chetworth, she supposed.

She watched them coming, with a curious mingling of interest in them
and detachment from them. She was to them merely the Squire's paid
secretary. Were they anything to her? A puckish thought crossed her
mind, sending a flash of slightly cynical laughter through her quiet
eyes. If Mrs. Gaddesden's terrors--for she supposed they were
terrors--were suddenly translated into fact, why, all these people
would become in a moment related to her!--their lives would be mixed
up with hers--she and they would matter intimately to each other!

She sat smiling and dreaming a few more minutes, the dimples playing
about her firm mouth and chin. Then, as the sound of wheels drew
nearer, she rose and went towards the party.

       *       *       *       *       *

The party from Chetworth soon perceived Elizabeth's approach. 'So
this is the learned lady?' said the Captain in Pamela's ear. She had
brought him in her pony-carriage so far, as he was not yet able for
much physical exertion, and he and Beryl were to walk back from
Holme Wood Hill.

He put up his eye-glass, and examined the figure as it came nearer.

'She's just come up, I suppose, from the farm,' said Pamela,
pointing to some red roofs among the trees, in the wide hollow below
the hill.

'"Athêne Ageleiê"!' murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the
Ireland, and a Balliol man. 'She holds herself well--beautiful
hair!'

'Beryl, this is Miss Bremerton,' said Aubrey Mannering, with a
cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancée to
Elizabeth. The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl's
manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.

The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on
the grass of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point
of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering.
For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its
pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the
stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a
vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down--a wood
of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had
furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier
fugitive of the Civil Wars.

The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of
things primeval. For generations the trees in it had sprung up,
flourished, and fallen as they pleased. There were corners of it
where the north-west wind sweeping over the bare down above it had
made pathways of death and ruin; sinister places where the fallen or
broken trunks of the great beech trees, as they had crashed
down-hill upon and against each other, had assumed all sorts of
grotesque and phantasmal attitudes, as in a trampled mêlée of
giants; there were other parts where slender plumed trees, rising
branchless to a great height above open spaces, took the shape from
a distance of Italian stone palms, and gave a touch of southern or
romantic grace to the English midland scene; while at their feet,
the tops of the more crowded sections of the wood lay in close,
billowy masses of leaf, the oaks vividly green, the beeches already
aflame.

'Who says there's a war?' said Captain Chicksands, sinking
luxuriously into a sunny bed of dry leaves, conveniently placed in
front of Elizabeth. 'Miss Bremerton, you and I were, I understand,
at the same University?'

Elizabeth assented.

'Is it your opinion that Universities are any good?--that after the
war there are going to be any Universities?'

'Only those that please the Labour Party!' put in Mannering.

'Oh, I'm not afraid of the Labour Party--awfully good fellows, many
of them. The sooner they make a Government the better. They've got
to learn their lessons like the rest of us. But I do want to know
whether Miss Bremerton thinks Oxford was any _use_--before the
war--and is going to be any use after the war? It's all right now,
of course, for the moment, with the Colleges full of cadets and
wounded men. But would you put the old Oxford back if you could?'

He lay on his elbows looking up at her. Elizabeth's eyes sparkled a
little. She realized that an able man was experimenting on her,
putting her through her paces. She asked what he meant by 'the old
Oxford,' and an amusing dialogue sprang up between them as to their
respective recollections of the great University--the dons, the
lectures, the games, the Eights, 'Commem.' and the like. The Captain
presently declared that Elizabeth had had a much nicer Oxford than
he, and he wished he had been a female student.

'Didn't you--didn't you,' he said, his keen eyes observing her, 'get
a prize once that somebody had given to the Women's Colleges for
some Greek iambics?'

'Oh,' cried Elizabeth, 'how did you hear of that?'

'I was rather a dab at them myself,' he said lazily, drawing his hat
over his eyes as he lay in the sun, 'and I perfectly remember
hearing of a young lady--yes, I believe it was you!--whose
translation of Browning's "Lost Leader" into Greek iambics was
better than mine. They set it in the Ireland. You admit it? Capital!
As to the superiority of yours, I was, of course, entirely
sceptical, though polite. Remind me, how did you translate "Just for
a ribbon to put on his coat"?'

With a laughing mouth, Elizabeth at once quoted the Greek.

The Captain made a wry face.

