Unknown (63 page)

Mr. Geard's gross and staggering actuality in these things not only disconcerted her, but, to confess the truth, a little disgusted her. It was certainly not in these mystical moods of his that she felt most drawn to her father. That happened when she heard him issuing tactical instructions, like some great strategic general, to John Crow; or when she heard him disputing with Owen Evans on some debatable point of Glastonbury mythology.

Mr. Geard followed her into the kitchen now and sitting down upon one of the extremely hard chairs there—Cordy's mother was not one for pampering a wench like Sally Jones—he continued to embarrass her, while she lit the fire in the stove and began preparing the thin bread and butter, by talking about Christ.

“He is with us, of course, all the time,” Bloody Johnny said,— while the physical accident that this singular evangelist was interrupted now and again by a hiccough increased his daughter's distaste—“but today He is with us more powerfully . . . much more powerfully . . . than any other day in the year.”

“More powerfully, Dad? I don't quite understand,” protested Cordelia, as having poured quite a lot of water out of the kettle, in order to accelerate its boiling, she began spreading the butter upon an oblong, square-edged “tin-loaf,” of a different appearance altogether from the one which the master of the house had just ravaged.

As he wratched her quick, competent movements, Mr. Geard thought to himself—“Mahomet easily converted his wife to his prophesying. Did he have just tins same trouble as I have with a daughter?”

Somehow the cutting of that practical tin-loaf, with its sharp edges and uninteresting crust, brought down the ecstasy of Bloody Johnny more effectively than almost anything else could have done.

The Mayor of Glastonbury felt at that moment as if he were disturbing the work, not of a mere daughter, but of all the competent executives in the world.

“I mean by more powerful, Cordy,” he went on, the film over his eyes growing thicker and thicker as the kettle began to simmer, “that He has more direct power over matter today than on ordinary days. He's always ready to work miracles if you call on Him strongly enough; but today, when He broke loose, He can change everything if you only make a sign.”

Getting up from his seat and moving across the room, to his daughter's dismay, Mr. Geard opened the kitchen door and looked out to the westward, As he turned his face towards this quarter where, beyond the terrace of tradesmen's houses,' a milk-cart was standing in front of Othery's Dairy, he could see high up in the air a great flock of starlings, tossed up and down in disordered, broken masses, and darkly outlined against the driving gray clouds.

“Do shut the door, Dad!” cried Cordelia crossly, “and either come in, or go out!”

Mr. Geard came in and closed the door with extreme gentleness. He did not say to himself—“How careless of me not to think of the poor girl being in her dressing-gown!” He said to himself—“She must have an instinct that that fellow Evans told me he was engaged for dinner today ... or at any rate couldn't come. Poor little girl! It's a shame! The only man she's ever had ... a madman like that . . . with God knows what on his conscience . . . possibly a murder.”

But the tea was made now, the bread and butter cut and the tray ready to be carried upstairs.

'Tve put out four cups,“ said Cordelia; ”for I thought I'd get Crummie up and we'd come into Mother's room. Mother loves a cup of tea in bed and never lets herself have one!"

It must be confessed that neither of the girls expressed any great disappointment when they heard of the absence of theii father from today's mid-day meal. Cordelia still entertained a hope that Owen Evens was coming. Crummie knew that Red Robinson was not coming; but that, on the contrary, Mr. Barter, who had spoken to her on the street yesterday, had said he might call in the early afternoon.

Since Mr. Geard had spoken severely to Mr. Robinson on the subject of his officious activity with regard to “the Morgan woman,” there had been a definite estrangement between Red and Crummie which Crummie's mood, when she met him after the choir-supper, had not helped to remove.

No, the girls were not sorry to hear of their father's visit to Lord P. His presence was always a restraint on these occasions and not infrequently a positive embarrassment; so that in their hearts both daughters felt a thrill of gratitude to the Marquis for his eccentric partiality. It was always a puzzle to both of them what the secret was of their father's success when he went out into the great world; and this particular interest in his personality, displayed by Lord P., was a complete mystery to them.

“He said in his letter that there was no one with him at Mark Moor but Rachel,” announced Mr. Geard.

