laugh at.’
‘Mary has gone completely and irretrievably cracked over George Meredith,’ Jim said, joining them.
‘And who’s to blame for that?’ said she. ‘Who put what book into whose hand? and bet what, that who would not be able to understand what-the-what it was all driving at until she had read the first how many chapters how many times over?’
Jim clutched his temples, histrionically distraught. Hugh was not amused. The match proceeded, the score creeping up now very slowly with Margesson’s careful play. General Macnaghten was saying to Mr Romer, ‘No, no, she’s only twenty. It is: yes: quite extraordinary; but being only daughter, you see, and no mother, she’s been doing hostess and so on for her father two years now, here and in London: two London seasons. Makes a lot of difference.’
Down went another wicket: score, a hundred and fifty-three. ‘Now for some fun,’ people said as Tom Appleyard came on the field; but Margesson spoke a winged word in his ear: ‘Look here, old chap: none of the Jessop business. It’s too damned serious now.’ ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Margesson, in perfect style, sent back the last ball of the over. Appleyard obediently blocked and blocked. But in vain. For one of Bremmerdale’s master-creations of innocent outward show and inward guile sneaked round Margesson’s defence and took his leg stump. Nine wickets down: total a hundred and fifty-seven: last man, nine. Hyrnbastwick, in some elation, were throwing high catches round the field while Dilstead, Anmering’s next (and last) man in, walked to the wicket. Margesson said to Tom Appleyard, ‘It’s up to you now, my lad. Let ’em have it, damn slam and all if you like. But, by Jingo, we must pull it off now. Only seven to win.’ Appleyard laughed and rubbed his hands.
There was no more desultory talk: all tense expectancy. ‘If Sir Oliver gets the bowling, that puts the lid on it: never hit a ball yet.’ ‘Why do they play him then?’ ‘Why, you silly ass, because he’s such a thundering good wicket-keeper.’ George Chedisford, about sixteen, home from Winchester because of the measles, maintained a mature self-possession at Lord Anmering’s elbow: ‘I wish my frater – wish my brother was in again, sir. He’d do the trick.’ ‘You watch Mr Appleyard: he’s a hitter.’ By good luck, that ball that had beaten Margesson was last of the over, so that Appleyard, not Dilstead, faced the bowling: Howard once more, a Polyphemus refreshed. His first ball was a yorker, but Appleyard stopped it. The second, Appleyard, all prudent checks abandoned, stepped out and swiped. Boundary: four. Great applaudings: the parson’s children and the two little Rustham boys, with the frenzy of Guelph and Ghibelline, jumped up and down jostling each other. The next ball, a very fierce one, pitched short and rose at the batsman’s head. Appleyard smashed it with a terrific over-hand stroke: four again – ‘Done it!’ ‘Match!’
Then, at the fourth ball, Appleyard slogged, missed, and was caught in the slips. And so amid great merriment, chaff and mutual congratulations, the game came to an end.
‘Come into the Refuge,’ said Jim Scarnside, overtaking Mary as they went in to dress for dinner: ‘just for two twos. I left my humble birthday offering in there, and I want to give it to you.’
‘O, but,’ she said, pausing and looking back, one foot on the threshold of the big French window: ‘I thought it was a bargain, no more birthday presents. I can’t have you spending all those pennies on me.’ Her right hand was lifted to a loose hanger of wistaria bloom, shoulder-high beside the doorway: in her left she carried her hat, which she had taken off walking up from the garden. The slant evening sun kindled so deep a Venetian glory in her hair that every smooth-wound coil, each braid, each fine straying little curl or tendril, had its particular fire-colour, of chestnut, tongued flame, inward glow of the brown-red zircon, burnished copper, realgar, sun-bleached gold: not self-coloured, but all in a shimmer and interchange of hues, as she moved her head or the air stirred them.
‘Twenty pennies precisely,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t call that breaking a bargain. Come. Please.’
‘All right,’ she smiled, and went before him through the small tea-room and its scents of pot-pourri, and through the great skin-strewn hall with its portraits and armour and trophies and old oak and old leather and Persian rugs and huge open fire-place filled at this season with roses and summer greenery, and so by a long soft-carpeted passage to the room they called the Refuge: a cosy sunny room, not belonging to Mary specially or to her father, but to both, and free besides to all dogs (those at least that were allowed in the house) that lived at Blunds, and to all deserving friends and relations. Those parts of the walls that were not masked by bookcases or by pictures showed the pale reddish paper of Morris’s willow pattern; a frieze of his rich dark night-blue design of fruit, with its enrichments of orange, lemon, and pomegranate and their crimson and pallid blooms, ran around below the ceiling. There was a square table with dark green cloth and upon it a silver bowl of roses: writing things on the table and chairs about it, and big easy chairs before the fire-place: a bag of tools (saws, hammers, screw-drivers, pliers and such-like) behind the door, a leather gun-case and fishing-rods in this corner, walking-sticks and hunting-crops in that, a pair of field-glasses on the shelf, some dog-medicines: pipes and cigar-boxes on the mantel-piece: on a bureau a large mahogany musical-box: an early Victorian work-table, a rack full of newspapers, a Cotman above the mantel, an ancient brass-bound chest covered with an oriental rug or foot-cloth of silk: a Swiss cuckoo-clock: a whole red row of Baedekers on one of the bookshelves, yellowbacks on another: Wuthering Heights open on a side-table, Kipling’s Many Inventions open on a chair, and a text of Homer on the top of it: a box of tin soldiers and a small boy’s cricket bat beside them: over there a doll or two and a toy theatre, with a whole mass of woolly monkeys, some in silver-paper armour and holding pins for swords: a cocker spaniel asleep on the hearth-rug, and a little dark grey hairy dog, a kind of Skye terrier with big bat-like ears and of beguiling appearance, asleep in an armchair. There pervaded this room, not to be expelled for all the fresh garden air that came and went through its wide windows and door which opened on the garden, a scent curiously complex and curiously agreeable, as of a savoury stew compounded of this varied apparatus of the humanities. Plainly a Refuge it was, and by no empty right of name: a refuge from tidiness and from all engines, correctitudes, and impositions of the world: in this great household, a little abbey of Thélème, with its sufficient law, ‘Fay ce que vouldras’.
Mary sat on the table while Jim unearthed from somewhere a little parcel and presented it to her, with scissors from the work-table to cut the string. ‘Twenty, you see, for the birthday cake,’ he said, as she emptied out on the green baize a handful of little coloured candles.
‘You are so absurd.’
‘We ought to have the cake,’ he said. ‘No time for it now, though. Look: there are heaps of colours, you see. Do you know what they mean?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I’ll show you’: he began to arrange them side by side. ‘They’re highly symbolical. Nine white. Those are your nine first years: tabula rasa, from my point of view. Then, you see, a red one: a red-letter day for you when you first met me.’
‘Was I ten then? I’d forgotten.’
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci, always forgets. Now, look: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink.’
‘The rainbow?’
‘Haven’t I charming thoughts?’
‘Then three goldy ones. Gold dust in them,’ said she, touching them with one finger.
‘Because of the presents,’ Jim said, ‘that I’d like to have given you these last three years, had I been Midas or John D. Rockefeller. Last, you observe: Black. For my own sake, because you’re going to be married.’
‘My