'It sounds plausible, I agree,' he said slowly, 'but I don't believe
a Greek would have understood a word of it. You remember that in the
dim Victorian ages, when one great Latin scholar gave, as he
thought, the neatest possible translation of "The path of glory
leads but to the grave," another great Latin scholar declared that
all a Roman could have understood by it would have been "The path of
a public office leads to the jaws of the hillock"?'

The old Oxford joke was new in the ears of this Georgian generation,
and when the laugh subsided, Elizabeth said mildly:

'Now, please, may I have yours?'

'What--my translation? Oh--horribly unfair!' said the Captain,
chewing a piece of grass. 'However, here it is!'

He gave it out--with unction.

Elizabeth fell upon it in a flash, dissected and quarrelled with
every word of it, turned it inside out in fact, while the Captain,
still chewing, followed her with eyes of growing enjoyment.

'Well, I'll take a vote when I get back to the front,' he said, when
she came to an end. 'Several firsts in Mods on our staff. I'll send
you the result.'

The talk dropped. The mention of the front reminded every one of the
war, and its bearing on their own personal lot. Desmond was going
into camp that evening. In a few months he would be a full-blown
gunner at the front. Beryl, watching Aubrey's thin face and nervous
frown, proved inwardly that the Aldershot appointment might go on.
And Elizabeth's thoughts had flown to her brother in Mesopotamia.

Pamela, sitting apart, and deeply shaded by a great beech with
drooping branches that rose behind the group, was sharply unhappy,
and filled with a burning jealousy of Elizabeth, who queened it
there in the middle of them--so self-possessed, agreeable, and
competent. How well Arthur had been getting on with her! What a
tiresome, tactless idiot she, Pamela, must seem in comparison! The
memory of her talk with him made her cheeks hot. So few chances of
seeing him!--and when they came, she threw them away. She felt for
the moment as though she hated Elizabeth. Why had her father saddled
her upon them? Life was difficult enough before. Passionately she
began to think of her threat to Arthur. It had been the merest 'idle
word.' But why shouldn't she realize it--why not 'run away'? There
was work to be done, and money to be earned, by any able-bodied
girl. And perhaps then, when she was on her own, and had proved that
she was not a child any longer, Arthur would respect her more, take
more interest in her.

'What do you prophesy?' said Elizabeth suddenly, addressing Arthur
Chicksands, who seemed to be asleep in the grass. 'Will it end--by
next summer?'

'What, the war?' he said, waking up. 'Oh dear, no. Next year will be
the worst of any--the test of us all--especially of you civilians at
home. If we stick it, we shall save ourselves and the world. If we
don't--'

He shrugged his shoulders. His voice was full and deep. It thrilled
the girl sitting in the shade--partly with fear. In three weeks or
so, the speaker would be back in the full inferno of the front, and
because of her father's behaviour she would probably not be able to
see him in the interval. Perhaps she might never see him again.
Perhaps this was the last time. And he would go away without giving
her a thought. Whereas, if she had played her cards differently,
this one last day, he might at least have asked her to write to him.
Many men did--even with girls they hardly knew at all.

Just then she noticed a movement of Beryl's, and saw her friend's
small bare hand creep out and slip itself into Aubrey Mannering's,
as he sat beside her on the grass. The man's hand enfolded the
girl's--he turned round to smile at her in silence. A pang of
passionate envy swept through Pamela. It was just so she wished to
be enfolded--to be loved.

It was Elizabeth--as the person who had business to do and hours to
keep--who gave the signal for the break-up of the party. She sprang
to her feet, with a light, decided movement, and all the others fell
into line. Arthur and Beryl still accompanied the Mannering
contingent a short distance, the Captain walking beside Elizabeth in
animated conversation. At last Beryl peremptorily recalled him to
the pony-carriage, and the group halted for good-byes.

Pamela stood rather stiffly apart. The Captain went up to her.

'Good-bye, Pamela. Do write to me sometimes! I shall be awfully
interested about the farms!'

With vexation she felt the colour rush to her cheeks.

'I shan't have much to say about them,' she said stiffly.

'I'm sure you will! You'll get keen! But write about anything. It's
awfully jolly to get letters at the front!'

His friendly, interrogating eyes were on her, as though she puzzled
him in this new phase, and he wanted to understand her. She said
hurriedly, 'If you like,' hating herself for the coolness in her
voice, and shook hands, only to hear him say, as he turned finally
to Elizabeth, 'Mind, you have promised me "The Battle of the
Plough"! I'm afraid you'll hardly have time to put it into iambics!'

