why,” said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken fields, – “why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do they never tell?”
“You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?” he answered.
“Yes – and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don’t you like us exploring things together – better than Pompeii?”
George turned once more to look at the view. “Eight hundred acres go with the house – the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is one of ‘em.”
“I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?”
George laughed. “That’s one of the things you’re expected to know. He never told me.”
The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that, as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his wife in the dairy, the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o’ nights by the big fire, when the two had been half the day exploring about the house, where old Iggulden, of the blue smock, cackled and chuckled to see them. The motives that swayed the characters were beyond their comprehension; the fates that shifted them were gods they had never met; the sidelights Mrs. Cloke threw on act and incident were more amazing than anything in the record. Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs. Shonts.
“But why – why – why – did So-and-so do so-and-so?” Sophie would demand from her seat by the pothook; and Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her knees, “For the sake of the place.”
“I give it up,” said George one night in their own room. “People don’t seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.”
“Poor old thing!” They had been walking round the farms as usual before tea. “No wonder they loved it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it. Jane Elphick married the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The octagonal room with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was hers. Now what did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?” said Sophie.
“About the Torrell cousins and the uncle who died in Java. They lived at Burnt House – behind High Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.”
“No; Burnt House is under High Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale Anstey,” Sophie corrected.
“Well, old man Cloke said – ”
Sophie threw open the door and called down into the kitchen, where the Clokes were covering the fire “Mrs. Cloke, isn’t Burnt House under High Pardons?”
“Yes, my dear, of course,” the soft voice answered absently. A cough. “I beg your pardon, Madam. What was it you said?”
“Never mind. I prefer it the other way,” Sophie laughed, and George re-told the missing chapter as she sat on the bed.
“Here to-day an’ gone to-morrow,” said Cloke warningly. “They’ve paid their first month, but we’ve only that Mrs. Shonts’s letter for guarantee.”
“None she sent never cheated us yet. It slipped out before I thought. She’s a most humane young lady. They’ll be going away in a little. An’ you’ve talked a lot too, Alfred.”
“Yes, but the Elphicks are all dead. No one can bring my loose talking home to me. But why do they stay on and stay on so?”
In due time George and Sophie asked each other that question, and put it aside. They argued that the climate – a pearly blend, unlike the hot and cold ferocities of their native land – suited them, as the thick stillness of the nights certainly suited George. He was saved even the sight of a metalled road, which, as presumably leading to business, wakes desire in a man; and the telegraph office at the village of Friars Pardon, where they sold picture post-cards and pegtops, was two walking miles across the fields and woods.
For all that touched his past among his fellows, or their remembrance of him, he might have been in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had been very largely spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had no wish to leave this present of God. The unhurried meals, the foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft sky under which they walked together and reckoned time only by their hunger or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms – Griffons, Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where Iggulden of the blue smock-frock would waylay them, and they would ransack the old house once more; the long wet afternoons when, they tucked up their feet on the bedroom’s deep window-sill over against the apple-trees, and talked together as never till then had they found time to talk – these things contented her soul, and her body throve.
“Have you realized,” she asked one morning, “that we’ve been here absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?”
“Have you counted them?” he asked.
“Did you like them?” she replied.
“I must have. I didn’t think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I’ve only had two or three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”
“Climate, all climate.” Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes’s barn.
“One must take hold of things though,” he said, “if it’s only to keep one’s hand in.” His eyes did not flicker now as they swept the empty fields. “Mustn’t one?”
“Lay out a Morristown links over Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire it.”
“No, I’m not as English as that – nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the farms here could be made to pay.”
“Well, I’m Anastasia in the ‘Treasure of Franchard.’ I’m content to be alive and purr. There’s no hurry.”
“No.” He smiled. “All the same, I’m going to see after my mail.”
“You promised you wouldn’t have any.”
“There’s some business coming through that’s amusing me. Honest. It doesn’t get on my nerves at all.”
“Want a secretary?”
“No, thanks, old thing! Isn’t that quite English?”
“Too English! Go away.” But none the less in broad daylight she returned the kiss. “I’m off to Pardons. I haven’t been to the house for nearly a week.”
“How’ve you decided to furnish Jane Elphick’s bedroom?” he laughed, for it had come to be a permanent Castle in Spain between them.
“Black Chinese furniture and yellow silk brocade,” she answered, and ran downhill. She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house