The three women's faces lit up at this piece of news. Hitherto they had displayed only the faintest interest in his excursion. But the mention of Rachel brought down on Mr. Geard's head a volley of questions. How old was she? Why was she at Mark Moor? Was it true that she was very fragile and almost an invalid? Wasn't Mark Moor Court a rough-and-tumble kind of place for a delicately nurtured young girl to stay in? Did Lord P. bring any servants with him? Wh-t did Lady Rachel do with her time when her father was out shooting?

Chuckling over these questions as he lurched heavily out of the room and down the stairs, Mr. Geard was soon making his way. with an old faded semi-ecclesiastical ulster, that had once belonged to Canon Crow, thrown over his black clothes, towards the Pilgrims' Inn.

“I'll go leisurely,'” he thought to himself. “Lord P. won't be at church anyway . . . that's certain, but if he can't see me till noon, I'll look about a bit, over there.”

Mr. Geard was indeed successful beyond his own private expectations, which were a good deal less optimistic than he had allowed his family to suspect, in his quest for a quiet steed that day. His ostler-friend supplied him with an old roan mare, who had been a famous hunter in her time and was still a very handsome creature.

“Wouldn't trust her,” avowed the man, winking, “with anyone but your Worship. But us do all know what a firm hand you has with the females, old and young, and Daisy-Queen's got the int-lect of a bitch dawg.”

With his canonical ulster buttoned tight under his chin and a heavy riding-crop, lent him by his ex-convertite, clutched in his ungloved fingers, Bloody Johnny mounted upon Daisy-Queen took the road for Mark Moor Court. The wind came from the southeast and he was riding almost due nortrrwest. Directly in front of him, about ten miles away, he could see the strangely shaped protuberance of Brent Knoll, drowsing there in the midst of the level fens like a great sleepy amphibian, whose sea-skin was too tough and slippery to feel the rush of the wind, that was now careering like a host of demons over the reedy expanse.

The only drawback to Mr. Geard's immense feeling of libera* tion was the flapping of his ulster, which the wind, blowing violently behind his back, kept lifting up and whirling about his ears. But he rode on at a steady pace, every now and then rubbing the thick handle of his crop against his horse's neck, as he leaned forward in the saddle, and murmuring her name with chuckling endearments—such as “That's the time o'day, Daisy-Queen! Best lass in the stables thee be, Daisy-Queen! Clean straw and a peck of oats, Daisy, when old John and thee gets safe to King Mark's lodge!”

The mad rush of the southeast wind, whistling past the rider's head, lifting the mare's mane and tail and causing her to turn her ears now and again, as if she were listening to invisible and ghostly ho of beats behind her, gave to the green spring landscape across which they trotted—horse and man, in this turmoil of the elements, grown as close as if they had been one creature—a curiously phantasmal appearance.

The groups of poplars bowing themselves westward were so blown down by the wind that the normal fluttering of their thin-stalked leaves was taken up and absorbed in one long, wild straining, as if each leaf were trying to escape from the burden of clinging any more to its parent twig and as if the whole soul of the tree were trying to escape from its rooted posture and float away, over the dykes and ditches, till it lost itself in the Bristol Channel.

The green, thickly grown tops of the pollards, as they too were blown westward, became the wild heads of armies of girl-witches, while great beds of reeds where the young shoots were mingled with tall dead stalks and brown feathery husks, set up, as the wind swept through them, an accumulated shivering cry, a cry like the*cry of the Cranes of Ibycus, that ran from weir to weir, from "gate to gate, from dyke to dyke, and kept gathering strength as it ran.

It was hard to restrain Daisy-Queen from breaking into a gallop as this shrieking demon drove them faster and faster towards Mark Moor. But the man and the horse had now become, for Bloody Johnny, in spite of his weight, had the true instincts of a rider, enough of one solid unit on the crest of this raving wind-wave to enable the man's desire not to shorten the ride by any such speed to be strong enough to rule the occasion.

Thus it was nearly eleven o'clock . . . about the time when the “five-minutes bell” in the towers of all the Somerset churches from the Quantocks to the Mendips was calling the loiterers in porch and purlieu to enter the building and take their places, when John Geard rode into the long avenue of sycamores that led up the steep slope to the eastern entrance of Mark Court.