So he had asked Miss Bremerton to write to him too! Pamela vowed
inwardly that in that case she would not write him a line. And it
seemed to her unseemly that her father's secretary should be making
mock of her father's proceedings with a man who was a complete
stranger to her. She walked impetuously ahead of Aubrey and
Elizabeth. Towards the west the beautiful day was dying, and the
light streamed on the girl's lithe young figure and caught her
golden-brown hair. Clouds of gnats rose in the mild air; and a light
seemed to come back from the bronzed and purple hedgerows, making a
gorgeous atmosphere, in which the quiet hill-top and the thinning
trees swam transfigured. A green woodpecker was pecking
industriously among some hedgerow oaks, and Pamela, who loved birds
and watched them, caught every now and then the glitter of his
flight. The world was dropping towards sleep. But she was burningly
awake and alive. Had she ever been really alive before?

Then--suddenly she remembered Desmond. He was to be home from some
farewell visits between five and six. She would be late; he might
want her for a hundred things. His last evening! Her heart smote
her. They had reached the park gates. Waving her hand to the two
behind, with the one word 'Desmond!' she began to run, and was soon
out of their sight.

       *       *       *       *       *

Elizabeth and Aubrey were not long behind her. They found the house
indeed pervaded with Desmond, and Desmond's going. Aubrey also was
going up to town, but of him nobody took any notice. Pamela and
Forest were in attendance on the young warrior, who was himself in
the wildest spirits, shouting and whistling up and downstairs,
singing the newest and most shocking of camp songs, chaffing Forest,
and looking with mischievous eyes at the various knitted 'comforts'
to which his married sisters were hastily putting the last stitches.

'I say, Pam--do you see me in mittens?' he said to her in the hall,
thrusting out his two splendid hands with a grin. 'And as for that
jersey of Alice's--why, I should stew to death in it. Oh, I know--I
can give it to my batman. The fellows tell me you can always get rid
of things to your batman. It's like sending your wedding-presents to
the pawn-shop. But where is father?' The boy looked discontentedly
at his watch. 'He vowed he'd be here by five. I must be off by a few
minutes after eight.'

'The train's late. He'll be here directly,' said Pamela confidently;
'and I say--don't you hurt Alice's feelings, old man.'

'Don't you preach, Pam!' said the boy, laughing. And a few minutes
afterwards Pamela, passing the open door of the drawing-room, heard
him handsomely thanking his elder sisters. He ran into her as he
emerged with his arms full of scarves, mittens, and the famous
jersey which had taken Alice Gaddesden a year to knit.

'Stuff 'em in somewhere, Pam!' he said in her ear. 'They can go up
to London anyway.' And having shovelled them all off on to her, he
raced along the passage to the library in search of Elizabeth.

'I say, Miss Bremerton, I want a book or two.'

Elizabeth looked up smiling from her table. She was already of the
same mind as everybody outside and inside Mannering--that Desmond
did you a kindness when he asked you to do him one.

'What kind of a book?'

'Oh, I've got some novels, and some Nat Goulds, and Pamela's given
me some war-books. Don't know if I shall read 'em!--Well, I'd like a
small Horace, if you can find one. "My tutor" was an awfully good
hand at Horace. He really did make me like the old chap! And have
you got such a thing as a Greek Anthology that wouldn't take up much
room?'

Elizabeth went to the shelves to look. Desmond as the possessor of
literary tastes was a novelty to her. But, after all, she understood
that he had been a half in the Sixth at Eton, before his cadet
training began. She found him two small pocket editions, and the boy
thanked her gratefully. He began to turn over the Anthology, as
though searching for something.

'Can I help you to find anything?' she asked him.

'No--it's something I remember,' he said absently, and presently
hit upon it, with a look of pleasure.

'They did know a thing or two, didn't they? That's fine anyway?' He
handed her the book. 'But I forget some of the words. Do you mind
giving me a construe?' he said humbly.

Elizabeth translated, feeling rather choky.

'"On the Spartans at Thermopylæ.

'"Him--"'

'That's Xerxes, of course,' put in Desmond.

'"Him, who changed the paths of earth and sea, who sailed upon the
mainland, and walked upon the deep--him did Spartan valour hold
back, with just three hundred spears. Shame on you, mountains and
seas!"'

'Well, that's all right, isn't it?' said the boy simply, looking up.
'Couldn't put it better if you tried, could you?' Then he said,
hesitating a little as he turned down the leaf, and put the book in
his pocket, 'Five of the fellows who were in the Sixth with me this
time last year are dead by now. It makes you think a bit, doesn't
it?--Hullo, there is father!'

He turned joyously, his young figure finely caught in the light of
Elizabeth's lamp against the background of the Nikê.

'Well, father you have been a time! I thought you'd forgotten
altogether I was off to-night.'

'The train was abominably late. Travelling is becoming a perfect
nuisance! I gave the station-master a piece of my mind,' said the
Squire angrily.

'And I expect he said that you civilians jolly well have to wait for
the munition trains!'

'He muttered some nonsense of that sort. I didn't listen to him.'
The Squire threw himself down in an arm-chair. Desmond perched on
the corner of a table near. Elizabeth discreetly took up her work
and disappeared.

'How much time have you got?' asked the Squire abruptly.

'Oh, a few minutes. Aubrey and I are to have some supper before I
go. But Forest'll come and tell me.'

'Everything ready? Got money enough?'

'Rather! I shan't want anything for an age. Why, I shall be buying
war-loan out of my pay!'

He laughed happily. Then his face grew suddenly serious.

'Look here, father--I want awfully to say something. Do you mind?'

'If you want to say it, I suppose you will say it.'

The Squire was sitting hunched up, looking old and tired, his thick
white hair piled fantastically above his eyes.

Desmond straightened his shoulders with the air of one going over
the parapet.

'Well, it's this, father. I do wish you'd give up that row about the
park!'

The Squire sat up impatiently.

'That's not your business, Desmond. It can't matter to you.'

'Yes, but it _does_ matter to me!' said the boy with energy. 'It'll
be in all the papers--the fellows will gas about it at mess--it's
awfully hard lines on me. It makes me feel rotten!'

The Squire laughed. He was reminded of a Fourth of June years
before, when Desmond had gone through agonies of shame because
his father was not, in his eyes, properly 'got-up' for the
occasion--how he had disappeared in the High Street, and only
joined his people again in the crowd at the fireworks.

'I recommend you to stick it, Desmond. It won't last long. I've got
my part to play, and you've got yours. You fight because they make
you.'

'I _don't!_' said the boy passionately. 'I fight because--'

Then his words broke down. He descended from the table.

'Well, all right, father. I suppose it's no good talking. Only if
you think I shan't mind if you get yourself put in quad, you're
jolly well mistaken. Hullo, Forest! I'm coming!'

He hurried off, the Squire moving slowly after him. In the hour
before the boy departed he was the spoilt darling of his sisters and
the servants, who hung round him, and could not do enough for him.
He endured it, on the whole, patiently dashing out at the very end
to say good-bye to an old gardener, once a keeper, with whom he used
to go ferreting in the park. To his father alone his manner was not
quite as usual. It was the manner of one who had been hurt. The
Squire felt it.

As to his elder son, he and Aubrey parted without any outward sign
of discord, and on the way to London Aubrey, with the dry detachment
that was natural to him in speaking of himself, told the story of
the preceding twenty-four hours to the eager Desmond's sympathetic
ears. 'Well done, Broomie!' was the boy's exultant comment on the
tale of the codicil.

The house after Desmond's departure settled dreamily down. Pamela,
with red eyes, retreated to the schoolroom, and began to clear up
the debris left by the packing; Alice Gaddesden went to sleep in
the drawing-room; Mrs. Strang wrote urgent letters to registry
offices, who now seldom answered her; the Squire was in the library,
and Elizabeth retreated early to her own room. She spent a good deal
of time in writing up a locked diary, and finishing up a letter to
her mother. Then she saw to her astonishment that it was nearly one
o'clock, and began to feel sleepy.

The night was warm, and before undressing she put out her light, and
threw up her window. There was a moon nearly at the full outside,
and across the misty stretches of the park the owls were calling.

Suddenly she heard a distant footstep, and drew back from the
window. A man was pacing slowly up and down an avenue of pollarded
limes which divided the rose-garden from the park. His figure could
only be intermittently seen; but it was certainly the Squire.