The old trees were groaning in the great wind as he rode up this slope; and in several places Daisy-Queen had to veer aside to avoid fallen branches. The greenness of these broken boughs, as Geard pulled up to walk his mare past them, had a lividness in the grey light that struck him as startling and unusual. It was extraordinary how that grey light between these massive trunks responded to the wind. It seemed itself to be in the process of flying through the air, along with ragged-winged rooks and hoarsely crying jackdaws!

Before he caught sight of the grey walls of Mark Court itself, hidden round the third curve of the leafy ascent, he heard a series of shrill discordant screams from somewhere in front of him, the crying, as he well knew from his old experiences at Montacute, of peacocks wildly excited by the wind.

“Queer that he should keep them out here,” he thought to himself. They swung round a bend of the drive now, the mare panting a little from the steepness of the way and from the weight of the man on her back. Then, all suddenly, she plunged and swerved to the right of the path.

There was a high, dark bank just here, out of which the polished roots of some tall white-trunked beeches stretched forth, patched with clumps of emerald-green moss. It was perhaps well that Daisy-Queen was somewhat spent. It certainly was well that her hasty shying brought her bolt up against the clay slope of this steep bank.

Twisting his body round to see w-hat had frightened the mare, Mr. Geard became conscious of the slight figure of a bare-headed young girl watching him with excited brown eyes and a faint smile of nervous concern. As soon as he got his horse under control again and was safely back on the level path quite close to where she stood, he took off his battered felt hat with a sweeping bow. The girl was the sort of figure that a visitor might expect to come upon in a glade at Fontainebleau or Blois or Chantilly.

Mr. Geard had never been out of his native land, but it was with the sort of historic glamour that these names summon up that he at once surrounded this frail apparition.

"Lady Rachel?5' he murmured, bending low down over Daisy-Queen's neck and whispering the words.

The girl smiled up at him, stretched out her arm and touched his fingers. Then she began caressing the roan mare and muttering hurried endearments to her.

"What a lovely horse!5' she said, looking up again into the face above her.

There must have been some truth in what his friend the ostler had remarked about Bloody Johnny's power over females of all kinds, for the reassurance that this slim little creature—she was really eighteen, but she looked no more than fifteen—received from the steady gleam of his dark eyes, was so deep that they became friends at once.

“She came from the Glastonbury stables,” explained Mr. Geard. Obeying some occult instinct in his unconscious nature he continued to address the girl in tones so low as to be practically whispers.

The wind was blowing her clothes, her hair, her scarf, as it whirled, rustling and eddying between the tree-rooted banks of that green glade.

“Let me take you up,” he now found himself saying, raising his voice a little against the swishing and soughing of the wind around them.

“Hold her still and I'll come!” she said; and thrusting herself between Daisy-Queen's rump and the high mossy bank she made use of a beech-tree root as one step and the man's foot in his stirrup as another and in a second was mounted behind him, perched sideways in the rear of his saddle, her thin arms round his waist and her fingers clutching tight to the flaps of Canon Crow's old ulster.

Daisy-Queen, feeling this new burden on her back, leapea forward with a wild bound; but the path being steep just there, it did not require any great display of horsemanship on Bloody Johnny's part to bring the mare again under control. They trotted forward now comfortably enough under the swaying archway of the tossing and creaking branches.

It was a wild-blown arcade of newly budded leaves through which they burst, the smooth beech trunks rising up like pillars at each side of them and the fallen twigs and broken branches trodden in the mud below them by Daisy-Queen's hooves.

In Bloody Johnny's nostrils was the sweet spring sap of the torn foliage above and beneath them and the fainter sweetness, but not less spring-like and youthful, of the young girl's chestnut-coloured curls, that wTere now blowing loose and free, after her struggle to attain her seat.

They were soon in full sight of the grey stone roof and grey buttressed walls of the Cornish King's hunting lodge. The place resembled one of those Gothic turrets, with low-flanking heavy masonry, that one sees in roughly engraved vignettes of German fairy tales. Its small, compact size rather increased than diminished the Nordic massiveness of its time-battered cornices, its moss-grown ledges with grey carved balustrades, its narrow, foliated window-arches, its lichen-covered battlements. The emerald-green grass blades that were sprouting freshly between the time-worn stones and the torn twigs with soft young leaves upon them that the wind was tossing against the masonry enhanced, like new-plucked petals against an aged skin, the hoary antiquity of this strange building.