She drew the curtains again without shutting the window; and for
long after she was in bed she still heard the footstep. It awakened
many trains of thought in her--of her own position in this household
where she seemed to have become already mistress and indispensable;
of Desmond's last words with her; of the relations between father
and son; of Captain Chicksands and his most agreeable company; of
Pamela's evident dislike of her, and what she could do to mend it.

As to Pamela, Elizabeth's thoughts went oddly astray. She was vexed
with the girl for what had seemed to the elder woman her young
rudeness to a gallant and distinguished man. Why, she had scarcely
spoken a word to him during the sitting on the hill! In some way,
Elizabeth supposed, Captain Chicksands had offended her--had not
made enough of her perhaps? But girls must learn now to accept
simpler and blunter manners from their men friends. She guessed that
Pamela was in that self-conscious, _exalté_ mood of first youth
which she remembered so well in herself--fretting too, no doubt,
poor child! over the parting from Desmond. Anyway she seemed to have
no particular interest in Arthur Chicksands, nor he in her, though
his tone in speaking to her had been, naturally, familiar and
intimate. But probably he was one of those able men who have little
to say to the young girl, and keep their real minds for the older
and experienced woman.

At any rate, Elizabeth dismissed from her mind whatever vague notion
or curiosity as to a possible love-affair for Pamela in that
direction might have been lurking in it. And that being so, she
promptly, and without _arrière pensée_ of any sort, allowed herself
the pleasant recollection of half an hour's conversation which had
put her intellectually on her mettle, and quickened those infant
ambitions of a practical and patriotic kind which were beginning to
rise in her.

But the Squire's coming escapade! How to stop it?--for Desmond's
sake chiefly.

Dear boy! It was on a tender, almost maternal thought of him that
she at last turned to sleep. But the footstep pursued her ear. What
was the meaning of this long nocturnal pacing? Had the Squire, after
all, a heart, or some fragment of one? Was it the parting from
Desmond that thus kept him from his bed? She would have liked to
think it--but did not quite succeed!




CHAPTER VII


A week or two had passed.

The Squire was on his way to inspect his main preparations for the
battle at the park gates, which he expected on the morrow. He had
been out before breakfast that morning, on horseback, with one of
the gardeners, to see that all the gates on the estate, except the
Chetworth gate, were locked and padlocked. For the Chetworth gate,
which adjoined the land to be attacked, more serious defences were
in progress.

All his attempts to embarrass the action of the Committee had been
so far vain. The alternatives he had proposed had been refused.
Fifty acres at the Chetworth end of Mannering Park, besides goodly
slices elsewhere, the County Committee meant to have. As the Squire
would not plough them himself, and as the season was advancing, he
had been peremptorily informed that the motor plough belonging to
the County Committee would be sent over on such a day, with so many
men, to do the work; the land had been surveyed; no damage would be
done to the normal state of the property that could be avoided; et
cetera.

So the crisis was at hand. The Squire felt battle in his blood.

As he walked along through his domain, exhilarated by the bright
frosty morning, and swinging his stick like a boy, he was in the
true Quixotic mood, ready to tilt at any wind-mill in his path. The
state of the country, the state of the war, the state of his own
affairs, had produced in him a final ferment of resentment and
disgust which might explode in any folly.

Why not go to prison? He thought he could bear it. A man must stand
by his opinions--even through sacrifice. It would startle the public
into attention. Such outrages on the freedom, on the ancient rights
of Englishmen, must not pass without protest. Yes--he felt it in him
to be a martyr! They would hardly refuse him a pocket Homer in
prison.

What, a month? Three weeks, in actual practice. Luckily he cared
nothing at all about food--though he refused to be rationed by a
despotic Government. On a handful of dates and a bit of coarse bread
he had passed many a day of hard work when he was excavating in the
East. One can always starve--for a purpose! The Squire conceived
himself as out for Magna Charta--the root principles of British
liberty. As for those chattering fellows of the Labour Party, let
them conquer England if they could. While the Government ploughed up
his land without leave, the Socialists would strip him of it
altogether. Well, nothing for it but to _fight_! If one went down,
one went down--but at least honourably.

In the _Times_ that morning there was a report of a case in the
north, a landowner fined £100, for letting a farm go to waste for
the game's sake. And Miss Bremerton had been holding up the like
fate to him that morning--because of Holme Wood. A woman of parts
that!--too clever!--a disputatious creature, whom a man would like
to put down. But it wasn't easy; she slipped out of your grip--gave
you unexpected tits for tats. One would have thought after that
business with the will, she would be anxious to make up--to show
docility. In such a relation one expected docility. But not a bit of
it! She grew bolder. The Squire admitted uncomfortably that it was
his own fault--only, in fact, what he deserved for making a
land-agent, accountant, and legal adviser out of a poor lady who had
merely engaged herself to be his private secretary for classical
purposes.

All the same he confessed that she had never yet neglected the
classical side of her duties. His thoughts contrasted the library
and the collections as they were now, with what they had been a
couple of months before. Now he knew where books could be found; now
one could see the precious things he possessed. Her taste--her
neatness--her diligence--nothing could beat them. And she moved so
quietly--had so light a foot--and always a pleasant voice and smile.
Oh yes, she had been a great catch--an astonishing catch--no doubt
of that. All the same he was not going to be entirely governed by
her! And again he thought complacently of the weak places in her
scholarship--the very limited extent of her reading--compared to
his. 'By Zeus!--[Greek: ei pot' estin]--if it weren't for that, I
should never keep the whip-hand of her at all!'

She had made a forlorn attempt again, that morning, to dissuade him
from the park adventure. But there he drew the line. For there
really was a line, though he admitted it might be difficult to see,
considering all that he was shovelling upon her. He had been very
short--perhaps she would say, very rude--with her. Well, it couldn't
be helped! When she saw what he was really prepared to face, she
would at least respect him. And if he was shut up, she could get on
with the catalogue, and keep things going.

Altogether the Squire was above himself. The tonic air and scents
of the autumn, the crisp leaves underfoot, the slight frost on the
ruts, helped his general intoxication. He, the supposed scholar and
recluse, was about to play a part--a rattling part. The eye of
England would be upon him! He already tasted the prison fare, and
found it quite tolerable.

As to Desmond--

But the thought of him no sooner crossed the Squire's mind than he
dismissed it. Or rather it survived far within, as a volcanic force,
from which the outer froth and ferment drew half its strength. He
was being forcibly dispossessed of Desmond, just as he was being
forcibly dispossessed of his farms and his park; or of his money,
swallowed up in monstrous income tax.

Ah, there were Dodge and Perley, the two park-keepers, one of whom
lived in the White Lodge, now only a hundred yards away. Another man
who was standing by them, near the park wall, looked to the Squire
like Gregson, his ejected farmer. And who was that black-coated
fellow coming through the small wicket-gate beside the big one? What
the devil was he doing in the park? There was a permanent grievance
in the Squire's mind against the various rights-of-way through his
estate. Why shouldn't he be at liberty to shut out that man if he
wanted to? Of course by the mere locking and barricading of the
gates, as they would be locked and barricaded on the morrow, he was
flouting the law. But that was a trifle. The _gates_ were his own
anyway.

The black-coated man, however, instead of proceeding along the road,
had now approached the group of men standing under the wall, and
was talking with them. They themselves did not seem to be doing
anything, although a large coil of barbed wire and a number of
hurdles lay near them.

'Hullo, Dodge!'

At the Squire's voice the black-coated man withdrew a little
distance to the roadway, where he stood watching. Of the three
others the two old fellows, ex-keepers both of them, stood
sheepishly silent, as the Squire neared them.

'Well, my men, good-morning! What have you done?' said the Squire
peremptorily.

Dodge looked up.

'We've put a bit of wire on the gate, Squoire, an' fastened the
latch of it up--and we've put a length or two along the top of the
wall,' said the old man slowly--'an' then--' He paused.

'Then what?--what about the hurdles? I expected to find them all up
by now!'

Dodge looked at Perley. And Perley, a gaunt, ugly fellow, who had
been a famous hunter and trapper in his day, took off his hat and
mopped his brow, before he said, in a small, cautious voice,
entirely out of keeping with the rest of him:

'The treuth on it is, Squoire, we don't loike the job. We be afeard
of their havin' the law on us.'

'Oh, you're afraid, are you?' said the Squire angrily. '_You_ won't
stand up for your rights, anyway!'

Perley looked at his employer a little askance.

'They're not _our_ rights, if you please, Muster Mannering. We don't
have nothing to say to 'un.'

'They are your rights, you foolish fellow! If this abominable
Government tramples on me to-day, it'll trample on you to-morrow.'

'Mebbe, Squoire, mebbe,' said Perley mildly. 'But Dodge and I don

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